Black Atlantic

by Peter J Evans

  He leaned over to see what was going on. The patrons of the Black Whale were all out on the street, surrounding a man in a coat. It was the man who was screaming, something about his brother.

  About a killer.

  Dray didn't like the sound of this at all. He went back into the hab and dressed quickly, making sure he had a couple of good knives in his belt. Then, with his wife still asleep under the covers, he went out, taking care to lock the door after him.

  A set of metal stairs took him down to the Black Whale, but most of the patrons had gone. He'd heard them yelling and whooping into the distance as he was getting his shirt on. There were just a handful left, talking excitedly by the door.

  Dray recognised a barrel-chested docker called Tome and trotted over. "What's going on?"

  Tome gave him a nod of greeting. "Looks like someone's gone kill crazy. Murdered Igor Tusk."

  "You're kidding!"

  "I wish. Erik came in screaming the place down, then someone caught sight of the killer and they all went after him. Gruddamn lynch mob. We've sent someone off to find a skipper's man."

  "Nice to see someone's still thinking." Dray puffed out a long breath. People died on Sargasso all the time, he knew. The Skipper and his patrols did the best they could, but there was just too many people to keep track of, too many places to hide. Still, a murder practically on his doorstep... That wasn't a nice thing to think about, not with his wife and children asleep just a level above his head.

  And the Golgotha below.

  He rubbed his chin, nervously. "Look, Tome. I'm gonna check the ship. Kelli and the kids are still at home. You couldn't...?"

  Tome grinned and slapped him powerfully on the shoulder. "I'll be right here."

  Mako Quint didn't sleep much. Lucky for him he didn't need to, because the skipper of a cityship didn't get time to waste sleeping. When the telephone rang he was still at his desk, gulping at a mug of caf the size of his own head and working on his notes for the next day's council meeting.

  The phone was his personal property; an antique, at least a hundred years old and held together with glue and silver tape. He lifted the handset from its cradle and spoke into the cracked plastic mouthpiece. "It's two AM!"

  "Trouble at the docks, sir." It was Philo Jennig, his deputy. "Looks like three dead."

  Quint closed his eyes for a second. "Where?"

  "Two down on the docks, portside harbour. One near the Black Whale tavern. By the sound of it, we've got ourselves a lynch mob, too."

  "Wonderful." Quint stretched, feeling the kinks in his neck and back crackle as he straightened. The harbour and the surrounding areas always had been a magnet for trouble. When people spent a long time out at sea things were bound to pop every now and then when they got home. One of his first acts as skipper was to double the number of patrols in those areas, especially at night. "Get a patrol on the tail of the lynch mob - we don't need any more deaths. I'll head down to the docks."

  "The council?" Jennig asked.

  "None of them will thank us for waking them at this hour," Quint replied. "Wait until we have something conclusive to tell them. I'll call you from one of the quayside boxes for an update. And, as this is a manhunt, turn on the harbour lights."

  The harbour was bathed in light by the time Bane got back. She'd made good time on the journey from the Old Man's chamber. All the way she'd been trying to calm herself down, to stop her heart yammering in her chest and her stomach flopping like a landed fish. He wasn't always right, she told herself a hundred times. He'd got things wrong before. He might have been drinking some of the offering booze, or maybe he was just stringing her along. Telling her a tale, trying to scare her.

  No one was in danger from the casket. Everything was going to be all right.

  She almost convinced herself. But all her comfortable lies disappeared when she opened the hatch and saw the harbour lights were on.

  The massive banks of halogens weren't cheap to run, and they were never turned on at night unless something bad was occurring. The last time it had happened was when Bane had been eleven and a megashark had come in through the harbour doors. It had taken two hours to drive it off.

  There was no shark thrashing between the ranked vessels this time. Just skipper's men on the quayside and Golgotha's deck, and thousands of people leaning over the railings on all the levels of streets above straining for a better view.

  There were more of Quint's men guarding the hatch. One of them had told her that no one was being allowed in or out of the harbour, but then the other had asked which ship she was from, and when she told them they looked at each other and let her through. That was when she knew for certain something terrible had happened.

  There was a mounded shape on Golgotha's deck, covered with a tarpaulin.

  As soon as she saw it, her stride faltered. She wanted, needed, to see what was lying there, but somehow her legs didn't want to move any more. She heard somebody make a choked, sobbing sound, and realised with no small surprise that it was her.

  By the time she got to the gangplank all the strength was gone from her. She stopped at the foot of it, unable to take another step.

  She heard footsteps and turned to see Dray and Angle coming towards her. They must have been talking to the skipper's men when she arrived, further along the Quay. Angle's face was whiter than usual. Dray's scales didn't show a colour change, but his expression was enough to confirm her worst fears. "Can-Rat?" she whispered.

  Angle looked momentarily confused. "He's okay... Well, he's got a bunch of busted ribs, but otherwise he's all right."

  Bane shook her head. "But the Old Man. I mean, up there..."

  "It's Orca," said a quiet voice behind her.

  She turned. Mako Quint was standing behind her, flanked by deputies and armed guards. Bane didn't think she'd ever seen the man this close.

  "I'm sorry, Captain Bane. I truly am." He glanced at the covered body up the gangplank. "I know you were friends."

  Bane's head felt as if it was going to come off her shoulders. The Old Man had seen Can-Rat in danger: why hadn't he seen this? "What happened?"

  "Looks like he disturbed the killer," Quint replied. "Can-Rat too, but Orca got the worst of it."

  "I need to see him."

  Quint shook his head. "Trust me, girl, you really don't. Besides, it didn't end here."

  Dray had stepped forwards. "Remember Ifrana Rokes, off the Melchior? He got her, too. And then Igor Tusk, up near the Black Whale."

  "Oh my grud..." Bane stepped away, her mind spinning. "I don't get it. How could somebody kill Orca? He was-"

  "He was a big man," Quint muttered, finishing the sentence for her. "I knew him. Not well, but we've worked together. Whoever killed him must be..." He shook his head. "I don't know. But this isn't over, captain. We've got a lynch-mob roaming the upper levels with Erik Tusk in charge. The harbour's locked down until my men find them, the killer or both. But that's not what I'm most interested in right now.

  "I want you to tell me all about what's in your forward hold."

  Quint had just finished questioning Captain Bane when one of the quayside boxes rang. When one of his deputies answered it there was a short conversation, some cursing, and then the phone was handed to him. "Quint," he barked.

  "Jennig, sir. We, er, I mean..." He heard the man swallowing hard. There were other noises, too. It sounded as though someone was vomiting.

  "Come on, Philo! Spit it out. Where are you?"

  Perhaps "spit it out" hadn't been the best phrase he could have used. It took Jennig a few seconds to regain his composure after that. He cleared his throat. "Up on fourth, near the starboard vent ducts. Sir, you'd better get up here."

  "Have you found the killer?"

  "No. We found the lynch mob."

  Three hours later, Mako Quint stood on Sargasso's central bridge, watching the rising sun paint a sick yellow line across the horizon. He stood ramrod straight, hands clasped behind his back, his chin out, gazing thro
ugh the wraparound windows with his customary cool, steady glare. The bridge crew expected nothing less of him. He was skipper of the biggest cityship afloat and he had a job to do.

  Nevertheless, he was glad that he could keep his hands locked together like that. It stopped them shaking.

  He had never seen anything like this in his entire life.

  Jennig had found the mob near one of the harbour's huge ventilation ducts. The ducts were big enough to drive a ground car through, sealed with armoured plasteen grilles to protect the giant fan blades inside. The killer had torn one of the grills open and smashed a fan blade to get through, which meant he had easy access to the rest of the harbour barge's giant air-system and, if he wanted, the open deck. Despite all Quint's efforts, there was a multiple murderer loose on the Sargasso.

  Before he had escaped, however, he had turned on the lynch mob.

  At first, Quint thought the bodies must have been caught in the fan and then thrown back out by the airflow, but there was no blood inside the grille. It was everywhere else, though, spattered against walls and metal. The killer had gone through the mob like a mincing machine.

  Later analysis of the bodies would reveal that, far from dying in a frenzied attack, the mob had fallen prey to an assault of almost unimaginable precision. Each corpse had sustained only a single wound, although those wounds were horrific beyond belief. Torsos had been sliced open, heads severed, throats and arteries cut. Erik Tusk had died when a blade had taken off the top of his head, from the eyebrows upwards. Another man had been sliced in half at the waist.

  A couple of the Black Whale's patrons had tried to escape, but were put down with the poisoned needles that had claimed Igor Tusk. And with that, the killer was gone. People living close by reported hearing a disturbance that only lasted about half a minute.

  In the hours that remained before dawn, four-man patrols of skipper's men had begun to move through the cityship, reporting back constantly to the central bridge. Meanwhile, Quint had interviewed Can-Rat, whose ribs had been tightly bandaged, then Angle and Dray, and spoke to Gethsemane Bane for a second time. What they told him had confirmed his worst fears.

  There had been more than one casket.

  The "man down" call came shortly after his second interview with Captain Bane. A patrol had come under attack as they moved through a hydroponics farm on board the bulk carrier Castiglione. Their attacker had shot one man and maimed a second, reportedly with a blade that was part of his arm, then made off in the direction of the Mirabelle, the Castiglione's immediate neighbour. Mirabelle was another ancient tanker, but its hold space had been fitted with hab-units made from stacked and racked cargo containers. Almost twenty thousand people lived there. Fearing a bloodbath, Quint directed his men on the neighbouring ships to converge on the Mirabelle. The moment he gave the order, he found himself wondering how many of his people he had just sent to their deaths.

  The dawn's yellow line had become a purple bruise across the sky. An hour ago the city council had been woken and called to an emergency session. The session was still in progress, but Quint wasn't chairing it for the moment. He had something more important to do.

  There was a very good comms set on the bridge and Quint's radio officer had already set it to the emergency frequency used by scavenger ships at sea. That frequency was on at all times, by Sargasso law. Every scavenger still out there would hear him.

  The coiled wire stretched as Quint raised the microphone to his mouth and thumbed the "talk" button.

  "Sargasso to all scavengers," he began. "This is a warning. Repeat: this is a warning. An unmarked watertight casket was salvaged and returned to the Sargasso in the last two days. Its contents are lethal. Repeat: lethal. We have at least twenty dead.

  "If you have picked up a similar artefact, dump it immediately. Under no circumstances should it be brought aboard the city; anyone who does so will be shot on sight. Details of salvage coordinates to follow."

  Quint paused. The sun's bloated bronze disk was rising above the horizon. The black ocean seemed to burn. He took a breath and began again.

  "Repeat: Sargasso to all scavengers, this is a warning..."

  8. DROPZONE

  The floors of the Grand Hall of Justice were synthetic marble, polished to a near-mirror finish, and Dredd's footsteps echoed as he approached the office doors. On any other surface in the city the soles of his boots would have made no sound at all, but the builders of the Grand Hall had been very particular about such things. Dredd could have worn boots made of spiderweb and his footsteps would still have echoed loudly as he walked up the corridor. There were electronics involved.

  The acoustics of the place had been specifically calculated to inspire awe. And to let the Chief Judge know who was walking up to her doors, of course.

  The doors in question, Dredd was pleased to note, had been reinforced again since he had last been here. Extra layers of bonded plasteen armour had been added to the outer panels, making the doors capable of withstanding assault by anything up to and including battlefield lasers.

  Dredd approved of that. He took the safety of the Chief Judge very seriously indeed.

  The doors opened as he approached them, smooth and whisper quiet. Dredd went right through across the wide floor and stopped in front of the Chief Judge's desk, rigidly at attention.

  "At ease, Dredd," said Hershey quietly. She waved to an empty chair set to one side of the desk. "Take a seat."

  "Thank you, Chief Judge. I prefer to stand." Out on the streets, Dredd didn't give two drokks about anyone's ideas of protocol or petty etiquette. But here at the home of the Law, it was always going to be different for him. Here he could be nothing but the model of propriety.

  Besides, one of the other chairs was occupied by someone Dredd preferred not to sit with, however persuasive Judge Hershey was.

  Judge Buell was the head of the SJS - the Special Judicial Squad. He was slender and sharp-featured, with the look of the now extinct hawk to him. The personality, too, Dredd knew from bitter experience. Predatory, he was. Carnivorous. And more than willing to use the Law as a tool to further his own ends. Quite frankly, Dredd would have rather taken his rest next to an active Warchild. At least you knew where the attack would come from.

  Across from Buell were Judges Duffy and McTighe. Duffy was head of the Atlantic Division; his remit was everything from the Mega-City Docks out as far as the territorial limit, two thousand kilometres offshore. McTighe was the Tek Division Chief. He and Dredd had crossed swords before, normally about McTighe's constant desire to redesign every piece of Justice Department hardware he could get his hands on. Personally, Dredd liked his daystick the shape it was.

  "Duffy, McTighe," he nodded to the two men, and without turning back: "Buell."

  Hershey raised an eyebrow at him. "Hmm. Anyway, now that the pleasantries are over and done with... I assume you've guessed what this is about?"

  "The Warchild," Dredd replied. "Either you've located the first shipment, or Hellermann's cracked."

  "The latter's proving difficult," Hershey muttered, sitting back in her chair. "You'll notice Psi-Chief Shenker hasn't joined us; Psi-Division's still working on Hellerman, but not having much luck. Her psyche's got more dead ends than a Mazny estate."

  Buell sniffed. "Give her to me. She'll crack, given enough time."

  "Time, Judge Buell, isn't on our side." Hershey touched a control on her desk, and a circular section in the centre of her desk fell away. The silvery disc of a Tri-D projector popped up to take its place. "Judge Duffy?"

  Duffy leaned forwards, and set a small data slug into the projector's base. A globe of hazy light sprang up, filling the air above the desk. Justice Department eagle logos scrolled around its equator. "This is an electronic intercept, picked up by one of our listening posts along the territorial margin." In response to his words, the Tri-D globe unfolded into a map, showing the coast and most of the Black Atlantic. The margin lit up as a jagged line of bright dots. "It's audio only,
I'm afraid, and not of the best quality."

  "Let's hear it," Dredd snapped.

  The map showed crosshairs and zoomed in to a point marked "Transmission Source." Dredd noticed its position was at least four thousand kilometres into the Black Atlantic, and then the air was filled with the raw scratching of static. And a man's voice, rich and commanding, with a hint of Euro-City in his accent.

  "Sargasso to all scavengers," the man began. "This is a warning..."

  The message ended. No one spoke. The map disappeared and the image returned as a spinning globe.

  "Any thoughts?" asked Hershey after a few seconds.

  Dredd folded his arms. "Sounds like they found a Warchild."

  Hershey nodded. "Not much doubt about that. Dredd, what do you know about cityships?"

  "Not a lot. Think I flew over one, once - a hundred or so surface vessels chained together into a kind of raft. It shot at us."

  "No surprise there," sneered Buell. "Probably trying to knock you down for salvage. It's how those... " he paused, hunting for the right word, "people live."

  Hershey shot him a glare, then turned her attention back to Dredd. "Sargasso is the biggest cityship afloat with over five hundred vessels. Last estimate put the population at almost a million."

  "A million?" whispered Duffy. "Dear grud. If one of those things has gotten loose in there, the casualties-"

  "Are nothing we need concern ourselves over," Buell interrupted. "Chief Judge, the cityships are out of Mega-City jurisdiction. And full of mutants, I might add."

  "What do you suggest, Buell?" Dredd snapped, still without looking at the man. "Sit back with a long lens and count how many it eats?"

  "Something like that."

  "Gentlemen!" Hershey was on her feet. "Bickering is not going to help us here!"

  "I concur," said Buell mildly. "Perhaps Judge Dredd would prefer to offer his own take on the matter."