by Dave Stone
"I remember..." said Doctor Bob. "I remember not having any choice. I made the best of it. I made friends. I took people and cut their heads up and made them into friends. Put them all together and linked them up."
"That's right, Robert," said Drago San. If his sense of amiable suggestion had been slipping, it was now on the point of becoming a positive landslide. He spoke in the voice of one speaking to a child - one who was getting angry at that child's antics.
"You took some of the inmates," he continued, "hundreds of them, those with a sufficient degree of latent psionic talent. You rewired their minds, set up a resonant mesh that you can control - but you'll remember why you did that, Robert? Who you did it for? You set it up for me, Robert. A psionic bomb, set to blast this sector of the city, sending those with a propensity for it into mass and instantaneous psychosis and allowing me to slip away in the confusion."
"Made it nice," said the floating Doctor Bob. "Made it into my own little world."
"You made it for me, Robert," said Drago San. "It's not your world, you made it for me, and you're damned well going to do what I tell you with it!"
"I... don't think so." For a moment the floating Doctor Bob sounded uncertain.
And then, abruptly, as though some internal switch had been thrown, he became decisive.
"Do you know," he said resolutely, "I don't think I shall. Years, as I said, I spent building up this little sinecure, setting up the processes which will extend it, set the city outside to rights... and if you think I'll allow you to come traipsing in as if you own the place, telling me what to do, and bringing the attention of the Justice Department with you, then you've got another thing coming."
It might have been Dredd's imagination, but it seemed that the more Doctor Bob gained in confidence, the more his speech-patterns and tone echoed those of Efil Drago San himself.
"Now you listen here, you jumped-up little lunatic with a god complex," snapped Efin Drago San, now with genuine anger. "I made you; I can damn well break you. You'll do as you're told."
"Shan't," said the floating Doctor Bob with finality. "Who are you to tell me what to do? And if it's a matter of people breaking..."
Tendrils of energy arced from his splayed fingers, striking the still forms of Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam. The energy seemed to be of a different nature than that which had recently struck Dredd, energizing rather than debilitating in its effect.
The bodies of Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam shuddered, and then turned to advance on Drago San and Dredd. Their movements now were not of the lightning-quick variety they had been when they had killed the Tactical Arms guards. Now they held a stiff and lurching quality, as though in some manner zombified.
A sickly light pulsed from their eyes. Their progress seemed inexorable.
"Things not going exactly how you planned?" Dredd croaked to Efil Drago San.
"You might say that," said Drago San. For the first time there was an active note of worry in his voice. "You might say that indeed. I rather think, in the figurative sense at least, that now might be the time to run."
SIXTEEN
"Those who believe they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something."
- Aldous Huxley
Point Counterpoint
Judge Tregan didn't bother to hit the suspect hard. You didn't have to hit hard to break the nose. There was a wet crack and blood gushed down to stain the man's skinny chest.
"Groke," the suspect blubbered. His name was Gorban Wiggles and he was a low-grade street kif dealer. Hardly worth the effort. "Oo groke by dose!" Also a master of the drokking obvious.
"Settle down, creep." Tregan produced the envelope he had "found" behind the couch, which Wiggles had not technically been holding at the time he had made the bust. "Lot of stuff here. Looks like it isn't even with Intent to Deal. Could be with Intent to Supply."
The difference was in degree the effective variation being an exponential jump in cube-time.
Wiggles looked desperate. There were now two practical options open to him. Unfortunately for all concerned he chose the wrong one.
"Lissen," he said. "I can give you people. I can give you names and-"
"Hello?" Tregan rapped him sharply upside the head. "Try again."
Wiggles shrugged. "Usual?"
"Triple," said Judge Tregan. "Otherwise some people might find out you tried to give them up."
Tregan left the conapt and headed for the hab-block transit racks with his Lawmaster, keeping an eye out for potential threat. A lone Judge was an easy target for anyone who felt like having a crack, and Tregan was quite relieved that his shift was almost over.
In the Sector Seven Precinct House, he met up with Judge Martok, fell into step with him and strolled through corridors that were, quite by chance, more out of the way and less frequented than others. "No problems," he said. "The Widows and Orphans Fund is healthy as ever."
"I'm glad to hear it, Chris," Martok said. "Look for a little something extra when we spread it out."
Tregan nodded. Felis Martok had been his supervising Judge years back, when he had been nothing more than a green Cadet.
Martok had shown Tregan the ropes and kept an almost paternal eye on him thereafter, giving him a hand up after he himself had made full Judge. Every operation in the Precinct worth talking about went through Martok - at least, every operation that involved the unofficial lining of the utility-belt pouches of the Judges on the street.
He was a good friend to have in your corner, what with the SJS taking their orders from Chief Judge Hershey these days, and actually doing their proper jobs. The crackdowns on the worst of the corruption that notoriously infected the Precinct Houses of Mega-City One were getting worse, but through long years of experience Martok had managed not to put so much as a blip on the Special Judiciary sonar.
Martok stopped by a drinking fountain and drank. His eyes, however, flicked from one end of the aisle to the other, making sure that they were effectively alone.
"I hear that one of the new lambs in the precinct has gone astray," he said.
"Breen?" Tregan said. Breen was one of the new crop of Cadets who had yet to be told the score in all its slightly dodgy details. Details that were only dodgy if you didn't have your mind right, of course. "I know him. Friendly enough, just a bit too fond of being shocked to the knickers at the minor sins of the world. He'll wise up."
"I hear a rumour that he might be Covert Ops."
The Justice Department Covert Operations Squad was to the Wally Squad what the East-Meg crater was to a hole in the ground: same general deal, but seriously worse news. Whereas the SJS liked throwing its weight around, and thus were relatively easy to see coming and avoid, Covert Ops were capable of very slowly and deliberately sneaking up and planting a knife in your back.
"Really?" Tregan became thoughtful. "I don't know. I don't think so. I usually have a nose for these things."
"Unless they're running him on deep cover." Martok shrugged. "Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn't. I do know for a fact that he's tried to make a couple of appointments with Hall of Justice personnel, and he won't take a telling. I think Breen needs to be told a little bit harder, you get me?"
"How hard?" asked Tregan.
Judge Martok had a thoughtful look on his face, then pulled his Lawgiver from his boot and, very calmly, unloaded a hi-ex round into Tregan's stunned face.
"Oh, about as hard as that, I should think," he said.
In the Hall of Justice stratopad comms-centre, Detective Judge Treasure Steel sat at a console that could have probably contacted Mars and run the entire colony by remote control. She had come here after being informed, somewhat brusquely, in her opinion, that the Justice Department did not lay on such fripperies for visitors as simple payphone call-boxes.
"Missing you, babe," she was saying. "We should be heading home soon, though, once they get their collective finger out and finish prepping the strat-bat for launch. How's Callum?"
> "The little bastard's having one of his days," said Terry, in the kind of exasperatedly loving tone that allows mothers to get away with calling their offspring little bastards, on the basis that the words themselves are diametrically opposed to the true facts of the matter. "You know, if I didn't know it was impossible, I'd say some of your boss's bloody DNA got into the mix. He gets that look, you know what I mean, just before he starts throwing a tantrum."
Terry was, of course, Detective Judge Steel's wife, and Callum was their infant son, the production of whom had involved a "naturally-based" procedure currently popular with female Brit-Cit couples, in which the genetic coding of one mother was implanted in the gene-cleaned spermatozoa of a donor. The precise method of combining the resultant material with an egg was then a private matter between the couple concerned.
Rather than involve a stranger, the motile component had been provided by Treasure's superior officer in the New Old Bailey, Chief Detective Judge Armitage, who, as he had said, didn't have any other use for it.
"Speaking of the miserable old bugger," said Terry, "he's looking for you."
"What?" said Detective Judge Treasure Steel. "Why would he be looking for me? He knows where I am. The order to guard the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber came from his office."
"That's news to him, apparently," said Terry. "His precise words to me were 'what the - Bzzzt! - is that silly bitch doing in Mega-City One? Tell her to pull her head out of her arse and - Bzzzt! - call me!' Then the language got more extreme."
Some small part of Detective Judge Steel idly wondered why the Mega-City comms-console would leave the words bastard, bugger and so forth alone but buzz out the F-word. Admittedly, some words could be considered worse than others, if you were of a mind to make the distinction, but to make the distinction seemed to go against the Mega-City Justice Department's all-or-nothing attitude and its sledgehammer way of going about things.
The far larger part of her, however, recognised the above as merely the displacement-activity of one who is suddenly very worried indeed, and can't quite bring oneself to think about why in one go.
"Listen, Terry," she said. "I'm gonna have to go. There's another call I really have to make."
"He's toying with us," said Efil Drago San as his floater powered down a corridor, dragging Dredd behind it, sec-system plasma bolts from an ejector in the ceiling hitting the floor less than a metre behind them. "This is all low-yield stuff, if I'm any Judge - with a small capitalisation, naturally. If he wanted to kill us outright, he'd have set the countermeasures to full lethality."
"That's good to know," Dredd managed, the effort of speaking costing him dearly.
The various forces involved in making it back to the elevator in time to evade the zombie-like clutches of Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam, riding it down until the sec-system cut its power, and then barrelling off through the Psyko-Block corridors had battered his already damaged body to hell and back. It was almost a relief that his nervous system was shot so he couldn't feel how bad it was.
"That's not going to last," Drago San continued. "Sooner or later he'll get tired of it, and come after us, and simply kill us. I know I would. What's needed, here, I feel, is some modicum of an edge to... aha! This'll do."
The floater pulled up to a stop before a door marked "MED STATION", Dredd smacking face-first into it from the momentum.
"Let's just see if our Robert hasn't remembered to rescind my biometric clearances," said Drago San, trying the door's control panel.
It had occurred to Dredd more than once to wonder just what had happened to the vast majority of the Psyko-Block population during the months and years that Doctor Bob had been building up his private little world.
The short answer was that the lives and work of the inmates and personnel - those inmates and personnel not intimately involved with rewiring the minds of latent psionics into one big mind-bomb, in any case - had simply carried on as normal. The micro-societal hierarchies of med-techs and their patients were in place and self-sustaining, after all, and there was no particular reason to know or care that the man at the top was a complete homicidal loon.
In this respect, of course, the Mega-City Psyko-Block had the same kind of relationship with Doctor Bob as corporate employees throughout history have had to their CEOs, or countries with their ostensibly elected presidents: happily splashing about in the pond, completely oblivious to the bloated, poisoned toad squatting in the centre.
The Med Station was simply a first aid point for dealing with any physical injury the Psyko-Block inmates might cause, either to those who were in the business of treating them or to themselves. It was currently occupied by a Med-Division tech and an orderly - one in a paramedic uniform reminiscent of a Judge's, though with medical-based insignia and a hypo-gun instead of a Lawgiver, the other in a white if somewhat grubby smock.
"What's happening?" the med-tech asked, automatically and a little slow on the uptake. "The level's locked down, there's no contact with Justice Department control and... uh..."
The med-tech trailed off as he belatedly realised the nature of these new arrivals and the state they were in. He had no time to react any further, because Efil Drago San reached out a hand - the hand on the arm not currently cuffed to Dredd - grabbed his face, and smacked his head into that of the orderly. There was a crunch of bone from a blow so powerful as to be instantly, and mutually, lethal.
"I do so abhor getting my hands dirty," said Drago San conversationally. "Ah, well, needs must, I suppose."
"You didn't have to do that," Dredd croaked. "There was no reason to drokking kill them."
"Oh, can that really be so?" said Drago San, in utterly mortified tones. "Have I really sunk so low as to take human life without cause? Why, it's as if I were a mass-murderer whose every impulse is to kill if I can possibly get away with it."
All the while he was busily scanning the medical equipment on offer in the Med Station.
"Stasis and anaesthesia field emitters," he said, as though compiling a small mental list. "Dermal-regeneration unit for those minor and unavoidable little scrapes. Micropore and microsurgical sutures and - ah, yes, what do we have here? A good heavy-duty laser saw. Just the very ticket!"
In addition to these items was a wheeled gurney suitable for transporting the physically injured. With his massive upper body strength, Drago San hauled Dredd off his feet and heaved him onto the gurney.
Dredd gasped for breath and attempted to struggle, but his debilitations were such that it was all he could do to flop weakly.
"The time has come," said Efil Drago San, "to do something that I've been putting off. Believe me, Dredd, hard though it might be, this is something I really do not wish to do. But the fact is, amusing as your company might be in your present state, you've become something of an unsupportable dead weight.
"Now just you lie back. You might feel a bit of a brief sting."
Detective Judge Treasure Steel kicked open the door of the strato-platform lounge, barrelled through, slipped on blood to pitch back and landed on her backside. Fortunately, though blood-soaked, the carpeting was lush and thick: a rare Justice Department consideration for visiting dignitaries.
The lounge was awash with blood, other fluids and certain... items that were definitely not fluid at all. There were various items of human anatomy, but they were not connected to each other or, indeed, anything much at all.
In fact, the only relatively intact human item was cowering in a corner and whimpering to itself. Treasure Steel recognised him: Barnstable Wheems.
His left arm appeared to have been shattered. What with one thing and another, Detective Judge Treasure Steel was not in the best of moods, and not inclined to be kind, so she used that arm to drag him out of the corner. Wheems shrieked in agony, then stopped abruptly. The pain had crossed over the threshold where he could feel it in any human sense.
"Tell me what happened here," Treasure said curtly.
Wheems worked his
mouth. It was like trying to speak of some vision that was too huge and horrible to come out.
Steel slapped him. "Tell me!"
"They exploded!" Wheems cried. "There were these injections, and they took their injections, and then they looked at each other and they swelled up and they all exploded!"
Treasure Steel glanced around the room, noting the remains of hypo-guns strewn through the mess. Wheems was not, in fact, telling her anything she didn't already know.
She shook him. "I want to know what's going on," she said. "All of it. Tell me about it now."
It seemed that his initial hysterical outburst had somewhat calmed Wheems. Twitching with agony though he was, he twisted his head to look at her with what he probably thought of as guile, but merely came off as low cunning.
"I know my rights," he said. "I'm a lawyer. I know my rights. I surrender myself to your custody, and once I'm in your custody, you have to protect my life and you can't torture me."
Detective Judge Treasure Steel walked him over to the wall and smacked his face into it. Not hard enough to do much more damage than a broken nose, but hard enough to make it clear that she wasn't messing around.
"Wrong city-state," she said.
SEVENTEEN
"Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine - they are the life, the soul of reading! - take them out of this book, for instance - you might as well take the book along with them."
- Laurence Sterne
Tristram Shandy
Out in the city, the influences of the disruption increased: a single, random and apparently meaningless psychotic episode became two, then four, then eight, as incidences increased exponentially. Innocent victims were stabbed by crochet needles, pushed out of hab-block windows, flayed by cheese graters, choked by roller skates, maimed by tables, decapitated - in increments - by belt sanders, drowned in vats of malmsey, impaled by curling tongs, exsanguinated by trocars, bludgeoned by rolling pins, sliced by sharpened coins, defenestrated by pillows, choked by razor blades, buried in salt, scarred by acetic acid, dissolved by lye, trepanned by spoons, savaged by teeth and nails, skinned by filleting knives and murdered by any number of objects that were lying about the home... and more, and more, in any and every combination.
