Psykogeddon (6 page)

THREE

"
We are for our own people. We want to see them happy, healthy and wise, drawing strength from co-operation with the peoples of other lands, but also contributing their full share to the general well-being. Not a broken-down pauper and mendicant, but a strong, living partner in the progressive advancement of civilisation.
"

- William Gallacher

The Case for Communism

The Chief Judge hated the sleep machine with a passion. To the extent that she allowed herself special privileges of any kind as a result of her position, she had dedicated the time of any number of Tek Division techs to overhaul the unit dedicated to her private use, tweak its processes to match the particular biological processes of her body, but in the end nothing seemed to do much good.

Sleep machines were really intended to be used by those Judges who had started out in life as engineered clones. A number of gene-sequences had been patched in at gestation and switched on in them, allowing them to mesh with the sleep machine processes more or less seamlessly.

The units were not recommended for sustained and regular use by Judges born in the more naturally human manner. The combination of slo-time to effectively compress six hours into as many minutes, the force-ejection of glucotic nutrients and rejuve-compounds to counteract the slo-time and the stutter-slits simulating REM seemed, increasingly, to leave the Chief Judge feeling simultaneously wired, enervated and subtly wrong inside.

Regular physicals still showed her to be in the best of health; it was all quite probably psychosomatic - but that, when you came right down to it, was the problem.

Chief Judges of Mega-City One did not exactly have the best of track records when it came to the subject of mental stability. There was something about the job that seemed to turn what had appeared to be the very best initial choice, comprehensively, and in some cases spectacularly, nuts.

Check out the famous case of Chief Judge Cal, who had promoted a small goldfish to the rank of Senior Judge and installed it as one of his advisors.

The Chief Judge had the uneasy suspicion that half the Justice Department was living in fear of the day she decided to instigate a Mounted Division and started channelling the spirit of Catherine the Great.

She clambered out of the pod and racked it shut behind her. A standby light pulsed balefully on its monitor display.

She rolled her sleeve down over the already-healing welts that the force-injectors had left, pulled on a gauntlet and her private chambers, rubbing absently at her inner arm.

She wished she could make time for a quick shower, but the uniform of a Judge, even the Chief Judge, was not designed to get out of and back into that easily. Fortunately, the uniform was, to a certain extent, self-cleaning.

Judge Dredd was waiting for her in her Audience Chambers, alone. Almost any other Judge, even the head of the SJS - especially the head of the SJS - would have been accompanied by a guard detail, but the Chief Judge had known Dredd for years. She trusted him implicitly.

Of course, she thought, one of the things he could be trusted on was to say and do things that she didn't necessarily agree with.

He was standing there with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing out through the big observation windows at the Mega-City spread below.

The Hall of Justice was the tallest structure in Mega-City One, rising to the centre-point of the ion-plasma dome that, effectively, sealed the city and its inhabitants from an atmosphere contaminated in any number of ways, by any number of wars. Or even wars.

The ionization-dome was in the process of polarising towards its night-time setting, shutting out the light from the
Corona Maladictus
- the suspended cloud of quasi-biological micro-particles released during the Apocalypse War, the decay of which could at times turn the night sky bright as day.

Corpse-light, basically: the suspended remains of the vaporised dead.

Lights were already coming on in the city below, to stave off the artificially boosted night. The whole arrangement was a colossal waste of resources, in the opinion of some - it was just healthier than spending the night under corpse-light.

"I expected you here later," the Chief Judge said. "There must have been any number of crimes you simply couldn't ignore on the way back."

"I ended up totalling my Lawmaster," said Dredd. "I had to come back directly."

He turned from the windows to face her. Usual procedure was for a Judge to remove his or her helmet when in the presence of the Chief, but Dredd made a point of never showing his face to any living soul. There was even a special dispensation somewhere in the Justice Department records.

Like a lot of clone-based Judges, the Chief Judge knew, Dredd's identity was engaged with the idea of the Law almost to the point of monomania. He was the living and iconic embodiment of it. Showing something so individualistic as his naked face would go against the very core of his being.

Besides, like a lot of clones, Dredd was without a shred of such a basic human weakness as vanity - even to the point of refusing reconstructive surgery for injuries received in the line of duty. There could be anything at all under there. On the whole it was probably best not to think about it.

Then again - and unlike a lot of clones - Dredd could turn around and suddenly display a surprising level of human insight.

"You're looking tired, Hershey," he said. "Just out of the sleep machine?"

"Yeah," said Chief Judge Hershey. "I've stopped complaining about it. Last time I mentioned it, Slithe gave me a week of oh-so-snotty and courteous enquiries about my hormone balance."

Slithe was a Senior Judge in the SJS - the Special Judicial Service - whose job it was, ostensibly, to Judge the Judges, rooting out corruption and abuse of power.

What the SJS seemed to do in actual fact was spend the live-long day hatching plots to stab Chief Judges in the back and overthrow them the moment they brought the faintest breath of humanity or clemency to their job.

Even more worrying, Hershey thought, was the uniform and general ineptitude of these various nefarious plots. It made you wonder how good the SJS drokkers were doing at their
proper
job of rooting out corruption and abuses and so forth. There could be any number of Judges out there, getting away with totally unnoticed murder.

"There's no reason why you shouldn't get some real sleep, Hershey," Dredd said. "Sure, a Judge has to be better and above human weakness, but there's no sense killing yourself doing the impossible." His lips twitched in the closest he had ever come in his life to a humorous smile. "It'd be like saying it was a sign of weakness to die when you're hit in the head by a hi-ex round."

"Believe me, Dredd," said Hershey, "I'd love to take the time - there just isn't any. Too many problems to deal with."

She gestured to the observation windows and the City beyond. "Out there we have one Judge for every hundred thousand citizens. The job never ends.

"It was different when the blanket-tranquilisation programmes were still active, and we could shift the resources to where they did the most good. But now the resources are just spread too thin. We're one big knock away from a mass-riot at the best of times - and it's getting worse."

"What about upping the number of clones on the strength?" Dredd said. "Or increasing the degree of automation?"

"Look what happened the last time," said Hershey. "Both last times. And the times before that."

"Genetics and cybernetics have evolved since then," said Dredd.

"Not to the point where they'll be accepted," Hershey said. "I mean, you, Dredd. You're an individual, as are the other clones on the strength. You were specially produced, as a kind, as a method of preserving the DNA of famous Judges from the past like Fargo and so on. Accent on the
special
. You know, like Special Edition?"

Dredd simply nodded. In this matter he was almost entirely ego-free, and did not take discussion of his basic clone nature in any pejorative sense.

Hershey sighed. "We start mass-producing faceless drones, DNA or cyber-based, and the city will revolt. No citizen is going to submit to the authority of something he can't think of as human, and at this point, authority is all we have going for us. Without it, we're just another armed gang."

Dredd nodded. It might have seemed odd to those who held that Mega-City One was a totalitarian police state, its jackbooted Judges forever stamping on the faces of the disenfranchised masses, but he truly believed in the democratic principle. Or at least, he found it less thoroughly appalling than any other alternative.

The Justice Department had, after all, come to power by popular acclaim. The fact that the Judges had been the only remaining organised force in the toxic, bloody chaos after the Rad Wars was neither here nor there. It had not been forcibly opposed out of nothing; people had simply recognised that it was the only chance for society to survive in any kind of coherent order.

The Justice Department remit had been reinforced, subsequently, time and time again by democratic election. The fact that some citizens never even bothered to pull their finger out and vote was entirely their prerogative.

"The way I see it," Dredd said, "a Judge must be above reproach. We can't resort to underhanded means - the blanket-tranque programmes weren't called the Big Lie for nothing.

"We're never gonna solve the problem of crime, once and for all, without lobotomising every man, woman and child on Earth - and even then they're gonna commit a whole bunch of incredibly dumb crimes.

"All we can do is the job in front of us. See a crime and deal with it. Do it hard and fast, do it without compromise and make drokking sure we do it fair. Justice must be seen to be done."

"However much it hurts," said Hershey. "However many problems it throws up in return."

She sighed yet again. She seemed to have been doing that a lot lately.

"That's the reason I pulled you in off street-patrol, Dredd," she said. "Something's turned around, come back, and bitten us in the ass."

The Sector around the Hall of Justice, Sector One, had the lowest citizen-based crime rate in the City. This was for the simple reason that its real estate was almost entirely devoted to supplementary aspects of Justice Department operations.

Here were the industrial plants where every item of a Judge's equipment from the boots up was designed, manufactured and tested.

Here was situated the Psyko-Block - known colloquially as the Kook Kubes - where the worst of those Judged too insane to be held responsible for their actions were housed, and some attempt was even made to treat them.

Then there were the high-security Iso-Cubes, where those in their so-called right minds were stockpiled, and no treatment or rehabilitation was attempted at all. All the effort was spent making damn sure that the drokkers never, ever got out.

Dredd walked through a series of armoured crash-hatches, which sprang into the ceiling a bare centimetre before he reached them and slammed back down a bare centimetre after he passed.

The mechanisms opening each hatch were triggered by the DNA signature encoded into his badge. The closing mechanisms were triggered by the DNA of Dredd himself, the flash-analysis of which lagged a fraction of a second behind - if the two failed to match, then the hatch would come down a crucial fraction of a second early, slicing him from head to toe.

Although, of course,
slicing
would probably be the wrong word. The bottoms of the crash-hatches were not exactly sharp.

The access-tunnel ran through the hundred metres of solid rockrete that formed the shell of the Sector One Iso-block - solid save for the buried micro-sensors, which would throw a small electronic fit if anyone so much as attempted to chip off a flake.

The tunnel ended in what appeared to be a colossal, empty chamber with a smooth matte floor... until you looked up.

Floating fifty metres above the floor under null-grav, and fifty metres from the rockrete walls, was a bank of monocarbon cubes as clear and impermeable as industrial diamond.

Each of these cubes contained a figure, each in some posture of listlessness, or stoicism, or stupor. There was not much actual movement. There was nowhere, much, to actually move.

There was nowhere, literally, for the inmates to go.

Flying Eye units drifted lazily around the bank of Iso-cubes, their sensors and receptors augmented with heavy-bore antipersonnel packages, just on the off-chance that some inmate might attempt chew through solid monocarbon with their bare teeth.

Waiting by the access hatch was a floater.

Justice Department policy of exposing citizens to personnel they could relate to as human did not extend to those who had forfeited their rights as citizens on arrest. The floater operator was a cyborg, melded to the chassis of the floater. Its biological components were derived from some Judge who had died in the course of duty, and had willed his (or possibly her) remains to the Department out of a desire to continue to serve.

"Take me up," Dredd told the cyborg. "MDU-790074-B. Drago San."