Black Atlantic

by Peter J Evans

  Judge Dredd, on the other hand, was not a sailor. But he had seen enough things come apart in his time.

  As the Elektra began to tilt both men had been in full retreat, sprinting across the Mystere's deck and yelling at anyone who would listen to do the same. A lot of Sargassans followed suit on reflex - had they seen these two men, the respected skipper's man and the feared lawman from the Mega-City, making a stand on the Mystere, they would have done the same and died with them. By knowing when to back out, Dredd and Jennig saved countless lives.

  Dredd had his back to the Kraken when the fusion torus failed, which probably spared his bionic eyes some maintenance. Fusion reactors that suffer catastrophic failure do not explode. The plasma reaction they sustain is so volatile that as soon as the magnetic field begins to waver it simply breaks down. That breakdown could sometimes be lethal. When the Kraken's reactor was struck by the Elektra Maru, its shattered magnets released, for an instant of time too small to measure, a horizontal tongue of plasma as hot as the surface of a star. It flashed out to port, impossibly bright, carving a glowing track ten metres high through the Kraken's hull from bow to stern. The flash melted the hull of the next ship along, too, and dozens of mutants were rendered blind by the flare.

  Sargasso got off lightly. Had the plasma lashed out into the water - if the Kraken had been heeled over, say - the steam explosion would have been enough to take the entire city out of the water.

  As soon as they saw the flash and heard the screams, Dredd and the deputy realised just what had happened. At that time, though, it was only Jennig who realised the full implications.

  Councillor Atia Borla, far from taking her people to safety across the sea, had instead doomed the cityship Sargasso to collide with Abraxis.

  The immediate destruction had ended by the time Judge Peyton had woken up.

  He lay still for a time, wondering what had happened to him. Realisation only came slowly, along with sensation. It was a minute or two before he could even see.

  After a time he was able to sit up. He could still hear screams and shouting from outside the office, but he couldn't face that yet. He felt as though he'd been run over by a Mo-Pad.

  He was, however, alive. Against all the odds.

  The gas-syringe was still lying on the floor where he'd dropped it. He hadn't remembered that, but when he looked at it he knew that by the time he'd injected himself, he was so weak with the infection that he hadn't even been able to put it back on the desk.

  He rolled up his sleeve. His skin was still corpse-white, but the rashes were fading. With the bacteria dead in his bloodstream the allergic reaction to their presence was dying too.

  "Grud," he whispered, "I'm gonna get stuff named after me..."

  He hauled himself up, staggered to the door and called for a nurse.

  When Dredd got to the central bridge the place was in complete mayhem. Skipper Quint was running up and down the line of control boards, roaring orders as he went. Vix was lying in the corner with her bandages soaked in blood. It looked as though every operator was doing at least three things at once. Luckily, several of them had enough arms for it.

  Bane had been darting about with a fire extinguisher, putting out small fires in the bridge's wiring. As Dredd stepped through the hatch she almost dropped it in surprise.

  "Drokk! Where did you spring from?" She set the extinguisher down and ran over to him. "Are you okay?"

  "Arm's broken," he snapped. "But it'll keep. What's the situation?"

  "Not good." Quint stopped by a nearby control board and stabbed at several keys. The response he saw on the monitor made him growl under his breath. "We're having to shut down the rest of the core drives."

  Dredd gave Bane a questioning glance. "Sargasso's too fluid to survive the stress," she told him. "If the other drives keep going, Kraken will start to fall back. That'll have the whole quadrant pulling backwards on the rest of Sargasso and eventually we'll come apart."

  "Got to be a phased shutdown," said Quint. "Take everything in stages, compensate for the currents and the damage. It'll take a while."

  Dredd nodded. "How's Vix?"

  "Unconscious," said Bane. "She fell really hard when the wave hit us. Dredd?"

  "Hm?"

  "I know you did everything you could."

  Dredd scowled. "Not enough. Quint, how's this mess going to alter our course?"

  Quint had obviously reached a point in the process where he had to stop and wait for a while. "If it was just an engine shutdown, we wouldn't have a problem. Under regular circumstances it takes a day to even start slowing down."

  He gestured out of the long window. "But all this? We've got new crosscurrents, pieces of debris still attached and dragging us back, hulls taking on water and slowing the whole system. We're even losing hulls from the outer edges. We've had to send out scavenger ships to pick up survivors. It's chaotic." The skipper folded his arms and turned to Dredd. "Our best guess? Abraxis will hit us in about three hours."

  "Then we haven't got long," Dredd replied. "Quint, start getting your best crews together. I'll need you and anyone relevant down in the council chamber in thirty minutes. That means keep the council out."

  "What are you going to do?" Bane asked, her eyes wide. "Abandon ship?"

  He shook his head. "We're going to sink the Abraxis."

  19. THE RETURN OF METHUSELAH

  The council chamber filled up quickly. By the time Mako Quint had brought in all the captains and skipper's men he needed, there was barely anywhere to sit.

  Dredd preferred to stand. He took a position in front of the benches and waited for everyone to settle. Although time was short, he needed them all with him on this. Going in hard would accomplish nothing.

  He'd taken a moment to splint up his broken arm. It was a temporary repair, but it would get him through the day.

  It was Quint who spoke first. "I'll get straight to the point. Since the Elektra Maru went down we've had to initiate a phased shutdown of all engines, just to avoid Sargasso being torn to pieces. We've got a handle on that now, and given enough time we'll start off again with a redistributed drive load." He looked across at Dredd.

  "Problem is, you don't have that time," Dredd grated. "Abraxis is on a new heading, but you know how long it takes these crates to turn around. It'll hit you in three hours."

  Unlike Dredd's previous time in the council chamber, there was no immediate outbursts from the men and women on the benches - a few sharp intakes of breath, but little more. This, Dredd reflected, was the correct way to run a community. People capable of making the decisions, making them for those who weren't.

  "We have a choice," said Quint. "We can break the Sargasso, take everyone we can to the outermost hulls and blow their links. We could get maybe thirty per cent of the population away on those vessels, and then move the others to the forward hulls. There's a chance Abraxis would be slowed enough by the first impacts to not drive straight through."

  Bane, who had a place on the benches with the other captains, raised a hand. "Aren't there more Warchild units on the Abraxis?"

  "Two," Dredd agreed. "At least. So the second choice is to sink the Abraxis."

  That did ellicit more of a response. There were shouts of disbelief, and worse. The idea of sinking a cityship, even a pirate vessel full of corpses, was anathema to men and women who had spent their whole lives trying to keep one afloat.

  "What about the Warchild on Sargasso?" one man yelled above the din. "And the plague?" Dredd fixed him with a glare.

  "The Abraxis will kill you a lot faster than the plague will," he snarled. "As for the Warchild, leave it to me. That creep's going down, and I'm taking it there."

  "I've seen your Warchild," said a voice behind him.

  He turned. There, standing by the hatchway, was a very Old Man. His skin was dark, like ancient oak, and his hair was pure white. He wore a dingy pair of safari shorts and a fish-skin shirt, and dozens of totems were strung around his scrawny neck. He was
so old, he looked like a skeleton draped in brown leather.

  Everyone in the room, barring Dredd himself, gasped.

  Gethsemane Bane jumped down from her place at the bench and ran across the room. She threw her arms around the new arrival. "Old Man! They said you were missing!"

  "Guess I've been found," he smiled.

  Bane smiled at Dredd. "This is our Old Man," she said. "He's our, well... He tells us things. He's like a teacher."

  "More like a shaman," said Quint. "Although sometimes I think he's the only one with any wits on this city."

  "We've met," said Judge Dredd.

  Bane blinked at him. "Excuse me?"

  "We certainly have," the old man grinned. "How long has it been, Dredd? Since you picked me up by the scruff of the neck and threw me out of your city?"

  Suddenly, the council chamber was very silent.

  "Twenty-two years," replied Dredd. "I never forget a case."

  "A case?" Bane was aghast. "You judged him?"

  "His name," Dredd told her, "is Meredith Caine, aka Methuselah. A mutant noted for his extreme persistence in staying alive. And certain empathic abilities."

  "That's not exactly true-"

  "Whatever you call them, Caine, you used them to con a lot of people out of a lot of money." He turned to Bane. "Your shaman was at the centre of a citywide cult. It took us three months to shut him down. Psi Division couldn't prove his psionic powers, but his mutant DNA was enough to convict him."

  The Old Man drew himself up. "You sentenced me to exile!"

  "You were judged according to the Law!" thundered Dredd. "There were thirteen suicides among your cult followers. People leaping off city blocks because they thought your magic would bring them eternal life!"

  Caine lowered his head. "I know," he said. "I did those things, and I'm sorry. I heard the screams of those thirteen people, even from outside the city walls. They've stayed with me forever."

  "And this is where you've been hiding out?"

  "Dredd!" Bane rounded on him, still staying protectively near the Old Man. "Whatever he did in the past, that's nothing to do with us now. The Old Man's been the heart of this cityship for over twenty years. He's been more like blood to me than any real relative."

  "Speaking of blood," Dredd pointed at Caine's shirt. "Cut yourself?"

  "I said I'd seen your Warchild," the Old Man replied. "Trouble is, it saw me at the same time." He lifted his shirt. A rough bandage had been tied around his chest, and blood was soaking through it. "We had a little 'disagreement'."

  Instantly the Old Man was surrounded. Bane grabbed a spare chair from the side of the room and eased the Old Man down into it. Someone else was keeping pressure on the wound, yet another man shouted for a medikit.

  Caine seemed quite irritated by the attention. "For grud's sake," he snapped, brushing their hands away, "don't you have more important things to be doing?"

  Quint gritted his teeth. "I have to agree," he said. "Despite our feelings for this-" he threw Dredd a vicious glance, "man - we have to decide."

  "No!" Caine shouted. "No! Gethsemane Bane, you said yourself - what's in the past is in the past. None of that matters now. What matters is that Dredd's plan has to succeed!"

  "But-"

  "Follow him!" The Old Man's skinny finger was pointed at Dredd. "Follow the lawman, if you want Sargasso to survive. Don't fret about the plague, that's already been dealt with. Just get in your ships and go!"

  For the next hour, Sargasso's harbours thundered with activity. Every serviceable vessel, barring those that were out picking up survivors of the Elektra Maru disaster, was being loaded with demolition charges.

  According to Bane, the charges were normally used for blasting massive pieces of salvage to a more manageable size. Dredd could only hope that they would be enough to fatally damage the Abraxis. In the plan's favour, it had only taken one rogue ship to threaten the entire survival of Sargasso. Big enough holes in all the right places should put paid to the pirate city, too.

  Just in case, Dredd had convinced Quint to prepare a surprise. But he still didn't know if it would work.

  There would have been no profit in telling Captain Bane that, however. She was with him on the quayside, helping her crew load demo charges onto the Golgotha. Dredd was putting as many as feasible onto Seawasp.

  "I still can't believe you judged him," she growled.

  "He committed a crime. While his acolytes were leaping from tweenblock plazas, he was buying himself a pleasure skimmer."

  "He's not like that now."

  "Nothing's to say a perp can't be reformed, Bane. I just don't have much faith in the process." He picked up another case of charges and set it onto Seawasp's floor. The vessel sank a little lower into the water. "Looks like that's about it. Are you done?"

  "Almost." Bane handed another case to one of her crew, a young redheaded man with far too many elbows in each arm. She leaned on the gunwale and looked down at him. "Is this really going to work?"

  "We have a chance."

  She looked away and hugged herself. "A chance. What's your stake in this, Dredd? Why are you even here? Sargasso's not your city."

  "No," he said. "But the mess it's in came from mine. That makes it my job to clear it up."

  Seawasp was out of the harbour first, going not much faster than a scavenger with all the demo charges weighing it down. Dredd took the little vessel out and then waited while the flotilla began to form up behind him. Up ahead, partially enveloped in a vast cloud of spray and flies, Abraxis looked like a mountain of grimy metal sliding across the sea towards him.

  He opened his helmet comms and patched into Sargasso's central bridge. "Quint, we're forming up. Should be under way in ten."

  "That doesn't give you long to do the job, Dredd."

  "Never mind that. Have you got the present ready?"

  "All set to be unwrapped. By the way, I've someone here who needs a word."

  Dredd felt his teeth grinding together. "Put her on."

  "Vix here, Dredd. Going fishing?"

  "Yeah, real pleasure cruise," he snapped. "How are you doing?"

  "I'll live. It doesn't hurt as long as I don't breathe."

  He couldn't help but shrug. "So don't breathe."

  "Ha," she said flatly. "My report to Judge Buell is going to be a real doozy, you know that? Anyway, I've just got confirmation from Judge Peyton. He beat the plague, just like your Old Man said."

  "I'm impressed."

  "I hate to admit it, but so am I. Seems the disease's final stage kills with a dose of neurotoxin. Same stuff as in the needles. Peyton came up with an antitoxin, not a cure as such. The disease cures itself, but the antitoxin stops you dying before the bacteria do."

  Behind him, the scavengers were in formation. He looked to starboard and saw Bane wave at him from the bridge of the Golgotha. "Guess that means the SJS gets something useful out of this after all. A defence against the Warchild poison."

  "Dredd? If I hadn't seen your Psi-Division reports, I'd say you were reading my mind. Vix out."

  Dredd let the mic snap back up out of sight and raised his right hand high. In response, the sirens on every vessel behind him - over forty little ships, from scavengers and fishing smacks to repair platforms with spare aquajets bolted to their blunt sterns - ripped out across the water. It was a mournful noise, but edged with anger, in the way some of the captains were hammering the controls. A stuttering, vengeful howl.

  It was time to go and sink a city.

  20. AREA DENIAL

  The flotilla moved out on Dredd's command.

  Bane was at the helm of the Golgotha, and it felt good to be back. Dray was handling the navigation board, while Angle and Can-Rat - his ribs still tightly bound - were down on deck, readying the demo charges.

  The only empty station was down in the engine room. Golgotha would be able to make the party without Orca's tinkering, but it would miss him. Bane missed him already. There was, however, an unspoken rule already being
enforced aboard the scavenger, and that was not to mention the loss.

  "Grud," Dray whispered. "D'you hear that?"

  Bane frowned. "I don't hear anything." In reply, Dray just nodded and gestured to stern.

  Of course, Bane thought. The Sargasso's engines weren't running. Every other time she'd left the harbour the noise of the core drives had been a roar, almost deafening. Spray had soaked the decks, made the windshield run with grubby, foamy water. Now there was nothing past the sound of Golgotha's engines and those of the other ships around it. Just a sluggish wake of rolling swells, tipping them back and forth as they left Sargasso behind.

  There were two formations, one from each harbour. As it turned out, most of the port formation were scavenger vessels, because they tended to congregate in the port barge. The starboard crowd were more varied, with a lot of fishing vessels, maintenance sleds, and repair barges. And Judge Dredd, wallowing along in front in his little powder-blue speedboat. Bane hoped that, far above her head, some kind of spy satellite was looking down on them all and taking picture after picture. Because the world deserved to see this. It was a sight not to be missed.

  Out past Dredd, the Abraxis loomed out of a cloud of oily spray; a dead thing, but still moving, bringing its corpses and its flies and its ravening monsters to crush her home. Bane found her hands tightening on the controls.

  "Not on my watch, you bastich," she whispered, and eased the throttles forward, just a little.

  It was going to be tough, she knew that. The currents around a cityship's hulls were something to be feared, the reason every vessel coming in to dock at Sargasso's harbours went in wide. Bane was hoping that Abraxis would throw out less of a swell, but if she'd had the slightest doubt that what they were going to do wasn't lethally dangerous she would have been fooling herself.

  The two formations were closing up, stretching into long lines of vessels and closing in towards the Abraxis like the claws of a spit-crab. Up on Golgotha's deck, Can-Rat was helping Angle strap himself to one of the starboard cranes.