Psykogeddon
Page 20
"I'm perfectly aware of that," said Drago San. "As the man whose name I'll momentarily recall says, when all you have left is the fall, it's how you fall that counts. I only said it to irritate you, and make your last seconds just that tiny bit worse."
From somewhere distant and below there came the muffled crump of an explosion. Alarms began to sound.
"Dear me," said Efil Drago San. "Whatever can be happening now?"
The cyborg guards, Dredd realised, had halted their advance. In unison, they turned and headed in the opposite direction. Later, it would be learnt that their modified command systems had been overridden. Dredd and Drago San were merely anomalous presences who must be detained - the fact that they would be unknowingly killed in the process was neither here nor there. Now the Psyko-Block was actively under attack, and the cyborgs were issued orders to meet that attack with lethal force.
Dredd did not have the chance to think about any of this at the time, however, because at this point something tore through his mind. It was like lightning, like the galvanistic discharge that had hit him so recently and all but disabled him. Only, here and now, it seemed to be coming from inside himself. From the centre of his head.
"Drokk!" He staggered, clapping gauntlets to his helmet. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to tear the helmet off, as though that would make it easier to plunge his hands into an unprotected head and tear the thing inside it out. He was only prevented from doing so by sheer force of habit: aside from entering the sleep-machines, and an extended period of time, some years before, spent wandering the Cursed Earth, he had never voluntarily taken his helmet off in his life.
"What?" said Drago San, with the surprised concern of one who was concerned for himself, but was actually feeling nothing. "What's happening?"
Dredd? The voice came like an explosion of static in his head. Can you hear me, Dredd? Is this getting through?
"Who is this?" Dredd snarled through gritted teeth. "What are you doing in my head?"
This is Karyn, Dredd, the voice said. Psi-Judge Karyn. A few years back, Psi-Judge Janus set a lock on you, set up a mental link. I'm coming in through what's, well, basically, the structured brain-damage that caused. It's probably hurting you like drokk, what with different psionic energy-levels and all. Sorry about that.
"Karyn!" Dredd exclaimed, the speed of direct mental transfer meaning that his exclamation of recognition had been going on even though Psi-Judge Karyn had continued talking for quite some while. "You took your drokking time getting here."
Yeah, well things have been getting pretty hairy out here, said Psi-Judge Karyn. And for a while we were looking in totally the wrong direction. Tell you about that later. For the moment, though, we're finally on the right track. We've breached the Psyko-Block perimeter and we're in the process of gaining partial control of the sec-system. That is, we would be if these drokking cyborgs would take a telling and lie down - die! Die, you motherdrokking piece of stomm! Why won't you - oh, you have.
"Are you okay, Karyn?" asked Dredd.
"Who are you talking to?" demanded Efil Drago San. "What is this? I demand to be told what's going on-"
"Can it, Drago San!" Dredd thundered, with such force as to momentarily shock Efil Drago San into silence. Then: "Are you okay?"
"Hardly the better for being spoken to in that tone," said Efil Drago San grumpily.
"Shut up! I was talking to Karyn!"
Yeah, I'm okay, came the voice of Karyn. We got Tactical Arms and Street Judge backup out the ass. It's still gonna take a while to get through, though. The signal causing the disturbances out in the Meg.
"Disturbances?" said Dredd. "How bad is it out there?"
Let's go into that later, yeah? said Karyn. There's disturbances. And the signal causing them is being relayed from the top of the Psyko-Block tower, but the actual source seems to be at a point maybe two floors under your current location. You're closer than we are. You wanna check it out?
"It's as good as done," said Dredd. "Can you give me an easy route?"
I can do you better than that, said Karyn. We have sufficient control of the sec-system to open up a couple of maintenance hatches. Get you there directly.
"Come on, Drago San." Dredd yanked on the cuffs tethering him to his prisoner. "We're moving."
"Well drokk me sideways with a pole and call me Felicity," said Efil Drago San cheerfully. "How perfectly lovely."
TWENTY
"And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you,
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
- T S Eliot
The Waste Land
If the private chambers of Doctor Bob had seemed a little excessive, in a holo-vid lair of a villainous mastermind sort of way, then the chamber to which Karyn had guided them via the maintenance ducts was something of a utilitarian disappointment. It was simply a large space, packed with racks containing rows and columns of translucent polyceramaline pods, from within each of which could be glimpsed a shadowy and wasted human form.
The pods were interconnected by tangles of electrical flex, data-cabling and tendrils of some fleshy substance that seemed disquietingly organic. The cables and tendrils clumped together to run up into the ceiling and thence, presumably, to the private chambers of Doctor Bob.
And that was all, in one sense - or rather, to one set of senses.
(A woman with vulpine eyes ranged an amorphous landscape of ponderously interflowing molten glass, her feet on fire, clutching the ragged bundle of a child to herself and sobbing. The face of the child was featureless, perfectly smooth.)
The chamber thrummed with psionic energy. Physical forms seemed to warp and shift, as though the mind was experiencing the vertigo of an endless mental freefall. Impossible images and thoughts sleeted through the cortex; words that no human ear would ever hear, no human mouth pronounce, burst in the vocal-centres. The buzzing and sparking of thought-fragments was overwhelming.
(A splintered, wooden parody of a dog flexed tendons seemingly wound from lengths of oiled rope, dragging its flaking, faded, painted bulk across the scraggy patches of a lawn burnt black and yellow. A wasted man, nearby, in striped blazer and a tattered straw boater, regarded the dog for a while, until it had dragged itself from sight, then turned his mad, black holes of eyes up to the sun.)
It was like being on the inside of a collective mind, a hive mind, and that collective was schizophrenically split.
"Little bit overstated, for my taste," said Efil Drago San. "All I asked the chap for was some means of creating confusion so I could make my escape." He sighed. "That's what one gets, I suppose, for leaving these busy little buggers to their own devices."
From what I can tell, you seem to be at the main source of the disruption, came the voice of Psi-Judge Karyn. Any way you can take it out?
"I can try." Dredd scanned the racks and pods, getting some idea of their number and coming up with a ballpark figure of maybe fifteen hundred. "You know better than me what's happening out there, Karyn. What sort of BC-factor are we talking about, here?"
BC-factor, of course, was the Justice Department technical shorthand for what kind of body count might be appropriate for any given situation, while still falling under the remit of Reasonable Necessary Force. In some situations it was better to think in shorthand technical terms.
Couldn't begin to tell you, said the voice of Psi-Judge Karyn. Last count put the deaths out in the Meg at tens of thousands and escalating.
Dredd came to a decision. "We have to try it."
He brought up the Screaming Meatgun and loosed a stream of slugs into the nearest rack of pods.
The slugs wavered in the air, as though hunting round themselves in puzzlement, and then dissipated.
"And that was supposed to help precisely how?" said Efil Drago San. "Our Doctor Robert already told you that the entire Psyko-Block was blanketed by a ne
rfing-field."
"And we were supposed to take his word for it without testing it out?" growled Dredd. "Oh well. It looks like we're gonna have to do it the old-fashioned way." He dropped the Screaming Meatgun with a wet and organic-sounding thump. "Go round these racks and start yanking leads."
"Now I really don't," said the voice of Doctor Bob, "think I can allow you to do that."
("We stumbled through the tunnels 'till we found the husk of Nail: desiccated and flaking and propped against the wall, crumbling into paper grey ash. The Strata Angel was there, a construct now, like gelid glass, shot with wormholes filled with lambent fluid. Shadowplay on translucent surfaces, macroforms splitting and flickering and pulsing. Somewhere somebody was shrieking, clawing at his face in the room of the broken machine...")
Shutters in the wall of the chamber racked back to reveal the forms of Doctor Bob together with Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam, standing in a loose kind of clinch reminiscent of the little tableau that had been presented to Dredd and Drago San on first entering Doctor Bob's private chambers. Though certain aspects might give rise, to a certain sort of mind, to dark suspicions as to precisely what it was Doctor Bob got up to in his off-moments.
Chief amongst these, perhaps, was the fact that Pebbles and Bambam were naked, their Nurses costumes having no doubt proved overly restrictive to any number of endeavours. The silver traceries of cybernetic implants were now clearly visible in their flesh.
"Can't have you throwing a monkey wrench into the works at this point," said Doctor Bob. "If the Justice Department has time to catch its breath and notice me, who knows what might happen?"
"Yeah, well I've got news for you," growled Dredd. "If you didn't know it anyway. Your perimeter's breached. Tactical Arms and Judges are coming for you as we speak."
"A small force, nothing more." Doctor Bob waved a negligent hand. "Easily dealt with in due time. For the moment, though, it's time to deal with you. And the good news is, my girls are fully charged-up. Ladies?"
The eyes of Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam blazed with light and they flung themselves forward with inhuman speed.
As the cyber-enhanced women flung themselves forward, their forms seemed to change. Something streamlined and demonic, their jaws elongating, their hands extending into talons.
Dredd had barely time to register this, because at that point Efil Drago San grabbed hold of him and held him in his powerful arms, in what for all the world was an embrace.
"What the drokk do you think you're playing at?" Dredd barked, trying to kick himself away.
"Hold still!" Drago San hissed, pinioning him. "We have to see if this... ah, yes, I see that it has. Work, that is, being the operative word. For the moment, anyway."
Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam had now stopped dead and were casting about themselves in feral puzzlement, like tracker dogs who had lost the scent.
"So glad that worked," said Efil Drago San smugly. "Since the masking-field that was supposed to protect me from Screaming Meatgun slugs was, as it were, redundant, I thought I'd modify the output to flummox cyborg sensors, should we happen to run into those chaps again. I'm glad to see that these charming young ladies here operate on the same general principles. Over to you, Dredd."
The first weapon to come to hand was the daystick Dredd had acquired back in the Med Station. Like any Judge from the streets, he was adept through long years of experience at cracking heads - but those had been predominantly human heads. There was no telling how far Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam might be enhanced in the armour-plated skull department.
Still, it was the only option going. He launched himself away from Drago San's bulk, flipping head over heels in mid-air - a vague creaking in his spine telling him it was probably about time he signed up for another round of rejuve-treatments - and felled the pair of enhanced women with a crack and follow-through and crack. Each blow was designed to transfer the maximum force possible through the skull and into whatever passed for the contents of the brainpan.
Amazingly, it seemed to have worked. Pebbles and Bambam went down as though poleaxed. For good measure, still hefting the daystick in his right hand, Dredd pulled the Med Station hypo-gun from his belt with his left and pumped a bunch of anaesthetic darts into the apparently unconscious bodies.
"Scratch one problem," he said.
It was only then, belatedly, that he realised what had been wrong with this scene. He looked down at the hand holding the hypo-gun to see the set of cuffs dangling from his wrist, the circlet that had up until recently been secured to Drago San quite definitively open.
He spun to see Drago San giving him a sardonic little wave.
"You appear to have things well enough in hand," Drago San said. "It seems to be a propitious time to reveal that I could have opened your handcuffs pretty much any time I liked. It's been useful to be under your custody and protection, but now, I feel, if I understand correctly from your incoherent mutterings, that the arrival of a number of other Judges is imminent. I think it's time I made my excuses and left."
"Hold it right there, Drago San!" Dredd snapped, training the hypo-gun on his former prisoner. "You make one move and-"
"And what, precisely, Dredd?" Drago San smirked. "Given my... well, given my bodily mass, and the number of darts I imagine are left in that hypo-gun, there's not a lot you can do. Nothing that would disable me enough to prevent me from doing what I need to do, in any event. I have, in fact, set my floater's self-repair routines in addition to disrupting the sensors of cybernetically-enhanced and comely young ladies. Allow me to demonstrate."
A bluish glow flared from beneath Drago San's paraplegic floater - and then, quite suddenly, he simply dropped down through a perfectly circular hole.
"Drokk!" Dredd pelted forward and looked down to see a perpendicular shaft, comprised of holes in successive Psyko-Block floors, the distant glimpse of what might or might not have been Efil Drago San dopplering away.
What the drokk was that? came the voice of Psi-Judge Karyn. Tracking shows something heading downwards, and it's going at a hell of a rate.
"That was Drago San," Dredd snarled. "He's making his break. Heading for the Undercity, probably. Do we have a Scumcatcher Detail down there?"
State of the city at the moment? said the voice of Karyn. I very much doubt it. We're over-extended here as it is.
"Oh dear me," said a voice from off to one side. "Do I take it that you've experienced a small inconvenience?"
For his part, what Dredd experienced at that point was a moment of complete and utter confusion. He simply could not, momentarily, work out who or what had spoken.
It would only be later that he had the time to wonder about this. The sudden escape of Efil Drago San was a distraction, to be sure, but there was just no way it could have made a trained Judge forget about the important matters and dangers at hand.
The nearest he could come to explaining it, when he had time to think about it, was that Doctor Robert Roberts (aka Doctor Bob) had some yoga-like ability to switch his essential self off and fade into the background. Become the equivalent of some dull little man, standing next to you somewhere crowded, who you only notice when you turn and walk right into him. Some form of protective colouration.
Whatever it was that he might have switched off, however, Doctor Bob had quite definitively switched it back on.
"This is becoming tiresome, Dredd," he said. "In a very real sense, the Psyko-Block is my home - and you've been blundering through it, making all kinds of noise and mess, and now you've brought along some equally noisy and destructive friends. I'm sick of having to think about you. I think it's time we ended it."
"Oh yeah?" Dredd hefted his daystick. "Bring it on, then. Let's end it, once and for all."
"So glad you agree," said Doctor Bob.
Energy-tendrils burst from the racked pods, striking Doctor Bob full in the chest. He lurched and staggered, flesh crawling and mutating on his bones, his body bulking at such a rate that his black polymer
coat burst apart in shreds.
"LET'S DO THIS THING," he said, his voice taking on the aspect of a booming, bestial roar. "LET'S DO IT NOW!"
TWENTY-ONE
"I wish I loved the human race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I'm introduced to one,
I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!"
- Sir Walter A Raleigh
In a place outside of space and time as we know it, creatures we have elected to call the Slaarg slopped and slunked around a Rift between the worlds.
It shall feed on the life there, and expand. It shall proliferate and eat that other world, converting it into that which we ourselves need to live. And then what they appear to call the sun...
The monstrous form of Doctor Bob stalked into the chamber, its feet pounding the floor with such weight as to make it tremble. The polyceramaline pods shook in their racks with a sound like a giant shaking a box of Christmas tree ornaments.
There was something oddly familiar about Doctor Bob's new form. It was a kind of cross between an ape and the idea of a troll or the like, but there was something specific and particular that rang a mental bell. It was a moment before Dredd was able to access that specific and particular bit of general knowledge.