Psykogeddon (27 page)

"I predict," she said cheerfully, hefting the big MFG rifle that had been issued and converted to her biometric pattern, "that given the sort of defences you say this place has, we're gonna get our arses roundly kicked."

"Not necessarily," said Karyn. "Why do you think I've bought my friends?"

Indeed, behind them was a large contingent of Street Judges tooled up for riot-control, and an even larger contingent of Tactical Arms troops. There might have been less of them than were being held in reserve, should the reactivation of Big Lie procedures prove to be necessary after all, but there was enough firepower assembled here to fight a small war.

"We're in," said Karyn, as the data-unit bleeped and the hatch slid back. "Let's do this thing. Go, go, go!"

In a Sector Five hydroponic rec-park, where force-accelerated algae was trained over frames in an ultimately doomed attempt to simulate plant life in an aesthetically pleasing manner, a member of the janitorial staff named Simon Deed came upon the hunched form of a derelict in the shadow of one of the tanks. Obviously, the man was taking advantage of the heat-bleedthrough from the biomass-reaction. It was somewhere warm to sleep.

Deed decided to leave him where he was. It was not as if the rec-park was crawling with visitors who might have their day spoilt, after all.

On second thoughts, Deed decided to go over and stick his finger in the derelict's eye. There was no emotion attached to the thought; he just felt vaguely like doing it.

Deed strolled closer, the smells of urine and old sweat emerging to blend with the all-pervasive reek of the tanks.

The derelict was maybe seventy years old, possibly older. He lay there like a puppet with the strings cut, brittle hair clinging to a crusted scalp, an open sore flowering on his left temple, gurgling snores issuing from the back of his throat.

The snores changed in pitch and tone as Deed knelt down and reached out a hand. They became a kind of rumbling growl, as though some bare thread of consciousness had sensed the proximity of threat, but could do no more than issue the mildest of warnings.

Bursting through the cornea and gelid mucus, the feel of the optic nerve against his fingertip was... Deed didn't know what it felt like, quite, save that it made him feel slightly weird inside. He increased the pressure, sunk his finger in up to the third joint. It was harder than he had imagined, like pushing his finger into a lump of raw meat, which was basically what it was, he supposed.

The derelict shuddered, mouth working. His teeth had rotted to the gum line.

"Muh," he said. "Muh. Muh. Muh..."

After a while the body stopped shaking and was still. Deed pulled his finger from the socket, reclaimed his discarded mop and bucket and peaceably returned to his janitorial duties.

Absently, from time to time, he licked at his finger. There seemed to be some thing on it. It was almost as if sticking his finger into the eye of the derelict had been real.

"Drokk!" Dredd exclaimed as heavy shutters came down behind them, blocking off their line of escape.

"Do you know," said Efil Drago San, "that really is a bad habit. You should look into it. I mean, it's not even as if it's proper swearing, after all. What the hell is all this
drokk
,
stomm
and
bastitch
nonsense about, anyway?"

"Judges do not swear," Dredd told him, somewhat stuffily. It wasn't one of the things that Judges usually talked about, but the alternative would have been to have Drago San continually pestering him on the matter. "Occasionally, however, we need the stress relief that swearing brings, so we use null-words that don't really mean anything."

"I understand completely," said Efil Drago San. "'Prick' shall never pass your lips, but you'd kill for a nice relaxing drokk."

There was a pause.

"You've been saving that up for a while now, haven't you?" said Dredd.

"Well, I thought I might as well spend it," said Efil Drago San. "While we still have time."

The relatively slow progress of the cyborgs had given Dredd ample time to try the makeshift weapons they had manufactured in or taken from the Med Station. An anaesthetic dart from a hypo-gun in the leg of one cyborg had it proscribing a single circle before its automatic processes overrode its vestigial biological components and it carried inexorably on.

The restraining field emitter, used to immobilise injured bodies for minor surgery on the fly, had proved to be of no use at all. The cyborgs simply and mechanically shrugged it off.

A somewhat disgusting-looking article reminiscent of a handgun, which Drago San had fabricated out of... spare parts when constructing the Screaming Meatgun, had actually proved useful. Dredd had been able to take down two of the cyborgs by way of compressed bone-shard bullets to the head. The problem was, it had limited ammunition, and that had soon been used up.

All he had left that might be of practical use was the daystick he had liberated from the body of the orderly.

"Well, it looks like this is the end, old friend," said Efil Drago San.

"What?" said Dredd. "I'm not your friend and never will be!"

"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.