The Cold Light of Day (12 page)

The fifty-metre-high banner flapped gently in the breeze, matching those of the surrounding blocks.

Dredd had read the reports of last year’s race: in Sector 86, one particularly enterprising block manager had locked access to the parking lot an hour before the race ended, and gone to the movies. Sixteen thousand vehicle owners had been forced to wait an extra three hours before they could retrieve their cars. Three extra hours meant an extra sixty credits per vehicle, netting him a nice bonus of almost a million credits in cash. He’d kept half, divided the rest between the block’s residents and everyone was happy, until one of them killed him and took his half too.

As Dredd’s bike hit the intake-ramp for Joanne Vanderbilt Block, the ground trembled and almost immediately his radio came to life once more. “Dredd... Meacham.
Damn
, these guys are hard-core. And they’re seriously packing. Grenade-launcher and Grud only
knows
what else. Two of us aren’t going to be enough.” Another explosion rippled through the building, and above Dredd several windows shattered, showering the ramp ahead of him with crystalline shrapnel. “Stomm! A couple more like that and they’ll bring the block down!”

Dredd skidded his bike to a stop. “Fall back, Meacham. Let them see a way out—it’ll be easier and safer to take them out in the open.” He could already hear screams from within the block.

Meacham’s voice came back, softer now. “All right... they’re going past me... Vehicle’s big, armoured, I think. Looks like a Chameleon, ten years old maybe. Dredd, that thing’s going to smash through anything you put in front of it. Nothing short of a H-wagon is going to be able to stop it.”

“I know the model,” Dredd said. “Built for use in the Cursed Earth. Doesn’t have a lot of speed.”

“I don’t know about that... It’s moving pretty damn fast right
now
.”

Dredd heard the roar of the Chameleon’s engine and the screech of its tyres as it rumbled and scraped its way down the parking lot’s interior ramps. “Control—you following this?”

“We are,” Judge Walton said. After a slight pause, he said, “Dredd, not good news. The Chameleon is registered to Meredith Rousseau. She was senior mechanic on Chalk’s scavenging team. She wasn’t present at his arrest in Eminence—safe to assume she’s one of the few who didn’t side against him. A month ago Rousseau bought—”

The entire ramp shook and buckled as something powerful exploded inside the block. Dredd looked up: directly above him, the block’s plasteen facade was cracking. He spun his bike about, and roared down to the street, moments before a five-tonne chunk of steel-reinforced plasteen slammed onto the ramp.

High above, through the billowing dust, Dredd saw the Chameleon crashing through the wall. It tumbled as it plummeted, straight down toward the shattered ramp.

And then its descent slowed. The two-tonne, armour-plated vehicle quickly righted itself, and soared over Dredd’s head, rapidly gathering speed as it headed toward the crowds gathered to watch the Mega-City 5000.

“Dredd? Dredd, you read me?”

Dredd fired up the Lawmaster and peeled off in pursuit of the massive flying craft. “I read you, Walton.”

“Don’t know if you caught that last part... A month ago Rousseau bought fourteen reconditioned skysurf anti-grav motors.”

“Yeah,” Dredd said. “Yeah, I can see that.”

S
HOCK’S SCREEN TOLD
him that Napoleon Neapolitan was thirty-one kilometres ahead, in third place, when the bulky vehicle passed overhead, following the path of the race. For a second, he thought it was a H-wagon—and there was a fleeting moment when he saw himself being arrested for causing the crash in The Crowbar—but it was the wrong colour, the wrong shape.

And it certainly shouldn’t have been there.

Muties
, he thought.
Has to be.
Though they were genetically normal, the team mostly operated in the Cursed Earth—hence their nickname—where the terrain was rough and the weather appalling. They were good, too, there was no denying that. They knew how to cope with pretty much anything. It was said that Napoleon Neapolitan himself had once travelled on foot from Mega-City Two to Texas City, a journey that few people would have the courage or the tenacity to take behind the wheel of an armoured truck.

But the Spacers were tough too. Many of them, like Shock, had spent years working in the asteroid belt, or on the Lunar colonies. Tooling around on your bike in the Cursed Earth was one thing, driving a skimmer towing a million-tonne iron-ore asteroid from the belt to the moon was quite another.

The flying vehicle—Shock didn’t recognise the make or model, but then he rarely saw them from this angle—was fast, approaching supersonic speed, and ahead he saw it veer sharply to the right.
What the hell? He’s following the race route!

Another two vehicles zoomed overhead, followed quickly by a third, then a fourth and fifth close together. Justice Department Hover-Wagons, definitely recognisable from below. And at the speed they were travelling, Shock guessed they were in pursuit of the first craft.

If this
was
a Mutie tactic, Shock couldn’t see where it was leading. He called up his race-planner on the comm-link. “Amanda, what the drokk is happening?”

“No idea, Shock. The Jays are all going nuts; there’s talk of shutting down the race. Might not be a bad thing right now—you’ll be hard pressed to catch Napoleon at this rate.”

“I’m
not
letting that Mutie drokker win. Not this time.”

“Figured as much. You’re faster than he is, but it’s not going to be enough unless something slows him down.”

“The rest of the team?”

“Endrian’s just made it out of The Crowbar. She’s riding well. Tiny chance she’ll catch up with you. The rest of them are close behind her, but they’re not likely to place. You want a Spacer victory, it’s up to you to take it. Your machine holding up?”

“Everything’s still in the green.”

“Then keep on Napoleon until we hear that the race
is
shut down. He’s still got Silver and Cannon to pass, and Silver’s got a four-second lead on him. Odds are he’ll take her before they reach Sector 141. By that stage you want to be no more than eight seconds behind him.”

D
REDD’S
L
AWMASTER ROARED
back through the gap in the crowd and again clipped the edge of one of the barriers, but it was a glancing blow, barely enough to slow him down. Now he was on the track, following the route, gradually gaining on one of the riders. “Control...”

“Sorry, Dredd,” Walton said. “We shut the race down now, we’ll be looking at a hundred-million-strong riot.”

“What’s the status on Chalk?”

“Spy-cams have positively identified him as the driver of the Chameleon. We’ve got two of the H-Wagons locked on but if they open
fire
—”

“The debris will rain down on the crowd,” Dredd said. “Chalk knows that. That’s why he’s following the route.”

“We’ve got the results of the DNA test on the diner shootings... Two of the grenade victims are on the list Moeller gave you. Squire and Kinsley. That leaves only one... Winston Fierro, resident of the Abbitat Habitat, Sector 115. Dredd, that’s on the race’s route, the last major turn before the finish-line.” A map of the route appeared on Dredd’s screen. At Sector 102, four hundred kilometres from Dredd’s current position, the route took a turn to the right, heading west until it reached the edge of Sector 141, where it took a meandering south-east path back to Sector 115. Then came the last stretch, a two-hundred-kilometre run down to Sector 124, the southernmost tip of the city.

“Tell me you’ve already got a squad on the way to pick up Fierro.” Dredd activated his bike’s sirens as he reached the racer, the celebrity rider Jeremiah Kentson, who stared open-mouth at Dredd as he steadily cruised past him.

“Affirmative,” Walton said. “Expecting a report from them any minute. If Chalk is going to stick to the route, you can exit the track at Sector 102 and cut across MegSouth to 115. That’ll take close to seven hundred kilometres off your journey. I’ll have the Judges at 102 prepare an exit route for you.”

“Understood.” Dredd wondered why Control was being so cooperative all of a sudden, but this wasn’t the time to ask. Stopping Percival Chalk was the only thing he should be focusing on right now.

What’s his end-game?
Dredd asked himself.
He knows we’re after him. There’s no way he can escape. Even if he heads out into the Cursed Earth, the H-wagons are more than capable of following him.

And there was something else niggling at the back of Dredd’s mind... the Chameleon was running on AG motors designed for skysurf boards, and the Chameleon was a lot heavier than a board and its rider. Even fourteen AG motors wouldn’t be able to power a vehicle of that mass for longer than a couple of hours, and that was only if the Chameleon wasn’t carrying anything heavy. Dredd estimated that Chalk still had over nine hundred kilometres to go before the route hit Sector 115. At five hundred KPH, he was going to be cutting it close.

And then what? He’s got to know by now that we’re anticipating his targets.

I
N HER ROOM
in the Justice Department Med Centre, Judge Amber Ruiz flipped the TV screen to Channel Epsilon. Her wounds had been sealed and her torso was encased in a rapid-heal unit, and even though she’d been anaesthetised from the chest down, she was sure she could feel the machine’s needles and scalpels working away inside her.

There was no longer any pain, and for that she was grateful. In her career as a Judge she’d been shot eighteen times, but this one had been by far the worst.

“Now, Peter,” one of Channel Epsilon’s unseen commentators said, “no doubt you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, and I wouldn’t blame you, but isn’t this an unusual turn of events?”

“A Judge on the track? Indeed it is, Ted. I don’t think we’ve seen a Judge on the track before.”

Ruiz shook her head in dismay.
The man is fearless.
She’d been following the case from the moment she regained consciousness.

The screen cut to a close-up of Dredd, sitting grim-faced on his Lawmaster as it hurtled past the baffled crowds. “I’m wondering...” the first commentator said, “well, he’s moving pretty fast there—viewers at home, you can see on your screens that he’s close to five hundred kilometres per hour—and I’m wondering, at this late stage in the race,
can
he win?”

“Well, Ted, he’s young, he’s fresh, and as we all know the Lawmaster is one of the most powerful motorcycles ever built. I’d say he has every chance.”

“Y’know, it puts me in mind of the late Rip Venner. He was a Judge before he took up scramble-biking. Played Inferno for the Harlem Hellcats for a while. Or did I dream all that?”

A med-Judge entered the room, and Ruiz beckoned her over. “How much longer do I have to stay here?”

The young woman checked the monitor at the end of Ruiz’s bed. “Another day, at least, then maybe six to eight days before you can return to duty.”

Ruiz pulled back the thin sheet covering her body. “And suppose I check
myself
out?”

The med-Judge smiled. “Go ahead. If you can walk as far as the door, I’ll even drive you back to your quarters.”

After a moment, Ruiz said, “I can’t move my legs.”

“That’ll be the anaesthetic. We need to have you immobilised so that the rapid-heal can work.” She moved closer and pulled the sheet back into place. “My advice... Take the time to recover. And prepare your case, obviously.”

Ruiz raised an eyebrow. “My case?”

“You were in charge of that hot-dog run. You take responsibility for anything your cadets did.” The med-Judge regarded Ruiz with an expression of pity. “They say this is the first serious blemish on an otherwise exemplary career. If you’re lucky, the SJS will take that into account.”

The Judge leaned back against the bed’s headrest. “The SJS.”

“That’s what everyone is saying. They’re going to want to talk to you.” The med-Judge gave her another pitying look as she left the room.

Ruiz sighed. The Special Judicial Squad were the Judges who judged the Judges, given special dispensation to act in any way they felt was necessary to root out corruption and incompetence. No one came out of a meeting with the SJS unscathed. Ruiz had even heard of Judges taking their own lives when faced with the SJS.
I didn’t do anything wrong
, she told herself.
We gave Chalk a fair sentence. We can’t be held responsible for his actions after his release.

She suppressed a shudder.
The SJS. Grud-damn it, that’s
it
for me. Pendleton and Collins are dead, and they’re going to want to blame someone for that.

An unexpected, bitter thought jumped into her mind:
And they won’t blame Joe Dredd, because he’s one of Goodman’s little golden boys. They’ll pin it all on me.

She took a deep breath—as deep as the rapid-heal would allow her—and forced herself to relax.
It could be just a rumour. Surely if the SJS wanted me, they’d have shown up by now.

Then the door was pushed open, and a tall, slender woman stepped in. Her black uniform was graced with silver instead of gold, skulls in place of eagles. The woman removed her helmet and ran a black-gloved hand through her close-cropped hair. “Judge Amber Ruiz. I was told you were awake. Gillen, SJS.”

Fifteen

S
HOCK CHECKED THE
map of the race’s route. He was still in fourth position, behind Silver Sylvia, leader of the Fishsickles. Neapolitan was six kilometres ahead of her, in second place. In the lead was Travis Cannon, an independent rider who’d been quickly dismissed by the bookies and pundits as a no-hoper. Cannon had taken the lead early, and stayed there far longer than anyone had anticipated. Now, there was every chance that he’d cross the finish-line in the top three. Possibly even first, if Napoleon Neapolitan couldn’t catch him.

For most of the other riders, the race might as well be over.