Fear the Darkness (20 page)

He stretched out his limbs.

The check-in desk. Gripped by a strange hysteria, the citizens waiting in the reception area suddenly explode into violence. They turn on each other with fists and kicks, tearing the plasteen seating apart to use as makeshift clubs. The injured fall screaming and bleeding to the ground. When the Check-In Judges venture from behind their bullet proof screen to quell the disturbance, some wade in with daysticks while others draw their Lawgivers. Shots are fired. More screams fill the air...

He stretched out his limbs.

Med-bay. As a Med-Judge loosens the restraints on Judge Brophy's arm to give him an injection, Brophy abruptly emerges from his catatonia and attacks her. Knocking the Med-Judge unconscious, Brophy grabs the las-scalpel from her belt and cuts himself free. As other med-staff rush to restrain him, Brophy jams the las-scalpel into a nearby oxygen tank. His last words, as the oxygen tank explodes in a bright white flash of fire are: "We are sinners. We must be judged!"

Uriel stretched out his limbs.

Tek-bay. Admin. Accounting. The comm-centre. All across the Sector House, the drama is repeated. Judges, citizens, perps, all awaken to the sudden realisation that the people around them are sinners. There is violence. Punishment. Retribution. And, deep in the darkness, Uriel senses the flow of souls towards him and smiles. It is all going splendidly.

He stretched out his limbs and took the Sector House for his own.

FOURTEEN

ANATOMIES OF DISASTER

"Code Ninety-Nine Red." The voice of Sector Control over her bike radio was shrill with panic. "Judges down. Reporting multiple incidents at Sector House 12. Holy Grud!" There was the sound of a shot, then a muffled scream and the noise of a struggle. Abruptly, Control's voice grew distant as though the controller had moved away from his station. "The drokker's gone crazy! Somebody restrain- Patterson? What do you think you're do- No! Don't-"

More shots. Then a squall of feedback, followed by the hiss of static as the voices of Sector Control and the sounds of whatever in hell was happening there were abruptly lost as the connection was broken. Riding her bike along the Brando skedway en route to the Sector House from Charles Whitman, Anderson tried switching through all the frequencies used for local Sector House comms. Dead air and static. It was the same on every channel. Whatever was going on at Sector House 12, it was clear the comm-centre was out of business.

"Judge Anderson to Central Control." Setting her bike radio to route its signal through an out-of-sector relay, Anderson switched across the channels to one reserved for direct communication with Justice Department's headquarters at the Grand Hall of Justice. "Reporting Judges down and a possible emergency situation at Sector House 12. The nature of the emergency is at this time unclear, but I am on the way to the scene to investigate. ETA: three minutes. Over."

"Acknowledged, Anderson," Central Control responded. "We received reports of a power outage and violent incidents at Sector House 12, then all comms went down and we lost contact. We are now re-routing street level comms through Sector House 11. Please advise when you have more information. Over."

"Will do, Control. Anderson out."

Hitting the accelerator and siren simultaneously, Anderson gunned her bike towards her destination. With comms down, she would only be able to find out what was going on at Sector House 12 once she reached it. All the same, as her bike hurtled past civilian vehicles that pulled aside to let her pass, she felt a growing sense of unease as she wondered what kind of situation she would face when she arrived.

Given what she had heard over her radio, it sounded like the entire Sector House had just gone crazy.

"Grud on a bike. Listen to them," Judge-Warder Cates said, his voice barely audible over the sound of perps hammering on the bars and walls of their holding pens. "I've never heard anything like it."

"Shut up, Cates," Chief Sykes said. "I hear you take the Lord's name in vain again, you're on a charge." Abruptly, Sykes found himself wondering why he had just said that - he had never been a particularly religious man. He shook his head. Guess the noise must be getting to me, he thought. It's like they say: there's no atheists in foxholes.

The lights had gone out ten minutes ago. Unlike the previous occasions when it had happened, after a few initial outbursts, there had been no screams from the holding-cubes. Instead, the perps in the overcrowded holding pens had begun to pound on the walls and bars around them, creating a deafening and unsettling avalanche of continuous noise. Having failed to quell the disturbance with the threat of dispensing extra cube-time to every prisoner, Sykes had ordered his men to assemble in full riot gear in the corridor and beat their shockprods against their riot shields in the hope of frightening the perps into submission. It had not worked - the cacophony coming from the pens drowned out their efforts. Moving the beam of his torch across the pens, Sykes saw hundreds of perps glaring at him from the darkness with fixed and glassy-eyed stares, their hands broken and bleeding from pounding their fists against the bars. And still the noise continued.

"It's like they're in some kind of trance." Cates shifted nervously beside him. "It's like they're waiting for something. Like they know something we don't."

"Quiet," Sykes grunted at him. "I'm not telling you again, Cat-" He became aware of another sound. This one more quiet, the low humming noise of electricity moving through the Sector House's power lines. "There, you hear that? The power's started coming on again. Crisis over. If the perps don't stop their noise when the lights come back on, we'll hit them with some stumm gas. See how they like that-"

He paused again, distracted by a series of metallic clicks coming from the locks on the doors to the holding pens. Then, incredibly, as Sykes and the other Judge-Warders watched it in mounting horror, the pen doors slid open as though of their own volition.

"The doors!" He heard another voice raised in panic. It was Murcheson this time. "The electronic locks are operating all by themselves!"

"Form up on me," Sykes shouted, fighting to make himself heard above the din as maddened perps poured through the opening doors and charged towards them. "Form up. Shockprods on full. Anything that moves is a target. Raise shields and forward!"

Adopting a wedge formation, the Judge-Warders advanced and counter-charged the onrushing perps. As the two groups met and tore into each other, things quickly became confused. Striking one man in the groin with his shockprod as he hit another in the face with his shield edge, Sykes found himself surrounded by chaos. He heard the sounds of men screaming and the
crack
of breaking bones, saw brief blue flashes flare in the darkness as his men used their shockprods. Then, it was as though everything was frozen as he heard someone calling his name, quiet and indistinct. A voice whispering in the darkness. Listening to it, Sykes felt a dark certainty take root inside him that become stronger by the second.

"Form up on me," he yelled. In the heat of the melee, his men had lost their formation and were in danger of being overwhelmed. "Form up. Lethal force permitted! Let's show this scum we mean business." He felt the certainty grow yet stronger and more compelling. He could not resist it. "Kill them," he screamed. "Kill the perps. Kill them all."

"They are sinners. They must be
judged
!"

It was only afterwards, picking himself up off the floor in the wake of the explosion, that it occurred to Whitby that the unfortunate incident earlier in the morning when he had brained Judge Brophy with his daystick had probably saved his life. If not for that, Whitby would not have had to endure hours of questioning before SJS Judge Hass had finally seen fit to release him. And, if not for Hass's questioning, Whitby would no doubt have been on time for his appointment in med-bay for a second speedheal session to finish treating his fractured shoulder. All of which, it now seemed, would have put him at ground zero when the whole of med-bay went up in flames.

As it was, he had just emerged from the elevator and was walking down the corridor toward med-bay when the explosion ripped it apart and threw him off his feet. Whitby stood up slowly and inspected himself for damage. Much to his surprise, he found he was none the worse for wear. Either somebody up there was looking out for him, or he was the luckiest drokker alive.

Stop standing around like some dumb drokking rubbernecker, he told himself. People are dying in there. You're a Judge, get moving. It's your duty to try and save them!

The sliding doors of med-bay had been blown away from their runners and smoke poured from inside into the corridor. Moving closer, Whitby felt a stifling wave of heat from the fires still burning inside. There must be oxygen tanks, surgical alcohol and other inflammables in there, he thought. The entire place is a powder keg. It could blow again at any time. For a moment Whitby stood uncertainly where he was. He thought of the victims who could still be alive inside, unconscious or too injured to move, helpless to escape the fire. He made a decision. Pulling down his helmet respirator and grabbing a fire extinguisher from among the debris lying on the floor, he steeled himself and moved forward into the heat, the smoke blinding as it closed around him like a shroud.

That's it, he thought as he stumbled onwards through the smoke. If I survive this, the first thing I'm doing is buying myself a Megalot ticket.

If I get out of this mess alive, you've got to figure I'm on such a lucky streak I might just end up winning the Billion Cred Bonanza.

A conspiracy of rogue Judges, a Sov-Block plot, mass hysteria, some kind of pre-emptive strike by an unknown crime group; as Judge Hass hurried up the emergency stairwell towards the Sector Command offices on the twentieth floor of the Sector House, he found his mind filled with a mass of conflicting theories to explain the bedlam that had erupted all around him. Chaos reigned in Sector House 12. First, the lights had gone out, then, Judges everywhere had turned on each other in a sudden mad orgy of bloodletting. Men and women who had served side-by-side together on the mean streets of the Big Meg for years had abruptly been overcome by a strange communal psychosis, raving about sin and damnation as they attacked former friends and comrades with Lawgivers, daysticks, boot knives and even their bare hands.

Hearing the distant sounds of shots and screams, Hass emerged from his office to investigate the source of the disturbance, only to find himself the victim of an attempted murderous assault by a Street Judge. Forced to shoot the man and at first unsure whether the cabal of rogue Judges he suspected to be at work in Sector 12 had decided to move against him, Hass had looked about him and seen a scene from hell. He saw a Street Judge screaming on the ground, hands raised weakly to ward off the blows from the daysticks of two fellow Judges, while beside them a handcuffed perp stamped repeatedly at the fallen Judge's torso.

Another Judge lay dead nearby, while the man who had apparently killed him scrawled the word
Judged
on the wall beside him in the victim's blood. He saw a gang of civilian auxiliaries hold a Judge down while a crazed Tek-Judge tore the helmet from the man's head and took his boot knife to his face. It was the same all across the Sector House. The normal divisions between Judge and perp, perp and citizen, citizen and Judge had been wiped away. Instead, the Sector House seemed divided into two separate camps: those who were affected by the psychosis and those who were not. As far as Hass could see, the unaffected Judges were in the majority, but it made little difference. Caught by surprise at the ferocity of their insane colleagues' unexpected descent into violence, the sane Judges were in danger of being overwhelmed.

I have to get to the comm terminal, Hass thought, his breathing laboured as he stumbled up another flight of stairs. Finding the elevators out of order, he climbed nineteen storeys via the emergency stairwell, exhausted. I have to call this in to SJS and tell them the entire Sector House has gone crazy. They'll send reinforcements.

He had already tried to contact SJS via his helmet radio and the comm-link on his own desk, to no avail. Finding every channel full of empty static, Hass realised that something must have knocked out the comms-array and broadcast relays on top of the Sector House roof. He headed towards the twentieth floor and Sector Chief Franklin's office to try to use the comm terminal there - by virtue of his position, Franklin's terminal was equipped with a hard line direct to Justice Department in case of emergencies.

It had not been an easy journey. Not only had Hass been forced to face the exhausting climb up twenty flights of stairs, but he had been attacked twice on the way - once by a shrieking Judge-auxiliary who had attempted to decapitate him with a fire-axe, and once by a screaming Acc-Judge from Accounts Division who had tried to club him to death with a swivel-chair. Abruptly, Hass found himself feeling a twinge of guilt at the fact that he had been forced to kill them both, but they'd left him no choice.

Whatever insanity had descended on the Sector House, it turned its victims into glassy-eyed madmen consumed by a homicidal rage against those they saw as sinners. There was no reasoning with them. It had been a matter of survival which had left him with no other option than to kill them or be killed himself. It was a tragedy, but once order had been restored to the Sector House, he was sure his superiors at SJS would concur that they had been righteous shootings. Granted, procedure said he should have called out a warning to them to surrender before he fired, but in the heat of the moment there had been no time for such niceties. Anyway, they had all been crazy; it was not as though they would have listened. Hass had been forced to act in defence of his life. No matter what had happened after that, his conscience was not troubled.

Level twenty
. Reaching the end of another flight of stairs, Hass saw the number stencilled in large letters on the wall beside the access door and breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, he had reached his destination.