Judgment Plague

by James Axler

  Recalling Irons, DePaul’s mind drifted back to his younger years, when he had still been a rookie magistrate in Cobaltville.

  Ten years earlier

  DEPAUL HAD SPENT a total of nine days out of action, recovering from the infection he had picked up at that mutie farm in the Outlands. He had been given a course of strong antibiotics, and the magistrate doctors had insisted on bed rest for the first five of those days of recuperation, but by the sixth they could no longer stop him as he went down to the gym to keep his body in shape. His muscle tone was looking less pronounced, and he wanted it back. He couldn’t go out on the streets at anything less than 100 percent perfect.

  Ten days later and he was back in uniform, accompanying Irons on a so-called pedestrian pit patrol, a survey of the Tartarus Pits that underpinned Cobaltville, conducted on foot.

  Like all villes, Cobaltville was organized in layers, with administration conducted in the highest, or Alpha Level, above which the baron dwelled, alone and unapproachable. Beneath this was Beta Level, where the Historical Division was located, then Cappa Level, which housed the Magistrate Division, including their training and medical facilities. Beneath Cappa was Delta Level, which was dedicated to the preservation, preparation and distribution of food, then Epsilon, where the construction and manufacturing facilities operated.

  The Tartarus Pits were located beneath everything, and made up of narrow, twisting streets lit by the lurid light of neon signs. These sectors of the villes were melting pots where the poorest of Cobaltville’s citizens lived, and though crime was not rife, there was a certain lawlessness among the inhabitants that was tolerated or stamped on, depending on what message the authorities wanted to send out. The pits provided a cheap source of labor, and movement between the enclaves of the ville and the pits was tightly controlled and restricted.

  The Tartarus Pits were accessed by monitored pedway or sealed elevator. Only a magistrate on official business was allowed to enter them.

  “Own the streets or the streets will own you,” Irons reminded DePaul as they exited the elevator that accessed the Tartarus Pits.

  DePaul nodded, holding back a smile. He was glad to be in uniform again, glad to be back at Irons’s side while the older man mentored him, taught him everything he would ever need to be a magistrate like his father.

  Then the elevator door silently slid back on its hidden housing, and the two men strode out into the pits.

  The overcrowded Tartarus Pits stank of human exertion. It was an eye-opener just being down here, DePaul thought, where the worst of humankind festered, a literal underbelly to the glorious ville. What kind of culture needed this? he wondered. It seemed absolute folly to him, to have a whole society, with all its riches and achievements, willfully keep a substantial section of their people in abject poverty, forcing them to fend for themselves where it was not necessary. It reeked of poor planning, and the place felt like a powder keg just waiting for someone to light the fuse.

  Irons set the pace, marching down routes he had been down dozens of times before, proud in his uniform and helmet. To his left, DePaul kept up with him, eyeing the market traders and their customers from the tinted plastic of his visor, mouth set in an emotionless line. Foods sizzled and spit on open griddles, smelling of grease and spices so pungent that DePaul could taste them in the back of his throat each time he breathed in. There were sticky scuffs marking the street, and they caught at the soles of his boots, pulling at them for an instant as he and Irons continued to march down the narrow, winding lane of market stalls.

  People backed away from the menacing, black-clad figures, and as they got farther down the street, a ripple effect seemed to pass through the crowd, and a space was made for them like the biblical parting of the Red Sea.

  It felt good to be back on patrol, DePaul thought. Not just good—it felt right. It was right to be here, to bring order to the masses, to instill fear in them so that they knew to behave, that they were being watched, that there was no escape from the eyes of the law.

  But he felt something else, too. The smells, the taste of the air, the unwashed people—it felt unclean. He felt unclean.

  DePaul stopped, feeling his heart pound against his chest.

  Irons was three strides ahead of him when he realized that the rookie was no longer at his side. He paused and turned. “You spot something?” he asked.

  Irons was already looking around the immediate area, searching for the source of potential danger—DePaul could tell that, even though the man’s eyes were hidden by the visor.

  “Nothing,” DePaul said, but his voice wavered uncertainly.

  Irons stepped closer to him, pitching his voice low so that they would not be overheard. Around them, some of the unwashed crowd seemed to have stopped as people noticed the magistrates talking. They assumed that someone was about to get booked, and some of the crowd made to leave the immediate area with as much subtlety as their haste would allow.

  “Then what?” Irons said quietly.

  “I...” DePaul stopped, unable to say it.

  Irons looked at him, visor to visor, trying to read the rookie’s body language. DePaul had been trained since birth to assume this role as magistrate, and his body language gave nothing away. Still, Irons detected something, or maybe he guessed it—that old mag instinct doing double duty as it checked on his partner and remained alert to potential threats. “You feel okay? Is it that bug you picked up?”

  “No,” DePaul said. “That is to say, yes. I’m okay. It’s not the bug.”

  “Then what?”

  How could DePaul tell him? He looked at his sleeves, looked at his gloved hands. But what he saw there—how could he say? He could see germs on him, could feel them multiplying even through the protective leathers of his armor. They were covering his body, attempting to smother his mouth and nose and eyes. Germs conspiring to bring him down again, to lay him low.

  Irons was standing in front of him, his hand still on the rookie’s sleeve, staring up into the tinted visor of his helmet. “Rookie?” he said quietly. “DePaul?”

  DePaul stepped back, brushing Irons’s hand—and a whole culture of germs—away from his sleeve. “Get away from me!” he said, reaching for his own helmet and yanking it from his face. “Keep them away from me!” His last words came out almost as a scream.

  Irons was quick; a lifetime on the streets, including regular excursions into the dangerous Outlands and the Tartarus Pits, had kept his mind keen. He turned on his heel, facing the crowd that remained watching the strange scene play out, and there was authority in his voice when he spoke. “Everyone is to return to their homes—whatever that might mean—right now,” he shouted over the hubbub of the marketplace. “And I mean everyone. I see anyone still standing on this street in thirty seconds and I will arrest their dead body after I’ve shot it full of holes—get me?”

  For a moment the crowd seemed unsure, glancing at one another, looking for a cue. Then, almost as one, they turned and fled, hurrying from the scene as swiftly as their legs would carry them. Vendors left their stalls, exotic dishes sizzling and charring, juices spitting as the heat excited them.

  Irons ignored it all, trusting his authority to carry the situation as he turned back to his rookie partner. DePaul was still standing as he had left him, helmet lying sideways on the ground beside a market stall. He held one arm out before him and seemed to be studying the leather of his uniform.

  “DePaul? What’s going on here?” Irons demanded, employing that same tone of authority that he had used on the crowd moments before.

  DePaul looked up past his own arm, his haunted eyes meeting with Irons’s mask. “They’re everywhere,” he said. “Sticking to me, trying to kill me.”

  “Who’s everywhere?” Irons demanded. “Who’s trying to kill you?”

  “The dirt,” DePaul spit. “The germs, the viruses, t
he unclean shit that’s everywhere around us. Don’t you see it? Can’t you feel it?”

  Irons took a step toward his rookie partner, holding his arms out in a nonthreatening gesture. He had seen men crack before; good men, ones who should have made good magistrates. He had seen good magistrates shoot innocents out of fear, and he had seen brilliant magistrates moved to desk positions because they just could not face another day out there on the streets. He reckoned that he had seen it all, until he saw DePaul—the most brilliant rookie to ever come through the training program—crack as they stood in the squalor of a Tartarus Pits market.

  “We’re going to go back now,” Irons said gently. “Back to the Magistrate Hall on Cappa Level. Grab your helmet and we’ll walk back to the elevator.”

  DePaul just stood there, staring wildly at his gloved hands, his wrists, his arms. He was looking at them as if they were alien to his body, or as if they were covered in poison.

  “DePaul,” Irons said, putting a little of that authority into his voice. “Grab your helmet, lad. When you leave here you’ll do so looking like a mag. Is that understood?”

  DePaul looked up at Irons for a moment, a flash of blue eyes in his sunken face, the dark bags still visible under his eyes from the sickness that had felled him two weeks earlier. He seemed bewildered, as if he didn’t quite realize where he was.

  “Helmet,” Irons said again.

  Obediently, DePaul bent down and snatched up his helmet, brushing the dirt from it.

  “Put it on your head, boy,” Irons told him.

  DePaul looked askance at the older mag through narrowed eyes. “It’s dirty.”

  “Put it on,” Irons repeated. “If you don’t do it, I will shoot you right here. You leave the pits like a magistrate or you don’t leave at all.”

  DePaul held his breath as he put on the helmet, body trembling, his eyes closed in fear.

  * * *

  MAGISTRATE PSYCHOMETRIC REPORT D-1011-r, Code, DePaul (rookie), Cobaltville. Awaiting Active Badge of Courage. Training Scores: 10, 10, 10, 10, 10.

  Intelligent, loyal and unflinching. Has strong curb on emotions. Suggestibility low. Attitude scales incomplete. Concerns raised over mental health, seems traumatized by recent infection. Short-term observation prescribed. Caution recommended.

  * * *

  GRADUALLY, DEPAUL’S mind came back to the present, his eyes focusing once more on the bleak desert that stretched before him in all directions, rocks and cacti and dirt laid out beneath the sinking sun. He had been clinging tightly to the steering wheel as he recollected his experience in the Tartarus Pits, and the insides of his gloves were slick with sweat.

  Soon now, he would bring his final judgment to the Tartarus Pits and to everyone else in Cobaltville. Soon all the lawbreakers and corrupt administrators and the filthy baron would reel from his decision, as he passed sentence on the whole ville.

  And after that? Well, the world was full of lawbreakers, criminal minds scheming to destroy the fabric of moral society. With his biologically engineered plague, he would cast judgment on every man, woman and child on the planet. The final judgment would wipe every lawbreaker from the face of the Earth, finishing the job that the nukecaust had started. And then he could start things fresh, cleansed from all the germs and bacteria and human detritus that befouled this perfect blue-green mud ball of a planet.

  The twin SandCats continued their passage across the empty desert, plumes of dust billowing in their wake, bringing the final judgment to Cobaltville, and to the world.

  Chapter 19

  At the bunker in the Sonoran Desert, Cerberus physician Reba DeFore and her two associates were studying the health of the mysterious prisoners that Kane’s team had discovered in the room of cages. They had sedated those who seemed to be in real pain, partially in an effort to be humane, but also to help make recording and studying their symptoms easier.

  Not wanting to move far from the source, DeFore set up a mobile analysis lab in the sleeping quarters of the underground base, placing Sela Sinclair on guard duty outside the base itself. Sinclair was a long-standing member of the Cerberus organization. A lithe, muscular woman with dark skin and short hair weaved in braids, Sela was another of the cryogenic freezies who had been discovered on the Manitius Moon Base. Sinclair had been an Air Force lieutenant in the twentieth century, and she was one the most capable combatants in the Cerberus team.

  Of the twelve people they found in the compound, six of the cell inhabitants were already dead, including the one shot by Grant. Four more were close to death, by DeFore’s reckoning, while the last two were in a declining spiral of health that had already taken a grave toll on their mental well-being. With Grant infected by the same virus, it was crucial to learn exactly what it was they were suffering from and how medical science might combat it.

  DeFore and her two assistants set up portable monitors for the sick, injecting a simplified version of the transponder nanotech to assess the victims’ health. Their patients—though DeFore struggled to apply the term to these human wretches—complained, but they had little energy to fight. She tried to be gentle, promising them this was for their own good.

  “This is horrible. I’ve never seen anything quite like this outside of the medical journals,” DeFore said, speaking with a lab tech, Gus Wilson, as they studied the results of their initial tests.

  Wilson shook his head. “It looks like it’s already in end stage,” he said, emphasising his words with a whistle that was muffled by the protective mask he wore. “Poor devils don’t have long to live.” A handsome young man barely into his twenties, with unruly locks of russet-brown hair, Wilson could be a little intimidated sometimes by the array of knowledge on show at the Cerberus facility, preferring to keep to stock checking and less hands-on duties if he could. But he was a diligent worker and had taken this field assignment at Lakesh’s urging.

  “No,” DeFore said, with a solemn shake of her head. “It seems that wherever Kane and his team go, they find things I never imagined still existed. This appears to be a virulent strain of the bubonic plague. However, it’s being transmitted by the exchange of bodily fluids in preference to airborne particles.”

  “From Brigid’s report, Grant was infected by one of these—” Wilson gestured toward the cage room “—poor people vomiting at him. She said it took less than two minutes for the virus to take hold.”

  DeFore nodded, professional concern on her features. “Could be a flinch response, but as soon as it gets in the system it doesn’t take long to kick in,” she said. “These people are in the end stage of the cycle, as you say, but how long did it take them to get there? Weeks? Days? Hours? Without that information it will be hard to treat Grant.”

  The third member of the team, Karen Stapleton—a lanky woman whose strawberry-blond hair had been tied back in a high ponytail beneath her protective helmet—entered the mobile lab then, holding a sheaf of paperwork. “Ten days,” she said, answering DeFore’s question.

  The two turned to their colleague, understandably surprised. “What did you say?” DeFore asked, not quite believing what she’d just heard.

  Karen flipped through the papers she was holding in her gloved hand. They were bound computer printouts, text with graphical analysis, and as she turned the pages the others could see that a number of additional notes had been added by hand. “It’s an experiment into using a weaponized virus,” she explained. “The guy running the experiment made copious notes. It looks like he was trying to perfect the strain to ensure it was both virulent and highly contagious. Everything’s in here, from the early tests on rats to the full-blown breakdown of his findings with each strand on his human subjects.”

  DeFore let out a heavy breath at this last. “Ghastly. Why?”

  “Doesn’t say,” Stapleton replied. “It’s just a diaried report on tests and findings. It’s very
meticulous. The guy’s utterly methodical.”

  “While experimenting on humans like animals,” DeFore said grimly. “What drives a man to do that, I wonder?”

  The question hung in the air as the pained moans of the experimental subjects echoed along the grim corridors of the underground bunker.

  * * *

  “YOU MEAN OUR crazy ex-magistrate plans to unleash some kind of virus like the one we discovered in Freeville?” Kane asked. He was barely able to contemplate what Brigid had just said.

  “We discovered that he monitored,” Brigid told him. “And he most probably released it, too.”

  “That’s...”

  “Crazy?” Brigid taunted. “Isn’t that exactly what you just said about the magistrate psychometric report this guy received?”

  “We’re speculating,” Kane said dismissively.

  “Based on the facts we have,” Brigid told him hotly.

  Lakesh held his hands between the two of them, drawing their attention. “What Brigid says does make a certain degree of sense, friend Kane. If your frightening mask man is a rejected magistrate, then he would have the training and insight to work with the viruses in the compound, and he could quite probably have the motivation to use what he found in the form of a chemical weapon.”

  “To do what? Take revenge on the magistrate who assessed him?” Kane asked. “I don’t buy it.”

  “No,” Brigid said. “To continue being a magistrate. Imagine if you had a weapon that could punish the guilty, execute everyone who ever committed a crime.”

  “Such a weapon doesn’t exist,” Kane stated.

  She leaned close to him, speaking suggestively. “It does, my dear ex-magistrate,” she said. “It just depends on who you think the guilty are.”

  Kane looked at her, his brow furrowed as he worked her words over in his mind. “But this...virus he’s planning to unleash kills everyone without distinction. You saw Freeville, Baptiste—it killed everyone.”