Whiteout

by James Swallow

  There were some teething problems; one or two of the first subjects left their patrol patterns in order to chase cars, or sleep on the sun-warmed roofs of citiblocks, but after a while the Citihawk program proved its worth, becoming an integral part of MC-1's airborne line of defence. There was nothing in the sky that could touch them.

  Dredd's face was set in a pressurised grimace, his lips forced back from his teeth by the sheer velocity of the flight. His breathing was harsh, forcing the air in through his mouth as the woolly weight of seven gees pressed into him. Normally, the service bay on an F-95 was used to house sensor gear or a weapons platform, but today it was a jump seat, bolted to the deck in the coffin-sized space. The Citihawk made a steep banking turn around the crest of Boris Becker Block, the roar of the thrusters rattling windows in its wake.

  "Have, have, have I said what, what an honour it is to have you as a passenger, uh, Judge Dredd? Judge Dredd? Sir?" The aircraft's name was Rex; he'd been a Spaniel-Westie crossbreed before a wayward block buggy had run him over.

  Dredd managed a nod. Actually, it was more of a twitch, what with the straps holding him in place in the acceleration chair.

  "Oh. Ah," panted Rex's synthetic voice, "approaching target. I just, just want to say, ah, that it's nice to be able to break regs this once, ah. Usually we don't get to go supersonic below ten thousand feet."

  The Judge tried to say something in reply, but then Rex called out the word "Eject!" and suddenly Dredd was airborne without a plane around him, the grav-chute on his back dropping him through the rain toward the neon sillhoutte of the Carnivale.

  "What the sneck was that?" snapped Flex. The screech of the Citihawk's low-level pass was fading away even as he said it. The thug looked down at Jayni where she cowered on the sofa, annoyed at the distraction. She had the strangest look on her face, staring up over his shoulder and through the penthouse's glass roof above him. Flex absently turned in place to follow her line of sight. He swore again when he recognised the figure that loomed out of the wet sky.

  For a moment, Jayni thought that Flex had hit her so hard she was unconscious; maybe her addled brain was dreaming. But then she felt the rain on her face as the Judge came crashing through the skylight, she saw the glitter of light off the golden eagle on his shoulder and the shield on his chest.

  And suddenly Jayni Pizmo was eleven years-old again. She was there on the street with Ma and big Mister Spah'v'K, the Bixerite who ran the alien grocery on the corner. She was there when the tap gang boiled out of the alleyway to strip, rob and kill them, and the fear was so strong it choked her. She was there when the sirens made the muggers scatter like ninepins, there as the armour-clad sentinel swept off his bike and brought every one of the thugs down. Jayni was there when Judge Dredd stormed in to save her life like some elemental force of nature. She had never forgotten that day.

  Time snapped back into place. Dredd flattened Cortez's desk with his landing, coming up from a coiled touchdown pose as Flex jerked a laser from his shoulder holster. The Judge made the shot look effortless, a single standard execution round crashing from his Lawgiver to bury itself in the muscleman's chest. He stepped over Flex's corpse and extended a hand to Jayni. He couldn't know that the next words he spoke were the same ones he had used on a street corner twenty-four years earlier.

  "Are you all right, citizen?"

  Jayni took his hand with a choked half-sob; and then she screamed.

  Dredd wheeled in place, the Lawgiver hunting a target. In the doorway there was a man wrapped in shadows, the stench of new death sluicing off of him. His aspect was stormy, hardly able to contain the rage inside it.

  "Don't touch her," Wess hissed.

  RECIPROCITY

  From the corner of his eye, Dredd could see the tiny sight-screen on the stock of his Lawgiver. The sensor eye beneath the pistol's barrel was aimed directly at the figure in the doorway, but the scanner saw nothing; no thermal imprint for a heatseeker, no heartbeat for an audio target triangulation. He thought of the corpse aboard the dropship in Denver, the blackened polymer skin all over the dead body. In the half-light cast from the highway lamps, he could already see small fingers of the same material clustering at the base of the man's neck. Dredd weighed his options; there would be only one chance to take a headshot, but with a civilian in the room the balance of play was upset. He'd watched the telemetry footage from the weapons test a dozen times now, and the Judge had no illusions about what he was facing off against.

  "Wess?" The woman's voice was tremulous with disbelief. "Oh, Jovus Grud. Wess, what happened to you?"

  She tried to step forward, and Dredd held out an arm to stop her. "Stay back."

  "I said," hissed the figure in the door, "don't touch her!"

  "Wess, please!" pleaded the woman. "Have you seen yourself? You're changing!"

  "No!" he shouted. "You don't understand!"

  "I do," Dredd said carefully. "The Skorpion... You can't control it, you know that. You have to stop this before it goes too far."

  "Skorpion..." The gunman spoke the word with reverence, teasing out the sound of it. He gave the woman a direct look, eyes flashing. "I did this for you, Jayni. They took you because of me. I wanted to make it right."

  "Right?" She shook her head, the tears starting to come. "Wess, listen to Judge Dredd. That thing in your hand, you haven't been the same since you turned up with it. It's done something to you!"

  "For the better!" he spat. "I'm not the joke of a man I was anymore! Cortez made that mistake and now he's dead because of it, Hoog and Toes and all of them! I'm Wesson Smyth and drokk it, I want my payback!"

  "And I want the man I love back!" Jayni replied.

  With great care, Dredd raised the Lawgiver and took aim. "This ends now, citizen. Drop the weapon or I'll shoot you where you stand."

  Smyth gave his gun hand a curious look and let out a chuckle. "I'm afraid I can't do that, Judge. Too far gone now. Can't exactly disarm myself." The muzzle of the weapon moved in a lazy arc. "For your own good, I'd suggest you drop your gun." The man's voice changed slightly, the timbre becoming more clipped and severe. "Or we will be forced to terminate you."

  "Wesson Smyth," said Dredd formally, "you are under arrest for multiple counts of murder-"

  "No!" The plasma gun screeched and Dredd threw himself aside, shoving Jayni to the floor. Darts of superheated gas ripped into the penthouse furniture, sizzling through the wet air. The action seemed to be painful for Smyth and he recoiled, slamming himself against a support stanchion. "Aaagh!" He pressed his free hand to his head. "No! No, I won't kill him! He saved her. I can't kill a man who - aaaah!"

  "Who is he talking to?" Jayni cried. "What's wrong with him?"

  Dredd vaulted to his feet and returned fire; two standard rounds in quick double-tap progression. Smyth jerked like a puppet on a string, the first shot narrowly missing him. The second round scored a hit on his torso, ripping through his ragged clothes. A gut-shot; it should have dropped a normal man to his knees in screaming bloody agony, but Smyth shrugged it off, shouting incoherently.

  Wess's mind was boiling in a sea of white fire. The weapon dragged his body around with crude jerks of muscle and sinew. It was getting better at working him, he realised, learning the ins and outs of making a human form walk and talk and kill for it. Smyth threw himself against the windows of the penthouse, desperately trying to spoil his own aim. The wild discharges of the gun were going everywhere, and he was terrified that a random bolt would strike Jayni before he could prevent it.

  Wess wanted it to stop. He never intended to attack a Judge - and Judge Dredd at that! All he had wanted was to destroy the men who had ruined his life, to find Jayni and keep her safe - wasn't that enough?

  "Your scope is limited," said the gun, the thing Dredd had called the Skorpion. "Objective Cortez is deceased. New objectives required. We must exploit the resultant power vacuum. Target Dredd is an impediment to that goal."

  Smyth's mind thrilled at the possibilit
y. The weapon was suggesting that he could step in and take over Sector 88? It was insane, but it was also possible. Then in the next second he was shaking the sheer madness of the thought from his head. He wanted fortune and glory, sure, but not like this! Not off the backs of dead men, not at the top of a pile of corpses! "No!" he spat out the denial. "I won't!"

  "We can defeat Dredd. We know how he thinks."

  He closed his eyes and stumbled away, moaning with agony, the Judge's bullets cracking around him. For one brief second, Wess locked eyes with Jayni and what he saw there made his heart freeze in his chest. She was utterly terrified of him; but what was worse was the way it excited him as much as it repelled him. He had to get away before it was too late. Smyth gripped the broken edges of the penthouse's glasseen roof and threw himself out of the Carnivale, down toward the highway below.

  Vedder licked her lips as the wind brought the unmistakable shriek of plasma fire to her ears. She set her bike on auto, riding the slipstream of the mopad, and used the magnoculars in her belt to catch a glimpse of the gunfight on the roof. Darts of white light blinked, and she saw Dredd reeling under a punishing attack. Perhaps she'd get lucky and the Skorpion would kill the old dinosaur for her.

  Voices screamed into the rain, and she could only hear the emotions of them, not the words. Then, in a flash of falling glass fragments, a black form flew from the Carnivale, flickering through the neon holo-aura and over her head.

  "Stomm!" Vedder whipped around in her saddle to see the man land on the roof of a snake-bus and run along its length. Then he was leaping again, off the bonnet of a podcar to a roadliner, using the vehicles like stepping stones against the flow of traffic. The COE agent triggered her lights and sirens, stamping on the footbrake at the same time. Her bike's Firerock tyres howled and threw up arcs of rainwater as Vedder made a perfect one-eighty turn. She bolted away, into the oncoming rush of cars.

  Something made her flick a last quick look over her shoulder at the Carnivale; and there was Dredd, face set in fury, watching her leave him behind.

  The Judges swept into Sector 88 like a storm of eagles, but Smyth and Vedder had already vanished into the sublevels of City Bottom by the time the H-Wagons were circling Martin Shaw Overzoom. The Carnivale was crammed into a breakdown island past the ninety-six mile marker, and forensics department Tek-Judges were swarming all over Cortez's mobile mansion; there was a colossal haul of intelligence data for the taking in The Eye's files and records. Dredd's attention was elsewhere, however. He delivered Jayni to a robo-doc and interrogated her as the machine worked. The woman spilled it all out to him in broken, tearful sentences, and the picture began to come together for the lawman. By the time Tyler arrived at the crime scene, Dredd had a good picture of the kind of man Wess Smyth was.

  "Dredd!" The Luna-1 Judge jogged over, brandishing the data pad that never seemed to leave his side. "I heard what happened. This Smyth guy just threw himself into the road? How the drokk did he survive that?"

  "Beats me," he replied. "But you saw the deader out in the wastelands. The Skorpion ain't just a weapon. It rewires whoever is dumb enough to use it."

  "No wonder the COE wants to keep it a secret. What did you find out about the shooter?"

  Dredd nodded toward the ambulance where Jayni lay. "His ex-girlfriend talked and Justice Central's records filled in most of the blanks. Don't ask me how, but the Skorpion is in the possession of one Wesson Smyth, a small-time criminal with a string of petty offences going back to gang activity in his youth. There are a million minor perps like him in Mega-City One. Hardly the best choice to turn into an invincible gunfighter."

  "You think Vedder did this, implanted Smyth on purpose?"

  "She likes to live dangerously. I wouldn't put it past her. But it's more likely that Smyth stumbled across the Skorpion, probably in the wake of the wrecker attack on Braga Skedway, and stole it." Dredd shook his head. "Dumb spug probably had no idea what he had until it was too late."

  Tyler nodded. "I almost pity the guy. Talk about falling into the wrong hands."

  "Are there any 'right hands' for this thing? Take a look inside that mopad, it's a slaughterhouse in there. If the Skorpion can turn a scrawny no-hoper like Smyth into a killing machine, can you imagine what would happen if it imprinted on someone trained for the job? Someone who was already lethal?"

  Tyler let out a low whistle. "An army of one."

  "Yeah. Gloves are off now, Tyler. We have to bring this thing down."

  "Well, then this is gonna help." He handed the data pad to Dredd. "I ran the names of all the victims that have been positively identified as Skorpion kills."

  The senior Judge scanned the names. "Why are there two lists?"

  "Half of these guys are mid-level creeps who belonged to the criminal network of the late and unlamented Ruben Cortez."

  Dredd nodded again. "Smyth talked about 'payback'. Guess the Skorpion finally gave him the chance to wipe out everyone who made his life hell. But what about these others? Loengard, Pang, Dolenz, ViSanto... What's the pattern with them?"

  "Every fatality on that second list was connected in some way to West 17 Test Labs and the Skorpion Project. What I can't figure is, why would Smyth want to eliminate them?"

  A cold rush of understanding swept through the Judge. "It's not Smyth. It's the gun."

  Tyler gave a snort. "That's crazy, Dredd."

  "Is it?" The Judge gave him a hard look. "Think about it. Our snitch at West 17 got in touch with us because they were scared. But what if it wasn't Vedder they were worried about? We know the Skorpion has an artificial intelligence circuit. Maybe Smyth isn't the only one looking for a little revenge."

  "Well, on the off-chance there could be another lead here. I ran a deep search into West 17's records usin' a cipher that I, uh, borrowed from the Special Judicial Service. There's one other member of the original Skorpion Project design team unaccounted for. He hasn't been at work in the past two days and there's no sign of him at his hab." Tyler touched a button on the data pad and the sallow face of a bookish young man appeared. "Say hello to citizen Hollis Nolan, intuitive software architect."

  Dredd raised an eyebrow. "Intuitive software. AI, right? I think this might be our snitch."

  "Yup. Only problem is, how do we find this guy before Vedder or the Skorpion?"

  The Judge handed him back the data pad. "If Nolan is the one who planted that information in my bike computer, then he knew his life was in danger and he wanted us to find it, which means he wants to come clean."

  "'We need to talk', it said."

  "Yeah. Go through the data again, look for anything that doesn't track. Nolan wouldn't have gone into hiding without giving us a way to find him first."

  Tyler blew out a breath. "I hope you're right. Otherwise, the next time we see the Skorpion, we'll be at the wrong end of a sniper sight."

  Vedder studied the concrete chasm around her. Down there, at the very lowest levels of Mega-City One, the sunlight never penetrated the pitch darkness. The citiblock and stratoscrapers were so high above her head that light and even the climate never reached this far. City Bottom remained a grey and sullen place, day after day, year after year. Somewhere in this shadow land the Skorpion had got away from her, the weapon dragging its avatar away from her pursuit, bouncing off walls and scrambling into dark corners where even her bike-spot lamps couldn't reach. She felt annoyed that the thing could evade her so easily - but at the same time, she was pleased that it was performing so well. The Skorpion really was everything she had hoped it would be, and now it was free and wild, out of the confines of the lab and into the world.

  How many times had she watched the tapes from the Denver test? Vedder had lost count. There wasn't a single frame of the footage that she hadn't pored over and reviewed a hundred times, scrutinising the most minute details of the way the Skorpion moved, the predatory manner in which it made its kills. It fascinated her, like the vids she had collected as a child of extinct big cats from the African c
ontinent. The weapon had the same cool feline grace of those long-dead hunters, the same brutal but playful manner toward its prey. And to think Loengard and his cadre of limited thinkers wanted to terminate the program after just that one mis-step.

  Then again, perhaps it wasn't so hard to understand. After all, Vedder had been safe and sound in the relay control centre beneath the West 17 complex while Judge Loengard had been out there, watching the killer butcher his men at close quarters. The Tek-Judge had almost died at the hands of his creation, his arm crisped to a wasted, burnt twig by a near-miss plasma blast. That he made it out alive in an escape pod was remarkable in itself. It had been good fortune that the neural overload shock had finally proven too much for the unit to handle; otherwise it would have followed and killed him.

  Loengard had called the Skorpion "an abomination" and ordered the termination of the six other prototypes; it was only the pressure and influence of the COE, which Vedder brought to bear, that finally kept just one of the nascent weapons from destruction. Where the Tek-Judge saw a dangerous instability in the machine's sentience, Vedder saw potential. Yes, if one wanted to embrace Loengard's crude and imprecise descriptions, one might define the mentality of the Skorpion AI as psychotic - but it was a living gun, for Grud's sake! A synthetic intellect designed only for killing could not be expected to conform to petty human standards. Doctor ViSanto agreed with her; it was his programming that allowed them to adapt the second Skorpion prototype, to manage its neuroses to work for them. Loengard strutted and fumed, but he knew in the end that the COE's secret partnership in the project was ultimately a sword hanging over his head, and he kept silent.