Swine Fever

by Andrew Cartmel

  "Well it seems someone stowed away on board the garbage skiff."

  "Stowed away?"

  "They must have been hiding in one of the empty cans. They got into it somehow when the kitchen waste was shipped to the Trinny and Susannah Municipal Dump. Then the stowaway was shipped back to Justice Central, inside one of the cans, his cunning plan being-"

  "To be automatically shunted back into Waste Processing," said Dredd impatiently.

  "That's right, and once he was inside the building he had access to all the rest of Justice Central. They snuck in right under our noses, or at least right under my nose. I was there when it happened." Darrid's long, grey moustache twitched with regret. "I could have caught him."

  "Has the perp been spotted on any of the video surveillance cameras?" said O'Mannion.

  Darrid shook his head. "No."

  "Isn't that strange?" said Zandonella.

  "He must have managed to duck under the line of sight."

  "How do they know there's an intruder at all, if they haven't seen him?" demanded O'Mannion.

  "The weight sensors for the waste cans recorded the movement of a body mass which approximates one adult male human being."

  "Which way is the perp headed?" said Dredd.

  Darrid flushed again, this time on behalf of the entire department it seemed. "No one seems to know."

  O'Mannion's silver eyebrows scissored with cynical surprise. "No one knows?"

  "Like I said, he's pretty good at avoiding the video surveillance and no one's actually laid eyes on him in the flesh. This dirtbag is smart and he's moving fast."

  "What about internal security?" said Dredd. "Everything is on lockdown automatically after an intruder alert."

  "That's right," agreed Darrid with a knowledgeable nod. "They seal themselves off. There are whole areas of the building where he can't possibly go."

  "So that means there are still some areas where he can go?" said O'Mannion tartly.

  "Well yes, I guess so." Darrid shrugged. "That's why I'm here. There are two areas in this section of the building that aren't locked down and remain vulnerable to intrusion by, er, an intruder..." He glanced anxiously upward as the lights in the corridor flickered off. After a fleeting moment of darkness, the peculiar amber lighting returned.

  Zandonella stared at the other Judges. They looked unearthly in this strange glow. Carver tried to ask a question but he was drowned out by the eerie wailing of the alarm. After a while the alarm faded and the lights returned to normal.

  "A little reminder," said O'Mannion.

  "You mean that wasn't the all-clear?" asked Carver.

  O'Mannion looked at him with cruel amusement. "No, Judge. The all-clear isn't likely to consist of flashing coloured lights and disturbing warning sounds, is it?"

  "So we should go and reinforce these vulnerable areas immediately," said Dredd to Darrid.

  Darrid nodded. "That's right. I was just on my way there when I bumped into you."

  "On your way where?" demanded O'Mannion. "What are these two unprotected areas?"

  "Well, one's the map room," said Darrid. "And the other is the Bio-Chem Weapons Lab."

  "The Weapons Lab?" said Esma, her voice rising an octave. "The place where they store the nerve gas and killer viruses and stuff?" Darrid looked at her and nodded in silent response.

  O'Mannion shook her head ruefully. "I think what the Judge is implicitly asking, Darrid, is why this area isn't under automatic lockdown."

  "I suppose no one ever thought an intruder would target the map room..."

  "Not the map room," snapped Dredd. "We're not talking about the map room. Why isn't the Bio-Chem Weapons Lab sealed off?"

  Darrid shrugged. "Technical problems with the security auto-response system apparently."

  O'Mannion stepped in front of Darrid, putting her face in front of his, their noses virtually touching. "You're saying this intruder could be heading to the Weapons Lab?"

  "Yes."

  "And it's unguarded?"

  Darrid looked helplessly away from her hot brown gaze and turned to Zandonella. He clearly felt he was being unjustly blamed for events beyond his control and that he might get a fairer hearing with her. "I was just on my way there..."

  "Come on," said Dredd. He was already moving down the corridor, his Lawgiver held ready for action. "O'Mannion, you and the Karst sisters follow me to the Lab. Zandonella, you, Carver and Darrid take the map room in case the perp heads there." Dredd never moved slowly, but now he was heading down the corridor with the casual speed of a large jungle cat. O'Mannion and the Karsts had to run to keep up.

  Zandonella watched them go and then turned to Carver, who still seemed puzzled about the whole situation, and Darrid, who despite his seniority seemed to be waiting for Zandonella to take charge.

  The two men stared at her expectantly. Zandonella had the sinking feeling that she'd been stuck with dud colleagues on a dud assignment. "All right," she said. "Let's head for the map room."

  Although the map room itself wasn't deemed sufficiently high risk to merit a lockdown system of its own, several of the departments adjacent to it were, and these had been duly sealed off. Zandonella soon discovered that there was only one viable route that any intruder might follow. This led through the labyrinth of the Vehicle Confiscation unit.

  "This place is really something," said Carver eagerly as they entered the echoing warehouse space. "I always wanted to look around here."

  The confiscation unit was just one room, but it was a room big enough to have its own weather. It had to be, to accommodate some of the more grandiose vehicles that had been confiscated from the tirelessly industrious and ambitious miscreants in the Mega-City. "You see that over there?" said Carver, his voice rising with boyish excitement. He seemed to have forgotten that they were in the process of hunting down a potentially deadly intruder; an intruder sufficiently intelligent and cunning to have penetrated deep into the heart of Justice Central.

  Zandonella looked in the direction that Carver was pointing and yawned. It was merely the replica Apollo 13 space rocket and launch vehicle that a wealthy businessman had used in an attempt to get rid of his wife permanently, by sending her into a long, gentle orbit that took her out past the moon on its leisurely eternal elliptical sweep through the solar system. Unluckily for the rich murderer-to-be, Dredd had got wind of his plans and rescued the heavily doped spouse from the capsule on the launch pad, just as the countdown was dropping to zero.

  Now the spaceship sat here in Justice Central with other seized vehicles, its nose cone pointing towards a milky sphere that hung in the ceiling high above them, like a counterfeit moon left there to taunt the stranded spacecraft.

  Zandonella was all too familiar with the Apollo. All the news broadcasts had featured pictures of it for days afterwards, usually with headlines like "Mega-City One, We Have a Problem!"

  The rocket ship was one of the larger crafts in the room, but it was far from being one of the most interesting. Had this been a sightseeing expedition, Zandonella would have made a point of checking out the full-sized wooden pirate ships HMS Depp and HMS Flynn, which were floating in a purpose-built tank. But it wasn't a sightseeing expedition. "Pay attention to the job at hand, Carver," she said.

  Carver looked at her, a hurt expression in his liquid bovine eyes. "I am paying attention." He turned to Judge Darrid. "I just think this place is awesome."

  Darrid snorted dismissively, his grey moustache twitching. "I guess a rookie would be impressed, but I got bored looking around this dump years ago."

  "Yeah, I guess you'd rather be sniffing around the kitchen garbage cans, looking for scraps." Carver stared pugnaciously at the older Judge.

  Darrid's face reddened. "At least I don't stink like-"

  "It's strange, isn't it?" said Zandonella quickly, interrupting Darrid and forestalling the time-wasting argument that threatened to distract the men even further from the job at hand. "It's strange that this room isn't under automatic lockdo
wn."

  "What? What's that?" Darrid turned his red face from Carver to Zandonella.

  Zandonella smiled. The old walrus had taken the bait. "I was just saying it's strange that the Vehicle Confiscation unit isn't locked down. You'd think it would be a primary target for any intruder with all of these..." She gestured at the exotic array of vehicles that surrounded them, ranging from bicycles to hovercraft, jet-packs to hot air balloons. Immediately in front of them was a sand-coloured tank designed for desert warfare, its long deadly cannon projecting from a pilot turret spattered with graffiti. The tank had been the property of a gang who had stolen it from a war museum, planning to use its uranium-enriched shells to blow open a bank vault. Judge Dredd, however, had once again interfered with the scheme and the gang had been forced to settle for lengthy prison sentences instead. Zandonella patted the armoured treads of the massive tank.

  "You'd think a vehicle like this would be a prime target for any perp who broke in here," she said.

  Darrid snorted derisively. "Any perp who did that would have to be pretty stupid. Certainly a hell of a lot more stupid than our intruder has proved to be so far."

  "Why?" said Zandonella in her most innocent voice. She knew the answer, of course, but by letting Darrid explain she knew she could defuse the tension between the older Judge and Carver. "Please explain," said Zandonella.

  "Because all these vehicles are on inertial lockdown." The old Judge pointed at the milky globe that hung above them in the dim recesses of the distant ceiling. "There's the inertia projector up there. It has a computerised map of all the confiscated vehicles stored here and it's got them on permanent scan." Zandonella nodded as if all this was news to her. "It will automatically project a heavy inertia beam at any vehicle that so much as budges a centimetre. Anybody trying to steal one of these babies will find that it's like driving through swamp mud or quick-drying cement."

  "Didn't you know that?" said Carver.

  "No," said Zandonella sweetly. "It's all so fascinating." But as she spoke, a thought suddenly occurred to her. "But you can still get into the vehicles?"

  "Get into them?" Darrid frowned. "I suppose so. But what's the point of getting into them if you can't drive them away?"

  Zandonella had already pulled herself up onto the gun platform of the desert tank and scrambled up to the turret, the hatch of which was indeed unlocked, and descended into the bowels of the tank itself. She emerged a moment later to see the two men staring up at her as if she'd gone mad.

  "What are you doing up there?" said Darrid.

  Zandonella smiled and held up the three small handheld screens she had retrieved from the supply niche of the tank. "Motion detectors," she said. "Just exactly what we need for tracking down an intruder. I remembered that these combat vehicles were outfitted with all kinds of supplies, including motion detectors. They're a bit old-fashioned, but they'll work."

  Carver eyed the motion detectors with distaste. "Why don't we get some proper, up-to-date ones from the Armoury?"

  "Because the Armoury is under lockdown, remember Stinky?" Darrid accepted one of the motion detectors from Zandonella. She offered the other one to Carver, who was reluctant to accept it. "Go on, take it," Zandonella urged.

  "What's the point?" Carver shrugged. "No one's coming in here anyway. The intruder won't come for a confiscated vehicle he can't drive."

  "He might be on his way to the map room," said Zandonella.

  "Oh sure," snorted Darrid. "The map room. That would be the first port of call for any perp invading Justice Central. No, I have to admit Stinky's right." He nodded at Judge Carver. "Any action is going to be taking place outside the Bio-Chem Lab."

  Carver nodded gloomily. "That's why Dredd sent us here. To keep us out of trouble."

  "To keep us out of the action," agreed Darrid. The two men seemed to have forgotten all about their earlier altercation. They were now united in dismal contemplation of the boring mission they'd been assigned.

  Zandonella felt her own spirits sinking. "Oh well, we might as well take up defensive positions since we're here." She turned and walked in the direction of the map room, past a towering yellow bulldozer fitted with machine guns, and a jet-assisted cherry-red fire engine whose water tanks had been converted into gasoline tanks, changing the emergency vehicle into a deadly platform for a flame-thrower. Darrid and Carver followed slowly behind her, their lack of enthusiasm palpable.

  When she idly flipped the switch of the motion detector to its ON position, four glowing white dots appeared on the orange handheld screen, all moving slowly in the direction of the map room. Three of the dots were clustered close together. The fourth dot...

  "He's here," hissed Zandonella. "The intruder." Darrid and Carver stopped and stared at her. "He's here in this room with us," she whispered.

  THREE

  The three Judges moved swiftly between the ranks of parked vehicles. Zandonella signalled to Carver to keep up with her. Darrid was already ahead of both of them. Despite his age and his burgeoning paunch, the old Judge was moving more quickly than they had specified in the plan. Watching him go, she had a sudden strong longing for Dredd's presence. But Dredd was protecting the Weapons Lab. She would have to handle this herself.

  They had agreed in a minute of swift whispered deliberation that they would head for the door of the map room, fanning out so that they would overtake the intruder and surprise him, coming at him from three different directions in a coordinated swoop.

  The plan was in danger of falling apart if the idiot Darrid continued to hurry ahead. Was Darrid going to attempt a single-handed arrest? Zandonella wouldn't put it past the old walrus. She tried to signal to him but he wasn't looking in her direction, and he was already too far away to speak to without shouting and tipping off the intruder.

  Darrid was moving faster with each passing second, his Lawgiver extended out in his right hand, finger ready on the trigger. Zandonella turned and signalled urgently for Carver to catch up. If they could intercept Darrid's bid for glory maybe they could still salvage the operation. She broke into a run herself, just as Darrid disappeared around the side of a red double-decker bus that was parked across from a curious antique bicycle with an enormous wheel at the front and a tiny wheel at the back.

  Almost as soon as he was out of sight, they heard Darrid begin to shout. "Halt, or I'll fire!"

  Zandonella cursed under her breath as she forced herself forward at top speed, boots slapping on the concrete floor, trying to catch up with the old maniac. Behind her she could hear Carver panting as he followed. Then there was the sound of gunfire, like a miniature thunderstorm ripping at the air, and erratic flashes of blue light flared under the bus. Zandonella reached for her Lawgiver and flung herself around the front of the bus. There she found Darrid, legs braced and one eye squinted shut as he took aim with his weapon.

  The Lawgiver fired and twenty metres away a pink and yellow hovercraft, turbocharged for use by sugar smugglers, exploded into a million fragments. Jagged pieces of flaming shrapnel caromed all around the hall, ricocheting off vehicles and bouncing across the floor. A superheated fragment of metal went hissing past Zandonella's cheek, close enough that she felt the warm breeze of its passage. Another larger piece smashed the windscreen of the bus above her. Fragments of glass showered down on Darrid and Zandonella and the tardy Carver as he came stumbling around the bus to join them.

  Darrid took his hands away from his face and grinned sheepishly at Zandonella. "I must have hit the gas tank." Zandonella ignored him and hurried over to the smouldering remains of the hovercraft. There was no sign of any intruder, living or dead, anywhere in the vicinity. She checked her motion detector. It only registered three moving shapes. Darrid joined her as she studied the small screen and he shook his head.

  "I guess I missed him."

  "Did you even see him?" demanded Zandonella.

  "What do you mean? What are you implying by a remark like that?"

  "If you saw him, describe him," s
aid Zandonella tersely.

  "Well, I only got a glimpse."

  "A glimpse?"

  "A glimpse of a shadow."

  Zandonella curled her lip. "A glimpse of a shadow. I see." There was a startled cry behind them. She turned to see Carver drop his motion detector and raise his Lawgiver.

  "There he is," he yelled as his gun went off.

  The murderous cough of an explosive shell detonating was heard, and in the next row of vehicles a tractor burst into flames. A moment later a limousine and a motorcycle parked adjacent to it also caught fire and then exploded. These in turn set off an ice-cream van and a jet ski. Finally, the chain of exploding vehicles came to a stop when it reached an old-fashioned stagecoach, the kind that used to be pulled by a team of horses.

  The stagecoach was made of wood and began to burn enthusiastically, but at least it didn't explode. "Stop using explosive ammunition!" yelled Zandonella. "You'll blow us all up." Carver had the good grace to look a little ashamed as he altered the setting on his Lawgiver.

  Zandonella jogged over to the burning wreckage of the tractor. The air was full of fumes and the stink of smoke and burning fuel. The hot air wavered in front of her and the dancing, towering flames from the tractor cast strange, writhing shadows on the floor. Something landed on Zandonella's head, as light as a feather, and she looked up to see fat white flakes descending in a cloud from the ceiling.

  For a surreal instant she thought it had begun to snow. Then she realised that the fire control system had finally kicked in and was dropping dry extinguisher flakes onto the flaming wrecks. In no time at all, white flakes were blizzarding down in a churning cloud and within seconds, the fires were all out and the wrecked vehicles were buried in neat, white piles. Zandonella lifted her face to the strange snowfall. She caught one on her tongue and almost gagged at the acrid, chemical taste. She turned to see Carver and Darrid approaching. They were both staring at their motion detectors, but she could tell by the expression on their faces that they had found nothing.