Black Atlantic

by Peter J Evans

  He couldn't have explained it to Orca even if he had wanted to. In the same way that he couldn't have explained how he sensed things that were about to happen before they did, because he could feel their connections shifting about. It would be like trying to describe what Synthi-Caf tasted like to a man born without a tongue.

  Orca was heading along the spine of the ship, towards the forward hold. Can-Rat knew where he was going and found himself hanging back.

  The casket.

  It lay at the heart of a web of connections, darker and more tangled than he had ever seen. It made his head hurt just being around it. The others thought he had sensed the pirate vessel closing in on them before the sensors had picked it up, but he hadn't. It was the casket that had been bothering him.

  Death lay within that thing, like a statue lies within stone, waiting to be freed by the sculptor's art.

  And Orca was walking right towards it.

  Can-Rat stopped where he was. The engines were part of Golgotha. They were part of Orca, too. If Orca ceased to function the engines would, and then the ship would. Gethsemane Bane was part of Golgotha. If Orca died, the engines would die, the ship would die, and Bane would... Die!

  He didn't want that.

  "Wait!" he called, his voice sounding reedy and thin as it bounced from the hull's metal walls. "Orca, wait up!"

  Orca hauled himself along the length of the Golgotha, squeezing through hatches and passages and moving more easily through the ship's holds. The holds contained nothing but spare parts and provisions. The only salvaged booty lay in the forward hold.

  He almost filled the narrow passage that led to the forward hold. Spinning the locking wheel in the centre of the door, he pushed the heavy metal panel inwards without even feeling its weight. Orca wore a layer of dense fat like a suit made for a giant, but he wasn't a weakling. It took powerful muscles to move his bulk, as more than one dockside loudmouth had discovered to their cost.

  He turned sideways as he stepped over the hatch sill and eased himself through. The forward hold was in darkness. Orca heard Can-Rat saying something a few bulkheads behind him, but he chose to ignore it. The little man had bothered him enough for one day.

  Light from the passage cut across the hold, drawing a bright line across the deck and up the far bulkhead. Orca reached out to the bulkhead by the hatch and turned the switch he knew would be there. Above him, blue-green fluorescent tubes fluttered into life.

  The casket was open.

  The cables holding it down to the deck had been broken, their frayed ends glittering in the light. The lid of the shell had flipped open and was now lying on the deck next to the body of the casket. Fluid, translucent and greasy-looking, had spilled out of it in considerable quantity and now lay in steaming puddles on the deck.

  Orca hesitated, unsure of whether to step back into the corridor and slam the hatch, or try to find whatever had been released from the casket. Something organic had been sealed inside, he could see that from the exposed systems. There were data leads in the casket, drug injectors, a gas-transfer system. The lock had opened by itself. A timing mechanism?

  Just as he thought that, Orca saw part of the far wall shimmer.

  One second it was just shadowy, stained bulkhead metal, the next it was fluid, mobile, casting shadows that were all wrong as it separated from the wall.

  And hurled itself towards him.

  Orca didn't even have time to move before it struck.

  Back in the passageway, Can-Rat saw Orca jerk suddenly, horribly. The web of connections that linked him to the rest of the world were already unravelling around him.

  Can-Rat skittered to a halt. Orca was still on his feet, but he was sagging, as if his vast weight had finally caught up with him after all these years. There was the sound of something wet and heavy hitting the floor.

  "Orca?"

  The engineer must have heard his voice. He turned, awkwardly, his great shoulders rolling around first until he almost lost his balance, then his foot came up and moved back, slamming back down to the deck. He ended up facing Can-Rat.

  There was an expression on Orca's face that was almost infinitely sad. He opened his mouth, but all that came out was blood, because there was a wound in his body that ran from his groin up to his throat. He had his hands across it, as though trying to hold himself together, but he was too late. His massive torso had already emptied itself over the deck.

  Can-Rat screamed in horror and took an involuntary step backwards. Orca raised a foot and stepped forwards too, as though trying to get away from the hold, but before he could move again a long, shining blade, white and glistening like wet bone, exploded out of his throat.

  Orca went down like a loose sack, sliding off the blade to crash onto the passageway floor. Blood, sent flying by the impact of his body, went halfway up the walls and painted Can-Rat from head to toe.

  He felt the warmth of it, the sudden, acrid taste of it in his mouth, and he shrieked. At the sound of his voice, what he had thought was a shadow in the hatchway shimmered and flowed and then stepped out into the light.

  Its skin was blue-lit metal and rust-stained wall, and then it was pale and slick and unfinished, like something unborn. Can-Rat saw it for a split second before the terror took him and sent him scrambling for his life back along the passageway. He had seen the half-made armour growing through it in patches, the blades, the nightmare it had for a face. He saw the way it was looking at him. Then he ran.

  The cold intelligence in that awful stare was something that would stay with him until he died.

  6. PROPHESY

  "Central Dispatch, all Judges in sector twenty-one, please respond."

  Dredd finished cuffing the unconscious perp to a holding post, shook a few gobbets of blood and hair from his daystick and shoved it back into its belt loop. "Responding."

  "All points request for back-up, Fresh Start Displaced Persons Habplex, off Weaver Skedway."

  Dredd's Lawmaster was parked a few metres from the holding post, near the entrance to Hackin' Henry's Smokatorium. That was where the perp had been when Dredd pulled up: kicking the door and demanding to be let in. The Smokatorium staff had locked the doors from the inside, and little wonder, since the man had been wearing nothing except a small pouch of pipe tobacco. And that had been slung around his neck.

  Dredd knew that tobacco addiction could do strange things to a citizen. Still, this had been an eye-opener. Even more surprising had been when the man had rounded on Dredd and tried to set him on fire with a cigarette lighter.

  Dredd climbed quickly back onto the Lawmaster and gunned the engines. The big bike leaped forward with a throaty whine. "Acknowledged, Dispatch. What's the situation?"

  "Attempted mass breakout, with associated damage to municipal property."

  "On my way." Dredd took the Lawmaster left onto the intersked that would lead him onto Weaver. By his reckoning, Fresh Start had been due to pop for the past two weeks. He was quite surprised it had taken this long.

  There were hundreds of Habplexes all over the city, unwelcome leftovers from the Apocalypse War. Areas that had been reduced to rubble during the conflict had been bulldozed flat, levelled out and used as the foundations for sprawling, fenced-in camps. Inside the fences, temporary hab-domes provided shelter for the unfortunate citizens made homeless during the war. Often they ended up camping on ground once occupied by the blocks they had lived in previously.

  The Habplexes hadn't been intended as permanent accommodation, but as the years went by and disasters like the Necropolis Event and the Second Robot War had continued to stretch the city's housing budget, plans to close the camps down had been pushed back further and further until they were basically out of sight.

  Every month or so, someone from the Habplex would get lucky and be rehoused; that was usually the trigger for the remaining ten thousand inhabitants to begin ripping the place apart. The fact that they were destroying their own homes in the process always seemed to escape them.
<
br />   The intersked sloped up sharply, taking the road over part of the Meg-Way. The rise afforded Dredd an early view of the camp - a wide gap in the Mega-City skyline, maybe five kilometres away, and a distant smear of yellow security lights. There was smoke, too, lit crimson from within. Fresh Starters often tried to burn their way through the perimeter fence.

  Dredd tooled his Lawmaster diagonally across the sked and into the exclusive Judges' Lane. He could move faster there. As he did so, his helmet comms hissed into life again. "Central Dispatch."

  "Already have that Fresh Start call, Dispatch. I'll be there in three."

  "Negative, Judge Dredd," the dispatcher told him. "Message is direct from Chief Judge Hershey, your request to be appraised of developments in the Warchild case."

  That, Dredd thought to himself, was fast. Hershey must have been taking a special interest. "Go ahead," he replied. "But make it quick."

  "The SJS got nothing out of Hellermann."

  Dredd hadn't expected to hear that. The Special Judicial Squad - the Judges who judged the Judges - were masters at interrogation in all its forms. Truth drugs, psychic techniques, dream machines; they had all the tricks and showed no mercy in using them. Dredd knew Hellermann was tough, but SJS should have cracked her like a synth-egg.

  "She's had herself modified," the dispatcher reported. "Artificial glands grafted into the brainstem. They release anti-serums that neutralise truth drugs. Looks like she'd been undergoing deep hypnosis, too. She has auto-suggestive blocks set up to stop her breaking under psychological duress."

  "She knew what to expect if she got caught and prepared for it," Dredd muttered, guiding his Lawmaster onto a slipzoom. Already he could hear the dull roar of the riot, punctuated by the whiplash cracking of gunfire. Things, it seemed, were getting ugly.

  "That was SJS's assessment, too," said the dispatcher. "Judge Buell has ordered that Hellermann be handed over to Psi-Division for deep psyche interrogation."

  "Let the Chief Judge know I won't be holding my breath."

  Ahead of him was the broad, flat expanse of waste ground on which the Habplex had been set up. Bathed in the nicotine glow of the security lights, rioting camp-dwellers moved through the area in destructive waves. At least half of the hab-domes were ablaze and most of the others were in ruins. From the look of them, many had been torn apart to provide weapons for the rioters.

  A group of Fresh Starters had built a bonfire against the electromesh fence, hot enough to melt the wire and short out that section. Tearing the burning debris away from the blackened wire, they had succeeded in ripping a hole in the mesh. Dredd angled his bike towards the opening and thumbed its siren into life.

  "Thank the Chief Judge and tell her I'll be in touch. Now get me Weather Control."

  The journey from the harbour barge to the Old Man's chambers took Bane almost an hour, although part of that was spent in the dockside market looking for a suitable offering. Row after row of stalls were arranged around the forward edge of the harbour pool, covered against the constant rain of rusty condensation dripping from the metal roof. All the stalls had battery lamps and bioluminescent tubes strung from their frames, so that shoppers could see what they were buying in the cavernous gloom of the harbour barge. Some even had their own portable generators running noisy neon signs and matrix displays. Bane tended to steer clear of those stalls - if the owners had that much credit to burn, they certainly didn't need any of her hard-earned notes. There were plenty in the dockside market who did.

  She settled on a bottle of potent brown spirits, no doubt brewed up from fruit mash and fish innards in some bottom deck bilge-still. It would probably taste ghastly, but the Old Man wouldn't mind and Bane had liked the little charms strung around the neck of the bottle on baling wire: sea creatures cut from scraps of thin metal, megasharks and octopi and long, looping serpents. They chimed against the glass and caught the light. Bane had thanked the toothless old woman behind the stall and handed over enough notes to pay for the bottle and a little more besides. An extravagance, she knew, but what was the point of making a good catch if she couldn't spread it around?

  The market was packed - it usually was - and Bane had to duck and weave to get past the shoppers and back onto open dockside. From there she took the starboard ladder up five decks until she reached a hatchway in the barge hull. That led her out onto a narrow, hanging mesh bridge that swung uneasily in the wind. That bridge - quite terrifying to cross, with the cables groaning and the black water rushing past far below - had been the beginning of Bane's trek through the cityship, across eighteen decks, up and down numerous levels, through tunnels and up towers and down grimy, corroding ladders. She passed through three more markets, a wedding, two brawls, an open air drinking competition and a minor fire until she reached the chem-tanker Hyperion, only six hulls from Sargasso's centre line.

  By the time she got there she was cold, soaked from spray and very, very tired. Her limbs ached from all the climbing and carrying the bottle around hadn't helped, either. Next time, Bane promised herself, she would take the old fool a sandwich. At least she could stuff that into her coat pocket and have both hands free.

  She went into Hyperion through the deck where hatches had been cut in the thick metal. Stairs led down through the levels until she was at a point that must have been midway between the deck and the waterline. There, a series of gangways opened out into multiple compartments, set into what had once been the tanker's vast chemical storage tanks. Now they were factories, homes, brothels, a hospital, and the chambers of the Old Man.

  A chem-tanker was as big as a small town, although it was still only a tiny fragment of Sargasso's total bulk.

  Bane had been to see the Old Man so many times she could have made the trip blindfolded. She had to go down two more levels and through a narrow plasteen tunnel to get to his chambers and when she finally arrived she found the way blocked.

  Two huge guards crouched at the chamber entrance, their heads almost touching the high ceiling. Everyone on board Sargasso was mutated to some degree - the Black Atlantic did that to everyone after a while - but this pair were extreme by anyone's standards. They had biceps Bane could have curled up and hidden in, and one was carrying a plasteen H-girder in one mighty hand, slapping it against the other palm like a jetball bat.

  The Old Man's guards were legendary on board Sargasso. One of them was rumoured to be female, but Bane had no idea which.

  "Hey," said the one without the girder as she stopped. Its voice was surprisingly soft and high, almost childlike, like that of a singer. "Bane. Good hunting?"

  "Pretty good," she smiled. "Is he-"

  "Expecting you? Yeah." The other guard stopped slapping its palm with the girder and rested its end against the deck. Bane felt the mesh sag slightly under its weight. "He's been asking for you."

  "Right..." Suddenly, Bane felt unaccountably nervous. She swallowed hard, tugged her long coat a little tighter around her shoulders and stepped between the guards, the bottle a comforting weight in her fist.

  It was time to meet the oldest man in the world.

  The quayside under Angle's feet seemed to be pitching and rolling like the Golgotha in a heavy swell, which was just how he wanted it. After spending as much on grog as he had in the past couple of hours, he would have demanded his money back if he hadn't been at least partially drunk. As it was, he reckoned he was at least three quarters there, which he considered a pretty good deal.

  Even though he was barely out of his teens and the youngest of Golgotha's crew by far, Angle was already an experienced drinker. Luckily, the mutation that had given him his extra joints had also blessed him with a surprising capacity to metabolise alcohol, even the vicious algae-based grog they brewed on Sargasso. Within an hour or two he would be as sober as a Judge, which was a good thing. He was meeting Kerryanne, the barmaid from the Leaping Eel, after her shift was done.

  There was a breeze coming in through the harbour doors, cool and tangy with the battery-acid smell
of Black Atlantic seawater. It sent the quayside lanterns swinging on their cables and sent sprays of condensation drizzling down from the roof braces. Angle walked unsteadily between the moving cones of yellow light, feeling cold, rusty rain hit his shoulders and the top of his head as he headed for the Golgotha. If he was going to impress Kerryanne, he needed a shower and a change of clothes.

  Behind him shone the lights of the three taverns in which he had spent his evening: the Dancing Norm, Lannigan's, and, of course, the Leaping Eel. The places had been jammed with all manner of revellers, from market traders and entertainers to cleaning crews and maintenance gangers down off the gantries. And, of course, the other scavengers. Angle had enjoyed the evening immensely, drinking the hardest of the gangers - a red-haired shift leader called Big Molly - clear off her chair, and swapping tall stories with the crews of every other ship in the harbour. But, as drunk as he was, he'd kept the secret of what lay in Golgotha's hold to himself. The other scavs would find out about the casket on the day of the auction and not before.

  The grog was warm in Angle's gut, the hour was late, and he was as relaxed as he had been for a while. So much so in fact, that he almost tripped over the corpse before he saw it.

  It was in the middle of the quayside, in the shadows between two lanterns, and he had to stop himself stumbling into it. At first he thought it was a pile of old cargo nets, dropped carelessly in his path, but then he noticed something pale emerging from the bundle, splayed in a pool of lantern light. It was a hand.

  Three of its fingers were missing.