“Can’t we call in aerial assistance, have an H-Wagon pick us up from this level?”
Saunders shook her head. “Take too long. Like I say, I don’t want to be here now my cover’s been compromised. I’ve contacted Control. Special Tactics is heading this way; they can extract us, providing we make it to the sked in one piece.”
“They’re sending Tac-Div into Strickland? Someone at Grand Hall trying to start a war?”
“Apparently Goodman signed the order. Looks like you’re too valuable to write off.”
Dredd considered this. Was it him they wanted to retrieve, the Judge they’d forged; or was it the DNA, the blood, too precious to end up in the hands of others? Were the two separate at all? He never felt more like a construct, the property of Justice Department, than he did when the-powers-that-be turned their eyes on him. Chief Judge Goodman was taking a personal interest; maybe it was the tragedy of Rico, the desire to avoid further embarrassment, the unwillingness to waste potential. It was both reassuring and concerning: would he ever be allowed to stand on his own two feet? He resented being made a special case on the basis of his genes. He didn’t need protecting. His failures should be his own, they would inform his future career—if, that is, he still had one, he thought, noting the patchwork of injuries his body had become.
The el dinged, the doors slid open, and a surprised-looking henchman who’d evidently just been down to the nearest Shapiro’s on a hottie run had a moment to register the two figures standing in front of him before Saunders shot him in the face. She wasted no time, hauling the corpse from the car, ushering Dredd into the lift and hitting the ground-floor button.
“How long you been part of Winstanley’s outfit?” Dredd asked once they started to descend.
“Just over a year.”
“It true he recruited you from Eastside U?”
“That’s where I was placed. The gambling thing was part of the lure. Sector House has been trying to get someone on the inside since the Brit’s been making a name for himself in Strickland. My handler created quite the backstory for me—had to be convincing if it was going to work.”
“Feel like I ruined your op.”
“Wasn’t your fault, you weren’t to know. Choosing between pulling you out and keeping my cover ain’t no choice at all.” She looked him up and down. “What the hell happened to you, anyway?”
“Just having a bad day. Comes with the territory, I guess.”
“You’ve not long got your full eagle, am I right?”
Dredd nodded. “Second year.”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s a learning curve.”
“And then some.”
The el shuddered, then bounced to a stop, creaking on its cables. Saunders instinctively looked up. “Oh, drokk,” she whispered. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“Fault?”
“Or someone’s stopped the el. Could be my little bullet party upstairs has been discovered earlier than I hoped.” Dredd glanced at her. “Winstanley’s men have access to another el on the north side,” she explained. “That’s why we had to get out of there fast.” The car juddered again, tipping slightly. “Think they might be trying to disconnect it, blowing the cables.”
“Would they know it was us?”
“The boss-man’s quarters were CCTV’d to the hilt. Anyone checking the feed would’ve seen which way we went. I didn’t have time to disable it.”
“Give me a boost,” Dredd instructed, pointing to the maintenance hatch in the ceiling. Saunders nodded and laced her fingers together, and the uniformed Judge stepped into her hands, reaching up for the hatch. It resisted at first, until he sharply elbowed it free of its hinges and pushed it aside. He got an arm through and pulled himself up; he struggled a little, but gritted his teeth and tried not to vocalise the pain from his midriff.
“You okay?” she enquired.
“Been better,” he muttered, holding a hand to his side where the bullet had entered. Felt like something new had ripped. He looked around, saw the doors to a level they’d just passed several feet above him to his right. The el suddenly lurched, and a cable whipped down the shaft. He stepped back quickly, jerking his head out of its way as it struck sparks from the grey metal walls. The car was now tilting sharply; they really didn’t have much time before it became a literal express all the way to the bottom. If this was a more modern block, it’d have foam safeguards in place at the base, anti-grav emergency protection ready to kick in. McCluskey was a pre-war wreck, of course, with none of those features. It was unlikely it had graced an inspector’s report for the last fifteen years—which meant the standard of repair must’ve seriously deteriorated all over. Still, there would be some safety measure from the original build...
It was pitch black in the shaft, but he scanned the walls with infra-red and saw the panels scored by decades of rust, the scrapes left by the plummeting cable that had gouged out holes in the metal. He sighted his gun just below the bottom corner of the el and pumped the trigger, punching deep impact craters into the side. He then scrambled back to the hatch and put his arm through, indicating Saunders should grab hold. She jumped, and used her feet against the el doors to push herself upwards. Dredd grunted as he pulled the undercover officer onto the lift’s roof. His muscles screamed, but she was through.
“This is going to hurt,” he breathed as they both stood on the sloping lift.
“More than it already is?” she replied, noting a fresh bloodstain blossoming on his uniform.
“Yeah. Be ready to jump on my mark. The angle the el’s at, the moment it drops it’s going to collide with the shaft wall.”
“Where are we going to be?”
“Heading through the wall. It’s going to be split-second, so don’t hesitate.”
“What’s on the other side of the wall?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
The lift trembled, then jolted downwards just as a tremendous bang echoed down the shaft. The bottom edge of the car smashed through the rusted panels Dredd had shot, leaving a gaping rent.
“Now!” Dredd ordered and grabbed Saunders’ arm, throwing the pair of them off the el and through the tear in the wall as the car continued its fall, pinballing off the walls. The lawman felt the ragged edge of the hole slice his back but he flung out his left hand and found purchase, his fist closing over a rung. For a moment he took the weight of them both and nearly lost his grip
you failed, Joe
but Saunders clung on too, her feet scrambling, finding a lower rung to secure herself. They hung, motionless, panting, listening to the roar of the el as it plunged towards the ground floor. An almighty crunch followed, the whole shaft reverberating.
“How... how did you know this access ladder would be here?” she asked at last.
“I guessed.”
She laughed despite herself, a short bark of hysterical relief, but there was a catch in Dredd’s voice that was concerning. She could barely see him in the dark, but he clearly hadn’t come through it unscathed. He’d warned it was going to hurt. She felt like she’d torn a ligament herself.
“You ready to climb?” she heard Dredd say.
“When you are.”
13.13 pm
“JOVIS, DAX, YOU seen this?” Bonedog pointed from the bench in Scott Potasnik plaza. They all turned and stood as one.
“Holy drokk,” Sheema breathed.
The pat-wagon rumbled into the thoroughfare between Meyer and McCluskey and came to a halt, the Judges dismounting and spreading out. Even from this distance, the scatterblasters the badges were wielding looked huge, intimidating. The jays meant business.
Bonedog glanced down at the snubnose he’d been twirling on his finger, then hurriedly stuffed it in his pants. They’d been taking potshots at batgliders for the last couple of hours, held up some dinks on the pedway and scored a few creds, which Dax had used to purchase half a dozen grams of sugar off the Candyman. The gun falling into their laps had felt like a stroke of luck,
a means to have a little fun. Now it was impossibly heavy, a millstone that he wanted to discard as soon as he could. Dax saw him sweat and fidget nervously.
“Relax,” she said, turning her attention back to the helmets. They seemed to be going door to door, rousting the bums from the entrances. “They ain’t gonna turn out in force like this for a stolen piece of hardware. Probably don’t even know we got it. They must’ve come for the bluejay.”
“But he saw us,” Sheema said. “Remember? He saw you take it, Dax. What if he fingers us, reports us for not calling it in?”
“Will you calm down? He’d just had the stuffing kicked out of him, he ain’t gonna remember shit.” All the same, Dax was worried. She should’ve known pilfering the weapon would be bad news, but she couldn’t help herself. To be honest, she hadn’t expected the Judge to have made it; she would’ve anticipated the Furies or the MC to have taken care of a wounded badge without much trouble. She assumed he was still alive, that that was what this was all about: officer down, back-up required. Kid must have some sand to have survived this far.
“Reckon we should dump it,” Juice remarked. “Lose it before the jays track it to us.”
“Just don’t blow your cool, okay?” Dax was insistent, as much for her own benefit.
“Easy for you to say,” Bonedog scoffed.
“I’ll take it, you’re so scared.” Bonedog surreptitiously passed it to her, and she jammed it in her belt, pulling her vest-top over it. “Jays ain’t lookin’ for us. Long as we stay under the radar, nobody does nothin’ stupid, we’ll be all right—”
It was at that moment that the first firebomb came arcing out of Meyer and exploded in front of the pat-wagon.
13.15 pm
THEY CLIMBED IN silence and darkness for several long minutes before they reached a service door that Dredd had to shoulder repeatedly until it buckled enough for them to squeeze through. They came out on a middle level, quietly relieved to be back on firm ground. Under the grimy ceiling-mounted fluorescents, Saunders could finally see the damage that Dredd had inflicted upon himself in the jump from the el roof: a deep gouge between the shoulder blades, the uniform soaked in blood. His right arm was also hanging oddly, limp and unmoving against his side.
“Christ, Dredd, what’s happened to your arm?”
He glanced at it, brought his left hand round and tested the unresponsive limb. “Took the full weight of both of us on this side. Pulled it from its socket, I think.”
“You climbed the ladder with it like that?” she asked incredulously.
“Wasn’t easy, admittedly.”
“Here, let me,” she said, stepping forward and firmly placing one palm on his bicep, the other on his shoulder. “On three.” She got as far as ‘one’ before she slammed his arm back into place. Dredd yelled like she’d never heard him respond before, a primal cry of pain that he must have been desperate to let out. The kid had been through so much, borne so much, that this latest physical trauma needed some release. The sharp, guttural roar was over in a second, and he looked angry with himself for having given voice to his agony, like it was a display of weakness. She got the impression that any emotion should be buried deep down inside, that it was a betrayal of his own personal code to allow it to escape. It couldn’t be healthy, she thought—if he kept this up, in a few years he’d be a roiling mess of stifled fear and anger that would see him either retreat within himself completely, or quit.
He pulled away, but nodded nevertheless in gratitude. “Appreciate it.”
“You’ve got a hell of a wound on your back, too.”
“I’m aware. It’ll have to wait.”
“It might not, if you’re losing blood.”
“Just one more deadline we gotta beat, then.” He motioned towards the el doors. “Lift’s out of action. Are the stairs going to be viable from this point?”
“Yeah, Winstanley didn’t bother controlling access this far south.”
“Guess we’re walking.”
In fact they ran, as much as they were able, half-tumbling down the emergency stairs, Dredd losing his footing occasionally but waving off support and indicating that Saunders should concentrate on her own descent. They’d gone down nine flights when gunfire striated the wall, ricocheting off the metal bannisters, forcing them to retreat and hunker down—a six-man group of Murder Corps members came streaming up in the other direction, stutter-rifles blazing. They had them pinned down. Dredd managed to take out one with a well-aimed shot down the stairwell, but they had the numbers; a sustained barrage kept the Judges from manoeuvring into a better position to return fire. Dredd tried his belt pouches, but came up empty of stumm grenades, or indeed anything else: Winstanley’s men had been thorough.
“Any ideas?” Saunders asked.
“They’re being paid to get the flashdrive back,” Dredd answered. “We could give it to them.”
“That’s not going to stop them killing us.”
“No, but it might make them pause.” He ejected the clip from his automatic, and held out his hand for Saunders’ blaster, which she passed over reluctantly, eyebrow raised. “Tip from my final-year firearms instructor,” he said. Then he shuffled over to the edge of the step they were perched on, waited until there was a lull and called down, “You want the memory stick? It’s yours.”
There was no response, so Dredd tossed the clip, which clattered down onto the next landing, then drew a bead on it with the blaster. They heard murmuring, and shadows moving up from the level beneath. The lawman waited until he saw the first MC meathead edge within a couple of feet of the landing, then fired, the slug striking the clip dead-centre; the bullets detonated, becoming a bright fireball. Screams and curses echoed up the stairwell, and Dredd took advantage of the chaos, standing to shoot down the stairs. He put one perp down, still beating flames from his clothes, and another two followed, too stunned by the explosion to seek shelter. Saunders used the covering fire to retrieve one of the dead men’s stutter-rifles and found a corner to take out the remainder. Once the last body hit the deck, the two Judges regrouped and collected as much ammo as they could carry.
“Remind me to thank your tutor,” she said, pocketing a handful of clips.
“Died two months ago,” Dredd replied, chambering a round. “Random drive-by.” He looked around at the distant thud of explosions outside the block. “Let’s keep moving.”
Eight
13.21 pm
THE SPECIAL TACTICS unit was coming under fire from both sides, and had fallen back to regroup at the pat-wagon. Pools of liquid flame were scattered around them, courtesy of the improvised weapons thrown from above. It seemed the Russ Meyer Furies and the Len McCluskey Murder Corps had buried the hatchet and joined forces to repel the Judges—the jays hadn’t been down on Strickland like this for years, hadn’t shown any interest in the cits that scraped a living amongst the half-ruined towers of the old city. If they thought they could move into the estate in force, start throwing their weight around, they had another think coming.
Jeb Rawlings watched from his vantage point as the helmets sought cover behind the wagon, their progress impeded by the automatic gunfire tearing up the rockcrete between the two blocks. He knew why they were here: they’d been sent in to extract the badge that had turned up this morning. Quite why he deserved the overkill treatment, Rawlings didn’t know, but the jays sure were keen to pull him out. Rawlings should’ve had his head by now—he’d promised Gilpig as much—but now things were getting messy, which wasn’t going to please the councillor one bit. More witnesses, more loose ends: it was spiralling out of control. Maybe they should’ve hung back and let the ST-Div conduct their search, not drawn any more heat onto themselves, but it’s hard to deny a Fury when his blood is up—and those uniforms weren’t popular among his crew. Just the sight of a single bluejay was enough to get them riled; a fully-armoured squad rolling onto Strickland was an automatic target. It wasn’t smart, but feelings were running high.
No, Gilpig wa
sn’t going to be happy. He’d bet the farm on this scheme of his, and now it was unravelling, thanks to a random—seemingly indestructible, it had to be said—helmet being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was mad of the councillor to have come onto Strickland in person to deliver the codes—Rawlings had warned him about keeping a low profile—but it was typical of his paranoid arrogance that he didn’t trust anyone else to hand them over. Even then, he’d held back half the files until he was sure the Furies weren’t going to stiff him, which, ironically, had been his undoing—if the jay hadn’t found the zipdrive in Gilpig’s car, then they wouldn’t have been put in this position.
To be fair, his mistrust wasn’t entirely misplaced; Rawlings had been contemplating selling on the codes to the highest bidder (someone who could’ve made better use of black-market treemeat cargo), much preferring the immediate creds to the long-term plan Gilpig had in mind. It had sounded impressive, and could’ve meant serious paydirt in the future, but the gang leader wasn’t that patient; it would’ve been years before they saw a return on the risk they were taking. All very well for the councillor to shut himself away in Learner, far from the scene of the crime, while the Furies did the dirty work. He was the kind of uptown drokkwad who saw the people of Sector 9 as nothing more than variables in a potentially lucrative project. Why should their feelings come into the matter when there was an area that needed gentrifying?
Judge Dredd: Year Two Page 20
