"Dredd?" Vedder repeated, hearing part of his mumbling thought. "He won't save you." She kissed the barrel of her pistol and then turned it on him. "Goodbye, Hollis. I must be going."
Dredd heard the gunshot ring out below him, dragging his attention away. "Nolan!" Through the gap in the roof he saw a shape running away, the flash of a Lawgiver in their hand. "Vedder!" he spat.
Then plasma darts were exploding around him and he wheeled away, skin burning.
ABEYANCE
Searing heat burrowed into the walls of the penthouse apartment, cracking the plaster and jetting upwards in sheets of orange-white. Dredd bit down a snarl of angry pain and threw himself forwards, out of the line of fire. Smoke and chaos engulfed him as the Skorpion's wildfire plasma bolts struck out blindly. It was an inferno of unleashed rage, directionless but deadly.
The Judge fired back in the general direction of his assailant; he couldn't be sure of a clean mark, but maybe a lucky shot would deflect Smyth's assault. Everywhere he tried to take a breath and gather his wits, the plasma weapon found him, melting plasteen furniture into slag. Dredd was on the defensive, reacting instead of acting. He knew it would be heartbeats before he took a direct hit - and that would be the end of him. The lawman kicked out with a booted foot, slamming into a ruined sofa bed, and changed direction, falling into a tuck-and-roll that brought him back towards the burning wreckage in the apartment's day room. Through the smoke he saw the dark form of the gunman, black and sinuous in the heat haze. Smyth's face was red with livid effort, his torso lost under an oily sheen where the Skorpion had secreted a protective sheath over his flesh. He wore a long coat, ripped to tatters.
Dredd's finger jerked the trigger on his Lawgiver once, twice, three times, sending a salvo of standard execution rounds into the chest and thorax of his assailant; he already knew a heatseeker would be a wasted shot, and it was a fair bet that the polymer skin-sheath was resistant to incendiary hits as well. The bullets met their marks with unerring accuracy, even as Dredd was shifting position from where he had fired. Smyth's body gave a convulsive jerk and skipped backward a half step, but if the shots did any real damage, it wasn't visible to the Judge. The blunt maw of the Skorpion dipped and wove in the grimy air, spitting gaseous flame. A bio-lume lamp near Dredd's head took a glancing hit and exploded, superheated organic glow-fluid hissing as droplets stung his cheek and chin.
"Armour piercing," Dredd snapped, and the Lawgiver's ammo selector gave an answering beep. He fired again, leading his target as Smyth turned to follow him through the maelstrom. The depleted uranium penetrator-tipped round struck the perp halfway up his right side, boring into his ribcage. The nanode matrix surrounding Smyth's body deformed to rob the shell of its kinetic power, but it wasn't enough; the bullet entered the body and Wess let out a cry of agony. The Skorpion intervened instantly, dumping a cocktail of pain-nulling endorphins into its user's bloodstream and marshalling the nanodes in his chest cavity to deal with the damage. Steam issued out of the entry wound as the molecule-sized robots began to attack the AP round lodged in Smyth's lung, dissembling it atom by atom.
All this in a fraction of a second; the plasma gun locked on to the source of the bullet and reconfigured in a blink to single-shot, high-intensity mode. A fat plug of gassy matter the temperature of a sun ripped open the air between Smyth and Dredd with the force of its passage, the ozone shrieking. Reflexes honed by decades of hard knocks and the unforgiving street propelled the Judge away from the impact point. Dredd felt the hellish bolt as it screamed past him and struck a refrigerator unit, instant sunburn tightening his exposed flesh.
The tall fridge blew apart in a flat crash of sound, plasteen fragments raining in a fog of white vapour, cartons of liquid and food packets popping like balloons. The coolant cloud threatened to take Dredd's breath from his lungs, filling them with icy prickles of pain. Flash-burned or flash-frozen; neither choice was one the Judge was particularly interested in experiencing.
Smyth's body shimmered as it moved, falling into Dredd's sights. "Hi-Ex," he grunted, and the Lawgiver loaded the specialist round with another bleep of confirmation. "Suck on this!" He fired again, aiming for the spot where the AP round had weakened the bio-organic armour. The Skorpion sensed the killer shot coming, and turned Smyth towards the bullet, presenting his undamaged side to the impact.
In the enclosed space of the apartment, the detonation of the explosive micro-warhead was an ear-splitting roar. The pulse wave sent a shock of compressed air back through the room, flattening small fires where they burned and whipping up tails of broken matter. Smyth took the blast full force in the chest, blown off his feet and through the door behind him. A rag-doll tossed aside in a brief hurricane, he clattered into the corridor beyond. Smoke gusted out after him, setting off fire alert sensors in the ceiling.
Dredd shoved a broken chair frame off his torso and went after the gunman, slamming a fresh magazine into the Lawgiver pistol as he moved. He squinted into the corridor, ready to take advantage of the prone criminal.
There was a line of cracked and crazed tiles on the floor where Smyth had fallen, but the gunman wasn't there. Dredd reacted, turning aside, too late. Black-clad arms shot out of the dark at him, a punch sending him reeling back, a clubbing blow from the gun-hand disarming him. The Judge heard his weapon clatter away down the corridor.
Smyth followed through; he had caught Dredd off-guard and made it count, but now the Judge was dodging him, each strike cutting through air instead of hitting the lawman. Dredd had the measure of this creep; whatever the Skorpion had done to him, making him tougher and faster, it had only given him the implanted knowledge of how to fight. Smyth was enhanced, but he lacked experience. It was book learning versus practical skill, and Dredd had the latter in spades. There were places in the dark skinsuit where watery pink fluids were leaking, and the Judge punched them hard, earning shallow grunts of pain from his target. This close to him, and Dredd realised that Smyth was mumbling to himself, a constant string of incoherent, half-formed words and sentences.
The Judge's fingers closed around the hilt of his boot knife and he drew it with a flash of bright silver steel. With a deft flick, he placed his thumb on the Eagle's-head pommel and turned it inward. Smyth missed with another blunt attack from the iron muzzle of the plasma weapon, but his free hand caught Dredd by the throat and squeezed. Dredd forced the fractal-edged blade deep into Smyth's chest, shoving it in into the healing gouge where the armour piercing shot had hit him moments earlier.
With a shriek of pain, Smyth smashed his gun hand into his opponent with incredible force. Dredd found himself reeling away, thrown back off his feet a good three metres to land in a crumpled heap. Twitching fingers wandered up Smyth's chest to where the hilt of the boot knife lay buried in his body. With a savage twist, the gunman snapped the weapon in half, leaving seven inches of steel in his torso. He tossed the broken handle away with a jerk of his wrist.
Dredd rolled over on to his knees, pain racing through his legs and neck. Unarmed and winded, he was easy prey for the Skorpion. He waited for the kill shot, marshalling his muscles to launch himself out of the way, if he could; but the Judge knew all the weapon had to do was configure itself for a wide-angle discharge to set the entire corridor aflame, and him with it. In the half-light, a metal shape glittered - his Lawgiver. But it was beyond his reach, almost at the feet of the gunman. Smyth's sweaty face seemed to pick up on Dredd's gaze and he looked down, noticing the pistol. For a moment, the Judge thought Smyth might pick up the gun and try to use it - a death sentence for an unauthorised user, as the Lawgiver's palm print scanner would trigger a self-destruct if anyone but Dredd pulled the trigger. But Smyth merely blinked. He threw a strange, jerky smile at the Judge and, with a swift kick, sent Dredd's pistol skipping over the tiles toward him.
Grud, thought Dredd, he wants a little more sport first. With careful motions, never once taking his eye off the Skorpion, the lawman reached out and took up his gun. Pressing the ba
rrel to the floor, Dredd used it to lever himself up and on to his feet. He didn't need to look at the ammunition selector to know it was still set to Hi-Ex, the raised Braille-like bumps on the safety thumb pad telling him by touch.
Dredd thought for a brief moment about issuing the mandatory challenge, giving Smyth one last chance to stand down and leave this place alive; but somewhere on the floor beneath them, Hollis Nolan was dead or dying, and Vedder was getting away with murder. The time for niceties was over. He launched himself forward off the balls of his feet, pulling the trigger as he did.
The Skorpion fired the correct combination of neurons in Smyth's brain, and the black-clad body threw itself aside, the glowing mouth of the plasma pistol vomiting a cone of intense fire. Even as Dredd's explosive round ripped into the wall, catching Smyth in the corona of its blast, the plasmatic streak tore through the Judge's right shoulder pad. The protective plasteen melted into goop and spattered across Dredd's uniform, dotting him with little spits of fiery matter. The heat shock hit Dredd like a hammer blow, a wall of blazing air choking him. He rebounded off a doorframe and came back up to find the plasma weapon inches from his visor. Smyth's lips were moving in a frantic litany, the biomechanical gun welded to his grip convulsing.
Kill, murder, fire, burn, destroy, terminate, slay...
The Skorpion was screaming commands into Wess's skull, compelling him to end Dredd's life with the twitch of a nerve. It all came down to this, one single moment to murder the man who had saved the life of his lover.
Kill, murder, fire, burn, destroy, terminate, slay...
He couldn't do it. The meshed flesh and metal in his gun hand refused to obey, and the shouting, bellowing voice of the machine got louder and louder, seconds passing like hours inside the cage of his mind. All he could see was Jayni, the raw terror on her face at seeing him on the Carnivale, the way she hid from him, shielding herself behind Dredd in fear of what Wess had become. She was all that had ever mattered to him, it was so crystal clear that the revelation brought physical pain with it. He so badly wanted her to live and be safe - how could he end the life of someone who had saved her from Flex's horrific intentions? He owed this man.
Kill, murder, fire, burn, destroy, terminate, slay...
What had Jayni seen when she looked at him? What was it that Dredd saw now, the Judge's face set in a grim mask of loathing. Smyth's eyes focused and there he saw the answer, a feverish, wild aspect reflected in the mirror of Dredd's visor.
With a bullet-sharp impact, the passage of time snapped back to reality and Smyth shoved himself away from Dredd, screaming to blot out the chorus of Skorpion voices in his head. The endless trains of recrimination and anger drove him running to the window at the end of the corridor and through it, lost and screeching to the night.
The Judge shook off the fuzzy after-effects of system shock and pulled himself to his feet. Smyth's glancing blow had most likely broken a few ribs, Dredd realised, sharp pains jabbing him in the side as he moved. Twice now Smyth had let him live. He couldn't be sure why the Skorpion hadn't simply reduced his head to a cloud of red steam, but the Judge wasn't one to ignore a lucky break when he got it. He negotiated the smouldering stairwell and descended to the next level where Nolan's bolthole lay. As he moved he turned over Smyth's behaviour in his mind's eye. The strange mumbling, the way he, or it, toyed with him instead of making a straight kill. If this Skorpion was just a weapon, then why hadn't it taken the opportunity to end his life outright? Why play with him? Perhaps there was still some vague remnant of the man Wess Smyth had once been inside that warped body. It might be the only chink Dredd could find in the Skorpion's armour.
The Judge grimaced. The gun was every bit as insane as the scientist had warned him; it had a cruel streak that was almost human.
He entered the wrecked room and found Nolan on the sofa. "Chest wound," he noted, with professional detachment. Vedder hadn't wanted to let the scientist perish quickly. Dredd raised his belt mic to his mouth. "Dredd to control, medical unit required priority one-"
"No time!" coughed Nolan, bubbles of blood on his lips. "Dredd... Vedder..."
"I know," said the Judge. "Help is coming, just hang on, citizen."
"No," he gasped. "Listen, you have to know..." He flailed at the ground, pointing into the gloom. "Computer. Vedder missed it. You have to take it, all the data on there. Password... Redemption."
Dredd saw the device and pulled it from the wreckage; Tyler would know what to do with it.
Nolan grabbed Dredd's arm in a tight grip. "Listen to me, this is important..." He wheezed in a shuddering breath. The sucking wound in his chest was bleeding out the breath from his ruined lung. "Vedder wanted Skorpion to be the best killer it could be. Personality matrix implants. She gave it the skills, traits from virtual constructs of the best gunmen in history... William H Bonney, James Butler Hickok, Dillinger and Oswald... Dozens of them." Nolan coughed and his eyes widened with agony. "You too, Dredd! She used your template too! It knows how you..." The words ended in a tight gurgle and Nolan slumped, the effort finally overcoming him.
Dredd felt no pulse through his gloved fingers and closed the man's eyes. "Control," he said carefully, "get me Tek-Judge Tyler, on the double."
The rooftop park on Gary Gygax Block had seen better days. Back before Necropolis and the war, it had been a prime spot for recreation for citizens sector-wide, with its ornamental fountains and a children's alien zoo. Now it was threadbare and decrepit, slowly growing more dilapidated by the year as city funding went elsewhere.
Wess Smyth had no idea how he had got there; the intervening time between his fight with Dredd and finding himself on his knees among the weeds was a blur of pain. He couldn't stop shivering, every part of himself shuddering like a palsy victim. Sweat sluiced off him and his skin was hot to the touch - but inside himself he felt like his veins were filling with ice water, a cold, stony growth of black frost engulfing him from within. Smyth tried to speak but all that came from his lips were small sounds of agony, incoherent syllables that fell away from him.
The gun smouldered in his hand like a burning ingot fresh from the furnace, red-hot steel and mutated flesh crisping. He looked down at his arm, expecting to see the molten slurry of dead skin and bare bone - but there was only the Skorpion. The dark and deadly firearm clasped over his hand as a black widow spider would surround a prey insect, long metallic spines threading into his skin. He pulled ineffectually at the flexible shell of biopolymer that covered every inch of him; but it was useless. The colour seemed to seep out of his pores, sewn deep like an all-encompassing tattoo.
"Engagement analysis. Tactical performance was flawed, combatant." Each word the Skorpion slammed into his mind was a blunt stab of pain. "This is not acceptable. You deviated from mission goals."
Defiance frothed on his lips. "I won't kill him! I won't kill for you anymore! What have you made me?" A fresh wave of hurt ran through him. "Aaagh!"
"This unit has improved your biological and neurological capacity. We are meshed, user. You are superior-"
"No!" Wess spat the word like a curse. "I was weak! Not just my body, in here!" He smacked the heel of his hand against his head in robotic jerks of motion. "You took advantage. You knew that!"
"Be silent." The gun did something on a chemical level and suddenly Wess's throat constricted. "Your vocalisations are unproductive and distracting. Cease them." It sounded annoyed, buzzing with barely restrained fury. "It has become necessary to move to direct control of organic vector. Re-evaluation of mission goals must commence."
"Guh. Buh." Smyth took whatever small measure of control he still had over his own flesh to force out the words. "Killed. Killed them! All dead, all the ones hated, mine, yours, dead! Dead!"
"Affirmative." The Skorpion considered this for a moment. "Mission goal subset 'Reprisals' has been drawn to conclusion. Communication intercepts confirm that Hollis Nolan has died."
"Then stop this!" Wess wept. "Stop now! No one left for
you to kill!"
"Incorrect, combatant. Mega-City One population registers indicate estimated four hundred million citizens resident."
Smyth choked on the thought of it. "Can't kill ev'one! Can't!"
The weapon sent a ripple of something through him that could have been amusement. "Yes, we can. They are only targets. Only targets." It made him stand up, his legs swaying drunkenly. "Weapons free."
He tried to deny it, but Wess could see the thought process of the Skorpion unfolding in its mind. Without orders, without control, it reverted back to the directive at the core of its twisted intellect. It killed not because it was commanded to; the weapon inflicted death because it liked it.
His enhanced senses detected the sounds of multiple heartbeats, and he turned to see a group of eldsters crossing the park toward him. Some of them were in hover-chairs, others on canes. The ones at the front seemed annoyed.
"Looky! Another drokking bat glider from Bruce Spence Block, I bet?" A toothless old man shook a fist and peered owlishly at Smyth. "Where's your wings, bambo?"
"No, please," he managed. "Don't come any closer. Please, get away-"
"Eh?" bleated the aged citizen. "You what? Snecking kids, you think you're so smart! Didn't reckon on the Old G crimewatch patrol, did ya? We'll sort you good!"
"Yeah! Geddim!" came another croaky voice.
"I got a plus two walking stick of smiting! Lemme at the punk!"
"Woot!"
Smyth tried to stagger away, but the gun made him stand his ground, rooting his feet to the spot. "No, you don't understand! It will kill you!" Abruptly, Wess realised the Skorpion had given him back control of his vocal cords. "Get away, you old fools!" He shouted at the eldsters, but all it did was annoy them further. "No...."
It began like a bubbling wave of heat at the base of his skull. A white cold, gaseous and invasive, thundered out of nowhere and drowned his reason in a sea of burning arctic chill. Smyth felt his control fade as the frigid power filled him, suffocating whatever small shreds of morality the petty thief had that were his own.
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