Whiteout

by James Swallow

  "Drop the blade, creep. Reach for the sky!" The wrecker tensed, his free hand drifting toward the control toggle for his jetpack. Dredd put a round into the ferrocrete at his feet. "That hood cuttin' off the circulation to your brain? I said drop it!"

  It was then the Judge caught the minute twitch of the eyes behind the wrecker's mask, a quick glance over Dredd's shoulder and then back. Dredd spun in place, just in time to meet another, much larger perp propelled by a burst of jet wash. In his hands was a double-headed hammer that connected with the Judge's chest, forcing the air out of his lungs. Dredd lost his balance and his gun, the pistol skittering away into the dark. The hammer came after him and he rolled, dodging blows that made small, round dents in the highway. In the corner of his vision, Dredd could see other wreckers racing back to the drop point, but his attention stayed firmly on the big guy. With a speed that seemed impossible for a forty-year street veteran, the Judge swept his legs around in a low spin kick that caught the hammer-man on the shin, armoured Justice Department-issue kneepad meeting bone with a sickening crack.

  Dredd pushed himself off the roadway as the machete-wielding punk ran at him, blade raised, a scream on his lips. Too easy. The Judge caught the creep by his cross-belt and used his momentum to toss him over his shoulder. The punk tried to trigger his jetpack, but the squirt of power threw him tumbling into a puddle of burning battery chemicals. He shrieked, the hot acids cutting through his plasteen hood, and in his pain he reflexively clenched the jet control. The wrecker took off in a blast of noise, trailing fire like a comet. He didn't come down again.

  Hammer-man was swearing through gritted teeth, and he shouted out an indistinct name. A new wrecker skipped into the smoky arena formed by the smashed cars and threw the big guy a nod. This new arrival carried a collection of canisters and pressure hoses ending in a bell-shaped nozzle. A small pilot light flared at the tip, and its reflection danced in the wrecker's manic eyes. Dredd didn't have to be a psi to know that this creep must have been the one who hatched this psychotic plan. He'd seen enough pyromaniacs to know the type.

  With great deliberation, Dredd drew his boot knife. "You're all under arrest."

  The wrecker with the flamethrower burst out laughing and shouted out a command: "Rush him!"

  Jetpacks flaring, they dived on him like falling hawks.

  "You got it yet?" said Clark, eyeing the thermograph display. He'd dialled in filter after filter, but the heat haze wafting up from junction 846 was making the sensors top out, blanking them from even the most crude readings.

  Tyler threw him a quick nod and began the upload protocol to the drone platform. Strictly speaking, it was a felony offence to tamper with a city-wide weather regulation system, Tyler actually had no business knowing how one of them worked - but the lax attitude to law enforcement on the Moon was one of the things he'd brought with him on this posting. If there was something that watching Judge Dredd in action had impressed upon the Tek, it was that some circumstances required the ability to think outside the strictly legal box. Interpretive law, they called it; and if what he was doing turned out to be a big mistake, then he had no doubt that Dredd would see all manner of discommendation added to the Luna-Judge's personnel file.

  The H-Wagon's console gave him an answering beep and the data stream flowed into the drone overhead. Tyler looked up involuntarily; somewhere above them, advanced thermodynamic vector generators and precipitation actuators were spooling up to maximum power.

  "It never rains..." he said to himself.

  Dredd attacked them with the lone blade, arcs of flashing silver cutting the hot night air as the carbon-steel fractal edge kissed flesh, slashing through muscle and sinew.

  It was all a feint on the part of the flamer guy; while the Judge's guard was up, he worked his way in, until the manic wrecker brought the weapon down on Dredd's back and sent him sprawling. The stench of igniter fuel wafted out of the muzzle as the perp rested it on Dredd's chest, finger curled on the spray trigger. On his back, the Judge saw something shimmer overhead, a glittering curtain of sliver.

  "Gonna burn you, Dreddo," hissed the wrecker. "Toast yaaaaa!"

  "Reckon not," the Judge replied, as a fat droplet of rain splashed on the flamer's nozzle with flat hiss. The pilot light guttered out and died.

  Instinctively, the wrecker looked up - and for his interest was hit by the deluge of falling water created by the weather drone. It struck so hard it was like a punch in the face, which Judge Dredd followed up with an actual punch in the face, rocketing off the road to slam the wrecker into a taxi.

  Hissing, spitting plumes of steam were suddenly everywhere, the wreckers scattering as the fires they'd started died instantly. Dredd grabbed the creep by his lapels, and with a swift shove forced him prone. The plasteen cuff drew the perp's wrists tight and he bubbled a moan into a growing puddle of rainwater.

  "Code two, section one," Dredd began. "Judge assault, twenty years. Code two, section three, Citizen assault, eight years..."

  Dawn was forcing its way through the pillars of black smoke from the damp, smouldering lumps of the burnt-out vehicles. Tyler picked his way around them, careful to avoid the parts of the highway where scanner-bots were combing the ferrocrete for particle samples and other evidence. He found Dredd near to the median strip, scrutinising a data pad report on the incident. He stood in the shadow of a wrecked truck.

  "Ah, Dredd? Tyler." He gave a weak smile. The Tek-Judge was somewhat intimidated by the legendary officer. "Control's been trying comm you for the last ten minutes."

  Dredd tapped his helmet and frowned. There was a crack in the plasteen near his temple. "Must've taken a hit when I went hand to hand. I'll get a replacement at the Sector House."

  Tyler glanced at the truck; the vehicle seemed oddly untouched. The Judge frowned. It didn't seem right. "Guess the wreckers missed this one."

  "Guess again," said Dredd. "Hatch was opened. Cargo bay's bare."

  The Tek-Judge took a closer look and gave a low whistle. "This is a class five lock. That's a tough nut to crack."

  The older man nodded. "From the outside, maybe."

  Tyler frowned. "Weird. This looks like a regular truck from here, but that compartment... It takes up most of the hull space. Heck, there's enough armour surrounding that to deflect a laser cannon, or worse."

  "No driver," added Dredd. "The computer navigator's a dead-end too, wiped clean in the impact."

  "An emergency erasure program? That sort of thing only gets used with stealth cargoes." He patted the truck. "Not to mention it's dishonest, too."

  Dredd nodded. "You're a Tek. What does this crime scene say to you?"

  Tyler licked his lips. He hadn't expected Dredd to even talk to him, let alone ask him to venture an opinion. "Well, uh... Maybe the wreckers caught a big fish in their net? A clandestine cargo, maybe the property of a shady corp or something?" He glanced at the number plate. "Let me guess - fake plates?"

  "You catch on quick." Dredd gestured with the data pad. "There's no registration for the vehicle. No registration for it of any kind, anywhere in the city databanks. Aside from being ten different kinds of illegal, that's also-"

  "Weird?" supplied Tyler, and then regretted it instantly.

  "Yeah." Dredd eyed him. "Weird."

  WINDFALL

  Hershey spotted him there in the atrium the moment she entered.

  Dredd gave his typical terse nod. She'd learned to read a lot from that sullen jut of a chin, and without her even replying the senior Judge was already on his way over. He had "the look", plain as day in the gait of his stride and the way he carried himself. Something out there in Mega-City One was awry, a crime was going unpunished, a mystery unsolved, and Dredd was on it like a heatseeker. Hershey resisted a slight smile. It was the thing that made him the consummate lawman that he was; an inability to let any criminality lie while it was within his power to crush it.

  The younger officer at her side fell silent as Dredd approached. The senior Judge
gave him a look. "I need to speak to the Chief Judge."

  The other man nodded. "I, uh, I'll be over there."

  "Give us a moment, Chapman," said Hershey, brushing a length of hair from her eyes. When they were alone, she fixed Dredd with a level gaze. "My office door is always open to you, Joe. You could just make an appointment."

  "Easier this way," he rumbled.

  "Well, make it quick, Dredd. I've got a conference starting on Justice Five in two hours and I don't want to be late."

  "I'm getting stonewalled and I want your permission to go deep on something. I need clearance." He said the last word like it left a bad taste in his mouth.

  "What, those wreckers?"

  A curt shake of the head. "There was a Judge in Sector 88 last night, just before it kicked off. I want to talk to her, but it's like she just dropped off the planet. MAC database records on her are so vague I can see right through them."

  Hershey frowned. "So call her in. You've got seniority, pull her off duty and get her down here. Even the Special Judicial Service can't refuse a legit request."

  "Vedder's not SJS; she's part of DeKlerk's spook squad."

  The frown deepened. "COE? Well, that's a different matter." Although on paper Chief Judge Hershey's authority over the Council of Five and the city's judicial forces was absolute, in reality the fiefs of the SJS internal investigations division and the ultra-clandestine COE were almost laws unto themselves. Judge DeKlerk, who served in a direct role as the Chief Judge's Special Investigator, ran his department under levels of secrecy that made the Grand Hall of Justice look like a playschool. "You know as well as I do, Dredd, the mandate for Covert Ops is external, not internal. DeKlerk's people are only allowed to conduct surveillance within the city walls, nothing else. If you can't locate this Vedder, she might be part of a deep-cover operation, something vital to city security."

  "Maybe." Dredd didn't sound anything like convinced. "Maybe not."

  "Look, Joe. I know you don't like the spooks - hell, all of us get itchy when they're around, even the SJS - but Vedder's presence doesn't automatically imply a connection to your incident."

  "All the same, she's a factor I want to eliminate from the investigation. She was in a watch bay when it went down, she would have seen the whole thing."

  Hershey turned to leave. "I'll pass it along to DeKlerk, have him get a report to you."

  "Better I see her myself-" Dredd began, but the Chief Judge stopped him with a hard glare.

  "That's not gonna happen, Joe. Much as I dislike it, the COE are teflon - slippery as drokk - so don't waste time with this. We're not done with Sector 88 yet, and I want you to be there putting the screws on every perp that calls that pesthole home."

  "Even Ruben Cortez?"

  The comment caught her off-guard. "Of course. The Wally Squad have got a man in his club right now, gathering intel. When we're ready, we'll move on him."

  Dredd said nothing; undercover operations didn't exactly mesh with his kicking-down-doors-and-taking-names style of justice.

  "I'll be back in a few days." Hershey threw a glance over her shoulder as she walked away. "I don't want to hear you've been making trouble while I'm off-world."

  "I'll try not to disappoint you."

  In the depths of the Dust Zones there were places where no human being had walked in more than fifty years. Parts of the city's industrial underbelly where robots in factories toiled ceaselessly, so that robot loaders could fill robot trucks with goods (many of which were other kinds of robots) that could be taken to stores where robot salespeople could sell them on. It was a wilderness of blunt, ugly architecture; huge blockhouses designed by AIs to be totally efficient in form and function, tattooed with barcodes for the laser-readers in the droid workers, bereft of any kind of organic life larger than rats - and even those had a limited presence, hunted down by cybercat patrol automata. But in some places, there were islands of decrepitude among the unending toil of the machines.

  Here in the factories it was the machines that managed and worked, never making errors, fabricating their produce to micrometer tolerances, while beyond, in the city proper, it was humans that ran the corporations that owned them. And sometimes, the humans would make errors, or run out of credits, or die as the result of a disagreement with other fleshy ones. Such a thing had happened to StellaToaster Incorporated. In the early 2100s StellaToaster made some of the finest toasting devices in the Northern hemisphere, an advanced range of appliances that cooked fauxbread products to perfection - or at least they did until a stray nuke from the Apocalypse War turned their head office into vapour.

  The factory, hundred of miles away, remained untouched by the conflict and went right on making toasters, months and years after the war ended. Eventually, the constructor droids had taken to cannibalising themselves to fill non-existent orders, until one day the last of them tore out its own motivator chip to finish a BagelMatic 9000, and ceased to function. Forgotten and lost in the swathe of records destroyed by the warfare, all evidence of the factory slipped through the cracks; and the rats moved back in, happy to find a new home.

  So this was why Wesson Smyth was hiding out in the bowels of the rusting StellaToaster works, surrounded by hundreds of thousands of toaster ovens in silent towers of tarnished chrome.

  Wess's distended face was now streaked with soot as well as dried blood, and in the warped mirror-finishes of the toasters his reflection was downright horrific. His cheeks were stinging, and it made him whine with pain every time he tried to open his mouth more than an inch or two. Mournfully, Smyth sucked at the drawtube on a carton of Martian mineral water and swilled the red-tinted fluid around his mouth. It tasted of iron from the blood leaking out of his gums. Fingers tapping anxiously against one another, he sat himself on a cargo pallet piled with MuffinAtors and examined his prize.

  A silver lozenge of brushed steel, the case was larger than a biz-cit's office-in-a-box, smaller than the holdall that Wess's last girlfriend had used to stuff her clothes in before leaving him. It was heavy, too, but it didn't rattle when he shook it. The whole thing had a kind of thickset solidity to it, as if it were engineered to suffer the roughest of treatments and still protect the contents. He ran his fingers around the surface of the case, looking for seams or anything that might have been a lock. There was nothing, just the oval loop of the handle. Smyth set the case down and drummed his fingertips on it in an aimless rhythm. The moment he'd seen it in the back of the crashed truck, he'd known it was valuable. Swaddling the thing inside his ruined coat, he tucked it under one arm and ran, skirting the confusion and the Judges until he'd got off the sked and over the fence into the Dust Zone. His nervous energy spent and his mind clearing of its default "greedy" setting, Wess was starting to get concerned.

  Once, in a tri-d flick he'd seen at the cineplex on Floor 82, there had been a guy with a case like this one, and in it was a vial of goop that had turned out to be virulent alien protoplasm that wound up eating a whole citiblock. Wess sniffed; he hated documentaries. A case like this could have anything inside, and most likely it was something small and very, very valuable. Photic diamonds, maybe, or some rich guy's clone pattern on a mag-memory core. For all his weasel-like nature, Wess wasn't an idiot, and he knew he wasn't smart enough to get this thing open himself - and why would he want to, if maybe something like that protoplasm thingy were inside? No, he reckoned there might be a reward for finding this from wherever it had been "lost" from. A fat reward of thick creds that would square him with Cortez once and for all.

  Thinking of The Eye made Smyth wince involuntarily, and sent a spasm of pain up his nerves. Suddenly he was afraid again, terrified of Flex and the other thugs, seeing them kicking and punching, feeling the ghosts of their brutality across his torso. No, they didn't call Cortez "The Eye" for nothing. All seeing, all knowing, all bastard, as they said on the streets of Double-Eight. If the mobster found out that Smyth had purloined something like this case and then fenced it elsewhere, even if it meant
that Wess was paying off his debts, Cortez's reaction would not be favourable. He'd take the money and have Flex punch Smyth until he died.

  The petty crook watched his warped reflection sag in the wall of toasters. He really had only once choice, when he thought about it. Present the case to Cortez and hope against hope it was worth a bit of money, and not full of some top-secret laundry or something dumb like that. He wiped absent-mindedly at his cracked lips, smearing a thin lick of blood across his thumb, and for the first time he picked up the silver case by its form-fitting handle.

  In the grip there was a very advanced device that sampled the biometric information of the holder by means of microscopic needle sensors. Wess felt a series of strange prickles on the tips of his fingers and dropped the case in surprise, clutching at his hand. He backed away from the container where it fell as a jet of icy nitrogen squealed from a hidden vent in the surface. The case hummed and clicked, before opening along the middle of its length like a sliver beetle flexing its carapace. Little flowing tides of white vapour lapped out of the box, and inside soft blue lights blinked, illuminating the contents for Wess's startled gaze to fall on. As quick as it had come, his fright waned.

  It wasn't diamonds, or memory chips, or even alien slime-gunk. It was something that made Smyth's bruised face split in a predatory, avaricious smile.

  The Tek-Labs in Justice Central sprawled across dozens of floors of the city's primary precinct house, some of them isolated in the deep levels far below the main entrance atrium and others placed at the apex of the Eagle-shaped construction. Dredd's attention today was on Tek-31, a vehicular forensics workshop on the street level. At first sight it seemed like a bizarre mix of operating theatre, science lab and maintenance garage; Tek-Judges and droid assistants, many clad in polyprop oversuits, orbited wrecked pods and the remains of grav-cars like surgeons working on patients. Dredd steered a course around the cordoned-off process areas, well aware that a stray hand or boot in the wrong place could taint evidence vital to the prosecution of a criminal. He felt the tingle of invisible static shield-fields around one platform, where a sleek hover limo was being dismantled for clues to a recent mob hit at the Costa Del Meg resort.