Dredd VS Death

by Gordon Rennie

  A spell in the kook cubes. That caught Dredd's attention. Not that Martins, or Icarus, or whatever he wanted to call himself, was unique in that respect. Necropolis was like an open wound in the city's psyche; sixty million citizens had died, and tens of millions more had suffered severe mental trauma, filling the city's psycho-blocks to maximum capacity for years afterwards. Some had recovered sooner than others. Clearly, the psycho-cube docs had thought Martins/Icarus was one of them, but now Dredd knew different.

  Using MAC's resources, he'd uncovered a lot on the h-wagon ride out here. All the information had been there all along, for anyone who wanted to go digging for it. Dredd knew that, with over four hundred million citizens to watch over, the Justice Department couldn't keep a close eye on all of them, but there were enough anomalies in the records to have maybe raised at least a few questions in someone's mind.

  EverPet's financial records were a revelation. The Pet Regen product was a commercial success, but the company was still trading at an enormous loss. Their public accounts records showed huge large amounts of money being ploughed into unspecified "research projects". Using MAC's high-powered analytical abilities, Dredd had quickly found out what that really meant.

  Money had been transferred to overseas accounts and then shifted back into the city in the guise of charitable donations to various minor religious organisations, all of which, Dredd suspected, would quickly be revealed as mere fronts for the Church of Death. Other funds had been siphoned off to set up the facility Dredd was about to enter now, even though there was no official record of the place in the list of the company's property holdings.

  A secret lab, hidden away from the prying eyes of the Justice Department. A biochemist with a history of mental disorder, connections to the Church of Death and whose research speciality was the reanimation of dead tissue.

  Didn't need forty years on the streets to put this one together, Dredd figured.

  Icarus, for whatever reasons of his own, had funded the Church of Death, created its vampire shock-troopers, freed the Dark Judges and caused the deaths of a lot of cits and Justice Department personnel. The mood he was in now, Dredd would be happy now to just put a few Standard Execution rounds into the murdering creep at the first provocation, and let some of the big brains down at Justice Central figure out all the hows and whys of whatever it was Icarus was hoping to achieve from all this mayhem.

  "Help you, sir? I'm afraid this facility is closed to the general public, but if you want a tour of the main EverPet labs, then our Citizens Relations office will be happy to arrange it. Their office hours are 0900 to 1700, and you can contact them on-"

  Dredd silenced the security droid in the foyer with a single Armour Piercing shot, instantly transforming it into just so much expensive junk. Another shot silenced the alarm that had started shrieking as soon as his first gunshot rang out. His override card took care of the second and more serious set of security doors, and then he was through and into the lab complex proper.

  The h-wagon Dredd had rode in on was a command model, with a fully equipped mobile armoury of Justice Department standard-issue weaponry. Dredd hadn't been shy about helping himself to whatever he thought he was going to need. When he exited the h-wagon, he had been carrying enough weaponry to fight a small block war all on his own.

  Beyond the doors, a group of Death cultists were waiting for him. High on hate and eager for death, they charged down the corridor towards him, firing off indiscriminate volleys of bullets at him. Dredd raised his Lawgiver and introduced them to the gun's rapid fire setting, giving them an object lesson in what tight, accurate bursts of fire were all about.

  Four of them hit the ground in as many seconds, Resyk-bound. Dredd popped a stumm grenade and let the rest of the survivors share its contents out amongst themselves. Respirator down, Dredd strode on through the midst of them. Choking and retching, completely incapacitated by the effects of the gas, Dredd knew none of these creeps were going anywhere in a hurry. One of them still managed to rise staggering to his feet. Dredd slammed him hard in the face with the butt of his Lawgiver. The creep ate floor, fast and sudden. Next stop for him would be a med-unit to fix his broken nose, busted teeth and severe concussion, before the Judge-Wardens threw his deranged butt into an iso-cube for the next twenty years or so.

  Dredd strode on. A chorus of snarls and growls warned him what was waiting for him round the next corner. Dredd figured that Icarus's retrovirus didn't do much for IQ and common sense when it came lying patiently in ambush. He also figured that, since they had been voluntarily infected with the virus, Icarus's vampire-things were, to all intents and purposes, legally dead. That being the case, they weren't entitled to the same legal rights as any ordinary, decent citizen that still had a pulse, and hence Dredd's next actions weren't governed by the regulations that normally applied in matters relating to the correct use of the proper and legal amount of force to be applied in carrying out his judicial duties.

  And besides, he reminded himself... both the retrovirus and the Dark Judges were clear and present dangers to the lives of everyone in Mega-City One, meaning that any extra-judicial force he chose to employ was officially permitted under the terms of the Security of the City Act. Short version: no arrest, no warning shot, no shooting to wound. These creeps were going straight to Resyk.

  Dredd reached for the first of the surprises he'd taken from the h-wagon armoury, popping the safety caps and timer fuses on them and throwing them almost casually round the corner. The explosions came just a second later, but Dredd had already moved into the cover of the near wall to avoid the dual waves of flame and shrapnel that came roaring round the corner.

  A vampire, completely bathed head to foot in fire, came staggering round the corner. The phosphor chemicals from one of Dredd's grenades had already burned away its eyes and face, but somehow it could still sense his presence. It turned and came charging towards him, screaming in rage and pain. A moment later, anything that was left of it was decorating the walls, floor and roof of the corridor, liberally distributed there by the Hi-Ex shot Dredd had calmly snapped off.

  Round the corner waited more evidence of the aftermath of the phosphor and fragmentation grenades that Dredd had just used. The shredded and burning remains of several more - Dredd estimated at least four - vampires littered the place. One of them, its lower body torn away by shrapnel, its remaining upper half charred and burning, still managed to summon up the strength to start crawling towards him, making a hideous mewling sound as it scrabbled at his Judge boots with its burning claws. Dredd put two Standard Execution rounds through the top of its head and carried on.

  It was at the next corridor junction that he started to run into trouble. He was just finishing mopping up the combined group of vampires and cultists who had foolishly imagined they could lure him into some kind of crossfire ambush there. He'd picked off the first few of them with shots from his Lawgiver, demolishing one of the barricades they'd been sheltering behind with a double-blast of Hi-Ex. Heatseeker hotshots had flushed the remaining cultists out of hiding. The vamps, whose inhumanly low body temperature barely registered with the Heatseeker warheads' targeting systems, Dredd took care of with one of the other weapons he was carrying, hosing them down with a spread of rapid-fire explosive shell fire from the Colt M2000 Widowmaker.

  The M2000, a replacement for the old Lawrod weapon in providing Judges with some additional heavier firepower for on-the-street use, had first come into widespread service during Judgement Day. It had proved highly effective then against zombies, so Dredd didn't see why vampire targets would prove any more resistant to its devastating effects.

  He wasn't wrong. The vampires disintegrated bodily under the impact of the volleys of high-calibre shotgun shells. One of them, which had come at Dredd with an industrial las-burner, was blown clear across the corridor by the impact of the shells into its body, hitting the far wall with a sick, wet splat.

  It was only after the roar of the weapon's fearsomely lou
d gunfire reports started to die away that Dredd heard the other sound coming from the corridor behind him: the loud, pounding tread of metallic feet, too heavy to be anything human, too regular and steady to be anything other than a droid. And not just any kind of droid.

  War droids were supposed to be illegal in Mega-City One. Even before the Second Robot War, when crimelord Nero Narcos had used an army of war droids to try and overthrow the entire Judge system and install himself as the city's new ruler, the manufacture and ownership of any kind of combat-orientated robot unit was highly illegal. The Justice Department had its own war droid reserve resources, of course, although a scheme under the late Chief Judge McGruder's administration to make up the growing shortfall of patrol Judges by putting robot Judges onto the city streets had not met with success, Nevertheless, the private ownership of such droids was forbidden.

  Such devices were still available elsewhere, of course. Asiatic mega cities such as Hondo Cit, Sino Cit and Nu-Taiwan did a roaring trade in war droid manufacture, and even in Mega-City there was always a thriving underground black market in war droid units still left over from previous conflicts, stretching all the way back to events as long ago as the early twenty-first century Volgan Wars. In fact, the ABC Warrior unit, dating from the mid-period Volgan Wars, was still highly prized for its combat abilities, even now more than a hundred years after its original construction, and there were those collectors and aficionados of such things who considered the ABC unit so durable and easily adaptable that they claimed they could still be in active service even thousands of years from now.

  Dredd dived, rolling for cover, as the metal brute stomped up the corridor towards him, opening fire with its own inbuilt weaponry. Bullets ricocheted off walls and careened off the stone floor as the droid's weapons systems tracked Dredd, his speed and reflexes managing to keep him just that vital hairsbreadth ahead of its targeting sensors.

  He dropped the M2000, knowing its high-calibre shotgun capabilities, although devastating against unarmoured human opponents, would be useless against a heavily armoured droid. The droid kept on coming, its thunderous footsteps cracking the stone of the floor. It was too big and heavy to be one of the sleek new Hondo-cit jobs had been coming onto the market in the last few years, and superior targeting programs on the Nu-Taiwan models would most likely have found him and vaporised him by now, so Dredd's best guess was that it was probably an old Sov Blok unit, probably even pre-Apocalypse War. The details didn't worry him; if they wanted to, the Tek-Judges could try and identify it from whatever scrap metal was left when he had finished taking care of it.

  He came out of the roll, Lawgiver in hand, firing as he went. Armour Piercing shells ricocheted off the droid's armoured carapace, barely even denting the thick armour there to protect its CPU core. A Hi-Ex shell took care of the heavy spit-blaster mounted on one of its shoulders. Dredd was just about to fire a second shot to destroy the mini missile launcher on the droid's other shoulder, when it hit him with the auxiliary electro-gens built into its chest unit. Crackling lightning bolts of electricity filled the corridor in front of it, leaping from metal wall to metal wall, striking Dredd multiple times. The heavily insulated material of his uniform's bodysuit saved him from the worst of it, but the blasts still threw him several metres back, slamming him painfully against the corridor wall. His Lawgiver flew from his nerveless grasp, landing far away from where he fell.

  He slumped to the ground, hearing the stone-cracking impacts of the droid's footsteps as it stamped forward to finish him off, its servo-motors growling in what sounded almost like eager anticipation.

  Muscles cramped with pain from the effects of the electricity blast refused to respond. Dredd's vision swam, the heavy, deadening weight of imminent oblivion pressing in on the edges of his consciousness.

  Get up, old man, he told himself. You're not out for the count yet, not while your city's still in danger.

  The reminder was like a shock to the system. He was moving even as the droid's giant metal fist jack-hammered down towards him, pile-driving into the area of the floor where only moments ago Dredd's head had been resting. He scrambled away from it, reaching out for the nearest weapon which instinct and more than forty years of combat experience told him should still be lying right where its previous owner had dropped it.

  The las-burner wasn't designed for combat use, and wasn't a particularly easy thing to operate, usually requiring a physically strong operator or even work-droid to wield properly. Its main purpose was to cut up dense materials like metal or reinforced plasteel. Perps had quickly found its uses when it came to slicing through inconvenient obstacles like vault doors and walls. It probably didn't say anything about it in the manufacturer's manual, but disabling maniac war-droids seemed to be another one of the multi-faceted tool's many useful applications.

  In an impressive feat of strength, Dredd swung the heavy device one-handed, activating its power supply with a flick of his finger. The tool's las-beam instantly hissed into life, projecting several feet from its end, burning with a cold, clear light that made Dredd's eyes hurt, even through the polarised visor guard of his helmet.

  The las-burner sheared through the armoured metal of the droid's right arm as if it was nothing more substantial than raw munce. The metal monster's hand fell to the ground with a loud clunk, twitching in distressed reflex, sparks and oily black hydraulic fluid spraying out from its severed end. The droid made a dull roaring sound that was either a mechanical expression of pain and anger or merely a change in the pitch of its servo-motor system as it shut down the flow of power and fluid to the damaged limb.

  Dredd was moving again, rolling between the thick metal tree trunks of its legs as it swivelled round in search of him, trying to bring its remaining weaponry to bear on this one unexpectedly troublesome human target. Designed mainly for frontal assault, the droid was more vulnerable to attack in its more weakly armoured rear sections. Hefting the las-burner, Dredd quickly got to work on the backs of its legs, slashing into the joint-pistons and power cables there.

  Hamstrung, with both legs disabled, and bellowing in impotent mechanical distress, the three and a half metre tall droid pitched forward onto its face, with a crash that reminded Dredd of the sound of a conapt building or small-sized city block being demolished.

  It lay there, emitting strange mechanical growls as its servo-motors whined in protest, flailing its one still-functioning limb about the place in futile protest. A few more brief seconds' work with the las-burner put paid to even this much activity from it. Dredd walked away, leaving the now-deactivated weapon buried deep into the fused slag that had been the droid's CPU unit.

  Icarus had been surprised how easy it had been to track Dredd's progress through the complex by the sound of the gunshots alone.

  First had come the loud and intense sounds of several different guns firing at once, as Dredd encountered and dealt with the main groups of Icarus's security detail at the main entrance points to the lab. After that, the gunfire had become more sporadic as it crept closer to where Icarus was and Dredd penetrated further into the complex, encountering the occasional wandering vampire or small pocket of Death cultist resistance. Amidst these had come the odd explosion, the sounds of those also coming progressively closer as Dredd methodically destroyed lab after lab, wiping out years of Icarus's research into longevity and various possibilities for sustaining life after death. It didn't matter, Icarus knew. He already had everything he wanted from his research, and it was coursing through his veins now, changing his mind and body in ways that puny, mortal intellects like Dredd's could never imagine.

  The last explosion had come about half a minute ago, no doubt caused by Dredd laying waste to the lab just down the corridor, where the vampires' blood serum food supply was produced. If that was the case, then by Icarus's calculations he should be entering the...

  Right on cue, the lab doors obediently opened in response to the Justice Department override device's command. Dredd walked in, his Lawgi
ver aimed at Icarus. Apart from the two of them, there wasn't another living soul in the lab.

  "Dick Icarus? Fun-time's over, creep. You're under arrest."

  "Really? On what charges?" Icarus's tone was casual and breezy, his voice deliberately raised to distract Dredd's attention away from the faint pounding sounds on the incubator vault door on the wall to the side of them.

  "Don't get cute, punk. So far tonight, you've been responsible for the deaths of thousands. Grud knows how many more are going to die before we take care of the things you've unleashed on this city."

  "Aren't you even going to ask me why?" asked Icarus, glancing down at the weapon he'd left on the desk top beside him. It was only an arm's reach away. All he had to do was-

  "No need. You'll tell us everything we need to know soon enough, as soon as we get you into an interrogation cube," promised Dredd. "Why you did it, what you know of the Dark Judges' plans, any more little surprises you had planned for us. You won't hold anything back for too long. We've got interrogation techniques that'll make you tell us things you didn't even know you knew, and that's even before we bring in the Psi-Judges to go creeping around inside your mind."

  "I did it because I want to live forever, and because the Dark Judges have the power to grant me that wish." Icarus was almost shouting, as much to drown out the sounds from behind the vault door as from the sense of rising excitement he felt within him. The moment was so close now, so close...

  Dredd wasn't impressed. "So thousands have to die to feed your sick fantasy that the Dark Judges will give you eternal life? Grud alone knows how you managed to convince anyone to let you out the kook cubes, Icarus. The only wish the Dark Judges are ever going to grant is a death wish. You'd have to be completely insane to ever think you could make a bargain with those things."

  Dredd was walking across the room towards him now, reaching into a belt pouch for the handcuffs to secure his prisoner. The noise from the vault door finally drew his attention. He paused, glancing suspiciously over at the door.