Whiteout

by James Swallow

  That sort of petty, small-time stuff wasn't really a concern for Ruben Cortez. His money came from prostitution, drugs, protection and gambling, all of which were industries that required people to come out of their homes to facilitate. As such, whenever it rained, Cortez was in a bad mood, insisting to anyone in earshot that the Judges were causing it just to spite him. The thing was, Ditta thought to himself, Cortez was probably right.

  Ditta ran an absent hand through his floureco-dreadlock haircut and sparked off a twinkle of blue-green light. He had the whole casual disinterest, faux-cool manner of Cortez's gang off pat now, and he fitted in there perfectly. The mobster threw him a nod and Ditta knew that was a cue to bring him the decanter of synthi-scotch. He poured a measure into a glass and presented it to Cortez, who took it without comment.

  Ruben Cortez; in repose he didn't seem like very much, a slightly corpulent Hispanic male, below-average height with a taste for garish gold buttons and cufflinks. But Ditta had seen the little man turn into a tornado of violence, those thick and meaty fists of his raining blows down on bruisers twice his size. Cortez noticed his attention and glanced up at him. His artificial eye caught the light from the glow-strips bisecting the glass roof above. Ruben's distinctive trademark, The Eye's eye as it were, was an ugly, bulbous model of SouthAm manufacture. Gang legend held that Cortez had lost his organic eyeball when an uppity sugar dealer from Mex-City had dared to try his luck with Ruben in a knife-fight; so they said, Cortez cut the dead orb out himself and then stuffed it in the mouth of his opponent before killing him. His replacement was polished to a fine sheen, and like every accessory Cortez wore, it was gold.

  "Snecking rain, eh?" said the mobster. "Damn Judges got it in for me."

  "Right," Ditta agreed, as a wash of bright light swept over them. They were passing under the Rosenbaum Interchange, and he felt the slight sense of motion as the room swayed around them. It was easy to forget that they were inside a moving vehicle; the Carnivale, as Cortez called his huge mopad, was one of the few Cosmos Imperials on the streets of Mega-City One, as large as a mid-size hydroliner. On the lower levels, next to the parking ramps, there were the sections for the casino, nightclub, the dining compartment and kitchens; above that, the private suites and what were euphemistically known as the "recreation rooms"; and on the top deck, Cortez's personal domain. The crimelord surveyed a series of monitors showing camera-eye views of the rooms below. There was precious little action going on, just a few hard-eyed gamblers in the midst of a poker game and some mechanical sex in one of the brothel-booths. Cortez drained his glass and Ditta refilled it.

  There was a heavy, pregnant atmosphere in the office, a foreboding that Ditta could taste like the smell of the second-rate whisky. He kept his feelings utterly hidden. Ditta hadn't served this long as an undercover Judge without learning a few hard lessons.

  On one of the other screens he saw Flex's harsh, florid face snarling up at the security camera, and then the office door whispered open to admit Cortez's lead thug.

  "I wanna hear it all," Cortez snapped, before Flex even had a chance to speak. "Gimme the story."

  Flex gave Ditta a look, and another to Quiet Mike on the sofa nearby. Not so much a greeting, but a warning that what he had to tell the boss would not improve his mood. Ditta took the opportunity to retreat. Before today, he'd dodged thrown bottles when Cortez had lashed out in fury at something. "Four deaders down in the skids. I went took a look-see myself." Flex gave a shake of the head.

  "Who?" Cortez rolled the tumbler between his thumb and forefinger.

  "Bob Toes and his boy Hoog, and the Clent brothers-"

  Cortez made an annoyed sound like a spit that crackled in the air. "I know who is dead, Flex! I meant who did this? Tell me the name of the punkamente who thinks he can rip up my people!"

  Flex blinked a few times. Ditta recognised the reaction; the bodybuilder did that whenever he wasn't happy about something. "Uh... I ain't sure, but, uh-"

  With a flick of his wrist, Cortez sank the last of the drink and put down the glass. "I ask you one more time." He still had the tumbler in his hand, and Ditta knew he was going to throw it.

  "There was this call," Flex began. "Hoog's phone. So, I roughed up the watchbot at Q-Save, and got ta look at the security tapes. It seems like it was, uh, Smythy. Wess Smyth."

  It was Cortez's turn to blink. "Smyth? The little creep with the bad suit?" He looked to Quiet Mike for confirmation. "Owes us money?" Mike gave a sage nod in return. Cortez seemed to be having a hard time taking this in. "This is the same Smyth that pissed and puked up in my club? The pencil-neck geek who lost in the shuggy game?"

  "Yeah," said Flex. "Him. I, uh, beat him up a while back."

  The mobster hurled the glass and exploded with rage; it was textbook Cortez behaviour. "This little sneck," he hissed, words thick and sibilant like hot fat on a griddle. "How tha' spug he did it, I don' wanna know! You get him, Flex. Take a couple of boys and find that piece of bottom-feeder shit and rip him!"

  Flex grinned, pleased to be back on safe ground now, with a task to perform that he could manage. "Gotcha. You want I should do it any special way?"

  Cortez waved an angry hand at him. "This is all about respect, eh? This little weasel, he grows himself a spine allasudden? That's bad for The Eye, eh?" Cortez tapped his cybernetic implant, his natural accent slipping out as he lost his temper. "You find this pendejo and make sure you do him messy and public! Double-Eight has to unnderstan', no one defies Ruben Cortez and keeps breathin'!"

  And then without warning he turned a cold, level gaze on Ditta. "Ain't that so?"

  Ditta went cold inside. "Yeah, boss. Sure." An instinct honed by years in the Wally Squad screamed in Ditta's mind. He knows. You've been made.

  "Too many people try to screw with The Eye!" Cortez growled, making a performance out of it. "I don't like that. Eh? Eh, Ditta? Mister Judge Ditta?"

  The undercover officer jerked his wrist, and the quad-derringer concealed in a sleeve holster dropped into his palm. He wasn't fast enough; Quiet Mike came up off the sofa like a rocket and grabbed him, knocking Ditta off-balance. The Judge tried to struggle free and met a huge red fist from Flex as the thug stepped in to punch the fight out of him. Ditta's head rang like a struck bell, and the small holdout pistol fell from his nerveless fingers. Mike hauled Ditta up and there was Cortex, leering at him, the cyber-eye whining as it focused on him.

  "Filthy rat puta," Cortez spat, "You think you fool me? I knew who you were all alon'!"

  "It's all over, creep," Ditta snapped back, bearing his teeth. "The whole department are on to you. I've put enough data together to send you to the cubes for life - if you're lucky!" The bravado was all he had left.

  "You mean this?" Cortez held up a small memory disc. "Stupid pig. You shoulda kept it hidden better. One of the girls foun' it." He snapped the plastic in two.

  The Judge failed to keep the panic from his face. "Oh yeah," smirked Flex, "you know you screwed now."

  "I keep an eye on you," said Cortez, and then Ditta screamed as a thread of ruby red light shot from the mobster's implant and cut a long, deep sear up one of his cheeks. The laser shot into Ditta's right eye and popped it in a flash of steam. Quiet Mike held him as he wailed in pain.

  Cortez stepped away and nodded to the window. "This is his stop. Put him off."

  Flex took Ditta by the scruff of the neck as Mike opened the sliding glasseen. Then the Wally Squad Judge's world spun end over end before he met the highway below at four hundred kilometres per hour.

  Quiet Mike closed the window, and, pausing only to gather up Ditta's fallen pistol and the fragments of the whiskey glass, returned to his seat as if nothing had happened. Flex, on the other hand, was panting with the rush of a quick and dirty kill. "Judges ain't gonna like that!"

  "Judges can eat my dust," Cortez replied with the traditional go-ganger rejoinder of his youth. "They can pin nothin' on me." He helped himself to another large synthi-scotch. "Now we dealt
with that, go kill that shitbag Smyth."

  "Back off, Dredd," said Woburn, the silver skull on her helmet glinting in the light, "You know the drill, blue-on-blue."

  The Special Judicial Service Judge's hand was raised in a warding-off gesture, and it was almost touching Dredd's chest. Dredd glared at the internal affairs officer and Woburn self-consciously retracted her arm. "I didn't kill him. A first-year cadet could see that."

  The SJS Judge shook her head. "That's not for me to say, Dredd. There's going to be an investigation."

  "I'll say," Dredd replied. "Mine. And you're stopping me from doing it."

  Woburn glanced over her shoulder at the other two men in black body armour and heavy full-face helmets. They were impressively dangerous-looking, blocking the entrance to the Sector House cryo-mortuary, the SJS skull icon emblazened on their shoulders. "You know the rules, Dredd. You are formally barred from any involvement surrounding investigations into the murder of Judge Loengard. You are a material witness... and possible suspect."

  "Suspect?" Dredd spat the word like a curse. "I had a legit reason to be at Loengard's billet. And unless I had a teleporter, a grav-belt or a time-travel device, there's no way I could have got outside his window nineteen storeys up to shoot him with a plasma rifle."

  Woburn gave him an arch look. "With your record, Dredd, anything is possible." She paused, considering. "Personally, I don't think you will be implicated."

  The senior Judge gave a sarcastic sneer. "I'm so relieved."

  "No," Woburn continued. "I think you're smart enough that you'd have made it harder to catch you if you did kill him. Judge Loengard's murder took place in the presence of another officer with no witnesses - that makes it an SJS matter until we can determine your level of participation."

  "How long is that going to take? I need access to his autopsy records. Loengard was a suspect in my ongoing investigation, and whoever killed him did it to stop him from giving up something vital. I want a Psi-Judge in there to go through his last thoughts. I need to see the data on the kill shot-"

  Woburn shook her head. "Utterly out of the question! Your seniority gets you a lot of leeway, Dredd, but I'm not shredding the rulebook for you! Take one step into that morgue and I'll have you in an iso-cube!"

  "His killer is gonna get away unless you give me access."

  The woman squared up and met Dredd's hard gaze. "I will be the judge of that. Now take a walk before I have to have you forcibly removed." The senior Judge turned to leave, and Woburn spoke again. "But don't go too far. Just in case I find out you did have something to do with Loengard's death."

  Tyler was waiting for him in the atrium. "I just heard!" began the Tek-Judge, "Clark told me the SJS brought you in with Loengard's corpse!" He hesitated. "You... You didn't shoot him, did you?"

  Dredd frowned. "Bad enough I get a grilling from Woburn and her skull-heads, I gotta hear that from you too? No, Tyler, I didn't shoot Loengard. It was a sniper."

  "Sniper?" he repeated. "How? I mean, there's nowhere in that zone where you could place a gun platform... Unless it was on a vehicle."

  "Negative. I checked in with traffic control, there were no aircraft in the vicinity." Dredd paused, thinking the scene through again. "The shot came from low down, close to ground level, I reckon. Steep angle of deflection. A double tap, one to punch through the glass, one to take out the target." He nodded. "Textbook technique, right out of the manual."

  Tyler tapped his fingers on the ubiquitous data pad he carried. "But Samuel Seaborne Block is in the middle of a protected recreation zone, nothing but parks all around it. There's no way someone could sneak a sniper rifle out there without tripping a dozen security sensors."

  "I've never seen weapons fire like that before," Dredd noted. "Looked like a plasma burst, but it was modified somehow... guided. Shooter nailed Loengard with a deflected shot like they knew where he was gonna be standing."

  "If we could get a look at the body, I could get a discharge signature from the wound-"

  "Not gonna happen. The SJS have the corpse in lockdown. Convenient for whoever shot him that it was Woburn who got to the scene first."

  Tyler's eyes narrowed. "You think someone tipped her off?"

  "Maybe."

  "How about camera footage? Perhaps something got picked up by a local street-scanner..." The Tek-Judge met Dredd's gaze and his words trailed off. "Oh, drokk..."

  "You got something to say?" Dredd growled.

  He gave a slow nod. "You got cybernetic eyes, right? Artificial implants?"

  "Yeah. Zeiss-Ikon, model six-fives. What of it?"

  Tyler's face split in a grin. "Oh, I think we might have what you might call an eagle-eyewitness after all!" He flicked a glance at the chronometer above them. "But we gotta be quick!"

  In the depths of the Tek-Lab, Tyler worked quickly and deftly, assembling the components and hardware he would need. "See, most cybernetic optical processors use an image plane transfer system to manage incoming light and colour-"

  "Spare me the technobabble."

  "Oh." Tyler paused. "Well, there's a chip in your artificial eyes that turns the digital information they pick up - the sights, if you like - into impulses that your brain can understand. The thing is, in order to make it work faster there's redundant storage in there. It's like a low-bandwidth comm link, it only refreshes the parts of the picture that change."

  "You're telling me what I saw in Loengard's hab is still in my implants?"

  Tyler nodded. "The refresh rate will be breaking it down by now. At best, the image ghost will be barely readable... But there might be something." He held up a connector. "I have to plug this into one of the optics. You'll need to, uh, take off your helmet."

  Dredd gave him a long, silent look, and then removed his headgear. Colour drained from the Tek-Judge's cheeks as he caught sight of Dredd's visage. "Oh Grud," he whispered.

  "If I was pretty, I'd be a vid-star," grunted the Judge. "Now, make it quick."

  Tyler nodded and inserted the lead into Dredd's right eye. The senior officer flinched as metal met plastic with a hollow click.

  Instantly, flickering, garbled colour began to stream across Tyler's console. The Tek-Judge worked at the panel, clocking back the time index to the moment of Loengard's death. He frowned. "It's worse than I thought. There's barely enough to get a read on. I'll try running an ultra-violet spectrum transform."

  Behind him, Dredd tugged the cable from his eye and replaced his headgear. "What do you have?"

  "Take a look." Tyler displayed a series of washed-out images, the colours and shapes so bleached of definition that it was almost impossible to glean any context or meaning from them. "There's an after-image of the shot, but it's weak..." The Tek-Judge was undeterred. "See that halo, around the head of the discharge?" He pointed at a faint glow around the energy bolt.

  "Thought so. A collimated plasma discharge," Dredd gave a nod. He'd seen enough gunshots to recognise the signs. "Doesn't make sense, though. Hand-held plasma weapons are high-maintenance, fragile. Only real use for them is the big models they mount on starships."

  "Something of alien origin, you think?" said Tyler.

  "Possible," agreed Dredd, "but unlikely. Let's not forget what Loengard did for a living. It was his job to create cutting-edge weapons systems. A plasma gun would class as that all right." He tapped the screen. "Look at the shape of the bolt. Most plasma charges are ragged, they bleed off heat and light too quick to make an effective kill. They're messy. But this... The shot was clean. This is advanced, way beyond mil-spec. We're looking at radical arms technology here."

  "You think someone shot him with a weapon from West 17? That's not too much of a stretch, I suppose..." Tyler called up a link to Justice Central's main computer. "Let's see what MAC has to say about this."

  Loengard's name, predictably, came up with nothing but a string of Access Denied: Top Secret Clearance Required flags on his files, but there were cross-references in Accounts Division files about proc
urement costs on a research project at West 17 that showed up each time the search parameters hit the words "plasma weapon". Tyler read out the entry. "Project Skorpion. Sounds real friendly."

  Dredd's eyes narrowed. "That rings a bell. After the Apocalypse War, Chief Judge McGruder wanted weapons stocks back up and new hardware in case East-Meg Two decided to finish what their cousins had started. There was a whole bunch of defence projects that got the green light, but most didn't pan out... Skorpion was one of 'em."

  "What was it?"

  The other Judge shook his head. "Teape from Armoury was in charge, but she's dead now, killed during Necropolis."

  Tyler carried on searching, deleting extraneous results, following the money trail. "Another financial report from Acc-Div, this is dated 2125. There's nothing on the nature of the project, but it does say funding for the Skorpion was concluded." He rubbed his eyes. "Whatever it was, they stopped paying for it two years ago."

  Dredd threw him a look. "Or maybe it got shifted into some undisclosed black budget. Weapons research is just the kinda thing the COE keep tabs on."

  "I thought the COE spy on other cities, not their own."

  "A spy is a spy is a spy," growled Dredd, "and maybe an assassin, too."

  "Vedder?"

  A nod. "We have to track her down. She's the key to this thing."

  "That's not gonna be easy-" An alert chime from Tyler's computer sounded, drawing his attention.

  "Problem?" Dredd looked over his shoulder. The screen was displaying an autopsy report, one of the millions of cursory cause-of-death files that filtered through Justice Central on a daily basis, as members of MC-1's populace came to natural and unnatural ends.