Psykogeddon (10 page)

The Strat-Bat banked in the air, firing its retros, and settled on its landing gear. A gust of Brit-Cit air plumed from the exchange vents as the oxy-exchange systems equalised the pressure differential from the flight across the Black Atlantic.

Then the Strat-Bat simply sat there.

"They're taking their own good time about it," Hershey said after a while.

"It's a power play," said Dredd. "The drokkers are making it clear that they're at no one's beck and call. That's what I'd do."

At length, an access ramp racked itself down from a side hatch. A figure emerged and strolled across to Dredd and Hershey, the collar of its synthi-leather jacket turned up against the rain.

As the figure grew closer, it became distinguishable as female, and Chief Judge Hershey recognised her: a strong-featured woman in her early thirties, of predominantly Afro-Caribbean/Chinese descent. Despite herself, Hershey found it a little incongruous - what with all the received-wisdom clichés of Brit-Cit being inhabited by pasty-faced, chinless, inbred Lords and Ladies, it was easy to forget that Brit-Cit was every bit as much of a mixed culture as the Mega-City ever was, if not more so.

"Wotcha," the woman said. "Detective Judge Treasure Steel, Brit-Cit Criminal Interrogations Division, Flying Squad, at your service."

"I know," said Chief Judge Hershey. "We've met before."

Indeed they had. Over a decade before, Chief Judge Hershey had been a Street Judge and Treasure Steel, a Brit-Cit Rookie, indentured to a certain Detective Judge Armitage for a year-long period of observation and evaluation, which she could have failed at a moment's notice at any time. Hershey had been ordered to Brit-Cit to locate and contain a rogue biological organism, which had originated in the Big Meg.

The Rookie Treasure Steel - as she was then known - had been detailed to act merely as liaison, little more than a glorified chauffeur, ferrying Hershey around as the mission required.

In fact, showing remarkable resource and acuity of mind even then, Steel had conducted an investigation into the matter on her own, and discovered that the "rogue" organism was in fact an engineered and prototypical bio-weapon. And that it had been engineered, at least in part, with Mega-City Justice Department funding.

In short, it had not exactly been the Justice Department of Mega-City One's finest hour.

"I remember," said Detective Judge Treasure Steel, as she was now known. "I told you to give me a call if you ever needed another hand."

As a part of their final confrontation with the rogue bio-weapon, now mutated into a ganglionic mass of borrowed meat and ravenous mouths, Hershey had been incapacitated, leaving matters entirely in the hands of Treasure Steel.

This was to some degree apposite, since Treasure Steel had used one of those hands to clutch a live grenade, jammed the resulting fist into the bio-organism's nearest maw, then used the other hand to slice off the first with a laser-cutter so as to fling herself away in time to avoid being blown to pieces in the resulting explosion.

"The guys are insisting you get us some kind of water-proof umbilical..." Detective Judge Treasure Steel began, jerking a thumb in the direction of the Strat-Bat.

Then she realised that Dredd was looking her with an expression (so far as his expression could be read behind his visor) of flat and furious repugnance. What was visible of his nostrils was flared with disgust.

"What?" she said. "I'm not exactly fresh from the flight out, but you telling me I'm reeking or something?"

"That jacket," said Dredd. "That isn't synthi-leather. That's genuine leather. Possession of unlicensed animal products is a violation carrying a mandatory sentence of..."

"You haven't changed, have you, Dredd?" said Detective Judge Treasure Steel. "You probably don't remember me, but I remember you. I was there when you came over and met with my boss. On that thing which ended up involving this Drago San guy, as it happens. Armitage sends his love, by the way, and regrets he's too busy heading up the CID and kicking at the pricks to get away. That's
pricks
in the sense of what you get from the end of a sword, by the way. I know how you Mega-City types get about language."

Treasure Steel grinned maliciously. "Actually, what he said was, in the note that came down from his office, 'Watch yourself over there, Steel. Those Mega-City tight-arses are just the sort of extremist gits who shoot you in the kneecaps for
breathing
in a funny way'. I've got it here, somewhere, if you want a look."

It took all the diplomatic fibre of Dredd's being - admittedly, a slender thread at the best of times - not to actively snarl. That particular strain of Mega-City urban myth, it seemed, would never go away, and seemed to be constantly rearing up its head to bite him.

"I have never," he said, "shot a man in the kneecaps, other than in the circumstances of hot pursuit, to prevent a perp from getting away. You'd prefer I shot them in the head, Steel?"

"Yeah, whatever," said Detective Judge Treasure Steel dismissively. "Let's stick to the point, yeah? This jacket, here, has never been on an animal of any kind - but what's the point of molecular engineering bio-vats if they don't produce the real thing, with all the proper look and feel and smell?"

Detective Judge Treasure Steel thoughtfully fingered the absolutely genuine leather that had never seen the back of an animal. "You're gonna have to get used to the fact that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily do things the same way as you Mega-City types, Dredd. You can take this jacket off me and burn it, but I warn you now, you'll be in for a one hell of a fight it you do. It has sentimental value. It was given to me by my wife."

The Brit-Cit Detective Judge indicated the waiting Strat-Bat again. "Anyhow, back to the main point. The guys want some sort of waterproof umbilical up against the hatch. They're not coming out in all this rain."

"Am I to understand that the Chief Judges of a major city-state are afraid of getting their feet wet?" growled Dredd. "That isn't a reasonable demand. That's sheer arrogance. The Brit-Cit Justice Department is trying to push us around, and have the eyes of the world see it pushing us around. No deal."

"It's not a question of pushing anybody around." Detective Judge Treasure Steel seemed conciliatory now, if anything. "It's on strict medical grounds."

She stuck a hand into the leather jacket and pulled out a slim data-pad. "Take a look at these bio-readouts and you'll see what I mean."

Sela Defane thought of herself as one of the new breed of Psi-Judges, one of the Psi-Judges who was a direct product of and suited to the world as it was, here and now.

Where the old guard had sold out and bought into the system lock, stock and Lawgiver - those who were actually allowed to have a Lawgiver - and where the idealists like Cassandra Anderson had been nearly driven mad when they found out how the system in fact operated, this new breed of psi just simply knew the score.

In a city that compulsively exterminated mutants on sight, Sela knew, psionics were only alive in the first place because the Justice Department had a use for them. They were allowed to live because the mutation locked in their heads was useful and invisible to the naked eye.

Maybe one in four million of the Mega-City population carried the psionic anomaly to any real extent, and with numbers this low, the policy was to locate anyone who possessed the trait. Bludgeon them into the Justice Department mould by any means possible and lop off the bits that didn't fit.

Psi-Division so-called training involved a degree of neuro- and psychological and narco-conditioning that would make a modern-day Spanish Inquisition look sick, and stretched even the toughest cadets to the point where they might snap.

It was a misconception that Psi-Judges - the ones who made it through training more or less intact - were given more rope than other Justice Department personnel. In the main, they were allowed no more leeway than the most ultra-disciplined of the Street Judges. It was not surprising, therefore, that within those limits they periodically went berserk.

A high-profile, hologenic psi like Cassandra Anderson might be allowed to come and go as she wished, the lucky bitch, but Sela, like most of her kind, knew she walked on eggshells. She lived her life under constant supervision, the threat of prefrontal lobotomy or a lifetime of incarceration hanging over her head.

So, she dealt with it. She did the job, got away with what she could and tried to bottle up the anger that constantly gnawed at her inside.

In this, she was probably the worst person to be psychically examining the body of one Leon Gregor Sturlek.

"We need a cold reading," the med-tech said. "Quick as you can, yeah?"

He was obviously one of the low-level techs, unused in the usual course of events to entering the Psi-Division levels of the Hall of Justice and liaising with Psi-Judges themselves. Sela didn't even need to run a passive scan to know that he was creeped out by the simple fact of being here and thought of her as a drokking freak. He was masking his unease by trying to lord it over her and make her feel like she was nothing.

Not for the first time, Sela wished she was one of those Psi-Judges, male or female, who actually looked good in uniform. One of those who wore said uniform a strategic size too small and had a bit of trouble keeping the zipper all the way up - the female Psis who looked good in uniform, anyway. Those who could spend the day bending over a lot, and having the norm contingent of the supposedly celibate Justice Department personnel roster clenching their knuckles white, biting their lips and seriously doubting their vocation.

Then, at least, she could have come on as the Vampire Bitch-queen or something, and could have had a bit of malicious fun scaring the stomm out of the little jerk.

The problem was, Sela knew, she was too plump for that. And it was the sort of plumpness that sagged rather than the sort that, well, plumped.

Plus she had really bad teeth. And incredibly bad skin, besides.

"What am I supposed to be looking for?" she asked the tech.

"Something about how his mind was restructured structurally," the med-tech said. "According to the guy who knows a bit about this stuff.

He shrugged. "I don't know all the details. I offered to bring the body up because, you know, I was coming off shift anyway. I asked if you were free 'cause I think I saw you once in the communal canteen and remembered the name on your badge. You looked, you know, like someone it might be easy to talk to about stuff..."

Sela tuned the jerk out. There was nothing she found more annoying than norms who seemed to keep trying to talk about the minutiae of their lives; like they were trying to rub in all the advantages they were given just through being norms, the privileges that were forever denied to her.

Some Psi-Judges used little rituals when they did something active like a cold read, which was a process of plugging energy into a dead brain and re-firing the synapses so that an imprinted scan could be taken. It was like the way, she had read, that junkies and other drug users had made up whole stories about the things they used, and the way they used them, back in the old days.

They built up entire internal mythologies about how they were contacting Higher Beings, achieving a new spiritual state, accessing some superior human potential as if whatever substance they had taken was some kind of sacrament.

The reality then, as now, was that you were simply plugging new instructions into the workings of the memoplex inside the ganglionic sponge that rode the meat machine of your body.

Sela didn't go in for any of that stomm. She simply removed a gauntlet and put a finger on the body's head - the bare minimum necessary to make galvanistic contact - and went inside.

Interlude: Cerebral Break

In the ZipCo
^TM
corporate hab-block in Sector Nine, Employee Number RD0227-774R Juna Rae enters her sleep-capsule. A small woman, she is naturally inclined to plumpness, radiating a sense of solemn, childlike simplicity of which she is completely unaware.

It is not that she is unintelligent or uneducated. She has merely spent the entire twenty-seven years of her life within the corporate structure. It's safer in here than the Mega-City outside.

She has never gone hungry; she has never eaten too much. Every meal she has ever eaten has been nutritionally tailored to her precise physical requirements and served to an optimally devised schedule.

She has never suffered from more than minor illness. She has been inoculated from birth against all major diseases with which she is liable to come into contact, and the process is repeated every six months. She has a natural resistance to the hepatitis B vaccine so she will never, ever be allowed to come into contact with this particular virus.

Neuro-scanning shows that she is one of that small minority poised precisely between homo and heterosexuality, and who would require recreational facilities distinct from and more complex than the norms of either, were this not deemed far too resource-wasteful to supply. She has therefore been hormonally and subliminally conditioned from birth to tip the balance in a direction chosen more or less at random; in this case towards heterosexuality.