The rover skidded around and leapt over a rise, heading north to the Sea of Tranquillity. Frowning inside her helmet, the leader waited for her other team-mate to arrive and they paused to strip their dead comrade of equipment before destroying his corpse with a thermo-bomb.
Dredd pushed the rover to the redline while Kontarsky scrambled into the vehicle's engineering spaces, keeping one eye on the radar display in the dashboard. The screen showed sporadic contacts as the armoured hunters tracked them, the rover's sensors picking them up for just an instant as they crested a hill or jetted too high on their thrusters. They were close.
Kontarsky swayed down the gangway and dropped heavily into the other seat. Like Dredd, she had discarded the emergency environment suit as soon as they had found industrial-grade atmosphere gear in the rover. The Sov-Judge had also dispensed with her rad-cloak in order to squeeze into the maintenance bay. She wiped a speck of dirt from her milk-pale face; her expression spoke volumes before she opened her mouth. "Some of the batteries and a lubricant tank have been vented to vacuum. We have enough power to reach Luna-1 but we'll burn out the motors if we maintain this rate of speed."
"If we slow down those shooters will be on us in minutes."
Kontarsky threw up her hands in exasperation and swore in Russian, her cool finally cracking. "Fine! Just keep driving, then. At full power, sooner or later the motors will seize and the friction will cause a fire. We'll burn alive or suffocate!"
Dredd's eyes flicked to the radar screen in time to see another blink as something moved behind them. "We need another option, then." He pulled up a local map on the heads-up display. "Find somewhere to stop, make a stand. Otherwise, they'll be dogging us all the way." He highlighted an area and zoomed in.
Kontarsky saw where he was looking and shook her head. "You are joking."
The Mega-City Judge pulled the steering yoke around and changed course. "Have you got a better idea?"
She had to admit that she did not. "I'll fetch the suits."
The armoured figures landed on puffs of gas and dropped to their haunches, just as they had been trained. The leader tongued a switch on her chin-guard and gave her team-mate a quick beam-signal. He replied in the affirmative and walked in a crouch to the rover parked on the lip of a lunar dune. She watched her team-mate vanish inside, then reappear moments later. He made a shrugging motion. Empty.
They approached the flat piece of land before them, navigating around a small crater and from nowhere, a hologram blinked into life. Both of them had to restrain themselves from opening fire.
"Hello!" said the ghostly image of a smiling man, his voice broadcasting over their radio channels. "Welcome to Tranquillity Base National Park, the site of the first manned landing on the Moon in the year 1969! Please enjoy our interactive exhibit, but do keep off the-"
The proximity-activated hologram faded away in mid-speech as they left it behind and then the leader saw them - two orange shapes clustered in the lee of a low hillock. They fired, both hits to the body of their target and the suited figures slumped like discarded rag dolls. The leader closed the distance to them.
The holographic guide appeared and disappeared as she passed another point of interest. "To your left is a laser ranging retroreflector that was left behind-"
She swore aloud and flashed out an alert signal. The orange suits were decoys - Dredd had filled them with air and laid them out to draw their fire! As if in answer, pulse blasts blinked from out of cover and she ducked, watching them converge on her team-mate. She saw puffs of blood stream out from his suit joints, then she looked away, triggering her jets and shot at the gunner directly ahead of her, half-hidden behind the shape of an ancient lunar lander.
Dredd saw the armoured suit fly toward him and ducked, rolling under the leg of the bug-like lunar module. The heavier suit turned after him, but the Judge had agility on his side and he ducked up and around behind it. With a vicious shove, Dredd slammed the leader's helmet into the one hundred and fifty year-old spacecraft. The suit's visor spider-webbed with the force of the impact.
"Restored to its original state by the Historical Sticklers Society, the Apollo 11 lunar module seen here carried two human astronauts from ZZZT-" The holo was choked off in mid-speech as the armoured suit shoved an elbow into Dredd's chest and threw him into the display unit five metres away.
His ribs singing with pain, Dredd tried to scramble to his feet as the leader jetted across the distance between them. His STUP-gun had fallen out of arm's reach when he'd been thrown and now unarmed and injured, he saw the blocky shape of the armoured suit coming at him like a guided missile.
Dredd's suited fingers closed around something by his side and by reflex he pulled it from the moondust to brandish it like a spear. Unable to stop in time, the leader impaled herself on the spike and Dredd rammed it home through her faceplate, turning it into a window of red ruin. She slumped backward into a heap and only then did Dredd realise what he'd used as a makeshift weapon. Lanced through the suit's helmet was a steel rod that ended in a metallic Stars and Stripes.
16. RED MOON
Kontarsky scrambled over the lip of the shallow crater that had hidden her and sprinted as well as she could in the low lunar gravity, skipping over the moondust toward the shape of the second armoured figure. Streams of dark liquid, frozen into thick streaks by exposure to vacuum marred the grey frame of the exoskeleton; the hydrostatic shock of being hit by two full power pulse blasts had ruptured the delicate flesh of the man inside and cracked the suit collar. The armed hunter was bleeding inside and, if the blood loss didn't kill him first, he'd choke to death on his own vital fluids.
The Sov-Judge saw Dredd fighting with the other armoured figure in the periphery of her vision and ignored them; the Mega-City Judge was more than capable of dismissing his opponent without her help. She skidded to a halt near the injured man and planted a kick in his side as he tried to get up. Kontarsky felt conflicting emotions flood through her. A strong, heady anger was welling up in her chest and she wanted to turn it on the hunter, as if hurting him would pay back all the people who had been working against her. The rage drowned out the cold, clinical part of her personality for just long enough and she pressed her STUP-gun at his damaged chest plate.
The man mouthed something, but it was lost inside his bloodstained helmet. Kontarsky fired and the suit became his tomb. It wasn't until the life had guttered out in his eyes that she realised she knew what he had said. A plea, a single word, begging her not to kill him. Nyet.
She stiffened as the implications of it settled on her. Kontarsky peered closer at the suit, scrutinising the lines of its design, the framework of the laser weapon still gripped in one hand. The armour was of East-Meg manufacture, of that she was utterly sure. She looked away as Dredd approached, suddenly afraid that he would read everything through the emotions on her face.
Dredd gave the other corpse a cursory look. "Would have liked to get a live one," he said. "Might have been able to get something useful from them." When she didn't respond, he continued. "This hardware look familiar to you?"
"No," she replied, a little too quickly. "Why?"
"It's military specification stuff," Dredd noted, "not the kind of thing I'd expect a crook like Moonie to get his hands on. These people," he pointed at the dead man. "They were professionals."
"What does it matter now that they are dead?" Kontarsky tried not to be blunt, but she failed. "We can proceed now without any more interruptions, yes?"
"Yes," Dredd echoed after a moment, casting a measured eye over the Sov-Judge before making for the parked rover. "Let's get going."
As Kontarsky followed, her boot stubbed on something silver, half-buried in the moondust. She paused and bent to examine it.
"What?" Dredd paused on the ladder into the rover.
"It must have been knocked off the lunar module during the fight," she began, the thick fingers of her suit brushing the grey sand off the object. "A plaque..." Etched into the metal
plate were black letters, partly bleached by solar radiation but still readable. We came in peace for all mankind, it said. Kontarsky considered the object for a moment, then dropped it back where she had found it. The words left a bitter taste in her mouth. "It's nothing. Nothing important."
The Sov-Judge mounted the ladder and soon the rover was on its way, leaving the bodies of the newly dead among the footprints of ancient history.
Arnos LeGrove wasn't afraid of a fight. He was a Citi-Def veteran and proud of it! Oh sure, he'd been just like all the other guys on floor 114 of Tommy Lee Jones Block, taking his regular stint polishing the sonic cannon or doing drills, never once imagining that his training would come in useful. But all that had changed one morning when Sov nukes started flying over the walls of Mega-City One and the Apocalypse War began. He grew up quick, then, real quick. Arnos watched whole sectors vanish in nuclear flame and saw his buddies cut apart by las-fire from Sentinoid robots. By a process of attrition, Arnos ended up as platoon leader for the TLJ Citi-Def force and, out of one thousand able-bodied but bored citizens, there were maybe a couple hundred left when the last shots were fired. On Armistice Day, when East-Meg One was frying in an atomic storm of revenge, Arnos sat on the hull of a downed Strato-V and realised he was a changed man.
He'd met Gidea during the war - Gidea Parq as she'd been back then - and the conflict had brought them together. They married on VS Day and started a new life together. Gidea lost everything to the Sov invasion, but a will from her Uncle Drayton had saved them both from destitution. Drayton owned land in Apollo Territory and the young couple had grabbed it with both hands, heading off to Luna-1 and a better future.
But Arnos never forgot the war and so each year for the past two decades, he and his wife and every other MC-1 ex-pat who lived through it had marched in the Apocalypse Parade. Arnos didn't like the fact that the East-Meg veterans were allowed to have their own parade as well, but that was the downside of living in an international zone. This morning, the Judges had broadcast a warning that the streets were still unsafe and the nightfall curfew was still in force. Gidea stayed home, but Arnos was damned if he was going to miss the parade; he'd never missed a single one, not even on the day when his son Bruce had gone in for that head transplant operation. The Apocalypse War had changed Arnos LeGrove. It had defined him and, ever since, some small part of him had been praying for it to happen all over again.
Today, his wish had been granted.
Arnos hollered at the top of his lungs and kicked aside the bullet-riddled body of some crusty Sov eldo, a fat guy he remembered as owning a Zonkers franchise down on Collins Boulevard. Behind him, two dozen A-War veterans gave lusty cheers and brandished the weapons they'd taken. Arnos didn't quite understand where the guns had come from - it just seemed that one moment the fighting had been hand-to-hand and then someone had started shooting. It didn't matter to him if the blasters and spit-guns had fallen from the sky; the weapons simply propagated out into the crowds, one rioter picking them up from the hands of another when they died. If somebody out there was handing out guns like party favours, then Arnos was more than happy to take them.
When he had occasion to look up - which wasn't often, thanks to the fierce exchanges of gunfire and the homemade Molotov cocktails that sang through the air - Arnos had the vague impression of something important being imparted on the ubiquitous wall-screens that appeared every few hundred metres along the street. Some of the screens had pictures of stern, serious-looking Judges or newsreaders on them, explaining in calm and reassuring voices that everyone would be much better off returning to their homes. Those screens got shot at or stoned. Most of the other displays were left untouched though, as they showed pirated loops of footage from streetcams of fighting, fighting and more fighting. One time, a screen near the Planet Express dealership happened to show a close-up of an East-Meg Judge getting struck by a falling sofa and Arnos's mob roared with approval. The screen must have understood they liked that, because it showed the clip again and again, even bleeding it over to more panels to keep pace with them as they advanced down the road. Now and then he heard some squeaky voice babbling away about something, or he glimpsed a cartoon character up there capering around like a fool. Arnos didn't pay attention to it, though. Every time he looked at the screens or listened to them, they just seemed to make him more irate than before.
The parade had started quietly enough, just like any other year and they'd got as far as the minute of silence when someone had coughed. Arnos had never been so angry as he was right then. The hot rage just flooded over him like a red wave. Of course, it had been one of the East-Megger vets making the noise, an early arrival from their stinking "peace parade" and after just a moment the Sov was being beaten by a dozen men. Then the snecking Sov's pals had arrived and the whole thing had just kicked off.
Arnos and the other guys from the Big Meg fell back into the street-fighting mode from the war like it had been only yesterday - Perry Vale and his sister Maida on point, Lou Isham with his cyber-leg bringing up the rear and big Shadwell carrying a cheese laser he'd liberated from a delicatessen. Pretty soon they were at the head of a big crowd, the mob rolling forward with inertia of its own, the feeble resistance of the East-Meggers already crushed and forgotten. They got to the Von Braun Overpass and Arnos felt the shock that ran through the whole group when they came face to face with another mob coming the opposite way.
Arnos wasn't sure who the other folks were - they might have been part of another march from another sector of the city, or maybe just some knot of rowdies left over from the troubles the night before - but as a feral, hate-filled grin split his face, he found that in all honesty, he didn't care at all. All that mattered was that these people were not him and for that reason they all had to die.
The two mobs tore into one another, spit-guns flaring like popping firecrackers, screams and yells echoing. Every tension, every petty anger and insult that any of these people had ever felt was being nurtured and massaged, brought to the fore without any of them realising it. They turned on each other, repeating a scene that was taking place in a dozen flash points around Luna-1. There was no point to it, no ground being taken or objectives being destroyed. It was not block war; it was carnage.
Arnos was killed by a bolt from a Beria flesh-blaster pistol gripped in the skinny hand of a kid half his age. It was perhaps ironic that the gun he lost his life to was Apocalypse War-era surplus, an officer's weapon that had been recovered from East-Meg POWs. All of this was lost on Arnos LeGrove, though, as he choked out bits of his own lungs through a sucking chest wound.
Arnos lay to one side of the melee, unable to move or turn his head, his line of sight fixed on an ad-screen that dangled at a dangerous angle from the offices of Acme Plumbing. In the corner of the screen was a dumpy little figure, a bubble-headed caricature cherub with a skull like the Moon and a green complexion. It looked at Arnos and watched the war veteran bleed to death, laughing at him as if it was the funniest joke in the world.
"Off," said Judge-Marshal Che to the window-screen. "Off!" he shouted at it, when the device did not respond immediately. The office's voice-recognition system was still getting used to Che's speech patterns and he was growing weary of constantly repeating himself to the machine. The oval window went dark, taking away the spy-in-the-sky footage and the real-time view of the city beyond. Che allowed himself a moment to close his eyes and hide there in the darkness of his own mind. Everything was moving so fast, he told himself, no time to stop and assimilate it all, no time to think or make the right choices...
Che was afraid to open his eyes again. He couldn't see it, but he could sense the oncoming rush of more problems, more decisions and more pressure rumbling toward him like a distant, dark thunderhead. For all his career, Che had been happy to stand in Marshal Tex's shadow; the Mex-City Judge was no fool, he knew his limitations, he knew that Tex was the best at his job, just as he, Che, was the best man to be Tex's adjutant and deputy. But he had never,
never wanted to take the Chief Judge's place. There had often been talk of it among the lower ranks, but Che had always refused to address the matter. Other senior Judges had been generous enough to ascribe noble reasons to his decision, but in the cold silent moments when Che lay alone in his bunk, he knew in his heart of hearts that he simply was not capable of running Luna-1. He hated himself for it, but he could never be the man that Tex was. And now, his greatest nightmare had been made reality and Che was afraid that he would be exposed as a bumbler - indecisive and hesitant.
"Sir?" said Kessler, concerned as the long seconds of silence stretched into minutes. "I must have your orders, Chief Judge."
Che opened his eyes and studied the SJS-Judge. Kessler seemed to thrive on the chaos that was drowning the city; the livid pink scar that cut across his taut face fairly glowed with excitement. Kessler stood, hands clasped behind his back, watching Che through his cyberlink monocle. Behind him, the Brit-Cit Judge Foster shifted uncomfortably next to the silent, quiet shape of Tek-Judge J'aele.
"What... what is our status at this point?" Che managed. He tried to keep the weariness out of his voice.
"Every available man has been pulled from static duty and deployed in the streets," Kessler said crisply, "All Justice Department facilities are on high alert and riot gear has been issued. I took the liberty of ordering the activation of an electro-cordon around the Grand Hall plaza, as well as assigning a unit of Omni-Tanks for area security."
"Good, good. Madre de dios," Che breathed. "That it should come to this..."
"We are monitoring external transmissions," added J'aele. "There is an increased amount of signal traffic moving between Earth relay sats and the diplomatic fleet in lunar orbit."
Eclipse Page 20
