Psykogeddon
Page 22
The all-high Dominator slumped in on itself dispiritedly. It absently flicked an immature Slaarg, who was speculatively chewing on the matter seeping from a Screaming Meatgun-eaten hole, away with a tentacle.
Treasure Steel walked off the Strat-Bat, onto the landing platform of the New Old Bailey - the central headquarters of the Brit-Cit Justice Department - fighting back a bad case of strat-lag and shouldering the holdall containing an almost excessively large amount of hi-tech Mega-City weaponry.
Once a Mega-City Justice Department gun had been keyed to someone's biometric signature, it apparently couldn't be reset for anybody else. She made a mental note to find a safe place somewhere to sequester them away - you never knew when a sudden gun might come in handy these days.
Especially now.
She'd spent the flight home on the Strat-Bat becoming increasingly worried, in fact. Whether her mission to Mega-City One had been legitimate or not, the fact remained that she had gone with five of the highest-ranking Judges in the Brit-Cit Justice Department, and was returning with them left behind and exploded over several walls.
She had simply not known what she might expect on arriving home.
What she certainly had not expected, on stepping out of the Strat-Bat, was to be greeted by a crowd of Brit-Cit Judges cheering her and a band playing.
Admittedly, the band was comprised of three of the younger CID-Judges, who got together in the New Old Bailey Level Nine refectory after-shift, and were forever trying to revive skiffle, despite all the howls of protest from people who wanted them to stop - but they were here now, and playing, and making a relatively decent fist of "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow".
Terry was there, also, which was surprising in itself - as an installation artist, who used every scrap of media coverage that her installations bought to denounce the Justice Department as an abomination subjugating and suppressing the common man and/or woman, she was about as far from being a Judge, and welcome in the New Old Bailey, as a person could get.
At least, welcome as a guest of any kind, rather than banged up in the cells on some trumped-up charge after participating in a Civil Rights march.
For a dizzying moment, Treasure wondered if she had died or something, and this was one of those visions of all the people you knew acting weird that you were supposed to get.
The reality of the situation, though, was instantly reconfirmed when she was hit by her son, Callum, in that ballistic way that three-year-olds - who are supposed to be barely able to toddle - slam into you at chest-height like they've bounced off a trampoline.
"Mama Tesher!" he shouted. "Whaaya bringme?"
Detective Judge Treasure Steel very carefully held her bag full of Mega-City weapons keyed to her biometric signature away from her three year-old son's flailing hands.
There's an experience that Mega-City Judges are never gonna have, she thought.
She wondered what Callum was doing up this late, before realising that was the strat-lag talking. It was making her forget that, until he was enrolled in some school or other, and thus needed a set routine, Callum could stay up any time he liked.
Terry rescued her by grabbing Callum with one hand, lifting him up by his overalls like a cat is lifted by the scruff of its neck, and holding him out of the way while she grabbed Treasure with the other and planted the sort of kiss on her that makes time stop for a while.
"God, but I'm proud of you," she said when time started again. "What is it about you? You're supposed to be all Establishment, but you just go around doing this thing of screwing them over."
"What?" Treasure had heard what her wife had said; she just didn't know what she meant.
"She means how you went to Mega-City One and ended up telling them how to do their job," said her boss, Chief Detective Judge Armitage, who was standing off to one side, hands thrust into the pockets of the crumpled raincoat he habitually wore. He wasn't exactly smiling, but he was coming as close to it as he ever did. "And also how you single-handedly got rid of what was basically the Brit-Cit Justice Department's single biggest embarrassment."
"What, the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber?" said Treasure. "That wasn't me, that was Drago San."
"Yeah, well." Armitage glanced sardonically at the assembled Brit-Cit Judges, several of whom were giving Treasure the thumbs-up. "The rumour-mill word is saying that it was down to you. I wouldn't disabuse them if I were you."
A thousand kilometres southwest of Honolulu, in international waters, lies Leviathan - five cubic kilometres of floating platform, originally a Japanese landfill that was detached and set adrift during the Rad Wars, when a misdirected cobalt bomb triggered the eruption of Mount Fuji.
Leviathan has grown over the years, feeding on the seaborne detritus of the Rad and any number of other wars. It has absorbed oil rigs and shipwrecks, implosively decompressed submarines and the tsunami-hit remains of kelp-processing installations.
Banks of salvaged heavy-duty turbines allow it to move more or less at will - provided it restricts its moments to international waters. It subscribes a random course, for the most part, dishes on its patchwork superstructure tracking bootstrap-launched geostationary comsats through the crystal-clear waters of the Pacific - crystal clear because the Pacific Ocean has been thoroughly sterilised. It's as dead these days as the Black Atlantic... just a little bit easier to wash off.
Over four hundred thousand people live on Leviathan - the flotsam and jetsam of the world. There is a massive clash of cultures, of vestigial religions, of ideologies. There is no apartheid, so far as that term applies to the city-states of the world - there is no bar or restriction upon mutants, or alien-crossbreeds, or what the city-states of the world regard as bio-engineered freaks. The simple fact of being here and being alive means you have the right to survive here - however long you may manage to survive.
Leviathan falls under no jurisdiction and asks for none, operating as a clearing house for the various black economies that run under the skin of the world and stretch their tendrils into even the most so-called civilised of city-states. It has become the testing ground for technological and biological experiments outlawed in even the most draconian of city-states, who tend to believe that they can subject their citizens to almost anything.
Leviathan appears on no official maps, remaining fiercely independent of any external influence. The basic nature of its tactical position, remaining as it does, in relative terms, equidistant to four separate continents, means than any attempt to annex it would tip the international balance of power irrevocably. Besides, Leviathan has any number of salvaged missiles and similar weapons, pointed at any of the city-states which might attempt to cause trouble, and some of them may even still work.
Just the sort of place, thought Efil Drago San, to hole up for a while and catch his bearings.
The plain fact was that, since his escape from the Psyko-Block, Drago San had found himself at something of a loose end. So much of his mind, he realised, had been taken up with plotting his escape, and orchestrating events so as to make it possible, that he had quite forgotten to plan what he was going to do once he actually escaped.
Using the matter-disruptors built into his paraplegic floater to tunnel his way through several layers of Psyko-Block had depleted his power-reserves quite a bit, so by the time he had broken through into the Undercity, he had barely enough left to make a controlled landing on a dank and slimy pile of rubble. He had sat there, in the dark, while the floater replenished its power cells, wondering whether the Undercity scavengers or the Justice Department patrols would find him first.
In the event, he had been found by what he had come to think of as Morlocks - the engineered, half-human minions that he himself had introduced into the Mega-City One Underlevels when he had been running a small enterprise known as the Killing Zone.
Even though it had been several years, these Morlocks had seemed to recognise him - revere him, even. They had dragged him back to their makeshift encampment, where he had participated in a number of their quite repulsive rituals in the part of what appeared to be a minor deity. He'd had no idea if it was the sort of part that ended up being sacrificed, because as soon as he had sufficient power, he'd called down one of the self-contained flier-pods that he'd installed on the Undercity roof in case of eventualities just such as this.
The Morlocks had seemed quite sad to seem him go. Then again, that might have simply been due to the demolition charges he'd left behind in their encampment when he went.
In any case, the brief Undercity sojourn had given him time to contemplate his options, if not actively brood upon them. He could escape off to the stars again, but his short time out in space had left him heartily sick of it. That might have seemed a little odd, he supposed, given his Puerto Luminan origins, but the point was that Puerto Lumina had been an entirely human colony - however inhuman the conditions had become. There simply weren't enough people, human people, out there in space itself to keep him amused. And amusing himself with alien life forms just hadn't been the same.
Showing so much as his face in Brit-Cit wasn't even an option, let alone attempting to resume his previous position of power. Well, there were other cities. The main thing had been to simply get out of Mega-City One.
After a somewhat tortuous route that had involved a sub-orbital commercial jump-canister, a stolen flier and a gun smuggler's hovercraft, Drago San had arrived on Leviathan, and had gained entrance by the time-honoured method of defenestrating one of the Clan guardsmen, posted on one of the more peripheral pontoons, and relieving him of his weapons and identification. The decided advantage of a paraplegic floater, when set to simply serve as a replacement for legs, was that it was utterly silent.
Time to keep his head down for the moment, Drago San decided, memorising the body's Clan-markings for the time when it might be appropriate to assume them himself. Take the time to learn how things work around these parts, and then, who knew? There might just be a first-strike missile-system here on Leviathan with his name on it.
Dredd was back on the street, shaking down his senses. His vision was coming in just that little bit too sharp and bright. He had no idea if this was the result of the nerve-regeneration Med-Division had given him, or because of his new-model cybernetic eyes. There had been several generations of upgrades, apparently, since the last time he'd had them replaced.
Sector Nine seemed subdued in the aftermath of the Psyko-Block's psycholeptic pulse. It wasn't that there were less crazies around, Dredd knew, because the number that had been pulled down by Judges when they had flipped out had hardly made a dent.
The secondary effect of the influence that had turned people, briefly, into homicidal maniacs was to leave them with the unconscious and fundamental conviction that their acts, while under the influence, had in some sense not been real. Even confronted with the hard - or, rather, in most cases, the soft and sliced up - evidence of the bodies, they had been unable to comprehend that it mattered in any real sense. It was like a blind spot in their heads.
There were killers out there now who had killed and then just simply got on with their lives without giving it a second thought. Too many to catch by normal means. There were plans, apparently, to issue a questionnaire with one of the questions reading, "Did you brutally murder someone last week?" - in the hope that people would tick the yes-box without thinking or caring about it. What the drokk, it might work.
Dredd gunned his Lawmaster down a slipway and through a junction, noticing that all the traffic he encountered was being actively and somewhat pointedly on its best behaviour. Even though the whole point of a Judge's uniform was to signify the job rather the man, there was something about him that citizens recognised and responded to. Said response, basically, was that of having the fear of Grud forcibly inserted.
People didn't exactly fall over themselves to tell Dredd jokes, but he seemed to recall one about how the Queen of Brit-Cit - or Little Britain, or whatever it had been called when they'd had a Queen - thought the world smelled of fresh paint, because ten yards ahead of her there was always a man with a fresh pot and a brush.
It was gratifying in one sense, he supposed, to see people showing such respect for the Law around him, but on occasion it could get tedious. Every person in the world was committing a crime, of course, however minor, if you decided to make it your business to go after them. But go down that route too far and you would end up thinking in terms of that drokking story about jaywalkers and kneecaps.
"Anything for me, Control?" he said into his comms pickup. "You know, anything you think might be important enough for a Judge of my, quote, calibre, unquote?"
Rockets on the subject of leaving him out of the action, on the basis that he was too important, had been duly delivered. This made the fact that Control wasn't currently streaming him crime-data a little bit worrying.
"We got stuff," said the voice of Control. "We're just holding you back a little for when the thing starts."
"Thing?" said Dredd. "What thing?"
"Hey, you okay, Dredd?" the voice of Control asked. "Have you forgotten what day it is? It's Swami Whompa Day."
"Drokk!" What with one thing and another over the previous days, this had gone completely out of his head. Maybe it really was time to book in for another rejuve.
The Thirty-seventh Day Whompatarian Adventists were one of those religious sects based on a creed that had originated on Earth, been taken up by aliens and then imported back to Earth again. They were one of the few religious sects whose observances were banned under Mega-City Law - something that ordinarily only happened with activities like ritual human sacrifice.
The Thirty-seventh Day Whompatarian Adventists weren't quite that bad, but their celebrations on the day of their leader Swami Whompa's birth had been banned in response to the city-wide chaos it tended to cause.
The details would be too long and tortuous to go into in an account such as this, but the simple upshot was that, due to the Chinese-whispering nature of their creed, Thirty-seventh Day Whompatarian Adventists celebrated their holy day by sacrificing livestock, which had been genetically engineered and bred for that especial purpose.
Large livestock. By catapult.
From the tops of hab-blocks.
At the precise moment that Dredd was recalling all this, the time-readout in his helmet incremented noon, and from above came the approaching and terrified lowing of cattle.
The first Jersey cow hit a hov-cab, fla
ttening its canopy and sending it skewing into the side of a tanker truck. From then on, things only got worse.
As the world went to hell around him, though, and he gunned the Lawmaster forward on overdrive, Dredd found that he had to control what might have been a relieved sigh. There had been a few days of complications, of having to deal with subterfuge and vested interests of all kinds; of having to cope with any number of different factions, each and every one of them with their own agenda.
It was good, in a sense, to have a clean and simple job in front of you.
A return to sane reality.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dave Stone studied Fine Art and Visual Communication. After a spell in advertising, he found that most of his energies were being transferred to the written word. Scripting for computer games and comics led to writing full-length novels for such well-known titles as Judge Dredd and Doctor Who - work which he continues to this day. His experiment in self-publishing an original novel, The Mary-Sue Extrusion, can be obtained from: www.cafeshops.com/extrusion.
Extract
Other Titles
Indicia
Title Page
Prologue
Act I: The Setup
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Interlude: Cerebral Break
Act II: Trial and Error
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Act III: Walking Through Walls
Chapter 12
Chapter 13