Psykogeddon (9 page)

Young ladies in a variety of chambermaid-style outfits lounged, similarly, on other corners, with an demeanour that left no doubt as to what they might supply by way of extra services.

A place for everybody and everybody in their place, supposedly.

There were, however, those in the microcosmic culture of Those Below who fell through the cracks. Those who had found themselves some perceived space in the culture but for whom there was no actual use.

"Beggin' your pardon, yer worship," a ragged, wizened, crazed-looking individual said insistently, attempting to pluck at Dredd's uniform with a thin, crabbed hand. "I'm an ostler, me! Finest ostler you'll as ever like to meet! Got any 'orses you might want lookin' after?"

"Get away from me, creep," Dredd growled, though it must be said, not quite as viciously as he might have.

He recognised the type from the City outside. People so delusionally fixated on having some kind of job, on being of some actual use, that they starved themselves to death as beggars rather than accept the subsistence benefits that were, technically, every citizen's right. Such people were to be pitied rather than hated. If every one of them had turned around and demanded what was technically their right, after all, the Mega-City financial control systems would never have been able to cope.

"Touch me again and you'll find yourself in the iso-cubes," Dredd said. A few months in the low-sec cubes, with their provision of nutrition, medical attention and anti-psychotics, would probably be a step up in the life of this creep.

"Don' know anything about no eye-suck-ubes," said the half-crazed wretch. "I'm an ostler, me. Got any 'orses?"

Dredd brushed him off and pushed on through the crowd. He realised that, without having really thought about it, some part of him was keeping half an eye out for traces of a missing cat.

He'd left the Shangri La Proconsul, Lady Slocombe, with the impression that he was in fact here to look for the drokking thing, and his Judge-bred dislike for anything even approaching dishonesty was troubling him a little.

Ah, well, drokk it. The life of a Judge was, in the end, packed with such niggling details. Cases that were never solved to complete satisfaction, leaving any number of loose ends. Fugitives escaping capture despite every effort. Street riots that could have been avoided if one factor in the chain-reaction that had escalated them into disaster had happened differently...

Given all that, the knowledge of a lost drokking cat was like a drop of extra contamination in the Black Atlantic. It didn't mean anything and had no relation to anything else. It wasn't important.

At length Dredd reached the area he was heading for. Litigation Row - the level and section of the Shangri La lower levels that housed its lawyers.

As he prepared to enter, a segmented polycarbonate tentacle sprang from the wall and writhed before him, barring his way.

"Be aware," an automated voice said, "that you are entering a designated NERF-field zone. Be aware, therefore, that any injury received while on these premises will be deemed a result of your wilful actions and responsibility will not be assumed by the proprietors and/or affiliates of Shangri La Towers.

"Be aware, additionally, that an agreement of confidentiality does not extend to the withholding of any admitted crime, so far as it is defined in the Laws and Statutes of the Justice Department of Mega-City One.

"Please state your name and business for the purposes of voice-verification. Statement of name and business constitutes an acceptance of the above terms, together with such additional terms as might subsequently be deemed necessary, up to and including punitive measures requiring the use of ultimately lethal force."

"Let me get this straight," said Dredd. "I get past you by giving up every right whatsoever, and anything that might happen to me is my fault rather than yours?"

"That's about the size of it, sunshine," said the automated voice. "Please state name and business for the purposes of voice-verification."

"Judge Dredd," said Dredd. "Justice Department business. I'm here to see some creep by the name of Barnstable Wheems."

The tentacle whipped back into the wall as if had been physically stung.

"Too rich for my hydraulic fluid," said the voice. "Go in and see who you like. No polycarbonate sheathing off my endoskeletal armature."

Having never actually met a lawyer in his life, Dredd was unsure quite what to expect from Barnstable Wheems. In the end he found merely a pudgy, stuffy man in a suit.

This would have been no problem, so far as Barnstable Wheems was concerned, had the suit been of the three-piece Saville Row variety, the sort one might have imagined a stuffy, pudgy English barrister from back in the early twentieth century wearing. The sort of perfectly-tailored suit cut to transform mere pudginess into an imposing look.

Instead, the suit was trying to look like those sharp and shark-like suits that had been worn by US lawyers in the glory days of litigation, the twenty-first century.

Barnstable Wheems looked completely wrong in it, as if he were playing an inept and childish game of dress-up.

As a man, Wheems was balding, sweaty and more than somewhat twitchy - no doubt as a reaction to being in a job the pressure of which he was patently and innately not up to. Or possibly it was just a guilty conscience - it couldn't be easy being one of the last vestiges of a life-form the world regarded as the lowest possible order of slime, and would only breathe easy when such excrescences were finally extinct.

"Let me see if I can understand you correctly," Wheems said, squirming uneasily in Dredd's gaze after the Judge had put matters to him. "You're mounting a trial and you require legal assistance.

"What makes you think that
I
have the... relevant skills in prosecuting what is, after all, despite the scale and heinous nature of his crimes, nothing more than a common criminal? Where did you get my name? How did you come to decide upon me?"

On Wheems's desk, Dredd noticed, was a little polyceramic plaque.

"You don't have to be mad to work here," it read. "You have to be the sort of rabid and oleaginous jackal who'd sell their crippled old Grandma for the chemical-content value of her body while she's still alive!"

"You still misunderstand," said Dredd. "We don't need a creep like you for the prosecution. We can handle the prosecution on our own.

"Brit-Cit has demanded a reversion to the old forms of trial. Drago San supplied us with your name. You're gonna be acting in his defence."

In the Halls of Justice Med-Division, techs were working their way through the daily crop of bodies killed by Judges in the execution, as it were, of their duties.

Even with the winnowing processes that excluded all the cut-and-dried deaths and had the vast majority of these bodies packed directly off to Resyk, the numbers were still sufficient enough that the work had something of the quality of an assembly-line.

Given that the items on the conveyor belts were being disassembled rather than assembled, of course.

A med-tech checked the preliminary scans on the current body going past. On this level of triage he was just a Grade One, barely a step up from casual labour.

"Latent-psionic type, the scan says," he said unconcernedly. "Level too low to ever give him more than nightmares one night in three, usually, but just the sorta guy who tends to flip out this time of year when the atmo-systems start playing up. Run around, act up, get pulled down and stomped flat, you know?"

"Yeah," another tech agreed. "Bag him as standard suicide-by-Judge and... hang on, this one's tagged as 'further investigation'. What do you think? Did we miss him in the rush?"

"If you like," said the first. "I notice, though, that it's been tagged as 'further investigation' by Judge Dredd."

"Ah. Better actually do it, then. The last thing we want is an in-person visit from Old Stony Face."

The first tech shunted the body off the conveyor line and walked it through the secondary deep-scan processes that would give a fuller picture of its physiological state.

"Leon Gregor Sturlek..." he read from the display. "Cause of demise, well, we know about that... Massive trauma and systemic collapse due to the obvious... Previous neurological and synaptic disruption, together with an endocrinal shift consistent with a textbook schizophrenic break - now that
is
odd."

"What's up?" said the second tech. "You're the one with the basic neuro-training. I'm just the gut-guy."

"Well, the thing about what you can broadly call a schizophrenic break," said the first, "if I'm remembering it right, is that there's no such thing as a classic textbook pattern. It's like a kinda random shorting out and reallocation of synaptic pathways.

"Random being the operative word, apparently. The brain misfires and the victim experiences disruptions that could be literally anything, from hearing voices telling them to kill their mother 'cause she's a demon to being absolutely convinced that their mother is a small tub of synthi-cheese...

"Doesn't have to be about mothers, of course; the point is it could be
anything
. Thinking the whole concept of
up
is a tune you're whistling. Thinking Wednesday is a toad in a hat. Whatever. Just like this total nonsense. The reason so many schizophrenics seem to be similar is that the intact parts of their mind are trying, desperately, to explain the total nonsense and latch on to similar things and fears - that Grud's telling them to do things, that aliens are doing it, that it's all part of some Justice Department conspiracy pumping microwaves into their heads."

He tapped the deep-scan display. "The point is, this says, the synaptic disruptions here are entirely too organised in nature. It's as if they've been designed for a specific purpose. Not just to have this Sturlek guy flipping out in one of any number of odd, random ways - but to flip out in a specific and violently psychotic way. He was all charged up and just waiting for some kind of trigger."

"So what you're saying," said the first med-tech, "is that somebody actually did this to the guy?"

"Somebody did this to him," said the second. "Grud alone knows how or why. I think we're gonna have to pass this guy up the chain to the people who actually know stuff."

SEVEN

"
Minds like ours, my dear James, must always be above national prejudices, and in all companies it gives me great pleasure to declare, that, as a people, the English are very little indeed inferior to the Scotch.
"

- Christopher North

Noctes Ambrosianae

On the rooftop strato-pad of the Halls of Justice, Dredd and Chief Judge Hershey stood together with a contingent of armed Tactical Response Judges. An hour earlier, Dredd had procured the services of Barnstable Wheems, Efil Drago San had been moved to a hi-security cell in the Hall of Justice and now they were waiting for the final component of the affair: the arrival of a contingent from Brit-Cit by way of intercontinental Strat-Bat.

The Tactical Response squad with them was, ostensibly, an "honour guard", but in a far more real sense it was a failsafe, a protective measure, just to be sure. The Justice Department of Mega-City One, despite any failings it might have in the eyes of its critics, was not, in the end, a bunch of drokking idiots.

The Judges had realised early on - though just slightly too late to prevent their funding of it - the true nature of Brit-Cit's so-called "Justice Department" and what was being done in their name. They had yanked that funding and support as soon as they had become aware of what it was being spent on, but by then the damage had been done.

A visit by senior Brit-Cit Judges was basically the equivalent of a visit to the US in the twenty-first century by the President of an unrecognised, rogue South American state - a drugs baron who had clawed his way to the top of the heap, and was bringing along an entourage of the enforcers and hit men who had helped him to get there.

The tallest structure in the Mega-City, the Hall of Justice caught the full force of the weather systems and the driving, torrential rain that would evaporate to nothing before it completely failed to hit the heat of the city below.

"Any clue as to who these drokkers actually are?" Dredd asked, teeth gritted more against the anger at being imposed upon by a bunch of Brit-Cit drokkers than against the rain. "Do we have ID and creep-sheets on them?"

"Nothing like that," said Hershey. "It's like the Brit-Cit Senior Judges are all part of a secret society or some drokking thing. The only name for them we have is the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber."

"Fine by me," Dredd growled. "Not knowing the names makes the creeps that much easier to shoot in the head, if it comes down to it."

"Probably a good idea to can the jokes, Dredd," said Hershey. "We all know you're playing to type, but outsiders like this Brit-Cit drokkers might not."

"Who says I was joking?" said Dredd.

The roar of engines cut through the hiss of the rain and a Strat-Bat hazed in through the ionization field that insubstantially domed the entire city.