Swine Fever

by Andrew Cartmel

  JUDGE DREDD

  SWINE FEVER

  Trotters. Curly tail. Large, pointed, hypersensitive ears. Refusing to believe what her mind was telling her, Psi-Judge Zandonella opened her eyes again and looked around at the big room full of red light. She was seeing the room from about a metre above floor level. That was the height of her head, as she stood here on her four trotters, her little tail testing the air behind her.

  Gradually, like sipping a viciously bitter medicine, Zandonella let the truth trickle into her mind: the appalling, unavoidable, awful truth.

  She had jumped into a new body all right. A body that should by now have been covered in the oily sweat of fear.

  But pigs don't sweat.

  JUDGE DREDD

  #1: DREDD VS DEATH

  Gordon Rennie

  #2: BAD MOON RISING

  David Bishop

  #3: BLACK ATLANTIC

  Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans

  #4: ECLIPSE

  James Swallow

  #5: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND

  David Bishop

  #6: THE FINAL CUT

  Matthew Smith

  #7: SWINE FEVER

  Andrew Cartmel

  #8: WHITEOUT

  James Swallow

  #9: PSYKOGEDDON

  Dave Stone

  MORE 2000 AD ACTION

  JUDGE ANDERSON

  #1: FEAR THE DARKNESS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #2: RED SHADOWS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #3: SINS OF THE FATHER - Mitchel Scanlon

  THE ABC WARRIORS

  #1: THE MEDUSA WAR - Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell

  DURHAM RED

  #1: THE UNQUIET GRAVE - Peter J Evans

  ROGUE TROOPER

  #1: CRUCIBLE - Gordon Rennie

  STRONTIUM DOG

  #1: BAD TIMING - Rebecca Levene

  FIENDS OF THE EASTERN FRONT - David Bishop

  #1: OPERATION VAMPYR

  #2: THE BLOOD RED ARMY

  #3: TWILIGHT OF THE DEAD

  Chief Judge Hershey created by John Wagner & Brian Bolland.

  Judge Dredd created by John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra.

  For Rosie Alvarez, who laughs in all the right places.

  A 2000 AD PUBLICATION

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  www.2000adonline.com

  1098 7 65 4321

  Cover illustration by Patrick Goddard and Dylan Teague.

  Copyright © 2005 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

  All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S."Judge Dredd" is a registered trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions."2000 AD" is a registered trademark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.

  ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-060-0

  ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-101-0

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  JUDGE DREDD

  SWINE FEVER

  Andrew Cartmel

  MEGA-CITY ONE, 2128

  ONE

  The moon shone down on Mega-City One. It was a full moon, high and white, its ravaged face pouring steady cold light on the expanse of the city that stretched endlessly away across the dark half of the world. The moonlight probed the shadowed valleys between the high towers, stirring excitement in the mental hospitals dotted plentifully throughout the urban sprawl and shone, too, in the worshipful upturned eyes of the occasional lunatic roving free in the streets below. The moon was also reflected in a cold perfect circle on the steel and glass spire of the building called Justice Central.

  "Full moon tonight," observed Judge Carver as he struggled with a food-vending unit in the mess.

  "Is that significant?" asked Psi-Judge Zandonella, peering over his shoulder. Belinda Zandonella was a tall young woman with long, straight, lustrous black hair and the golden skin you might expect from the interplay of Filipina and Irish genes.

  In contrast, Carver was a tall young man with a pasty white complexion spattered with reddish freckles. He had big hands and a boyish face, and large blue eyes that promised loyalty and dogged devotion to duty, but not vast vistas of intellect. Now those moist blue eyes flickered nervously in their surveillance of Zandonella.

  He was not at ease with her, and with good reason. Carver was a street Judge and had never met a Psi-Judge before this assignment. He found Zandonella strange and a little unnerving, although so far she'd behaved much like any other Judge, never giving any hint of her special powers, which were rumoured to be highly unpleasant.

  "Crime goes up seventeen point five per cent during a full moon," said a low, harsh voice. Zandonella and Carver turned to see a tall figure looming over them. Zandonella hadn't heard his approach and she was a little spooked at this sudden appearance of her field commander for tonight, Judge Dredd.

  "Didn't you know that, Judge?" said Dredd.

  "No, sir," said Zandonella. "That's high."

  "The rate's even higher for certain offences. Like sexual assault." Dredd's face was expressionless. "Or murder. So it won't be making our assignment tonight any easier. Now let's get going."

  He moved off. The young Judges hurried after him. Zandonella and Carver had both fought to get places on tonight's task force and they were eager to show what they were made of. Carver hastily swallowed the last oily fragments of the munce morsels he'd purchased and tossed the empty packet into a recycling bin, which whirred and flashed purple as it malfunctioned.

  The full moon summoned something up in the minds of the vulnerable citizens of the Mega-City, firing unknown circuits in their addled brains, burning like a bright drug in their bloodstreams.

  Staring up at the beautiful purity of the streaming silver moonlight, a man in Kylie Minogue Block decided he could fly like a bat. He didn't have the necessary membranes under his arm but he hypothesised that these would naturally grow out under evolutionary pressure as he fell. After all, nature provides. So he put on his best clothes, stepped out of his sitting room window and promptly tumbled into the void. His fall was arrested on an illegal balcony extension seventeen floors below where he survived thanks to landing on an extremely overweight and therefore well-padded cyborg dog. The dog was destroyed in a messy fashion but the jumper lived to be charged with failure to hire a psychiatrist and was locked away in a suitable institution.

  Elsewhere, other full-moon fiends were busily obeying the siren call of their own chosen satellite. They were mixing explosives, sharpening knives and polishing telescopic sights.

  "For some, the full moon is like a dangerous intoxicant," announced Judge Darrid. He was an older street Judge, an experienced officer with more years on the job than Dredd, although not remotely the same level of reputation. He was a florid, portly man with a cherubic face that was lent a slightly eccentric air by the large walrus moustache that he sported. The moustache was as grey as the hair on Darrid's head.

  Darrid was sitting in the back of the H-Wagon, buckled in between Zandonella and Carver, while Dredd sat on his own in the cockpit and steered them through the night. The vehicle was a new design of H-Wagon that was being brought on stream by the Tek-Judges. Rumour was that the prototype had been a tricky vehicle to operate and several had indeed come to grief in the vast canyons of the Mega-City. Zandonella had heard a story about an inexperienced Judge steering too close to a building, over-correcting and sending the H-Wagon sailing too close t
o the building opposite. Panic had then set in, the pilot over-correcting again, and on the next terminal swing the vehicle had crashed into a building, ripping a deep groove in the densely populated structure and killing citizens as well as the crew, who had been charged with post-mortem negligence and had their ashes sealed in secure units at the penal crematorium.

  Until the technology was perfected it was volunteers only on the new H-Wagon, and Zandonella had volunteered. Her tour of duty with the street Judges had been intended as a disciplinary assignment - a form of punishment. Or penance. But that was no reason it couldn't also be fun.

  And Zandonella was delighted Dredd was flying the craft tonight. The H-Wagon was only dangerous if the pilot panicked, and Dredd didn't seem the type to panic.

  The H-Wagon had been as steady as a rock since take-off, and if Zandonella hadn't looked out the windows she would have believed that the craft was still floating in the docking bay in the vehicle pool instead of streaking across the city skyline. Despite the smoothness of their flight, Carver had already begun to look a little air sick. Zandonella devoutly prayed that he wouldn't throw up, not here in this tiny space. As far as she could tell, Carver had the makings of a good Judge, but his personal habits left a lot to be desired. He ate junk like those munce morsels and then went on assignments in a small personnel carrier like this and then of course the inevitable happened.

  Judge Darrid's nostrils suddenly twitched. "What is that grud-awful smell?" he said.

  "Malfunctioning exhaust," said Zandonella, which in a way it was.

  Carver suddenly seemed eager to change the subject. "What was that you were saying? Just now? About the dangerous intoxicant, Judge Darrid?"

  Darrid took the bait and began expounding his pet theories about law and order. As far as Zandonella was concerned, he was an old bore with a superfluity of nostril hair. She looked away from Darrid and Carver, out through the side window of the H-Wagon at the glittering towers of the Mega-City as they streamed past.

  "The narcotic of lunacy," said Darrid, "has tonight joined the multitude of other illegal substances coursing through the collective bloodstream of Mega-City One." He pointed at the endless landscape of gaudy urban deprivation flowing past beneath them. "Down there are literally millions of perpetrators squirming out from under their slimy stones to obtain illegal substances because they want a thrill that ordinary life can't provide. Squirming like vermin! Like squirming vermin! Millions of them. And we have to try and find and arrest every single one of these rotten, wriggling, squirming vermin."

  Zandonella felt a sudden clench of excitement. "Is that what tonight's assignment is about?" The task force's mission was strictly confidential. Only Dredd had been officially briefed and he wasn't saying a word. But perhaps Darrid had heard something. "Are we going after some kind of narcotics ring?" Perhaps it was sugar smugglers.

  "Well-"

  "Is that right?" broke in Carver, eagerly leaning forward. "Are we going on a drugs bust?"

  "Well," said Darrid, "have you heard of a gang called the Mob Better Blues?"

  "Darrid," said Dredd from the driver's seat. "Shut up. And the rest of you too. And buckle up. We're stopping to pick up one more member of the task force." The H-Wagon slowed as Dredd dropped it out of the traffic flow, falling one hundred and fifty metres in a smooth dive and drifting neatly into alignment with a Justice Department docking station. The umbilical port hissed and opened, extruding a clear plastic tube the same diameter as the hatch in the side of the H-Wagon's cockpit. A woman stepped into the tube and Zandonella's heart sank as she recognised Psi-Judge O'Mannion.

  "Who's that?" said Carver.

  "My immediate superior," said Zandonella.

  "What's she doing here?"

  "Evaluating my progress." She watched O'Mannion climb into the empty seat in the cockpit as the tube retracted, the door hummed shut and Dredd lifted them smoothly back into the traffic stream.

  Two and a half city blocks, or fifty-five kilometres away, a hydrogen-filled airship floated silently against the moon, leaving two long, cigar-shaped shadows on the roof of William Holden Memorial Trauma Unit below. The top "cigar" was the buoyancy module, filled with hydrogen, which kept the airship afloat. The lower shape was a large cargo container and a smaller control gondola. In the gondola there were crowded four young men and a young woman. All of them had been so densely and comprehensively tattooed that their skin appeared to be a uniform shade of blue.

  One of the men was extremely thin and he was called Blue Streak. "Why an airship?" said Streak. "There are plenty of more sophisticated vehicles we could have used for this job. Why are we stuck on this zeppelin?"

  "What's a zeppelin?" said one of the two extremely short young men who were standing rather than sitting on their seats in the gondola.

  "Ignorant dwarf," said the other extremely short young man. "Ignorant tattooed dwarf," he added.

  "The tattoos were your idea!" said the other blue dwarf.

  While they bickered, Blue Streak turned to the tattooed young woman. Even her eyes were blue. They gleamed at him in the moonlight, burning like blue coals in her beautiful depraved face. Her tattoos stopped at the neck and the shock of their interruption and the sudden appearance of unsullied white skin above made her face look positively naked. "Why are we using this archaic mode of travel?" he asked her.

  The girl was called Blue Belle, though the men in the gang secretly referred to her as Blue Balls. She ran her fingers through her close-cropped, bleached hair, shrugged and said, "Ask Big Blue."

  The fourth young man, Big Blue, was a giant product of an overactive pituitary combined with illegal steroids and many years of weight lifting. He crouched over the airship controls, occupying both the pilot and copilot's seats. Blue Streak leaned over one of his huge muscle-bound tattooed shoulders and addressed the man's strangely small, tattooed face. "Why?" But Big just ignored him, as if his task of piloting the airship was too important to allow him to indulge in pointless conversation. Deeply offended, Streak turned away and began to check the weapons.

  "Hey there," called Big Blue suddenly from the front of the gondola. He turned to look at Streak with a big white smile in his tattooed face. "Are you sulking back there, old Blue Streak old buddy?" The dwarfs and the girl laughed and Streak felt his face heat up. If he hadn't been covered in blue tattoos, he would have been turning red. "Are you sulking because I didn't answer your question?"

  "No," said Streak tightly.

  "Aw, yes you are. You are sulking. Here buddy, come on up here, old buddy, and give us a hug." Blue Streak put down the magazine of incendiary ammunition he'd been about to load into his PW7 Peaceful World fully automatic assault rifle. He set the weapon aside as he made his way past the escape pod, towards the front of the craft. Here the gang's leader Big Blue was turning from the controls, rising from his seats, his white teeth gleaming as his tiny blue face smiled and he welcomed Blue Streak into his enormous muscular embrace. Blue Streak winced at the pressure of the big arm as it wrapped around his shoulder. "We're the Mob Better Blues," crooned Big Blue into Streak's face. "That's because we're better than other mobs."

  "And we're blue," added the first dwarf helpfully.

  Big Blue hooked his thumb towards the cargo container hanging behind the gondola. "Better at mob jobs like smuggling contraband."

  "Contraband!" repeated the dwarf.

  "We're a better mob because we plan better. When we smuggle contraband we do it right, in a hydrogen-filled airship made of plastic. Which makes us harder to detect," said Big Blue. "It allows us to smuggle in our contraband in a silent, stealthy manner. Wouldn't you agree, old buddy?"

  "I suppose so." Streak nodded reluctantly, wrestling with a half-formed memory. "But wasn't there a problem with zeppelins bursting into flame?"

  "Bursting into flame!" roared Big Blue, pounding at the controls as he bellowed with laughter.

  "Bursting into flame," echoed the dwarfs, chuckling.

  "The only
reason airships kept bursting into flame," said Big Blue, "was because those old idiots back in the old days filled them with an inflammable gas called helium. That's why Big Blue got you a nice safe airship filled with hydrogen."

  "Hydrogen?" said Streak, struggling again with that half-formed memory.

  "That's right. It's helium you've got to worry about. Good old hydrogen is as safe as houses." Big Blue smiled and steered their airship towards its destination.

  "Normally a vehicle like that, virtually silent and with a polymer airframe, would be almost impossible to detect," said Judge Darrid, passing his night vision glasses to Zandonella. The twin cigars of the airship floated into visibility in the glasses, a ghostly lilac image.

  "How did we know to look for it?" asked Zandonella.

  "What?"

  "If it was undetectable, how did we know to look for it here?"

  "We were tipped off," said Judge O'Mannion from the cockpit. She was a petite woman in her early thirties with witchy silver hair. Even her ironic eyebrows were silver. Her foxy features and coffee-brown eyes, dark and bitter, reflected her wicked and often malicious sense of humour. Those bitter-coffee eyes were watching Zandonella now. She could feel them, weighing and appraising her; summing Zandonella up for the fitness report she'd soon be writing. The report would determine Zandonella's future as a Judge, and Zandonella wasn't sure what worried her the most, the arrest of the multiple felons that she was about to participate in, or the thought of this woman watching and evaluating her.