"Kontarsky, find us a hatch." Dredd weighed a cutting charge in his fist. "Otherwise, we'll have to do it the messy way and blast the hull."
She pointed, "There's a port by the plasma-"
Her words were cut off by a discharge of static across the comm channels, as one of the lasers tore open the shuttle with a lucky shot. Dredd turned just in time to see the Falcon's wounded form flip over. Out of control, the shuttlecraft fell into the larger ship like a bat-winged missile and struck the bow of the Irkutsk. The cruiser's fuselage rippled with the aftershock and white showers of frozen oxygen erupted out from the impact crater.
"So much for our security deposit," said Foster dryly.
Alarms cut through the Silent Room, bringing Ivanov and Gorovich to their feet. "What the sneck?" said Moonie. "We're under attack!"
"The bridge..." Gorovich said, leaning into a display on the holo-screen. "Something collided with the bridge!"
The kommissar's face soured and he barged Sellers aside. "Gorovich! We'll go to the secure command unit. We must launch the assault now!"
"And what am I supposed to do?" demanded Moonie. "Sit on my hands?"
"This is now a military operation," snapped Ivanov, any trace of his cool demeanour gone, "and I am the supreme authority in that area!"
Before he could frame an argument, the two Sovs left the crime lord behind, racing out into the corridor.
Sellers frowned at Moonie, pondering on the abrupt change of tone in their ally. "Ivanov won't spare any men to protect us if things start going south."
Moonie nodded his agreement, spinning his hoverchair about in a tight circle. "Forget him," he grated, stabbing a crooked finger at the control console on his chair. "I have the Moon-U command transmitter. I'm the one with all the leverage."
"What good will that do us if the ship blows up?" Sellers's voice cracked.
Moonie jetted closer and slapped him across the face. "Show some backbone, son. I've still got a couple of tricks up my sleeve." The wizened figure produced a laser pistol and handed it to Sellers. "Here. Maybe this will give you a little courage."
The airlock's outer hatch opened like a trapdoor to reveal a wedge-shaped machine lurking inside, bristling with guns and flailing tentacle limbs.
"Sentinoid!" snapped Dredd, kicking off the hull as he brought his Lawgiver to bear.
The metallic guardian was a shipboard model similar to those deployed in Mega-City One during the Apocalypse War. J'aele was seconds too slow to avoid it, scrambling back across the fuselage as the robot boiled out of the open airlock. One of the sinuous appendages caught the African's forearm in a pincer and severed it with a deft snip. Globes of blood scattered from the wound as J'aele's e-suit pumped him full of painkillers and quickly sealed a plasti-sheath over his stump.
Foster narrowly avoided losing his head the same way as Kontarsky released a fusillade of pulse fire. The Sentinoid turned toward them, las-cannons emerging from its chest; it was all the distraction Dredd needed.
"Hi-Ex," he told his gun and fired. Oxygenated rounds could fire underwater or in a vacuum with little loss of velocity at close ranges, but the physics of shooting a ballistic weapon in space remained the same. Recoil shoved him back like a kick in the chest, even as the bullet struck its mark. During the war, it had taken several direct hits to knock out one of these droids, but the larger-yield explosive rounds from the newer Mark 11 Lawgiver killed the machine with a single shot. The blast cut into its brain-case and boiled the delicate electronics there into vapour. The Sentinoid went limp, losing purchase on the hull. Then it flapped away into space like a discarded rag in an updraft.
Dredd reeled himself back in as the others clambered into the airlock. It was a tight fit and the Judge saw the hollow, sick look on J'aele's face as their helmets bumped. "Status?" he asked.
"I can function," J'aele replied stiffly, fighting off the shock of the blood loss.
Foster forced a smile. "You techies always say you can work with one hand tied behind your back. Now you get to prove it."
The inner airlock opened and they were in enemy territory.
Kontarsky had provided a partial digi-map of the cruiser's interior and Foster and J'aele took off the moment they were aboard the Irkutsk. The ship's computer core was held in a zero-gravity cylinder along the spine of the vessel and it would be there that the Tek-Judge would find the source code for the Moon-U AI. Meanwhile, Dredd and Kontarsky headed forward. The lightweight environment suits they wore were a far cry from the bulky civilian models that they had liberated from the Oxy-Dome rover, close-fitting unitards with heat-shunt meshes and a compact re-breather to recycle their air. The Luna Judges had less than a dozen of them and the price of a single one could have easily paid for a decent-sized hab in a Lovell District luxy-apt.
Dredd surveyed the empty corridor. "Where is everyone? This ship have a skeleton crew or something?"
Kontarsky shook her head. "Nyet, the vessel is on a Condition One alert." She pointed to a blinking indicator lamp on the ceiling. "Everyone is at their stations. The other crew will be in the loading bay, preparing the drop-troops for deployment." She stepped forward and Dredd followed their progress on a wrist-mounted sensor display screen. "The turbolift hub is this way. If we can get to the secure command unit, we can override the ship's systems."
The senior Judge examined the display. "Some kinda shielded shelter on the mid-deck."
Kontarsky nodded. "Like a bunker, if you will. In the event of an emergency, senior Kommandants or political officers can seal themselves in and operate the entire vessel from there." She smiled grimly. "It makes any thoughts of mutiny obsolete."
Dredd caught the sound of voices and froze. "Someone's coming..."
"Is this really necessary, kommissar?" said Gorovich, jogging to keep up with Ivanov's long-legged gait. "I do not believe-"
"What you believe is irrelevant, Gorovich!" Ivanov snapped. "I will not allow this operation to fall apart in the final phase! That strike on the bridge is clearly the prelude to a direct attack... The Luna-City Judges are desperate." He frowned. "I should have taken direct command of this from the start."
Gorovich spoke without thinking as they approached the turbolifts. "But then you would be dead now, blown out into space with the captain and the rest."
Ivanov ignored the two troopers who saluted him and gave the bald Tek-Judge a lethal stare, reading the poorly masked disappointment on his face. "How inopportune for you that I still live. Your plans to usurp me must wait for another day."
Gorovich made negative noises. "I... I intend no such thing, sir. I am merely a servant of the Sov peoples-"
"Yes, yes," Ivanov said dismissively, using a key card to activate the direct drop shaft to the secure command unit. "You're a model party member."
"It's him!" Kontarsky hissed from their hiding place. "If he gets through that hatch, there's no way of opening it from outside!"
Dredd flipped the selector on his Lawgiver to Ricochet. "Take him!"
Ivanov saw the brief instant of movement as the two figures in e-suits appeared around the corner. He shouted an order and the troopers brought up their beam rifles as the attackers opened fire. The kommissar knew the tell-tale report of a Lawgiver very well; he'd heard it untold times during his service through the Apocalypse War and there, behind the cowl of the suit, he saw light flash off the grim visage of a Mega-City Judge's helmet. Dredd.
Bullets made from a titanium-rubber matrix skipped off the metal walls with keening screeches, cutting through exposed flesh and severing the jugular of one of the troopers. On reflex, Ivanov grabbed Gorovich and thrust him forward like a shield, letting the hapless Tek-Judge soak up a dozen hits - a fitting final service for such a dutiful Sov officer, he decided. The kommissar shoved the jerking body away and dove into the drop shaft as it yawned open. As he fell into safety, he thought he heard Kontarsky's voice crying out in anger but then the hatch sealed behind him and the noise was gone.
Her pulse
blasts had made short work of the other trooper, but Kontarsky and Dredd reached the shaft hatch too late to stop it slamming closed, magnetic bolts thudding home with unyielding finality. The Sov-Judge cursed Ivanov's clone-mother under her breath and kicked the hatch ineffectively.
Dredd examined the shaft, fingering a small vent to the side. "There's an air duct here."
The Sov-Judge shook her head. "It doesn't connect to the secure unit. There's a bulkhead between them."
"How thick?" said Dredd. He reached into his backpack. "Thick enough to resist a thermite hull-cutter?" The Judge offered her a disc-like charge; a flat cone of explosive, the charge was strong enough to melt a man-sized hole through starship-grade metals in a matter of seconds.
Kontarsky studied the device, thinking. "It might be enough, but the shaft is too small for you to fit through."
Dredd dropped the charge in her hands. "I wasn't thinking of me."
The Sov-Judge gulped. "Oh." She began to strip off the outer layers of the e-suit, dropping her backpack and belt. "You understand, Dredd, if I cannot stop him, he'll launch the landers. Once the drop pods are away, there's nothing we can do to stop them."
"Then don't fail."
She nodded, ripping open the vent. "How will you locate Moonie?"
Dredd knelt by Gorovich as a weak groan escaped the Sov agent. "Maybe our friend here can give me some directions." He pressed on the Tek-Judge's wounded chest and Gorovich drooled blood. "Where's the dome-head, creep?" Dredd demanded.
"Suh..." Gorovich managed. "Suh-Silent. Room."
Kontarsky nodded again. "Yes, these cruisers often have such a facility. It's a sensor-opaque conference room."
"Where?"
The woman picked up her pistol and the cutter charge. "Just look for the only empty space on the scanner." Kontarsky swallowed the last of her nerves and gave Dredd a brisk salute. "Good luck, sir." She shifted her weight and vanished into the vent conduit.
Dredd's helmet radio crackled. "Foster to Dredd."
"Dredd here. Go ahead."
"Uh, right..." There was the sound of pulse fire in the background, then silence. "We've secured the computer core. Minimal resistance. J'aele's doing his thing, but I think one of the technicians may have set off the-"
From nowhere, an ear-splitting whine sounded throughout the ship and a synthetic voice bellowed something in angry Russian.
"The, uh, alarms," Foster finished.
Dredd reloaded his Lawgiver and studied the digi-map, overlaying templates from the e-suit's suite of thermal, radiation and sonic sensors. Sure enough, a large cabin further down the hull appeared on the display like a black hole in the cruiser's innards. "Copy that," he said, "Finish your job and then commandeer an escape pod. Don't wait around for me or Kontarsky."
Dredd snapped off the throat mic and broke into a run.
Kommissar Ivanov's nose wrinkled as the smell of hot plastic touched his nostrils. For a moment, he though that Dredd might have tossed a gas grenade into the drop shaft with him, or found a way to pump some toxin into the secure unit - but then he remembered that the unit had its own independent air supply, along with food, water, even a dedicated two-man launch in case the Irkutsk was scuttled. Alone in the compact command centre, he turned and started as his eyes came across the wide, discoloured oval forming on the bulkhead behind him. The tritanium alloy wall was bowing inward as he watched, the hissing metal going from cherry red to white-hot. Ivanov ducked behind the auto-helm console just as the bubble of superheated metal popped with a rasping cough of air, spitting globules of molten alloy across the floor.
He couldn't help but smile as a figure dropped through the newly made hole, her normally pale face a florid red from the heat backwash. The kommissar resisted the temptation to shoot her straight away and stood up to meet Kontarsky as she blinked away the sting of fumes from her eyes, her gun clasped firmly in her fist.
"Ah, Nikita, you are so resourceful," Ivanov indicated the breach. "A hull-burner. I should have anticipated that." He gave a little sigh. "No matter. I'm pleased you could join me."
"You," Kontarsky said through a seared throat, "are in violation of multiple statues of the Luna-1 penal code. You are under arrest."
Ivanov smirked. "This is a little joke, Nikita? Surely you understand what I am doing here?" He stepped closer to her, his voice warming even though the Volokov needler in his hand never wavered. "I am furthering the cause of the East-Meg city-state. By tomorrow, the Sov flag will be flying over Luna-1."
She sneered. "And will that be before or after your squalid little capitalist comrade names himself lunar emperor?"
The kommissar's smile slipped. "Moonie is just a puppet, a greedy fool we used to ferry weapons for us. He will be a willing part of the glorious Revolution and you can be part of it too, my dear." He held out a hand to her. "You have always been loyal to the Motherland, Nikita. Do not disappoint the Rodina now."
Kontarsky willed her finger to tighten on the pulse gun's trigger, but her hand remained immobile.
The first thing through the door of the Silent Room was the corpse of the guard who had been unfortunate enough to be standing outside it. Dredd shot him through the heart and then shouldered the dead Sov-Judge into the dark confines of the chamber. As he expected, laser fire erupted inside, savaging the body. Dredd followed his decoy, falling into a tuck and roll across the floor. He glimpsed something at the far end of the room, just the vaguest impression of a figure in a chair, blink-lit by the discharges from a beam pistol in his hand.
Accelerated photons tore through the air with cracks like fractured glass, searing the Judge as he wove between the shapes of chairs and the black bulk of the obsidian table. A wallscreen blew as a salvo of bolts ripped it apart and Dredd's street-honed skills pinpointed the shooter's position. He fired, three rounds spitting from the Lawgiver's muzzle so close together that the discharge sounded like tendons shredding. The figure slumped forward.
Dredd turned the seat to face him with the tip of his boot, switching on the lamps in his helmet. The man in the chair died with an imploring look in his eyes, his mouth silenced with plasti-tape, wrists held by cuffs to the seat arms. The laser he held made irritable clicking noises as its auto-seek mode lost its target.
"Poor Sellers," Moonie's voice issued out of the shadows. "He wasn't a bad guy. Just a little slow on the uptake. Rather like you, Joe."
Dredd's helmet lamps swung and picked out Moonie's age-scarred, bulbous face and his diminutive body drifting silently above him on a hoverchair. The floater disgorged fist-sized turrets from every surface and plates of metal snapped into place over Moonie's body. A combat visor dropped down over his broad forehead, framing the horrible rictus of the old man's yellowed smile. Dredd dodged away as the hoverchair unfolded like a lethal blossom into a skeletal frame of battle armour.
"Grud!" Dredd got off two shots, but the rounds deflected away.
Moonie grinned and hit a switch; oily flame jetted after the Judge and turned a chair into a torch. "I offered you a partnership once, Dredd and you turned me down. I made the mistake of underestimating you then. This time, I'm just gonna kill you."
The Judge replied with hot lead, bracketing the criminal with more bullets.
Moonie came on undaunted, his too-wide face twisted with cruel laughter.
"Join me, Nikita," Ivanov pressed. "It's time to grow up, my dear kadet. Time to learn that names, ideologies, they matter for nothing. East-Meg, Mega-City... They are all just shapes on a map. All that really matters is power and wealth." He smiled, his hand reaching for her STUP-gun. "Once you have that, you can believe whatever you want... And Luna-1 will make me very rich indeed."
As his fingers gently brushed the pistol's barrel, Kontarsky found her voice again. "When you were my tutor, I had nothing but respect and admiration for you. I saw you as the embodiment of East-Meg perfection. Every kadet wanted to be like you, the decorated war hero of the American invasion, the champion of Minsk." A smile fluttered
on Ivanov's lips, but it quickly died when he saw the icy look in her green eyes. "But all of that is a lie. You are an opportunist, a disgrace to the Soviet ideal, kommissar," she said. "You do not wish to see the people of Luna-1 gain freedom. You only wish to enrich yourself."
Her hand shook and the pulse gun discharged. Ivanov tumbled away from her, the point-blank blast smoking in his gut. "Dubiina! You motherless imbecile!" he choked. "Don't you realise, the Diktatorat ordered me to do this? If I am guilty, so are they! Do you know what you have done?"
"No," she admitted, "but I know I have kept my honour."
Ivanov screamed and fired his needler. Kontarsky dodged, and the shots went wide and shredded the helm console. Like a wounded beast, the cruiser lurched out of control and the g-plates struggled to compensate. "Then at least, dear Nikita, we will both perish together!" Blood bubbled out of his lips.
"No," she repeated and shot him in the head.
The quiver that ran through the hull of the Irkutsk threw Dredd off his feet and his helmet bounced off the table, lighting fireworks of pain inside his head.
Moonie was startled by the vessel's sudden shift and his floater whined as he tried to maintain a bead on his prey. The aged criminal stabbed at firing keys and spat a spread of micro-missiles at the Judge. The tiny, finger-sized rockets impacted the tabletop and cut it in half, shattering the lunar basalt into massive chunks. Dredd rolled, pain slashing through him as a miniature avalanche of razor-edged stone fragments scattered across the floor.
Options raced through Dredd's mind at lightning speed. Although Moonie was happy to discharge explosives inside the ship, Dredd didn't dare to use a High Explosive round in return - one deflected shot in the wrong place could kill them both. "Armour piercing," he said through gritted teeth and fired back at the floating cluster of guns and plating.
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