Whiteout

by James Swallow

Dredd took the proffered printout from Tyler's hand. "What's this?"

  "Sat-scan of the Denver Death Zone," said the Tek-Judge. "I had MAC give me a replay of everything that happened in that area while we were out there." He tapped the paper. "That's the thermal bloom from a secondary explosion, after those mugs in the transport blew themselves up. Too big to be another assassin."

  "Probably their ship. It would have been masked, so the sats wouldn't have picked it up on the way out." Dredd handed the paper back with a frown. "For all we know, they could have been tracking us from the moment we left the city." He glanced around the atrium of the Grand Hall of Justice; it was the largest open space inside the massive precinct house, and Dredd felt secure that no one could be eavesdropping on their conversation. "Grud, I'm getting sick of this cloak-and-dagger stomm! Vedder's COE buddies are crawling out of the woodwork and there's no way of knowing how close they are to finding this Skorpion before we do."

  Tyler shook his head. "I can't believe that thing is loose in the city. I mean, you saw what it did to those Mutancheros and the poor saps on the VTOL."

  "That was just a prototype," Dredd noted grimly. "Grud knows what improvements they've had time to make in the last two years." He fell silent for a moment, considering. "At least we have some hard evidence now. We've been in the dark for too long on this. I'm taking it to Hershey."

  "The Chief Judge? But she's still up in orbit with that Space Division thing, right?"

  "She'll have to make time."

  Tyler studied the printout again. "Meanwhile, there's something else we can do. The memory cores had very detailed sensor records of the Skorpion test program. It's a metamorphic plasma matrix weapon, right? That kind of system has a very distinctive energy signature, as long as you know what to look for."

  "You mean you could track this thing?"

  The Tek-Judge shrugged. "Not exactly 'track' it, but I reckon I can scare up a search protocol for the city sensor network, keep an eye open for any similar discharges. If the Skorpion is used somewhere on the grid, the sensors would flag it." He pursed his lips. "At least in theory. It'll be like listenin' for one guy humming a lullaby in the middle of a DedRok concert."

  "Do it. We need any edge we can get."

  Tyler nodded, then paused. "Hey, I just thought of somethin' else. If the COE have been screwin' around with this thing for the last couple of years, then they'd know what to look for too. That means Vedder will be watching for the Skorpion as well."

  "And if so, why is she letting it run wild? Good question. I'll be sure to ask it when I've got her strapped down in an iso-cube."

  "Is this her?" Cortez used his false eye to run a close inspection over Jayni's pale, trembling skin.

  Flex gave a chug of laughter, amused with himself. "Yeah, boss. Smythy's piece o' skirt."

  Jayni gave him a defiant look. "Sneck off, meatboy."

  The thug moved to smack her, but Cortez waved him to a halt, a greasy smirk crossing the crimelord's face. "Ah, she's got a spark all right." He loomed over her, and Jayni shrank back against the shuggy table where Quiet Mike had tossed her. "You look like a smart girl, honey. Tell The Eye where your pendejo boyfriend is hiding out and this all goes away, hey?"

  She licked dry lips. "I fell asleep, see. He musta gone when I was dozing." Jayni shook her head. "I don't know where he is."

  "He took your car," Cortez said conversationally. "Where'd he take it?"

  "I don't know-"

  There was a flash of ruby light and the sizzle of a laser hit. Jayni wheeled away from the streak of blackened baize an inch from her head. Cortez tap-tapped his cyberoptic implant. "I get, whaddayasay, impulsive when I'm annoyed, girl. Sometimes, The Eye has a furious moment." He grinned. "You ain't all that pretty, honey. You wanna keep the lil' bit of looks you got, you tell me where Smythy is at."

  Jayni threw him a look that was as angry as it was afraid. "I'm not stupid! I know what goes on in this giant pimpmobile!" She flicked a hand at the mopad around them. "I'm not keeping quiet 'cos I wanna - but I tell you, I don't snecking know where he went! Wess was being all freaky..."

  "I'll say," snorted Flex. "Snecker."

  Cortez shot him a look that silenced the muscular heavy. "Freaky? Issat what you say?" The mobster's hand snapped out and grabbed a fistful of Jayni's hair. She yelped as he dragged her across the length of the casino room. "Your ugly little spugwit boyfriend, the little snecker piece of shit who couldn't even pay his bar bill a week ago, this guy suddenly turns into a stone-cold killer and caps a bunch of my boys?" He threw her roughly to the floor. "He burns down one of my places, disrespects me, and you call it freaky?" Cortez spat at Jayni, his face turning crimson. "Puta! I'll show you freaky! Where's he at?" The shout was loud and the girl began to cry.

  "Don't... Please..."

  Flex cracked his knuckles, anticipating a beating. "I'll make her talk."

  Cortez studied her for a moment and then looked away. "Nah. Don' waste your time. She don' know nothing." He tapped the implant again. "The Eye sees."

  The thug's smile slipped in disappointment. "Oh. Okay. What do I do wit' her then?" He jerked his head at the window and the road beyond. "You want I should put her off?"

  "Mama said always, 'Waste not, want not'." Cortez made a dismissive gesture. "Take her up to the penthouse. Break her in later, maybe."

  "What about Smyth?" Quiet Mike's low rumble of a voice cut through the air.

  Cortez sneered. "Maybe he got hisself a gun and a pair of cojones now, but he dint buy no brains to go with. Dumb spug, I know his type. He gonna come looking for his bitch." The criminal stabbed a finger at Flex. "Then you make an example of him, unnerstan'? Bloody and slow."

  Jayni let out a weak sob. Flex dragged her away, his thoughts wandering to the kinds of violence he would do when Smyth showed his face.

  His fingers grew talons that were bright and sliver-grey, like tempered steel. It was easy to gain purchase on the side of the Carnivale, the claws piercing the vehicle's hull to hold him fast. Wess inched his way along a rain gutter sluicing with run-off, hardly aware that he was clinging to the side of a moving object. At the back of the mopad, where the holo-projectors were mounted, there were the broad grilles of the ventilator hatches. Smyth buried his new hand into the plasteen slats and tore them off, tossing the fragments away into the rainy night. He kicked in the fans and wriggled through. Jets of fabricated endorphin-analogue blunted pangs of childhood claustrophobia from hours shut in a cupboard by his loud and angry mother. Soothed by the gun's chemical touch, he painlessly dislocated his limbs so that he could worm through the tight vent shaft. The channel came out in a service space on the Carnivale's mid-deck, and Wess paused there, marshalling his thoughts and listening to the voice of the weapon.

  "Objectives," it said. "Terminate target Cortez. Effect release of non-combatant Jayni. Terminate all other threats."

  He found his voice was hoarse when he tried to speak. "How can you tell the difference between who's bad and who isn't?"

  "There are only two kinds of persona," it replied. "Targets and potential targets. If in doubt, terminate all."

  A manic giggle rose in Smyth's throat. "Kill 'em all. Let Grud sort 'em out!"

  He slid open the door and peered out into the corridor, startling a portly man and an escort girl. The large guy in his biz-cut sparklesuit gawped at the feral glint in Smyth's eyes, the ghost-grey cast to his skin. He pushed the girl away and fumbled in his pocket for a can of stun spray.

  Wess killed him outright with a narrow-bore shot in the chest. He let the girl run, screaming.

  "Targets incoming," the weapon told him. Smyth met the surprised faces of Cortez's men with murderous fusillades of gunfire.

  "Which part of 'this is important' are you finding it difficult to process?" Dredd's voice was acid. "I need to speak to the Chief Judge. Now. Simple enough?"

  The Space-Div officer on the other end of the commlink shook his head slowly, brows furrowed. "On the contrary, Judg
e Dredd, it isn't simple at all. Chief Hershey is in closed session with Judge-Marshal Kontarsky and Judge-Commander Armstrong from the Space Corps-"

  "I don't want a role call, Chapman, I want a face-to-face with Hershey. Or do I have to come up there in person?"

  "Let me tell you the exact orders she left, Dredd," Chapman leaned closer to the transmitter pick-up at his end. "Chief Judge Hershey said to me, and I quote: 'I don't want to hear a word from you unless the city's on the verge of war, famine or pestilence. Anything else you can let Dredd deal with.' Her exact words, sir."

  "Let Dredd deal with it?" the senior Judge echoed, and stroked his chin. "That sounds like an authorisation to me."

  Chapman blinked. "Uh, well, I'm not sure if that's exactly what she meant-"

  An indicator blinked in the corner of the screen, highlighting a priority message from the Tek-Labs. Tyler's ident code was attached. "I have to take this," Dredd told the other Judge. "Tell Hershey I'll get back to her when the dust has settled."

  "Dredd, no. Wait, I-"

  He cut the signal to Justice Five and answered Tyler's call. "Tell me you got something."

  The Tek-Judge smiled. "Yup. Multiple plasma discharge signatures, a string of them picked up along the Martin Shaw Overzoom."

  Dredd gave a curt nod. "Sector 88. Can you triangulate an exact fix?"

  "Ah, now that's the trick of it. Each reading came in at a different location along the highway, from the street-scanners, like they were coming from a mobile location." A blurry image appeared in a side-screen. The Carnivale.

  "Cortez's cathouse on wheels. Figures. I'm gonna need a fast ride to get me out there. Feed all the data you got to a Citihawk and tell the pilot to prep for a rapid ingress."

  Tyler gaped. "Dredd, correct me if I'm wrong, but those aircraft are only for use in Code Black emergencies."

  "I'm overriding protocol. I want that flyer ready to go the second I'm on the pad. If control give you any stomm, tell them to take it up with Hershey." The senior Judge stabbed the disconnect key and raced for the turbolifts.

  The vid-phone booth was one of hundreds of double-blind locations throughout the city. Outwardly, they appeared to be little more than a commonplace bit of street furniture. Some looked as if they had been vandalised into uselessness, others were pristine and in perfect working order; but all contained embedded transmitter systems that fed directly into the COE's encrypted command network. The agency had similar set-ups in almost every city-state on Earth, and a few off of it as well.

  The transmitter detected the presence of Judge Vedder and linked itself to the head-up display on the inside of her helmet visor, briefly conducting a DNA sampling to be sure of her identity before proceeding.

  "Answering summons," Vedder said to the air, trying to keep the bored tone from her voice.

  She saw the shapes of the shadows hovering before her, their nulled voices flat and bland in her ears. "Skorpion has re-asserted itself," her controller said. "Data and locale are being transmitted to you as we speak. You should have no difficulty isolating the unit for recovery."

  The other shadow was reproachful. "Your procrastination on this matter has been noted, Vedder. There must be no error this time. The unit must be taken intact."

  She cocked her head. "I'm not sure I agree."

  There was a moment of silence over the coded frequency. "What you are sure or not sure of is of no value to the Establishment. Carry out your orders or other measures may be introduced."

  Vedder sneered openly. "No one knows this thing as well as I do. Don't presume to suggest that anyone other than me could deal with it."

  "Then deal with it!" The second voice crackled with barely masked anger, and the COE agent held back a smile. "West 17 is drawing too much attention. People are asking questions!"

  For a moment, she considered arguing the point; but then Vedder realised she would be wasting her time. Better to ask forgiveness after the fact than to seek permission before it, she thought. "It's under control."

  Without waiting for another rebuke, she turned away toward her waiting Lawmaster.

  "It's him," said Quiet Mike, punctuating the statement with the snap-click of his stump gun's breech.

  Cortez flashed his teeth in a cocky smirk and waved his own weapon like a waggling finger. "I'm always right, The Eye is always right. I tol' you he'd come for her." The crimelord patted his cheek with the gun barrel. The gold-plated firearm was a commonplace Fabra Spit-Nine, the first pistol that Ruben Cortez had ever owned. He bragged to anyone who would listen that he'd killed his first Judge with that very firearm, later having it tooled and engraved as a reminder of the roadpunk origins from where he had come. It was another part of the Cortez myth that The Eye liked to spread, a bit more of the folk-hero back-story that he believed set him above the more ordinary thugs in the city. He wandered across the gaming room, past the patient robo-croupiers dealing cards to empty chairs, halting at the bar. Cortez poured a deep shot of Mex-City tequila and downed it. "Hey," he grinned. "That punkamente, is he coming or what?"

  Quiet Mike, as his name suggested, kept quiet and just nodded. They had watched on the security monitors as Smyth blazed his way through the Carnivale's rooms like a figure from some first-person shooter holocade game, gunning down anyone who wasn't fast enough to get out of his way. The intruder was blasting out the camera pods as he went, darkening screen after screen. As far as Quiet Mike could be sure, only the service droids on the mid-deck were still moving. Cortez didn't seem that bothered; everyone Smyth had killed was either a client, or a replaceable gunsel. It wasn't like the families of the bordello patrons were likely to complain; the routine surveillance footage from the boudoirs was, as usual, a goldmine of potential blackmail material. Cortez was already planning how to use the film of a local city councilman's bondage tryst with two underage tentacular Vooties, even before Smyth had executed the three of them with callous precision.

  Quiet Mike wasn't as sanguine as his boss, though. Far from it. The Eye, for all his big talk, seemed unconcerned by the sudden and unexplained change in Smyth's behaviour. He was too simple-minded to understand the ramifications of it. Quiet Mike had seen similar things before; he'd been a Bruja mercenary before Cortez had recruited him, and he had witnessed first-hand the things that psycho-chemistry and cyber-implantation could wreak on a normal human. Something had warped Wess Smyth, and Quiet Mike was rightly worried about it.

  There was a spray of gunfire from the corridor outside the games room, and all of Cortez's men tensed. The Eye cradled his pistol in his lap and had another drink, saluting the noise and the screams with his glass. "Give him a welcome, boyos."

  Something man-shaped flew into the room and every weapon fired at it, lasers and bullets etching lines in the air, chopping into meat and bone. The charred human form collided with a tabloo table and flipped it over, cards and chips cascading into the air. Quiet Mike slammed a new shell into the breech of his weapon and grimaced. A decoy.

  "Hey," said Kosmo, the tall kid from Southside. "That's not him-"

  Then the floor beneath Quiet Mike's feet tore open, and white fire as hot as the sun ripped him apart.

  Kosmo died next, caught in the nimbus of the plasma flare as Mike's stump gun cooked off all the rounds in its magazine at once. Cortez threw his glass away and let off the Fabra at the dark shape that was cutting his men to pieces. It was about that moment that The Eye realised he had underestimated Jayni's boyfriend by a very large margin.

  The gold-plated spit-gun made a snapping noise and jammed. It was old and of poor manufacture, and such a malfunction would have taken place sooner or later. It was just karmic drama that made it now.

  Wess was a death angel, a shimmering ghost surrounded by burning corpses. "Poor choice of support firearm," he mumbled. "Flawed."

  "Sneck you!" Cortez gave him the Eye. A fan of blood-red laser light swept over Smyth, cooking off a layer of his epidermis. It should have blinded him, sent him screaming to his knees. Ins
tead, he waved it away and ignored the wispy smoke from his reddened flesh.

  Up came the howling maw of the weapon, a glowing ring like a circular brand where the muzzle ended. The stink of scorched metal stung the crimelord's nostrils. "Where is she, Cortez? Tell me and you get to live."

  Ruben, for all the airs and graces he put on, was still a common hoodlum at heart, a vandal and a bully; and like every one of his kind, he was stupid beyond all reckoning in the face of superior force, as if blind bravado was all he needed to prevail. "Kiss my churro, pissweed."

  Wess willed the weapon down to the lowest power setting it could manage. Then, with exacting care, he proceeded to burn Ruben Cortez to death, inch by inch.

  The MegaDynamics F-95 Citihawk was, as the saying went, as fast as drokk. Originally conceived as an eventual replacement for the Justice Department's fleet of Gunbird armed assault aircraft, the smaller and more agile Citihawk used cutting-edge aviation design and a powerful gravity-resist thruster to create a flyer that could outpace almost everything in the air. The only problem was, as MegaDynamics soon discovered, the F-95 was nearly impossible for a human pilot to control at the top end of its flight envelope. The designers had created an aeroplane that outperformed the people meant to fly it. Early test models made spectacular craters in the Cursed Earth, and one highly publicised collision severed the crowing glory of the Spraz Glukman Memorial, the nine-storey high statue of MC-1's multiple gold medallist in the Sensual Olympics. Rather than shelve the project, Judge-Pilots from Sky Division and the geniuses of Tech 21 came up with a solution; they gave the F-95 a brain.

  In a city as big as Mega-City One, the refuges for stray dogs and cats were always filled beyond capacity. It was a solution that benefited both. Animals scheduled for the big sleep, the ones too sick or too old to be re-homed, were checked for mental acuity and enhanced to sentience with cerebral processors. One operation later, and they were living in new bodies of steel and plasteen. The Citihawk was reclassified as a fast interceptor, tasked to deal with airborne threats to the metropolis that required rapid deployment; these ranged from rogue nuclear missiles and giant rad-bats to alien invaders and starships performing illegal, low-level manoeuvres.