03.Black Atlantic

  Judge Dredd

  BLACK ATLANTIC

  "Dredd! Six o'clock!"

  At Vix's alarm, Dredd whipped about and put a three-shot burst of execution rounds into another Warchild's chest. He heard it shriek and saw it go down, its camouflage flashing crazily. Then the first one was on him again, blades whirling. One went diagonally through the dead comms operator's skull, shearing most of his head off. Anther sliced into a control board, sending up a spray of brilliant sparks.

  Dredd hurled himself away. There was no way to block those blades - from the way they went through metal and bone with such ease, they must have been edged with monomolecular fibres. He heard a blade sing through the air again and the comms operator's chair fell away in two pieces. The corpse did too.

  JUDGE DREDD

  #1: DREDD VS DEATH

  Gordon Rennie

  #2: BAD MOON RISING

  David Bishop

  #3: BLACK ATLANTIC

  Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans

  #4: ECLIPSE

  James Swallow

  #5: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND

  David Bishop

  #6: THE FINAL CUT

  Matthew Smith

  #7: SWINE FEVER

  Andrew Cartmel

  #8: WHITEOUT

  James Swallow

  #9: PSYKOGEDDON

  Dave Stone

  MORE 2000 AD ACTION

  JUDGE ANDERSON

  #1: FEAR THE DARKNESS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #2: RED SHADOWS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #3: SINS OF THE FATHER - Mitchel Scanlon

  THE ABC WARRIORS

  #1: THE MEDUSA WAR - Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell

  DURHAM RED

  #1: THE UNQUIET GRAVE - Peter J Evans

  ROGUE TROOPER

  #1: CRUCIBLE - Gordon Rennie

  STRONTIUM DOG

  #1: BAD TIMING - Rebecca Levene

  FIENDS OF THE EASTERN FRONT - David Bishop

  #1: OPERATION VAMPYR

  #2: THE BLOOD RED ARMY

  #3: TWILIGHT OF THE DEAD

  A 2000 AD PUBLICATION

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  www.2000adonline.com

  1098 7 65 4321

  Cover illustration by Dylan Teague

  Copyright © 2004 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

  All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S."Judge Dredd" is a registered trade mark in the United States and other jurisdictions."2000 AD" is a registered trade mark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.

  ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-054-9

  ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-095-2

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  JUDGE DREDD

  BLACK ATLANTIC

  Simon Jowett and Peter J Evans

  Judge Dredd created by John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra.

  Chief Judge Hershey created by John Wagner & Brian Bolland.

  MEGA-CITY ONE, 2130

  1. DUST BUST

  "Careful with that, you barely-sentient gimp!"

  The woman's shout was so loud, so unexpected, that Arnold Crobetti almost dropped the canister a second time. He started, the mech-splint around his left leg whining and stiffening reflexively, and only just managed to pass the canister to the next man in line before it slid out of his fingers. Drokk it, the things were heavy!

  Crobetti turned back to grab the next drum from the man behind, and saw the woman striding towards him, her long lab coat flapping. There was an expression on her sharp features that he didn't like the look of at all. "Aw c'mon," he whined. "I had my foot under it when it came down, honest. Barely scratched the paint..."

  The woman stopped in front of him, glaring. "Listen to me, you throwback," she snapped, poking him in the chest. "Every one of these canisters is worth more than you are. More than your family, your friends, their friends and their pets put together!" One of the other men in the chain sniggered and the woman looked up and fixed him with that awful glare. The snigger trailed off into silence.

  "That goes for all of you. Remember that your boss is paying for this. If the equipment gets damaged, so do you." And with that, she turned her back on the lot of them and stormed off.

  Crobetti swallowed. "Man, is that any way for a professor to talk?" He took hold of the next drum - carefully - and handed it on.

  Little Petey, the next man in the chain, lifted it out of his grasp without trying. "Doctor," he singsonged. "She's a doctor. I heard one of the tekkies call her doctor."

  Oh brother. Crobetti's eyes went up. There were twenty guys in the chain, passing the heavy drums one to the next, all the way from the freezer wagon on the factory's loading ramp to the building itself. Twenty of Big Jimmy's finest, and he had to be next to Little Petey Steene.

  Little Petey was a head taller than Crobetti, but there wasn't much inside that head to speak of. He could squash shell casings flat between his finger and thumb, but he had trouble counting past four and once he started talking it was difficult to get him to shut up. He'd just keep saying the same thing, over and over and over, with a grin on his face so wide it looked as though his jaw was about to fall off. Big Jimmy only kept him on as part of the MegEast Mob because he could pull people's noses off with his bare hands.

  There was a small scar on Petey's left temple, and Crobetti wondered if maybe a bullet had gone in there one time and scrambled things up a little.

  Not that Crobetti was exactly a stranger to bullets himself. The mech-splint holding his leg together was enough evidence of that. The wound he'd got from last month's rumble with those MegCentral sneckers hadn't healed yet, and the splint was old and needed tuning. It made him limp, and it had made him drop one of Doctor grud-face Hellermann's precious canisters.

  "'Yes, Doctor Hellermann. Right away, Doctor Hellermann.' That's what he said," Petey was still chanting. Crobetti grimaced and hauled another drum around for him.

  "Yeah, okay, Petey. Thanks for clearing that up. Now grab." Anything to stop him getting into a rhythm. Crobetti limped round to take another item of Hellermann's equipment - some kind of armoured crate, this time - and pass it on to Little Petey. He looked longingly at the pile of weapons he and the boys had brought with them from MegEast, expecting that the job would involve using them on members of the MegSouth mob. Not acting like a gang of baggage-bots at Grissom Spaceport.

  "If I don't see another one of these things as long as I live, I'll be a happy man," Arnold muttered as he limped back to move yet another of the canisters down the line.

  "I'm a happy man," Little Petey chimed in. "I've always been a happy man. Can't remember a time when I wasn't happy. Happy, happy, happy. That's Little Petey..."

  Arnold Crobetti sighed. It was going to be a long night.

  Tek-Judge Gleick was having a long night too. He had been watching MegEast mobsters haul drums about for far too long, and Little Petey's singsong ramblings were making the job almost intolerable. Still, annoying or not, these scum were certainly going to be a worthy catch for the ground team. Not only did most of them have a rap sheet as long as the proverbial Judge's arm, but the canisters they were manhandling from the truck were plastered with biohazard stickers - not something one would normally expect to find being driven about in a Sunshine Synthifoods freezer wagon.

  But then, when Elize Hellermann was involved,
nothing was normal.

  Gleick was running a public surveillance workstation, situated in the Statue of Judgement in MegEast, not far from Big Jimmy's home turf. It was kilometres from the supposedly abandoned factory where Jimmy's boys were unloading, but the link between Gleick's workstation and the spy-in-the-sky camera he was controlling was close to perfect. He sent the insect-sized camera darting away from the chain of mobsters, past the wagon with its cheery logo of happy farm animals and up to a higher vantage point overlooking the factory.

  Why farm animals? Cows, pigs, chickens - what kind of a futsie would enjoy the thought of eating extinct species? Gleich shrugged, and as the big mobster's voice faded he selected a reserved channel and opened it. "PSU 767 to Ground Team One, over."

  "Receiving you, PSU." The answering voice was unmistakable, and Gleick couldn't help sitting up a little straighter in his seat. "Report."

  "Loading is still in progress, Ground Team. Can also confirm that Hellermann is in the building. Repeat: Hellermann is in the building."

  "Received and understood, PSU," came the rough sounding reply. "Maintain surveillance. Let us know when the last of the chemicals are off the truck."

  "Acknowledged, Ground Team One. PSU out." Gleick tapped at the camera controls, guiding the spy back towards the loading bay. Petey's voice became louder in Gleick's earpiece.

  "I don't know why I'm so happy. Poppa always said I smiled so hard it made him want to take his belt to me just to see my expression change..."

  Gleick sighed. It looked as if listening to this drek was going to be the price he'd have to pay to be able to boast to his colleagues over breakfast that he had worked with a legend.

  Elize Hellermann strode through the storage area on the far side of the loading bay doors. Yet more of Big Jimmy's men moved around her, stacking canisters from the freezer wagon for later use, or loading other containers and mixing vessels onto hover-pallets. Her own staff handled the ferrying, especially for the items that went through a set of automatic doors to the nursery.

  Whatever machinery had once been housed in the factory had been removed decades earlier. She had chosen this location within the Dust Zone - sector after sector of automated industrial units grouped around the Power Tower at the centre of MegSouth - because so many of the units had been closed down during one of the sector's periodic economic collapses. Falls like that hit every sector of Mega-City One at some time or another; businesses that took their owners a lifetime to build up could be gone overnight due to anything from an alien invasion to a dip in the sales of Mockburgers. Any increase in the numbers of unemployed from such a collapse would be barely noticeable in a city of four hundred million, with an unemployment rate of ninety per cent and holding.

  Hellermann couldn't have cared less. Over the years, the number of things she cared about had dwindled sharply. At present, the number stood at one.

  This.

  The nursery doors opened smoothly. Hellermann walked through, feeling the downdraft of the clean air curtain - the environmental control system was one of the first things she had installed.

  It was warm in the nursery. The temperature was boosted by waste heat from the equipment packed around the walls and across the floor, and the air was permeated by a constant low hum from the portable generators, brought in to ensure that no one at Big Meg Power noticed a spike in demand where there should have been no demand at all.

  The factory space had been retro-fitted to her specifications with equipment of her own design, bought with money loaned to her by Big Jimmy, the diminutive - some would say stunted - grudfather of MegEast. Of course, Jimmy hadn't the faintest idea what she was doing here. All he was interested in was the money she had promised it would make him. If she had mentioned the word "treason", even a mobster like Jimmy might have balked.

  Treason, she thought sourly, walking between processing units, purifiers and regulators. A stupid, small-minded word made up by stupid, small-minded people. People like those who claimed to uphold the law, and yet had reduced her to this - bowing and scraping for mobster money so she could continue her life's work in a rusting, bug-infested factory in the middle of the Dust Zone.

  Technicians made their reports as she passed them. Everything was proceeding smoothly; as well it should, given the success of the first decantation.

  Hellermann moved to another section of the nursery, where large, ovoid growth tanks stood in ranks across the floor. Each had a viewport set into the armour, and Hellermann peered into the nearest, through cloudy fluid and soupy, filigreed membranes. Inside, something thrashed and convulsed, powerful muscles jerking as a direct neural link downloaded terabytes of information directly into its brain.

  Hellermann had selected the data for download very carefully: medical files, survival tactics, a compressed database of mankind's entire accumulated wisdom on the subject of war and ninety-five separate and distinct ways to kill a human being.

  Placing a hand against the transparent plastic of the viewport, Hellermann smiled as she watched the creature twitch in its nutrient fluid.

  "Soon, my child," she whispered. "Soon."

  "That the last of 'em?" Arnold Crobetti asked. A man ahead of him in the human chain nodded.

  "Looks that way."

  Crobetti stretched. His splint shell casings the movement and kicked out, almost unbalancing him. The other mobsters in the loading bay pointed and laughed.

  "That was funny, Arnold," laughed Little Petey. "You're a funny guy. That makes me happy."

  "Yeah, yeah, very funny," Crobetti addressed his reply to everyone in the loading bay. An insect buzzed close to his ear, and he recoiled instinctively, waving it away with his hand. Damn bugs. "I don't remember seeing any of you mugs backing me up when I took a slug for Big Jimmy."

  Getting his mech-splint back under control, he turned and made for the stacked weapons. The sooner he got back to MegEast, the better. If any MegSouth mobsters turned up now, he didn't trust his splint to get him out of the way of any more slugs.

  "PSU to Ground Team One. The chemicals are off the truck. Repeat: the chemicals are off the truck. Perps are tooling up and preparing to leave. Repeat-"

  "Acknowledged. Ground Team One, we move. Team Two stay alert; Hellermann might use the back door." The gravelly voice cut across Tek-Judge Gleick's by-the-book communication etiquette. Gleick figured that was okay, though, seeing as the Judge on the other end of the comm-link wrote the book.

  As he made his report, Gleick remote-guided the spy-in-the-sky out of the loading bay and into the night. Activating the infrared system, he piloted the flying camera skywards, broadening its field of view. His headset filled with a network of feeder roads, alleys and the dark hulks of abandoned, ruined buildings. The Dust Zone.

  There. Half a dozen multicoloured heat signatures, moving in two ranks of three down the main drag. Moving fast.

  "You hear that?" Crobetti asked no one in particular. He'd been strapping on his gun harness when he'd noticed: the sound of powerful engines. At first he thought it might be heavy traffic on the nearby skedway, but then he realised it was growing louder.

  Getting closer.

  "Lights."

  Six sets of infrared vision filters were disengaged and the beams from six sets of powerful sodium quartz headlamps arrowed through the darkness and turned the loading bay as bright as a minor sun. In the glare, figures scrambled blindly trying to find cover, shading their eyes and bringing weapons to bear.

  "Break."

  The Lawmasters to left and right swung out smoothly, hugging the road's shoulder as the first volley of gunfire, fired blind from the loading bay into the dazzling headlights, swept between them. A lucky round struck the front wheel housing of the lead bike, whining off the armour and into the night. The rider's only reply was to trigger his bike cannon.

  The other Lawmasters followed suit. In the sudden hail of high-explosive shells, the loading bay began to fly apart.

  The freezer wagon's auto-polarising windshi
eld had adjusted its setting the moment the Lawmasters' headlamps flared into life. Sitting behind the truck's controls, Tony Soba had a clear, though slightly tinted view of six Mega-City Judges barrelling towards him at what seemed a suicidal rate.

  Tony had been one of Big Jimmy's street soldiers long enough to know what would come next if those Judges were allowed into the factory - cube-time and lots of it. Tony had done time before when he was a young man. If he went inside now, he'd be a crock by the time he got out - if he got out at all.

  "I ain't going back inside!" Tony roared, and slammed the wagon in gear. The truck leapt forward and howled down the drag to meet the oncoming Judges.

  "I'll deal with the truck," snapped the lead rider. The other five Judges swung their machines wider and opened their throttles, surging past the freezer wagon and toward the loading bay. Behind them, the remaining Lawmaster's bike cannon hammered streams of fire into the darkness.

  The front of the freezer wagon simply dissolved. The forward grille, the bodywork, the windshield and the driver behind it; everything turned to fragments as the cannon shells tore the truck apart. The onboard computer must have gone too, locking the brakes, because the truck's wheels immediately jammed. The tyres gave out a chorus of shrieks as the wagon's momentum continued to drive them forwards, laying long strips of synthi-tread on the plascrete road.

  The truck fishtailed, its rear trying to overtake its ruined cab, its long bulk swinging round to block the skedway.

  Seeing thirty tonnes of driverless wagon heading directly for him, Judge Dredd simply opened the Lawmaster's throttle, kicked the rear wheel round and laid his machine down.