“I do. You can’t call for backup through the normal channels.” I took a step closer. “So for now I’m your backup. What’s the situation?”
“One hostile, one survivor.”
I said, “Got it. I’m going to operate on the assumption that you’re the survivor.” That was meant to be a moment of levity, but Vine didn’t crack a smile. “So what happened?”
“Follow me.”
She lowered her gun completely, and as she led me through the ship she filled in some of the background about the operation. “The hostile is Corporal John Armando. Thirty years old. Exceptionally skilled at hand-to-hand combat, weapons, tactics, anything you can name. Right now, he’s sealed in the lower levels—but he’s smart. He’ll find a way through.”
“What’s he got down there?”
“Enough air, water and food to last five years, minimum. More ammunition than he’ll ever need. Armoury, machine room, electronics lab, hydroponics... And access to the reactor.”
“You’re saying that he could just destroy the base?”
“The reactor is powerful enough to knock the whole damn moon out of orbit. But that won’t happen. There’s a lot of fail-safes, and Armando doesn’t have the clearance to bypass them. Or the skills to hack the computers.”
“You can’t just seal him in and leave him there?”
She slowed to a stop, and turned to face me. This close, I could smell her skin even with my altered olfactory system.
She looked as though she was about to say something, but frowned instead as she peered at me. Then she said, “I know you. I mean, I’ve seen you before.”
“Maybe you’ve met my brother back in the Meg. Last I heard he’s still a Judge.”
“Unlikely. It’s been four years since I last set foot in Mega-City One. It’s your eyes. Something about them.”
I guessed where she recognised me from, of course, but I preferred people to work it out for themselves. Kept at least one part of their brain busy. It had come in useful a couple of times when I was a Judge.
See, everyone was used to seeing pics of Chief Judge Eustace Fargo as an older guy. They recognise something of him in me and Little Joe, but they’re not always able to place it.
But I was wrong about Vine. She leaned even closer—I swear to Grud, for a second I thought she was going to kiss me—and said, “It’s you. The dead man.”
“The what?”
“You’re the one who survived that storm a few years back. It was my team who found you out in the Bronze, on the edge of suffocation. You were so far gone we almost didn’t bother trying to resuscitate you.” She stepped back, slowly shaking her head. “After everything you went through out there... What the hell did you do to end up like this?”
“Long story.”
She nodded and resumed walking.
But before she turned away, I saw another look in her eyes. I’d seen it before, a couple of times, when I was on the streets of the Meg. Sometimes a Judge just knows everything has turned a corner and there’s no way back.
Vine had that look now.
Eight
THE CLOSER WE came to the engine room, the more damage I could see. First the stink of cordite and thermite in the air, then fresh bullet-scratches in the walls. Blood spray across a glass door. A discarded ammo magazine on the floor. A first-aid box smashed open, its pills and bandages scattered like confetti after a particularly brutal wedding.
Through a synthiglass panel in a closed door, a boot on the floor with a small trickle of blood streaming past. No way to tell whether the boot was occupied.
More blood-spatter, running thickly down the wall—pooling at the ground around little tooth-and-bone islands.
“How many down?” I asked Vine.
“Thirty-four.”
I didn’t respond to that. On the bus we’d calculated that we were sending the base enough food for eighty people, roughly. What were they doing with the rest of it?
And then a picture of Kellan Wightman’s stash of fermenting fruit and vegetables jumped into my mind. That made sense. These people were soldiers, not prisoners. They probably had their own still somewhere on the base, and I was sure it would be more elaborate and more efficient than Wightman’s collection of hidden barrels.
“So what is it that you do here?”
“That’s classified,” Vine said. I got the feeling that it was such an automatic response that she didn’t register either the question or the answer.
She glanced back at me. “I know everything’s fubar now, but that doesn’t change the meaning of the word ‘covert.’ A former Judge should understand that.”
“I do. But—”
“If and when you need to know, I’ll tell you.” No nonsense, to-the-point. I was liking her more by the minute.
Ahead, the corridor split, with a staircase on the right. Vine didn’t say anything, but she’d slowed a little, her movements becoming more cautious, more deliberate.
“We’re close?” I asked, as softly as my voicebox would allow.
She nodded. “He’s down there.”
We stopped at the top of the staircase and she hunkered down, then motioned for me to do the same.
Below, I could see yet another sealed door—this one cutting off a smeared trail of blood. Something had been dragged through: going from the crimson fingerprints low on the door frame, a person. One who, at the time, was still alive.
Vine said, “I’ve sealed every door out of there but that one.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “Leave Armando an obvious way out. If he’s as smart as you say, he’ll know it’s a trap and won’t take it. Which means that’s our way in.” I stood up again. “All right. Eight of us should be enough to take him down.”
She sighed. “Typical Judge. Ego the size of Jupiter. Dredd, Armando killed thirty-four highly-trained marines in the space of eighteen minutes, most of them with his bare hands. The only reason I survived was because I was out on the surface at the time.”
I ignored that. “Can you patch into the base’s internal cameras? See where he is right now?”
Vine lifted up her left arm, showing me the small datapad attached to her wrist. It was displaying a map with a slowly-flashing dot in the centre. “That’s him. About twelve metres along on the other side of that door.” She raised her wrist to her mouth and softly said, “Computer. Best visual on Corporal John Armando.”
The datapad’s screen switched to a security camera feed.
Armando was barefoot, and naked from the waist up; he had a large, well-defined build. He was standing perfectly still with his arms by his sides and his eyes closed. His chest rose and fell regularly and deeply. What I at first took to be an aberration of the camera lens or the screen was clarified when it switched to a different angle. Armando’s skin was as grey as mine.
“Something you’re not telling me?” I asked.
“There’s a lot I’m not telling you.”
“Can you open the door remotely? See how he reacts?”
“We tried that shortly before you showed up. He just stands there. Look.” She tapped at the datapad for a second, and the image pulled back. On the edge of the screen were two very clearly dead bodies: human heads are just not designed to be at that angle. “Master Sergeant Wegryn and Second Lieutenant Matheson. They’d been outside with me. We saw Armando like this, and Wegryn approached. The corporal was totally unresponsive. He looked catatonic. But when Wegryn came within two metres, Armando struck. Matheson opened fire but...” She shrugged. “I’m not saying that Armando dodged the rounds, but I know how good a shot Matheson was. She could hit a running target between the eyes from two hundred metres.”
I pulled the datapad off her arm—she didn’t protest—and poked at the screen until I found the map again. “Straight line of sight between him and the door.” I began to walk down the steps. “Vine, how about you give me a gun, open the door and I shoot him?”
“We can’t kill him. Matheson shouldn’t have e
ven tried.”
“Do you mean we can’t, or we aren’t permitted to?”
“We’re not permitted.”
“Why not?”
“That’s classified.”
“Of course it is.” I’d reached the door, so I turned back towards the lieutenant. “How close did you say the Master Sergeant got to him? Two metres?”
“Dredd, he’ll kill you just as quickly as he killed everyone else.”
I couldn’t help smiling at that. She really didn’t know who I was. “I’ll take the chance. I’m clearly not a soldier, so he might not register me as hostile. Otherwise, what do we do? Wait for him to snap out of whatever trance he’s in and decide to blow the reactor?”
“I told you, he can’t do that,” Vine said, following me down the stairs.
I handed the datapad back to her. “Keep the door open wide enough for me to get back through if I have to. And have your gun ready.”
“Dredd, your life is worth less than his.”
I gave her another smile. “Maybe. But is yours?”
“Yes, it is. And stop being so drokkin’ smug, will you? You haven’t seen him in action yet.”
I almost said, “And you haven’t seen me in action,” but then I realised that would probably come across as even more smug. Instead, I said, “Open the door and start recording the camera feed. At the very least, if he kills me, then you can show the footage to sub-warden Copus and the others, give them some idea of what they’ll be facing.”
She said, “All right. If he kills you, you have the consolation that you’ll be immortalised in a special how-not-to-do-it training film.” Vine tapped at the datapad again, and immediately raised her rifle.
The door in front of me slid open, and a rush of warm air washed over us, carrying with it faint traces of blood, vomit and faeces.
I stepped through, very much aware of the thick smear of blood across the floor that led to a stomachless young soldier lying face up, his mouth and eyes open but unmoving.
Five metres from Armando, I stopped. He hadn’t noticed me, or if he had, he was keeping a very tight rein on his reactions. I’m no shrink, but that was a level of control I wouldn’t normally attribute to a frenzied killer.
Softly, I said, “Soldier...?”
No reaction.
“Corporal Armando, my name is Rico Dredd. Can you hear me?”
Still nothing.
“Corporal, I’m not your enemy. I’m unarmed. I want you to tell me what happened here, and why. Can you do that?”
He didn’t respond, so I took another step, and the grey-skinned man opened his eyes, looked straight at me. But that was it. No twitching of limbs or shifting of his weight. His eyes didn’t even follow me as I continued to move.
Keeping my distance, I walked slowly around him. His skin was almost the same shade as mine, and like mine was pockmarked with scars and needle marks where the cold-resistant polymers had been injected between the epidermis and the dermis.
“Corporal... John. I don’t know what they did to you, but I’m guessing that it was very similar to what happened to me. Look at my arms, at my face... Can you see, John? We’re the same. We’re in this together. We can help each other, protect each other.”
Though barefoot, Armando was a little taller than me. His muscles were as perfectly defined as I’d ever seen, not an ounce of unnecessary body fat. He was also completely hairless.
“I’m not a soldier,” I said. “But back on Earth I was a Judge. A good one too. I knew my duty. Semper Fidelis. Always faithful.”
Clearly, the man was in some sort of trance. Resting to conserve energy, but still on high alert. Soldier’s fugue, I’d heard it called.
“John, you’re not giving me a lot to work with here. This is a mess, and if we’re going to sort it out, I’ll need your help.”
I’m nothing if not adventurous. Now directly behind him, I took another step closer.
I knew that was a mistake before my foot had even touched the ground.
Armando whirled around, lashing out with his fist. The back-handed blow struck me square in the jaw, hard enough to almost knock me off my feet.
I barely registered the hit when his powerful fist slammed into the side of my head, staggering me, a half-second before his knee caught me in the solar plexus.
But it’s not so easy to knock the wind out of someone with an artificial respiratory system: I recovered almost immediately and threw myself to the side, ducking under the third blow. That left his own midriff unguarded, and I didn’t waste the opportunity. I hit him hard in the stomach with my fist clenched with the ring-finger knuckle prominent: a very specialised move that some of the perps in Mega-City One referred to as the ‘Judges’ Incentive.’ I’ve used it to bring down perps—and fellow prisoners—twice my weight.
Armando staggered back, but didn’t fall. That was impressive. He launched himself at me again, left fist clenched and his right hand clawed. That didn’t look like any kind of move I’d seen before, but I wasn’t taking any more chances: I stepped back and to the side at the last moment and managed to grab his left wrist, then turned my movement into a spin, pulling him off balance.
That put me in the position to jab my left heel into the back of his knee and pull harder on his arm at the same time.
Wordlessly, he went down, and for a moment I thought that was it, I’d beaten him.
But he twisted around as he fell, locked his hand onto my wrist and suddenly he was dragging me off balance. I tried to pull out of it, but he continued to twist, until somehow I was on the ground, on my back. He had his right hand on my throat and his left fist pulled back.
That was when Vine lashed out towards the back of Armando’s head with the butt of her rifle.
But the blow never connected. The grey man saw or sensed it coming—maybe there was a shadow, or he felt the breeze or something—and let go of me long enough to push himself up and back. The butt of the rifle slammed into Armando’s back between his shoulder blades, and he reached over his head with his right hand and grabbed it, jerked it free of Vine’s grip.
He kicked back at her, catching her square in the stomach: had she not been wearing body armour, that kick alone would have killed her.
He didn’t even look to see how effective it had been. Instead, he immediately dropped back into position, again grabbing for my throat with his left hand as he spun the rifle around in his right. By the time his fingers locked around my neck again, he had the rifle aimed at my face with his finger on the trigger.
I had an instant where I told myself “The safety’s still on!” but I couldn’t take that chance. I grabbed the barrel with my left hand and pushed it aside just as he fired. The gun boomed and the muzzle-flash scorched my cheek, and later I found fragments of the foam-steel floor embedded in my skin.
Still holding onto the barrel, I shoved the rifle back towards him, trying to twist it out of his grip, and at the same time he was squeezing my throat with his free hand. If I’d been a normal man, I might have already passed out from pain or lack of oxygen, but I’m no longer a normal man. My polymer-laced skin and modified respiratory system make my throat a lot more resilient than most people’s.
I slammed my right fist into his stomach over and over, as Armando fired four more times—each shot another deafening boom—and it was clear that strength-wise we were very closely matched.
I knew a little about military training, what they put the recruits through. It was intense; the system turned men and women into fighting machines, honed almost to perfection. Almost.
But I’d had fifteen years in the toughest academy on Earth. And for each of those fifteen years I’d excelled. Top of the class. Sure, Armando probably had ten more years’ experience than I did, but I’d bet my time in the Mega-City One Academy of Law and my one year on the streets against anything he had.
I went for his eyes.
Now, that’s a move that a rookie might make when he’s desperate. You go for your enemy�
��s eyes, you’re not playing around anymore. As Wightman had said earlier, there's no going back from that. Most people are squeamish about something as harmless as eye drops; even the thought that an opponent might attempt to tear out their eyes is enough to send them into an absolute frenzy.
So a seasoned fighter learns not to do that. Eyes are off limits. Unless, of course, you know what you’re doing. Could be that there’s a time when you want your opponent to go into a frenzy.
That’s what I did. It was a calculated risk, but it paid off.
I pressed the fingers of my right hand into a point and jabbed straight at his left eye.
Armando flinched to the side, shifting his weight and loosening his grip on my neck. That gave me the leverage I needed. I dropped my hand a little mid-strike, and instead hit him just below his jaw, driving my fingers into the carotid sinus and cracking the heel of my hand against his left clavicle, snapping it. Two points of pain with one blow.
He threw himself backwards away from me, but I was still holding onto the barrel of his rifle. I twisted my arm away, pulling him further off balance and weakening his grip on the gun, giving myself enough room to pull my right leg up and kick out.
The sole of my boot mashed satisfyingly into Armando’s face, and he toppled backwards. Have to hand it to whoever trained him, they did a pretty good job: he almost recovered before I was on my feet. Almost.
I stamped down on his broken clavicle to further disorient him, then as he was silently screaming, a quick, hard kick to his left temple put him out. It felt like kicking a breezeblock, but it worked.
I pulled the rifle from his grip, spun it around and quickly checked the breech. It was clear. I held it aimed at Armando, finger off the trigger but nearby, ready.
“Drop it!” Vine shouted from behind me. “I said, drop the weapon, Dredd!”
“You kidding me?” I’m not ashamed to admit that the weight of the gun was both comforting and empowering, but I shook off the feeling—this wasn’t the right time. “Vine, you should cuff this drokker while you have the chance.”
Rico Dredd: The Titan Years Page 16