Psykogeddon (30 page)
Funnily enough, after its latest round of maintenance, the sleep machine dedicated to the exclusive use of Chief Judge Hershey now provided her with the best and most relaxing sleep she'd had in as long as she could remember. The banning - and scrupulous enforcement of that ban - of any SJS-Judge from within a hundred metres of her chamber was almost certainly pure coincidence.
The Psyko-Block was secured and its population of administrators and staff released - many of whom had not the slightest idea of what had been going on, having spent their shifts watching over secure, soundproofed wards and so forth with not the slightest idea that a small war had been waged in the corridors outside.
It also emerged that, over the years, Doctor Bob had... well, doctored the records of a large number of patients, giving them criminal records so they fell within his remit and ensuring a steady supply of warm bodies on which to perform his psionic experiments. There was some talk of releasing these bogusly criminalised patients into other facilities, but in the end it was realised that there were no facilities in the city quite as good as those in the Psyko-Block itself.
The Justice Department Psi-Division, indeed, had a field day. The contents of the pods that Doctor Bob had wired together, when decanted, had resulted in almost nine hundred survivors - at least in the sense that they were technically alive and breathing.
Of those nine hundred, two hundred were eventually awakened to the point where they might be generally classed as alive and aware. And some of those two hundred, with their awakened psionic powers, even managed to find a place within the Justice Department.
As opposed to the alternative, for anyone tagged as a psionic, in Mega-City One.
In a place outside of time and space, a somewhat shamefaced Slaarg - if that term can be applied to a creature that does not in actual fact have a face - prostrated itself before its all-high Dominator.
As was the Scientificator, and every other Slaarg who had been present at the time when the Screaming Meatgun slugs had come barrelling out of the dimensional rift and chewing everything in their path, the all-high Dominator was currently sporting a number of gaping and Screaming Meatgun-slug-chewed holes. It would be a matter of squeems before they healed up again.
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.
The clans who slice the
Leviathan
raft between themselves agree on this if nothing else - if much of the world outside of the city-states and their Justice Departments has devolved into chaos,
Leviathan
is the last bastion on Planet Earth for the simply and frankly Lawless.
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.
