J'aele studied the display, working the console. "Dredd is correct. This is suspicious. I'm finding broken data tags in this part of the file."
"Which means?"
"The comparative DNA scan was entered here, but then it was erased. Rather sloppily, too." The Tek-Judge ran a few more commands and a cluster of red indicators blinked into life on the screen. "And that's not all. This file has been tampered with. Someone altered Rodriguez's autopsy report after the fact."
Dredd's brow furrowed. "Who has access to these records? Who could do that?"
"Senior medical department staff..." J'aele tapped out another string of commands. "The senior technician on duty today was Sanjeev Maktoh."
Kontarsky was already speaking into her helmet mike. "Control, query and locate Sanjeev Maktoh."
"Checking..." came the reply. "Confirming, Maktoh, Sanjeev. Justice Central medical department civilian auxiliary, Indo-Cit resident on lunar placement. He checked out from work a couple of hours ago, logging absent due to sickness."
"It's him!" she snapped. "Dredd, he must be the one."
"I need an address," Dredd told J'aele.
The African Judge nodded and flickered through to a personnel file. "Here it is. Ventner Boulevard, con-apt 44/LK/31."
Dredd threw J'aele a nod. "Good work."
J'aele sighed heavily. "Just don't tell anyone I gave in so easily."
Ventner Boulevard was in the midst of one of the central dome's mid-level residential districts, well appointed with a handful of block parks and shopperias between the stubby half-ovoids of the con-apt buildings. Maktoh's small two-pod habitat module was on the thirty-first floor, facing outward. Dredd and Kontarsky made a landing on a nearby Multistack, giving them a clear line of sight into the medical technician's apartment.
Kontarsky studied the windows through a compact pair of Sov-issue binox. "I see movement inside. A single person, I believe. He appears quite agitated."
Dredd accepted the field glasses and took a look for himself. "He's packing a bag. What do you reckon, he's already bought a ticket back Earthside?"
She nodded her agreement. "If he's running scared, that might explain why he made such a bad job of doctoring the autopsy report. His disquiet could be helpful in interrogation."
"Agreed. We'll take him now. You go through the front door."
"You're not coming with me?"
Dredd gunned the Krait 3000's gravity drive. "I'll be around."
Sanjeev caught his foot on the trailing cuff of a shirt dangling out of the pile of clothes in his hands and tripped over. He landed on the suitcase that lay open on his folda-bed and it flipped, spilling out the contents he'd frantically packed into a mess of unkempt clothing. He fell to his knees and had to struggle to keep from crying. Sanjeev's stomach turned over and he felt the same about-to-throw-up sensation that had been dogging him since the phone call.
That voice at the other end of the line. Menacing him, intimidating, making veiled threats about what would happen to his mother and father, his wife and the pod where they lived in Indo City. He had done as the voice had asked, time and time again. He had hidden things in rooms in the Grand Hall of Justice. He had given things to shady people in dark alleys. He had slipped the tasteless, odourless capsules into the food of the fat prisoner in iso-cube 576. All of this he had done, gradually getting more and more afraid, more terrified by increments until today, the dam of his fears had broken. The voice had made him change things in the dead Judge's file and even as he did, Sanjeev was suddenly struck by the absolute certainty that this time he would be caught. When it was done, he closed up his desk and left, every muscle screaming in him to run, run, run!
And running was what he was doing... Just as soon as he could pack his bags. When the knock at the door came it was as loud as a gunshot and Sanjeev almost soiled himself in fright. It wasn't the casual, how-are-you knock of a neighbour or the hopeful entreaty of some robotic salesman. It was a cop knock, hard and forceful and without pity. "Sanjeev Maktoh?" asked a woman's voice. "Justice Department. Open the door."
If Sanjeev thought he was panicking before, then the absolute terror that descended on him after he heard those words showed that everything up until now had just been a taster of the real thing. He twisted on the spot, hands flapping at the air like distressed birds, mouth agape. Mad, insane plans raced through his mind - could he hide in the fridge? Barricade himself inside the toilet? Feign unconsciousness until she went away? But with a physical effort he shuttered his fear away and made himself focus. He ignored the banging on the door and the shouting woman outside. Sanjeev grabbed the billfold that held all the credits he had withdrawn from Luna Bank 6 and stuffed the one-way ticket to Delhi-Cit in his pocket, then he sprinted for the hab's window.
He heard the door crash open under the steel toe-caps of Judge Kontarsky's boot, heard the high-pitched whine of her STUP-gun going active. But he was at the window, it was open and he was through it, hundreds of metres up over Ventner Boulevard.
Sanjeev's fingers snatched at the box on the wall where the emergency floater was stored, the one-shot parachute-balloon combination that high-rise residents could use in lieu of a fire escape. It was empty.
A new sound reached his ears: the high-pitched motors of a zipper bike.
Dredd let the flyer drop down from where he had been hovering. He held out a bright orange bundle of plasti-fabric. "Looking for this?"
With crushing certainty, Sanjeev realised he had nowhere else to go and he closed his eyes, letting himself teeter forward and surrender to the lunar gravity. Before he could fall, however, something hard and rigid snapped into place around his wrist and suddenly he was yanked back into the apartment, landing once more in a pile of his own clothes.
Judge Kontarsky held the other ring of the cuffs she'd just snapped shut around Maktoh's hand. "Do not move," she told him, "or I may be forced to injure you... permanently."
Sanjeev gave a nod of acceptance and then threw up.
9. BREAKING STRAIN
As a Judge-kadet, Kontarsky had studied the techniques of interrogations very carefully. She'd learned how to give them and how to resist them, how to tell if someone who was answering was actually replying or just saying what they thought you wanted to hear. She watched Dredd take two long steps across Maktoh's hab and decided to treat this as another lesson, a chance to observe an American Judge in the midst of a cross-examination. As she expected, Dredd went for the direct approach.
"Spill it!" he barked, his face a few centimetres away from the medical technician's. "We know you tampered with the Rodriguez autopsy!"
Sanjeev said nothing, eyes flicking to Kontarsky as she wiped off her boots with one of his shirts. He gulped down air.
"Silent type, huh?" Dredd pressed. "Fine. We'll take you back to Justice Central and Psi-Division can pluck it out of your head the hard way."
"Nooo!" Maktoh suddenly found his voice. "Please, no! It's not safe there! They can get me anywhere!"
Dredd's eyes narrowed. "They? Who are they?"
The thin man's vu-phone chirped and with a weak, apologetic smile in the direction of his boss, he stepped away from the conference table and answered it with a husky snarl. "What? I told you never to call me here-"
The caller's voice was muted by distance. "Uh, sorry, Sellers-"
"No names!" the thin man snapped. "Are you even using an encrypted channel, you dolt?"
"Sorry, uh, sir, but it's the mark. He's got company."
The thin man winced and gave the other men in the Silent Room a wan look. "Judges?"
"Yeah. Two of 'em."
"Ah, sneck." He hesitated, he was glad he had put some men on Maktoh just to cover himself, but now he was afraid that things would get out of hand. The last thing he needed was for one of their assets to start blabbing so soon after Dredd had squeezed information out of that corpulent slug Umbra. The thin man decided not to take any chances. "You got the hardware with you?"
"Sure, boss
. Right here." He could hear the rush of traffic in the background.
"Good. Waste him and then get the drokk out of there."
The trembling perp blinked fear-sweat out of his eyes. "I... I want protection," he said in a querulous voice.
"From what?" Kontarsky followed Dredd's lead, keeping her voice level and ice-cold. "Who are you working with?"
Words tumbled out of his mouth. "I needed the money, you see... I had gambling debts, I couldn't afford to let my family be shamed..."
"So you sold out," Dredd grated. "You'd better come clean. The more you hold back, the harder it's gonna be."
"I stole equipment for them, for the money. But then they wouldn't let me stop, they threatened my family..." The medic was on the verge of tears now. "Made me... do things. Change things."
"Like the autopsy," Kontarsky added.
"Yes... The analysis droid found anomalies in his brain tissue. I was told to blank the robot's memory, but it had already uploaded the data to the central file. I... I had to erase it..."
Dredd glanced down at the Birdie lie detector in his hand. Maktoh's stress levels were high, but his readings were still in the green. He hadn't said anything untruthful yet. "Tell me what you changed."
"I replaced the neurological scans. There were unusual readings in the aural centres of his brain. Very high levels of dopamine, serotonin and epinephrine..."
"Neurochemicals," said Kontarsky. "They stimulate adrenaline production and aggression."
The Mega-City Judge gave a slow nod. "Someone was pushing Rodriguez, making him crazy. How?"
"I... I can't be sure..."
"Take a guess!" Dredd growled.
Maktoh stared at the floor. "I think... Subsonic pulses, perhaps. Just beyond the range of human hearing, but powerful enough to affect the victim."
Kontarsky considered this for a moment. "This is quite possible. Sonic weapons technology is certainly capable of such a function."
Dredd grabbed the technician and dragged him to his feet. "Who was paying you, creep? I want a name!"
"No names!" Maktoh screamed, flailing in the Judge's iron grip. "Just a voice! A voice on the phone! The money came through Luna Bank! It's untraceable!"
"Dredd," Kontarsky said carefully, "Luna Bank is one of several subsidiaries owned by MoonieCorp."
"Well, well," said the Mega-City Judge. "What a surprise." He let Maktoh drop to the floor. "You're under arrest, pal. Conspiracy. Gambling. Computer hacking. Theft. I'm sure there's more. You won't be seeing your family for a long time."
The medic threw up his hands and yelled at the top of his lungs. "But I told you what you wanted to know! You promised me protection!" He stumbled backward, away from the Judges and swore at them in gutter Hindi.
"I never promised you anything," Dredd retorted.
"You're coming with us," Kontarsky added.
"No! No! NO!" Maktoh stamped on the floor like a child throwing a tantrum.
Something flickered on the edge of Dredd's vision and his head snapped around toward it. A thin tail of white smoke arcing around in a half-loop, something grey and bullet-quick spiralling towards the window.
"Down!" He shouted, reaching out to shove Maktoh to the floor.
Dredd was a half-second too slow. The compact mini-missile struck the glasseen window of the con-apt and the detonator triggered. Inside the warhead, a dense weave of monomolecular wires were projected outward in an expanding sphere and tore through Maktoh's apartment in a razor-edged hurricane. Dredd's right-hand glove was cut cleanly down the middle by a spinning fragment and behind him, Kontarsky lost a triangle-shaped section of her rad-cloak from another screeching piece of shrapnel.
Sanjeev was standing directly in the path of the detonation and took the full force of the weapon on his unarmored body. Dredd saw the medical technician jerk and spasm under a hundred hits before his body fell apart, irregular chunks of meat tumbling apart in a pink mist of fluids.
Kontarsky choked down a churn of hot bile in her throat and looked away. "I am uninjured..." she said, thanking her luck that the sofa she'd dropped behind had absorbed most of the damage.
"There!" spat Dredd, his now-bare hand stabbing out at something in the distance. Through the torn rent in the con-apt wall where the window had been, the Sov-Judge saw a black Skylord aero-sedan race away from a standing hover. "Blitzer team!" snapped the Judge. "In pursuit!"
Before she could react, Dredd was already vaulting out of the gap, dropping smartly into the saddle of his skybike where it floated below the balcony level.
The Krait 3000 handled well, turning sharply into the banks and angles as Dredd twisted the throttle, narrowing the gap between his flyer and the sleek shape of the dark aircar. He could see little of the interior through the sedan's tinted windows, but the bike's sensors swept an infrared frequency scan over the vehicle, showing three figures inside. Behind the driver, he could clearly see two human heat-shapes fumbling over a long, tubular object. The missile launcher. They're reloading, he thought.
The driver of the Skylord was good and Dredd could see that he knew the layout of Luna-1's streets. Against anyone else, that might have been an advantage, but with a Judge on his tail and the Krait's direct link to the city's central traffic net, Dredd was more than a match for the perp. Other vehicles were getting out of their way, yellow air-cabs and hover buses pulling aside to let them flash past. Dredd had the zipper bike's sirens and lights on the full power setting, the keening wails and flickering colours bouncing off the concrete canyons they sped down. The aircar turned sharply, pivoting around the offices of Interplanetary News and down into the stream of oncoming vehicles from a one-way skyhighway.
Slow and ponderous oxy-tankers passed by with horns blaring and a trio of egg-shaped floater pods collided with one another as Dredd's Krait cut through their formation like a diving falcon. For a moment, the Judge thought the aero-sedan was going to go full tilt toward the lower city levels, but then it angled upward and twisted into a side alley. Dredd executed a brutal wing-over and turned the zipper to follow them. His thumb flicked the bike's STUP-cannons from the "safe" to "armed" setting and he waited, counting down the seconds until the sedan's rear appeared in his target scope.
A flare of orange flame blinked out of the aircar's near side passenger window and Dredd jerked the handlebars by reflex, standing the Krait up on its stubby winglets. Heat from a jet of burning solid fuel seared the Judge's cheek as the rocket lanced past him, crackling through the air at near-supersonic speeds. His head whipped around to watch the missile spin past the zipper bike's underside and clip the upper floors of a Selenescraper. A fat bulb of yellow fire erupted out of the building where the warhead struck home, instantly immolating two whole floors of the tower.
"Grud!" Dredd said aloud. "Creeps have switched to hi-ex!" The Judge squeezed the pulse-cannon triggers and sent streaks of coherent particles stabbing out at the aero-sedan, bracketing the flyer. A well-aimed salvo punched through the trunk of the aircar and tore off the rear quarter fender and a stabiliser vane. The Skylord's driver pulled hard on the flight yoke, but the aircar lurched to starboard and began an uncontrolled turn.
Dredd gunned the Krait's thrusters and pulled parallel with the sedan, drawing his STUP-gun from its holster. "Level two!" he ordered. With these perps clearly eager to discharge military grade explosives as well as anti-personnel weapons inside the Luna-1 dome, Dredd's options had quickly changed from "arrest and detain" to "stop at all costs". Grud knew how many more shells they had to hand in there.
"Put it down, now!" he bellowed, his voice amplified by the helmet pickup and broadcast through the Krait's loudspeakers. "This is your only warning!"
The answer Dredd got was a snarl of spit gun fire as the Skylord sped over the roof of a tall, broad office block. Unable to turn as quickly with its stabilisers damaged, the aircar smashed through a video ad-screen, shattering it like glass. Dredd avoided the same obstacle and fired his pistol.
Pulse blas
ts punched out the windows on the driver's side of the flyer and tore ugly holes in the bodywork. Shots from a spit carbine sang out in reply, missing wide of the mark. Dredd returned fire and heard the clatter of a weapon discharge from inside the car. The thermographic scan of the sedan interior showed the gunman with the spit carbine twitch as he was hit, spastically emptying his weapon into the back of the seat in front of him.
Riddled with bullets, the driver slumped forward and his dead weight pressed on the steering column. The aircar obeyed and stood on its tail, the trunk flapping open like a gaping mouth as it soared vertically. Climbing on a powerful column of anti-grav thrust, the Skylord became a missile itself, heading straight towards the glasseen dome hundreds of metres above.
Dredd saw the danger coming. "Drokk! Control, Code black! Code black!" The two-word signal was an alert specific to space habitats and orbitals that simply meant explosive decompression imminent. Heedless of the speed of his own flyer, Dredd steered the zipper bike with his knees and used both hands to steady and aim the STUP-gun, firing full-power shots into the aero-sedan, desperately trying to knock out the gravity drive, but the Skylord was a favourite choice of Luna-1's criminals for a good reason. The thick fuselage could easily soak up energy weapon fire that would tear apart a weaker aircar.
The other occupant of the vehicle, the gunman who had interrupted his boss in the Silent Room, was desperately trying to load another high-yield explosive rocket into the launcher tube when the aero-sedan collided with the inner surface of the Luna-1 dome. The shock made him jerk the trigger and the missile added its destructive force to the explosion of the Skylord's fuel cells.
Dredd saw the aircar vanish in a ball of fire before it was snatched away by the hard vacuum of space as a hole blew through the dome and out into the lunar void. The sudden tornado of screaming air ripped him from the saddle of the Krait 3000 and the bike followed the car out into the darkness. Time seemed to slow to an agonising trickle as he tumbled up toward the gap, the hole shrinking even as emergency jets of cellu-foam from nozzles on the dome frame raced to seal it closed.
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