by Dave Stone
The word "costume", on the other hand was entirely spot on.
"My word," said Efil Drago San. "Things just keep getting better and better, don't they? Tell me, Dredd, did the Carry On Interminably series of holo-vids ever make it on to the Mega-City DataNet? How about Confessions of a Thermodynamic Coolant-exchange Systems Repairer?"
"I'm Nurse Pebbles," said one of the girls, who had a strapping, Scandinavian look about her.
"And I'm Nurse Bambam," said the other, who appeared to be a mix of Indonesian and Korean descent.
"Delighted to make your acquaintance," said Efil Drago San. "I do so enjoy a happy end - urk!"
Dredd, who had had enough, gave the cuffs connecting them a yank to shut him up.
"Sorry for the, uh, you know, look," said Nurse Pebbles. "We were pulling duty on the Grade II Aphasics Ward - and you have to project an extreme and basic image for them to even recognise you as medical personnel."
"We've been detailed to take you up to Dr Roberts," said Nurse Bambam, "for initial consultation and evaluation." She glanced at the Tactical Arms guards. "Would you like to leave your men here? We have a number of... highly effective security measures in place."
There was not a wall, floor or ceiling in the Psyko-Block, to Dredd's knowledge, that was not packed with those security measures, from technically non-lethal restraining-field emitters to decidedly lethal cyborgs permanently charging in alcoves behind slam-shutters. There was almost no conceivable circumstance with which these measures, designed as they were to contain criminal psychotics in their thousands, could not cope.
On the other hand, as he knew to his cost, when dealing with someone like Drago San it was better not to take any chances.
"Drago San stays under guard until we have him secured," he said.
"As you wish," said Nurse Bambam. "If you'd like to come this way?"
Doctor Robert Roberts, Dredd recalled, had been notable enough to make the Justice Department Internal Bulletins, years before, when he had been a Cadet training for Psi-Division. He'd scored off the scale for passive psionic talents - empathy, Rhine-card reading, psychometric reading, remote viewing - while evidencing no active talents whatsoever.
The reason for this, it had transpired, was that Cadet Robert Roberts was possessed of absolutely no psi talent at all - not even the vestigial breath possessed by the vast majority of norms on the planet. He had produced the effect by way of a massive amplification of the mundane skills that in usual cases supplemented psi talent: the reading of faces, the extrapolation of data that the mind was aware of only subconsciously, and so forth.
All of which was interesting and notable, but of about as much actual use to Psi-Division as a one-legged man in the hundred yards dash. Cadet Roberts was shunted into Med-tech Training, where psycho-profiling showed that he was perfectly suited to that brand of psychiatric medicine concerned with the criminally insane. It was a path that had led to a rapid rise through the hierarchy of the Tech-Divisions, culminating in him being appointed Surgeon in Chief in charge of the Mega-City Psyko-Block.
It was Doctor Roberts, in fact, who had introduced the innovations to the Psyko-Block environment over recent years. Innovations which might have jibed a little with Judges of the old school - the school that held that perps should drokking well get what was coming to them, whether they were in actual fact responsible for their actions or not, but there was no doubt that they seemed to work. A serious problem had not come out of the Psyko-Block in years. It had become a place, effectively, where you could leave a problematic case and forget about it.
That was going to change, Dredd thought, as the elevator carried him and Drago San, together with their Tactical Arms guard, to the offices of Doctor Roberts.
The elevator itself was little more than a null-grav platform in a shaft, used for the transport of administrative staff rather than inmates, so there was no need for an actual cage. Access hatches to the various levels of cells and wards zipped by at speed. It was still some time, however, before the platform came to a stop in a large and somewhat cavernous chamber.
A geodesic superstructure of what appeared to be brass supported a dome of LCD panels, currently showing the lava-swirls of an abstract fractal pattern in different shades of green. In the centre of the chamber, the segmented, polyceramic cones of a galvanistic transformer flared and Jacobs-laddered with plasma-fire.
Standing before him, bathed in this shifting light, was a man. Recognisable as Doctor Robert Roberts from the Justice Department files - if rather more pale and twitchy than those files suggested, to quite some degree.
He wore a spotless surgical laboratory coat, offset by jet black polymer gloves and sunglasses with circular lenses, to the sides of which had been clipped microfilament lights. An ophthalmoscope was strapped to his head, which at some point he had shaved completely bald.
The somewhat menacing effect was only slightly spoilt by the speculum sticking out of his pocket and the stethoscope dangling from his neck. Then again, it might depend on what he ever decided to do with them.
Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam now crossed the chamber to join the doctor, taking up positions that seemed to fire danger signals in Dredd's mind, despite the fact that they appeared to be nothing more than somewhat affectedly posing. It would only be later that he learnt why this was...
Dredd had never sat down and actually watched an entertainment holo-vid in his life, but there are some things one picks up by simple osmosis. The little tableau presented by Doctor Robert Roberts and the pair of nurses was straight out of an action-adventure spy show, where the Villain stands rather camply, flanked by his Cool Chick Assassins - only here and now there was a sense that those concerned had bought into it totally and were trying to do it for real.
"How do you do," said Doctor Robert Roberts, with the sort of languid and affected calm that would have had anyone - anyone who had watched an action-adventure spy-show holo-vid in their lives, anyway - heading for the nearest available equivalent of the tree line. "I'm pleased to meet you. I see you've met Pebbles and Bambam. You'll have to forgive them if they seem a little down, but we were expecting a bulk order from the Otto Sump Corporation. For reasons that shall quite possibly become evident, they practically live on synthetically-modified sucrose. They're a little disappointed that you weren't in fact the Umpty Candy man."
He gave a stiff little bow of the sort that should really have been accessorised by a heel-click and a monocle. "Doctor Robert Roberts at your service. Call me Doctor Bob."
A burst of electrical energy arced from an accumulator and struck Dredd before he had time to react - already caught wrong-footed by the apparent lunacy of Doctor Bob, he had no chance against the speed of light, which as the song says is the fastest speed there is.
Plasma-fire crackled around him. The pain was immense, as though every nerve in his body was being flash-fried. Beside him he heard Efil Drago San exclaim, "Oh, I say!" as the charge was partially earthed through the null-grav field of his paraplegic floater.
Sheer physical shock seemed to slow time to a crawl - the rabbit-in-the-headlights state where one can see the truck coming and knows, with an absolute and aching clarity, that the near future will contain the crunch and burst through flesh of bones shattered under motor wheels, but somehow cannot force the body to move fast enough to get out of the way.
The Tactical Arms guard detail were bringing up their MFG rifles - the big Multi-Function Guns that traded off the portability of a Judge's Lawgiver for sheer stopping power.
They never got the chance to stop anything. Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam launched themselves at the Tactical Arms men with inhuman speed, and killed the nearest in a fraction of a second - Nurse Pebbles simply by snapping the neck of her victim, Nurse Bubbles by literally punching stiffened fingers through a supposedly shatter-resistant visor and into the eyes inside.
"Metaneurological rewiring," said Doctor Bob a little smugly. "The cerebral motive-to-act is hooked directly to the c
ore libido-complex without cortical involvement. The subject tends to burn out fast, but they burn very bright indeed."
As he was speaking, Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam had grabbed the MFG rifles of their victims, and yanked them free of the chains that tethered them to their bodies. Then, simultaneously, they hurled the weapons at the remaining Tactical Arms men, who were still in the alarmed process of bringing their own MFG rifles round.
The force behind the stolen weapons was so strong, the aiming so precise, that they split through the Tactical Arms uniforms and speared their respective owners. The move had happened so fast that the security-chips of the guns themselves only now woke up to the fact that they had been taken by users with unauthorised biometrics - and triggered their self-detonation charges.
The Tactical Arms men went to pieces in a spray of burning polymer and meat. The force of the blast knocked a still immobilised Dredd off his feet, disrupting a nervous system and brain that were already in none too good shape.
The last thing Dredd heard before he lost consciousness was Efil Drago San, not a little irately, saying, "You took your damned showy time about it, didn't you? And you could have allowed me sufficient time to get free of the fellow before giving him a couple of hundred thousand volts where it does the most good."
FOURTEEN
"He has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation quite delightful."
- Sydney Smith
(On Macaulay)
If, when he was a child, you had asked Carlos Cica Mendez what he wanted to be, he would have instantly replied: "a Judge." Actually, this was not quite true. Carlos Cica Mendez would probably in fact have replied: "that's classified information, creep", and rabbit punched you in the kidneys. And if he had happened to be holding something sharp while doing so then that would be your bad luck.
He was as completely sociopathic as one can be and still function in human form: he simply had no concept of the effects of his actions in the world. At the age of ten, he had been arrested by the Judges after interrogating and summarily executing fifteen of his playmates.
Upon his capture, he had honestly expected to be congratulated upon being first-class Justice Department material and sent to the training complexes without delay. He was therefore puzzled hurt and angry when he was in fact dispatched to the kook kubes.
Those he had aspired to had spurned him completely; they had taken the one thing he coveted from him and obliterated it. The need for revenge was all-consuming.
Carlos Cica Mendez was an extremely bright child, and cunning. For more than fifteen years, with an almost inhuman sense of purpose, he said exactly the right things, and did exactly the right things, and made himself think exactly the right things until he was eventually released as cured.
This was during an abortive and short-lived experiment in leniency, which lasted a grand total of forty-eight hours, and Carlos Cica Mendez had just happened to fall between the cracks.
After his release he had gravitated to the criminal world, mostly due to a vague emotional feeling that criminals were actually allowed to kill people - and that they were especially allowed to kill Judges.
The Judges had rejected him. They were nothing more than scum. They deserved to be wiped out.
All in all, and what with the influence of the psycholeptic pulse, Carlos Cica Mendez was probably not the ideal choice for a group of kids in the Sector Three Hydroponic Arboretum, where they were playing Judges and Perps, to run up to and shout, "On your knees, Creep! Justice Department, Mega-City One!"
In the cell-chamber that had served so recently as a conference room between himself and Efil Drago San, Barnstable Wheems sat at the desk, in one of the pair of chairs provided, and put his head in his hands.
Since it was, basically, a charging-cell, the door could not be locked from the inside. All the same, Wheems had attempted to wedge the second chair against the door. It would do no good at all if anyone - especially any Judge with a grudge - took it into his or her head to come in, but all the same it was a symbolic gesture.
It occurred to him that for the vast majority of his life, everything he had ever tried to do, was to escape being called by idiots who didn't know any better - a loser. The impetus of his being had been, plain and simple, not to lose.
His work for the rich and, by their lights, powerful in Shangri La Towers had been, after all, nothing more or less than an attempt to stop the rich and powerful losing out. That was a different thing from winning. He had never been in the position of actually winning a thing.
Now, definitively, he had won. And wasn't the feeling just so good. It wasn't at all like a feeling of clinging to the ragged edge of suicide by the nails.
Barnstable Wheems noted, absently, that this was not a cell for those who had lost their reason and might become violent - as was evidenced by the fact that the chairs were not bolted to the floor and could be moved. Further evidence was presented by the fact that the desk had nice sharp corners.
Just the sort of corners you could imagine dragging the inside of your arms against, over and over again.
Only, who would be doing it? If he could believe what Efil Drago San had told him, would it be him doing it and would it mean anything at all?
Besides, there was one thing left that he had to do.
So much of his life and identity - what he could only assume, he supposed, to be his life and identity - was tied up in doing the job he had been contracted to do. Whether he had wanted to or not, whether he had realised the consequences or not, he had agreed to perform a certain function and he could not do anything other than perform it.
Barnstable Wheems picked up his attaché case - a symbol of a lawyer, from time immemorial, as much as his badge was a symbol for any Judge - and headed for the unlocked door, that could never be locked on his side, on his part, however much he might wish it.
The contents of the case had been given to him by a certain Mister Hand, in exchange for the removal of the mortal remains of the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton.
There would be, he knew, no impediment to going where he must, but he did not wish to go.
He had a delivery to make.
"Awake at last, my dear chap?" said Efil Drago San. "I was beginning, I confess, to fear for your general health and well-being."
"The drokk...?" Dredd looked around himself. He was lying on a mattress in an airy, pleasant and quite spacious room, for all the world indistinguishable from the sleeping quarters of some well-off citizen in any hab-block.
There was nothing cell-like about it, no sense of the kind of establishment the cell might be situated inside - until you realised that there were absolutely no sharp corners anywhere, and no arrangement whatsoever for the door to lock or unlock on the inside.
This was once again part of the principle, Dredd recalled, that if you're going to incarcerate those who have lost their reason, you might as well incarcerate them in surroundings that are more pleasant than otherwise, rather than drop them down a hole.
On the other hand, light and airy and pleasant, or not, that didn't change the basic fact of being locked in a cell with no way out.
Dredd was, he realised, still cuffed to Drago San. He used the leverage against the paraplegic floater to haul himself up off the mattress. His muscles and nerves crawled with a desiccated, blown-out pain. The pain was still there, but in a subtle sense it couldn't quite be felt. Grud alone knew what internal damage Doctor Bob's electrical blast had done. The only thing to do at the moment, though, was to push right through it.
"Do you mind, Dredd?" said Drago San as the floater wobbled precariously. "That nearly had me over. Such ingratitude - I gather that it was only my presence in the first place, earthing the charge, that prevented the electrical blast from killing you outright."
"Oh yeah?" said Dredd. "Seems to me that my death would be just what you wanted."
"There is that," said Drago San with a wolfish grin. "The plan was, when we thought you were dead, to
have the good Doctor Roberts - or Doctor Bob, as he seems to insist upon calling himself these days - cut me loose. Then we realised you were still alive. Doctor Bob was all for whipping out his scalpel for a spot of whittling, of course, but no, I said, let us wait." The grin became more wolfen, if that was possible. "That way you'll be awake and aware for it."
Dredd attempted to lunge for Drago San, haul the floater round and smack him down, but he was still too weak. He staggered. It was an effort even to stand upright.
"Now you don't think," said Drago San, "that I'd allow myself to be locked in here, alone with you, if there were a chance you could actually hurt me? The effects of the blast are more or less temporary, I gather - if you were to make it to some medical facility with nerve-regeneration capability in time - but you're currently as weak and debilitated as the proverbial kitten." Again the grin. "I doubt you'd be able to so much as hold your gun, far less fire it, even if you had it on you at this point."
Dredd had already noticed, in a secondary kind of way, that his Lawgiver, boot-knife and several other items of equipment were missing from him. This had been so obvious that it had not even been a factor in his thinking.
"I have to admit to a slight disappointment when your gun was removed by servo-manipulator," said Drago San. "The Psyko-Block personnel, I gather - those in a sufficiently modified state to do our Doctor Bob's bidding - are quite rare and valuable, at this point."
Gone, also, were the radio-units that kept Dredd in contact with Control. That was good in the sense that someone, at some point, would realise that contact was down for some other reason than a systems-glitch, and decide to check it out. It was bad on the other hand, of course, in that there was no way to contact control and drokking tell them to check it out.
