Rodriguez stood up and beckoned him over. As Dredd approached, he noticed a change in the SouthAm Judge's body language. "I found something, I think." He was muted now, more watchful. "When Che was briefing us he had information up on the screen about weapons they had captured from the survivors?"
"Yes, nothing conclusive though. Everything they found was generic stuff, low-grade knock-offs without manufacturer's marks or serial numbers."
"Sí, just your typical gangbanger spit guns. But look here." He indicated a low wall discoloured with smoke. "See anything familiar?"
Dredd bent down for a closer examination. Embedded in the grey lunar brickwork was a cluster of bright silver needles, each as long as his finger. "Standard pattern dispersal," he noted, glancing over his shoulder. "Probably fired from close range. I'd say the shooter was one or two metres away." With care, Dredd pulled a handful of the needler rounds out and rolled them in his palm.
"Those are from a Volokov, right?" Rodriguez asked. "Like the baby needler gun that the chica was packing?"
Dredd nodded. He could just about read the telltale rifling pattern on the shards that was common to the Sov-made weapons. "East-Meggers don't sell a lot of these on the open market. Could be war surplus from the '04 conflict."
Rodriguez looked in Kontarsky's direction. "You think, maybe-" he began in a low voice.
"You can secure that line of questioning right now," Dredd interrupted. "We need facts, not speculation," he said, repeating what he'd told the woman on the flight in. The Judge's analytical mind was turning the small shred of evidence over and over in his mind, making connections, forming a hypothesis.
"Got something?" said Foster as he come closer to them. Dredd showed him the spent needler rounds. "That tracks with what I've been seeing," the Brit-Judge noted. "Most of the weapons that the rioters employed could have been made on the Moon back in the old days, but here and there I'm seeing anomalies." He nodded toward a torched vu-phone booth. "Heat diffusion traces on the glasseen over there matches the outputs from a Flesh-Blaster. These are both weapon signatures that look like off-world makes."
Rodriguez rubbed his chin. "Off-world? You mean from Earth, right?"
Foster nodded. "Guns like those Volokov needlers are very rare up here. You'd have to smuggle them in if you wanted one."
Dredd and Rodriguez exchanged a silent look.
"I just can't figure out where they got 'em," Foster continued. "We got no leads from the perps we pulled in. It's like these weapons were just lying around, ready for them to use."
Dredd secured the needle rounds in a belt pouch and strode back toward his bike. "If the guns were brought in from outside Luna-1, we've got a new factor to consider. Somebody spent the rocket fuel and the time to bring these weapons up the gravity well, which means there's gotta be more to this than just arming some cits for a pointless bloodbath." He paused. "Someone in Luna-City knows where these weapons came from."
"So we have to think about who we have to squeeze to get some results," Foster added. "Gun control's got pretty strict since the blowout in the Velikovsky botanical gardens dome, when you were here last. Most of the creeps who smuggle stuff up the well concentrate on low mass, high return products like drugs or Stookie glands. I doubt any of the usual suspects will cop to gun-running."
Dredd considered this for a moment. "Then maybe we need to concentrate on some of the old school Luna perps. And I think I know where to start looking."
"You got a lead you're not telling us about?" said Rodriguez.
"Just a feeling. You stay here and finish up. I'll meet you back at Justice Central at the end of the shift." Dredd gunned the Krait 3000's anti-grav motor and the skybike roared away, back toward the airlock.
"Huh," said Rodriguez. "He says he wants facts not speculation, then off he goes on a hunch. What do you make of that?"
Foster gave a wry smile. "He's Judge Dredd, pal. You know his record - if he says he's got an inkling on something, you can bet cold, hard credits it'll be on the ball."
Down by the crossped, Kontarsky looked up to see Dredd's zipper bike vanish into the zipstrip tunnel. She chewed her lip, then drew out her recorder and spoke into it once more.
Dredd held the throttle at cruising speed for a few minutes as he vectored down the tubeway back toward the central dome. He kept a close eye on his rearview scanner, watching for any sign of pursuit. He half-expected to glimpse Kontarsky trailing him on her Skymaster, but the Sov-Judge did not seem to be following him. That's the problem with fielding an international team, Dredd told himself, there's always the chance that people will put loyalty to their flag before justice.
It didn't take a genius to realise that Kontarsky was relaying every little decision that Dredd made back to the Sov-Block's diplomatic courier in orbit and the East-Meg Diktatorat on Earth. It stood to reason that there were probably dozens of covert agents in the pay of the Sov's Klandestine Ops Directorate on Luna-1, even if Kontarsky wasn't one of them. Certainly, Mega-City One had its share of spies in the Moon colony and so did all the other major nation states.
Luna-1 was an international zone and that meant that every city on Earth had some kind of presence here, all of them watching one another, jockeying for position and playing political mind games. The lawman sneered at the thought of becoming caught up in this sort of intrigue. He wasn't a man for shady schemes or diplomatic double-talk. Dredd preferred a straight, stand-up fight to back-alley dealings and secret treaties. He was the blunt instrument of justice and he liked it just fine that way.
When Dredd was certain he wasn't being tailed, he opened up the Krait's throttles to maximum and pushed the flyer to the redline, weaving between heavy aerotrucks, darting through the traffic like a barracuda through a pod of whales. The East-Meg Judge had been constantly observing Dredd from the moment he'd arrived on Union Station, no doubt even from before they had met. He hadn't expected anything less - after all, he was the man who'd wiped out millions of her fellow Sov-Blockers with the push of a single button - but the discovery of the needle rounds threatened to shift the balance of his evaluation of Kontarsky. If the Sovs had some kind of connection to the Kepler Dome incident, then her position on the taskforce suddenly had a whole new dimension to it. Maybe all that wide-eyed rookie stuff was just a front. He even considered for a moment that Rodriguez might have planted the needler rounds to implicate the Sov-Judge, but then what would the Pan Andes Conurb have to gain by doing that? Besides, Foster had backed up the SouthAm Judge's discovery with one of his own and the idea of the Brits being in league with the Banana City boys was verging on the ridiculous, given current international tensions between them.
Dredd blew out a breath. All this second-guessing was distracting him from the real investigation at hand. The only course of action that presented itself was to keep himself at the forefront of things until he could be sure where the loyalties of the other Judges lay. Despite the professionalism - or lack of it, in the case of Rodriguez - shown by each of the foreign officers, the five of them were circling each other like wary tigers, watching one another for signs of weakness or malfeasance. It was up to Dredd to play the role of the pack alpha, to pull them into line, weed out any weak links and maintain discipline. Anything less and the group would fall apart before they could make any progress.
At the Santini flyover, Dredd took a sharp turn to starboard and throttled down the Krait, settling into a shallow cruise altitude over the quadrant formed by the edges of Verne Avenue and the Odyssey Loop. The locals called this place the Pink Crater and since the very first days of Luna-1's incorporation, it had served as the city's red light district where colonists could go to let off a little steam. The more relaxed laws set in place during the Moon's wild frontier heyday still granted this portion of the dome a little more freedom than other more upmarket parts of town, with licensed casinos on the edges of the zone feeding local pleasure-seekers and eager tourists alike into the null-grav nude bars, virtu-porn arcades and Lust-O-Mats. Me
ga-City One had similar districts, but the Justice Department kept them strictly regulated with regular crime sweeps on an almost daily basis.
The open immorality of the Pink Crater set the Judge's teeth on edge. It was in the interests of the businesses in the area to keep any serious crime off the streets, but he was willing to bet that untold numbers of lawbreakers and infractions were passing by beneath him right now, if only he could crack the place open to see them. He orbited around a gaggle of tethered floater boudoirs above the Satellite of Love massage parlour and located the building he was looking for, a fetish club at the rough end of the loop called the Harsh Mistress.
Dredd set the bike to hover mode and dropped down on to the roof, pausing to check the setting on his STUP-gun.
The holographic image of the club's signature female clad in black leather bondage gear leered over the rooftop, brandishing a cat o' nine tails and licking her lips. "Have you been bad?" the holo demanded of the revellers down on the street. "The harsh mistress knows you have! Come inside and get the punishment you deserve!"
Dredd gave a grim smile. "You have no idea how right you are," he told the sign.
6. VACUUM PACKED
Judge Dredd's boot made short work of the lock on the access hatch and he descended into the sweaty, ill-lit interior of the Harsh Mistress, the low-light image intensifier lenses in his helmet rendering the corridors of the club in green-tinted shades. Rastabilly skank music was currently enjoying a revival on the lunar cabaret scene and the grinding thuds of a particularly loud track's bassline resonated through the building. Dredd was thankful for the audio processing circuits in his headgear, which flattened the atonal pop music into a dull background hiss while still picking out the more important sounds of movement and activity. Correctly tuned, a Judge's helmet sensors could hear the sound of a spit gun being cocked amid the roar of a smashball stadium crowd.
A Bouncer-Mek met him halfway down the stairwell to the roof and grated out a stock warning in a metallic voice. "Your name's not down, you're not coming in. Hop it, you spugger!"
Dredd's reply was to fire a point-blank stun blast from his STUP-gun into the robot's braincase and it rocked back, spitting sparks.
"Awwk!" The pulse pistol worked just as well on mechanoids as it did on flesh-and-blood perps. The droid dropped to the floor in a clanking heap and lay there, twitching.
The Judge paused at the foot of the stairs to get his bearings. He was standing on a broad balcony that circled a packed dance floor below, where Luna-cits in various states of undress wrestled with things that could have been alien life forms or maybe just other people in bizarre fetish costumes. He shook his head and resisted the urge to arrest the lot of them. Off the balcony there were doors leading to private suites, soundproofed rooms where VIP club members could "entertain" or conduct clandestine trysts.
Dredd studied them carefully. The design of the club had been altered since he'd been here last and that had been a long time ago, with a force of two dozen Luna Judges and a fistful of warrants behind him. One of Tex's men at the time, Judge-Marshal Chico, had brought a tip-off to Dredd's attention and they had uncovered a smuggling ring bringing black market laser rifles up from Sino-City One. Two Judges had died in a firefight at the docks when they ambushed that cargo and Dredd had personally led the raid on the Harsh Mistress to arrest the man behind the deal, the night-club's owner-manager, Vik Umbra. He was a particularly odious perp, as Dredd recalled, with illicit tastes and desires that even the moderate laws of Luna-1's red light district paled at. If anyone could be sure to know something about the weapons from Kepler Dome, it would be him.
Dredd grabbed the arm of a woman who passed him. Her hair was a shock of bright electric blue and she wore a shiny black outfit of plasti-wrap, her neck covered by a choker adorned with rings.
"Hey, downshift, chummer!" she wailed, pushing at him. "What's your malfunction?"
"I'm looking for Vik Umbra. Where is he?"
"Vik?" she blinked. "He's in his g-room, wave me? You looking to spell with him? You a gravity-fun boy-boy guy?" She rubbed her hand over his uniform. "Oooh, deedee. This is real leather, wave? You gotta primo costume."
Dredd hissed in her ear. "It's not a costume, wave?"
"A real Judge?" her lip quivered. "I done nothin'!" The girl glanced at his badge and went pale. "Dredd? Dredd!"
Sometimes having his reputation precede him made getting what Dredd wanted a whole lot easier. "Show me where Vik is," he demanded and the blue-haired girl eagerly nodded her assent, ready to do anything to avoid time in the cubes herself.
She led him to an opulent room set back from the others and opened the door. Inside was an ornate, over-decorated antechamber where two human bodyguards were standing watch over a handful of frightened young juves, each chained to a spiked leash. The guards were quick and their hands were already diving for the triggers of their stump guns as he entered. Dredd wasted no time and fired two pulses into the meatheads, sending them sprawling. Sorting through their pockets, he handed the girl the keys to the leash and nodded at the teenagers. "You. Take 'em and get lost."
The girl did what he asked and Dredd looked around, finding and smashing an alarm keypad. It wouldn't do for Umbra to call for help before they had had their discussion. The Judge found a used injector that reeked of Stookie and a copious supply of Umpty Candy on a side table, more than enough to put the club owner behind bars for another long stretch.
He shouldered open the next door and found himself in a bi-gravity chamber.
Close to the doorway where Dredd stood, the g-plates in the floor simulated an Earth-normal one gee environment, but further in across a discreet line of yellow tiles, the room was completely weightless. The sole occupant was a pallid ball of skin at least six times the size of the Judge, a naked, corpulent pinkish mass floating just within reach of the padded walls. Sex toys, sense-dep masks and other less identifiable objects drifted around the huge fatty in a lazy shoal. "Has someone brought me a new playmate?" said a breathy voice. "My last one broke." The fleshy sphere of a man rotated slightly and presently a head appeared, peering owlishly at the Judge from out of a dozen rolls of neck-flab.
"Hello, Vik," Dredd sneered. "Long time no see. Have you lost weight?"
"Rot you, Dredd!" The fatty trembled. "I gained one hundred and thirty-six kilograms!"
"My mistake."
"I heard you'd come back to the Moon," Umbra said, spittle flying from his lips in little spheres. "Well, you can liposuck me, you drokker! I'm legit now! You got nothing on me!"
"Really? What about the youth drugs and addictive candy I found in here? I'm sure there will be more if I look for it."
"Not mine!" Umbra screeched, flailing at an inert alarm switch. "You can't prove it's mine!"
Dredd spotted a control panel on the wall and turned a dial on it. The effect of the gravity nullifier on Vik's side of the room began to decrease and by centimetres the bulbous man-shape slowly settled to the floor. "One-sixth gee has been good to you, Vik. I bet you couldn't even walk under your own weight on Earth." Umbra pooled on the tiles in a flushed pile of adipose meat.
He gave a weak cough as the dial passed the two gee marker. "Look, Dredd, stop it! My heart will pop like a balloon if you keep turning that up! What do you want with me?"
"I put you away for fifteen for dealing in illegal weapons back in '99, Vik. But even if you're not in the gun trade any more, I figure you still know who's bringing them into Luna-1."
"Sneck off, Dredd! All my gunrunning days are over. Like I told you, I'm out of it."
The dial turned to up three gravities. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that."
"Please!" Vik spat out bloody drool. "My heart can't take it!"
"Then give me a name, or else they'll have to use a spatula to scrape you into a coffin." Dredd thought he could hear the sound of ribs cracking.
"You're crazy if you think I'll give you anything, helmet-head! I withered away in prison thanks to you, living on ju
st nine meals a day! I'll die first!"
Dredd tap-tapped his finger on the gravity dial. "You sure about that?"
Vik's bluster wavered a little. "If I roll over for you, Dredd, I'll be a corpse before the next earthrise. These guys, they're connected."
"So you do know something," Dredd nodded to himself. His guess about Umbra still being in the smuggler's loop had proven right. "You've got a choice, Vik. You have to ask yourself who you're more afraid of. Me or them?"
After a few wheezing breaths, Umbra gave a wobbly nod. "All right, drokk you. Let me up and I'll talk."
Dredd dialled back the gravity to lunar normal, enough to keep the fatty down on the ground. "Spit it out, creep."
"You know about the rebel miners on Ganymede, right?"
A nod. "Sure. It was a Sov colony. They took the place over."
"There was a big cargo of weapons on the way out to them about three months back, so I heard. Nothing to do with me, part of some deal with the Diamante cartel in the Med Free States fronting for the Siberian Mafia." Dredd knew the name; the cartel were pirates and middlemen for a dozen larger criminal groups worldwide and the Siberian connection would have explained the Sov-issue guns like the Volokov needlers and Beria flesh blasters. "But they never made it there. Most folks figured that the load got caught by the East-Meg Judges, but one of my girls heard different from a, uh, client."
"Someone from the cartel?"
"Nah, this guy worked for M-Haul. They do interplanetary freight and salvage. He let slip that his crew intercepted the cartel ship. They cut up the freighter for scrap and kept the weapons."
"A name," Dredd growled. "Give me a name."
"Sure, sure. Yud Swindo, that was the guy. But don't bother looking for him, he's dead. A day after he spilled his guts, he was found out on the Sea of Vapours without an e-suit and the girl he blabbed to got done the same way too. Pretty soon after that, M-Haul lost all four of its ships in a tragic docking accident, if you get my drift."
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