With a grumble of long unused engines, the Elektra Maru began to rip its way out of the cityship.
Dredd had been close to a charge when it had gone off. The blast had rolled him across the deck and slammed him into the gunwales. His head felt as though someone had hammered it flat and his right arm would need some work when he got back to the Meg. He hoped the Speed-Heal machines were up and running.
He struggled up and opened his right hand, letting the Lawgiver drop into his left. Most of his targets were already down. The deck of the Elektra Maru was on fire in a dozen places, the ancient wood burning through and churning black smoke into the air.
The ship was moving.
Dredd could feel it dragging backwards, tearing the last of its links free. A mesh bridge snapped like stretched rubber only a few metres from him, and went whistling back to slam into Mystere. The engines were thundering, kicking spray high over the deck, and the whole vessel was beginning to shudder under his boots.
There was an awful sound from near the bow, a deafening shriek of stressed metal. He spun to see that one of the braces hadn't been blown apart and was gradually ripping its way free of the Maru's hull. It was twisting backwards on its huge bolts, the girders bending with long, agonised metallic moans.
Deck timbers shattered and spun across the deck.
Dredd started to head towards the bridge. There was a chance he could stop this if he could bring these lethal idiots to heel.
Borla watched Dredd running towards her. "Lock the bridge doors!"
The helmsman was cursing steadily, working the ships throttles. The days when the bridge merely signalled the speed commands to the engine room had been long gone before Elektra's keel had been laid down, but even with sail-by-wire, the ship was massively slow to react.
The remaining brace was still holding. It was forcing Elektra over at an angle.
"Helmsman!" Borla yelled. "Full power, or we'll never break away!"
"She'll go into the ships sternward! They'll never move in time!"
She ran over to him and shoved the throttle back herself. "Full reverse!"
Behind Dredd, the last brace exploded.
The entire ship seemed to shift sideways. He looked back and saw the brace twisting apart, the great square base slamming up out of its mounts. The whole assembly seemed to teeter in the air for a long second, and then it crumpled down through Elektra's gunwales and into the space between the ships.
Seconds later, Elektra Maru's hull ground sickeningly against that of the Waterloo Sunset, on the portside. The deck tilted violently, sending Dredd sprawling towards the gunwales again.
The Elektra Maru was heeling over between the two ships. The helmsman was hauling on the throttles and manhandling the rudders for all he was worth, but it wasn't doing any good. "Cross-current!" he screamed. "It's got the prow!"
Borla was hanging onto a control throne to avoid being slung clear across the bridge. She could feel the ship sliding out from under her. The huge, complex shape of the cityship had always set up lethal currents for kilometres around, but as long as it stayed as one, the relatively fluid structure of its multiple hulls settled into a stable system.
But the Elektra was breaking that system.
Without warning, the current changed direction. The ship tilted massively to starboard and the bow tore into Mystere's flank.
The current was shaking Elektra Maru from side to side like a dog shaking a rat. As soon as Dredd felt the ringing impact against the Mystere die away, the Elektra's bow was already heading towards the Waterloo Sunset.
He got back onto his feet and hung onto the gunwale. The ship was tilted over at almost forty-five degrees. It had moved back out of formation by nearly a quarter of its length, and that was bringing it into contact with the ships behind. Its stern was hammering into their bows.
The ship was lost. Dredd was no sailor, but he could feel it through his boots. Elektra Maru was coming apart and there wasn't a gruddamned thing he could do about it.
Borla was on the deck of the bridge. The last impact had flung her from the seat and against the wall.
The bridge was in chaos. Half the crew were still at their boards, trying everything they could to slow the vessel's destruction, the other half were screaming and banging at the locked doors. The helmsman had slumped across the throttles; the last impact had been enough to fling his head fatally against the controls.
Borla got to her feet. She felt the ship swaying, wallowing, but suddenly the violent side-to-side rocking had ceased.
Maybe the Elektra was clear, she thought wildly. Then a groan echoed throughout the vessel, from prow to stern, almost as if the ship knew it was dying.
The bow had been destroyed by the repeated slamming against the nearest ships and seawater was rushing into the forward compartments. Hundreds of people must have already drowned, if they hadn't been crushed by the impacts.
The Elektra Maru groaned again, and dipped forwards.
That was when the two ships at the back hit it square in the stern, and drove underneath her.
When the ships collided, Dredd was already on the Mystere. He'd jumped across and only just been able to grab a railing on the other ship. It was Philo Jennig who'd pulled him up.
The noise of the collision was incredible, awful. Jennig was staring at the Elektra Maru in utter horror. Even Dredd heard himself cursing in shock.
The Elektra Maru was going up on her bow.
The two ships behind had slammed into its stern with crushing force, but they had been lower in the deck than the Elektra. Their forward momentum had driven them clear under the stricken vessel's stern.
Elektra's shattered bow had gone completely into the Black Atlantic, and stopped almost dead. Dredd watched as the whole vast length of the ship, shedding crewmen and debris and tonnes of noisome black water, went tilting up over his head.
He saw the propellers still spinning as the ship reached vertical. Then the superstructure ripped free and began to fall, tearing a path down through the deck.
The ship twisted in place, propellers still whirling, sheets of flame billowing from the drives. Then it began to tilt over the rest of the way.
It went over like a felled tree, gaining momentum as it did, thousands of tonnes of steel and wood and screaming, dying mutants soaring sideways and slamming, with ear-splitting force, into the deck of the Mystere.
18. FALLOUT
Peyton was still on the Venturer when the Elektra Maru came down. He wasn't in the office any more, as there was nothing more he could do there. He'd moved himself into the small cot room that adjoined the office and taken up residence on the bunk.
He was running out of time.
The disease had progressed swiftly in his system. Already he was a mass of rashes and he felt as though he were choking, as though the life were already being squeezed out of his lungs.
Eight minutes previously he had injected himself with the contents of a gas pressure syringe. The drug was the product of a short, extremely hasty burst of work in a completely new direction. Peyton would have preferred to work for longer on it, but he wasn't sure how much longer he had. Anyway, the lack of oxygen to his brain was affecting his thought processes.
He lay on his back, shivering violently, feeling waves of pain wash down him from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. He was hoping that the nurse wouldn't come in before the bacteria went into cascade suicide. He simply didn't have the strength to explain to anyone what he'd done.
As he lay there, he felt a strange sensation. At first he wondered if it was something to do with the disease, but he quickly realised that there was something physical going on. A vibration had run through the Venturer's hull as though it had been shoved, hard.
There was another. Peyton tried to sit up, to call for someone to tell him what was going on, but he was too weak. There was too much bacteria in his system.
More thumps, faster. And a noise, distant through the Venturer's walls. Screaming. Th
e other patients were screaming.
Something terrible was happening to the cityship. Peyton knew that with a sudden, terrified clarity, just as the neurotoxin washed into his bloodstream, swallowing him in a flare of agonised darkness.
The Old Man was close to the Elektra Maru when it fell. He was on the same side of the cityship, and maybe three-quarters of the way along its length. He couldn't have said which ship he was on at the time, and he didn't really care. It was the people on them that mattered, not the words etched into pieces of their hull plating.
He had been making a final pilgrimage through the city. Like Peyton, he would have liked to have spent more time doing it, but simply didn't know how much time he had. That was always the way with the most important things, he told himself. They always got left until last. But if they got done first, they wouldn't have been important. It was a puzzle he no longer had time to solve.
The people he'd met along the way had been glad to see him. Many had offered him gifts, and asked him to sit with them and tell them what was going to happen. Most had just shaken his bony hands and wept, and told him that they were glad they had seen him, this one last time.
A lot of people aboard Sargasso believed they were going to die.
He had not taken the gifts, and anyone expecting his usual cryptic answers had been disappointed too. He had tried to reassure people wherever he went, and he believed that, quite often, it had worked.
While most of Sargasso's component vessels were very densely populated, there would always be parts of it that were not. The Old Man sometimes walked through ships with no one on them at all, or with just a few work crews who would wave at him and carry on. Very rarely he was challenged, but only because the places he was about to go were not safe. It had never been difficult to simply take another route.
It had been on one of these seemingly random detours when he had found the Warchild.
That, of course, had been the other reason for his pilgrimage. He had been following the ripples left by the Warchild in the background of his mind.
The weapon hadn't moved for a long time, since just after it had been damaged. The Old Man hadn't known exactly where it was, or when he'd find it. He just knew he would. Sometimes, things came to him that way.
He had stopped to drink some water as it ran down the pipes in the hull-space of a giant chem-tanker. The water had been sweet and cool, and as the Old Man let his heavy head fall back to swallow it, he had seen the Warchild crouched in the gantry above him.
"Aha," he whispered. "There you are. I've been looking for you."
The Warchild didn't move. It was still badly damaged, with its arm wrecked and what looked like a catalogue of other injuries. It looked to the Old Man as if the weapon had fallen from somewhere very high. Its eyes were open, but it saw nothing. It simply didn't have any eyelids.
The Old Man didn't move either, He stood, looking up at the nightmare of exposed bone and white-leather flesh above him, and just watched. In his mind, his odd, mutant mind, the patterns it formed gradually fell away, layer by layer. It was as if the Warchild became a blueprint in his brain, a diagram. A complex artefact whose secrets were as open to him as a road map.
It took a long time.
Finally, the Old Man blinked and allowed a smile to creep over his face. "Well," he thought. "Somebody really did the number on you, didn't they?"
He had discovered something very interesting about the Warchild.
That was when the Elektra Maru fell over.
He had felt the impacts of the ship slamming against its neighbours, but only vaguely, like the grumbles of a distant storm. But when the Elektra twisted on her broken bow and toppled over into the Mystere, a great wave had crashed outwards from the collision. It hammered into the ship the Old Man and the Warchild were on, and sent it banging hard into the next vessel along.
The hull-space rang like a titanic gong, and suddenly the Old Man was being showered with kilos of ancient rust. He had to steady himself against the wall to avoid being shaken off his feet, and the rust-storm made him duck his head and close his eyes to avoid being blinded.
When he opened them again, the Warchild was standing in front of him.
It hadn't attacked and hadn't tried to camouflage itself, although the mimetic cells in its skin were sending subtle patterns across its body in a self-test routine. Its rough ball of a head tilted this way and that, as if slowly shaking itself awake. As the Old Man watched, its remaining arm-blade extended, hinging out and forwards until it extended a metre in front of its hand, almost touching the floor.
Without warning, it erupted into motion. The arm whipped out, too fast to follow.
The Old Man stepped aside and the tip of the blade whined past his face.
The cityship was still shaking. Noises filtered through the metal of the ship's hull.
The Warchild had taken a few steps back, confused. Its thoughts - no, its algorithms and programs - were still in turmoil. It simply couldn't understand why the target in front of it had not been subdued. It tried again, its blade darting out, but finding nothing but air.
Unluckily for the Old Man, the third attack coincided with the explosion caused by the Elektra Maru, now a twisted and broken wreck, slamming back through the two smaller ships behind it and crashing into the Kraken.
The wave this caused slammed into the ship on which the Warchild and the Old Man fought. The Warchild skidded forwards and the Old Man, knocked off his footing by the impact, spread his arms to catch it. It was a kind of reflex.
For a moment, they embraced like wounded brothers. Then the Warchild withdrew its blade from the Old Man's chest.
"Oh," he said, watching as it scrambled away. "That wasn't exactly what I'd planned..."
Gethsemane Bane was on the central bridge when the Elektra Maru took out the Kraken. She was there with Quint and Judge Vix, watching in utter horror as the destruction played out below her.
The fall of the food ship onto the Mystere had been enough to fling them all off their feet. Bane had seen it come down, had stayed with her eyes fixed on it as the superstructure had torn free of its mountings and ripped its way down the vertical deck. She had resolved not to see it strike the Mystere, to look away as the ships connected so she wouldn't have the image of their destruction embedded permanently in her mind. But when the moment came, she couldn't turn away. Couldn't even close her eyes. So she saw it all: the food ship slamming into the Mystere with such force that a great sheet of deck simply folded up around it, crushing dozens of habs and sending others spinning and whirling into the air, trailing pieces of gantry, bits of deck and occupants. Hundreds must have died in that second.
Then the wave hit. The massive wave had been sent skating through the hulls by the death of the Elektra. It had sent the Putin sideways about ten metres and tilted it over several degrees. That didn't make too much of a difference on deck, but on the bridge everyone who wasn't strapped down hit the floor and rolled.
Quint was on his feet first, already hauling himself back to the comms board as the ship tilted back the other way in the swell. He was yelling commands into the microphone, trying desperately to minimise the damage. Judge Vix had hit the deck and stayed there, on her back, breathing hard. Bane looked across at her and saw fresh blood soaking into her bandages.
She reached up to the rim of the porthole and pulled herself upright. Outside, the wreckage of the Elektra was being dragged back along the deck of the Mystere by the current, scouring it clean of structure. Bane could see tiny figures running like insects in every direction, and watched in horror as hundreds of them were caught by the Elektra and swept away.
Judge Dredd must have been one of those figures, if he had even lived that long.
The deck was shuddering under her feet, convulsions rippling through the Sargasso's structure as the waves punched outwards from the collision point. She had to hold on tight to the rim of the port so as not to be thrown aside.
Finally, the Elektra came a
way from the Mystere. The part of it that had been in the water finally succumbed to drag and current, and pulled the rest away down into the Atlantic. Bane saw it topple sideways, taking a tangle of structures with it from the Mystere, and thump down into the water. A fountain of grey spume erupted upwards as it hit and went under.
"It's gone," she whispered. "It went under the water. It's gone."
"Ow," said Vix, very quietly.
Bane couldn't turn away from the porthole. Something hadn't happened yet, but her shocked brain couldn't work out what it was. When something goes into the water, she thought wildly, it sinks. If it's got air in it, it floats. But if it's heavy and it's got air in it, first it sinks, then it-
The Elektra came up again.
Like a drowning man reaching up into life and air one last time, the Elektra Maru roared back up to the surface. Its shattered bow speared upwards between the two ships that had battered its stern, as if in revenge, and then it was flung over again by the current. It tore a ragged gap between the two smaller vessels, sending their habs sprawling into the sea and finally, just before the ocean took it forever, it crunched into the nose of the Kraken.
The Kraken held a fusion torus. Bane was looking right at it when the magnetic containment field, holding a ring of sun-hot plasma in check, failed.
Judge Dredd was not on the Mystere when the Elektra Maru shattered its deck. Neither was Philo Jennig.
Both men had their own particular insight into what was about to happen when the food ship started to rise over their heads. Jennig had been a sailor all his life, he told Dredd later, and had never set foot on dry land. He had seen ships sink before and knew the way they died. He had known that this disaster, while doubtless the biggest he had ever witnessed, was going to play out in the same manner.
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