03.Black Atlantic Read online

  "Code ninety-nine red! Repeat: Code ninety-nine red! Judge down! Grud, he went under the truck!"

  From the spy-in-the-sky's airborne vantage point, Gleick watched in horror as the freezer wagon began to roll, digging chunks out of the road's plascrete surface. It was only a matter of time before...

  There was a hydrogen fuel cell in the truck's cab and volatile chemicals in the freezer at the back. With a heavy, flat sound the wagon spat out a sheet of flame, then detonated in a fireball that lit up half the block.

  "Oh, I like this!" Little Petey was shouting. Crobetti could hear him even over the sound of the Judges' bike cannon shells punching chunks out of the rockcrete walls all around him. "This makes me really happy-happy-happy!"

  Pumping his double-barrelled stump gun in a mindless, grinning frenzy, Petey fired round after round into the oncoming lights. Impossibly, despite standing in the open in the middle of the loading bay's raised platform, he hadn't been touched, either by the high-calibre munitions that were flying all around him, or by the debris blown out from the walls. Crobetti couldn't believe the man was still alive.

  "For grud's sake, Petey, get down!" Crobetti shouted from where he was sheltering behind a stack of packing cases. He had nowhere else to go as the loading bay doors had slammed down like a plasteel curtain as soon as the first bullets were fired. His wounded leg was jumping like crazy, as if his mech-splint had picked up on the wave of fear and adrenaline that was pounding around his body. This was definitely not how he had imagined the night would end.

  For a heartbeat, he entertained the fantasy that if he stayed where he was and crouched down really low, making himself as small as possible, the Judges wouldn't notice him when they stormed the loading bay. Then a glancing hit from a Lawmaster cannon shell tore half the packing cases to splinters.

  "Ah, what the sneck," he sighed. His face was bleeding from a dozen splinter wounds as he chambered a stub-shell and struggled round, his mech-splint still twitching, to get a good shot at the oncoming Judges.

  And died, quite without pain, as a cannon shell turned his skull into little more than red mist.

  "Dredd here. Cancel the code red. I'm fine. Tek-Judge Gleick, consider this your official reprimand for premature use of the distress code. There might be a Judge out there who really needs assistance."

  Dredd hadn't been anywhere near the Lawmaster when the truck had gone up. He'd kicked away from it to avoid being crushed between the bike and the road. While the Lawmaster had skidded away at an acute angle, finally ploughing into the perimeter fence of the neighbouring factory lot, Dredd had slid right under the truck and out the other side, letting his uniform's armoured knee and shoulder pads take the punishment. As soon as he'd shed enough speed he was up on his feet and running, Lawgiver in his fist, heading for the loading bay. His controlled fall from the bike had taken him to within a hundred metres of the ramp.

  The firefight in the bay was already over. One of the Judges - probably Marks, Dredd decided - had swung his Lawmaster around and gone up the ramp sideways, pinning several mobsters against the wall, while the others had dismounted and gone in with Lawgivers blazing, a standard Justice Department containment pattern. Dredd counted ten perps dead, three wounded.

  Farrell, a young Judge not long out of his rookie's white helmet, was cuffing the three wounded mobsters as they huddled against what was left of the bay wall. Seeing Dredd step up onto the platform, he turned to greet him. "Glad to see you're still with us, sir."

  "Eyes on your perps, Farrell," Dredd replied. He walked past the young Judge, who hastily returned his attention to the mobsters.

  Marks ran his override card across the lock. The plain-looking slug was programmed to override any electronic locking mechanism in Mega-City One, but in this case it simply emitted a sad bleep of defeat.

  "No go. They've shielded the lock." He grimaced, then noticed that Dredd now stood beside him. "Hi-Ex?"

  Dredd nodded and Marks moved quickly to his Lawmaster, opening stowage pods built into the rear wheel housing. He took out three slabs of plasteen, Hi-Ex charges with integral detonators. Dredd looked at the charges, made a quick mental estimate of the strength of the doors, and decided that two would probably do it.

  Still, nothing wrong with a little overkill. He brought his helmet mic down. "Dredd to Ground Team Two," he growled. "We're going to blow the loading bay doors. Prepare to move on my mark. Gleick?"

  "Reporting, sir."

  "What can you see?"

  "I'm picking up a lot of activity inside; they're either destroying evidence, getting ready to bug out or both - Judge Dredd! Behind you!"

  At Gleick's warning, Dredd whirled. One of the dead mobsters was getting up again.

  Later, at debriefing, he would discover that the big man with the stub gun pointing at his face was "Little" Petey Steene, wanted for numerous counts including that of strangling his own father with a synthi-leather belt at the age of ten. At this moment the man's name was less than important: by the time the mobster had chambered his first shell Dredd had already fired two shots from his Lawgiver. The first round shattered Steene's gun and the hand that held it, and the second blew most of his head away. Little Petey died with a grin on his face, or what was left of it. The execution round had destroyed everything above his top teeth.

  Dredd watched the corpse flop back down to the loading bay floor. "Watch your perps, Marks - even the dead ones." He glanced back to where Gleick's spy-in-the-sky was dropping down towards him. "Well spotted, Tek-Judge."

  "Th-thank you, sir!"

  "The reprimand still stands. Marks, where's that Hi-Ex? This raid has already taken longer than it should."

  The shaped Hi-Ex charges blew a ragged hole in the plasteel door, roughly the shape of an inverted triangle. A white-coated tekkie must have been standing too close to the doors when they blew as Dredd had to step over his smoking corpse to get in.

  "Nobody move!" he barked. Decades of street experience had given his voice a degree of authority that most citizens found themselves obeying before they realised what they were doing. "This is an illegal bio-tech operation and you are all under arrest!"

  Two tekkies looked up from their terminals, stared at Dredd like frightened animals, then took off for a set of doors to one side of the main area.

  "Ground Team Two, time to join the fun," Dredd snapped into his helmet mic as he brought down one of the running tekkies with a leg-shot. The second runner was reaching for the door controls when he was spun howling to the floor by a shoulder-shot from Marks, who had followed Dredd through the blast hole.

  Some of the tech staff were armed. A small-calibre pistol cracked from an overhead gantry, its bullet kicking dust off the floor at Dredd's feet. In a single movement, Dredd picked off the gunman then returned his attention to his main target before the perp hit the ground. "You!" he bellowed. "Where's Hellermann? Give her up now and you might get out of the cubes while you're still young enough to walk out!"

  The tech managed to get one hand away from the wound in her leg to point towards a set of big pressure doors on the far wall of the factory. "In there," she gasped.

  "I knew you'd say that," Dredd sneered. He left the woman to either tend to her wound or bleed to death, and headed for the doors. Behind him, the other Judges in his team followed Marks through the door and spread out through the factory space. Shouts of command and the occasional gunshot began to echo among the equipment.

  The doors slid aside and Dredd went through, feeling the pressure curtain brush at him. Beyond, rows of growth tanks stretched away, gleaming softly in the dim light. Cables and pipes littered the floor. Dredd tapped one with his boot and felt it thrumming through the kevlar sole.

  He'd seen these tanks in the briefing vid, although those had borne the Justice Department eagle crest. These bore the logo of what Dredd guessed was a Hondo-Cit chop-shop, specialists in the reverse engineering and copying of virtually any piece of high technology. All Hellermann had to do was get th
e specs for the growth tanks to the chop-shop engineers and they could have turned out dozens of the tanks almost overnight, ready to be smuggled back to Mega-City One.

  The woman would obviously stop at nothing. Dredd glared out into the gloom, making out a set of pressure-sealed doors in the end wall. According to the last set of building plans submitted to the MegSouth zoning board, those would have led to the works canteen. If Hellermann was there, she was heading right into the arms of Judge Mexter and the rest of Team Two.

  But she was clever, he knew that. And there were plenty of places to hide right here.

  "Hellermann," he called, stepping carefully over the cables. "You're under arrest. Make it easy on yourself."

  As if in answer, one of the tanks shifted on its base.

  Dredd heard it before he saw it; a heavy impact from within the plasteel and ceramic. He took a cautious step towards the nearest of the growth vessels. The lid was pale and opaque, with a viewport set into its curved surface. Inside, something moved spasmodically in gluey liquid.

  The sound of the canteen doors blowing inwards caused Dredd to turn, Lawgiver unconsciously and immediately aimed. A loose, tangle-limbed figure in a singed and tattered lab coat flew out from the doorway and rolled to a messy halt on the floor. There were shouts and orders to freeze uttered by someone with Justice Department training, then screams and several secondary explosions. A squeal of feedback made the audio pick-ups in Dredd's helmet dull for a second to protect his hearing, then the lights throughout the facility dimmed as something short-circuited with spectacular finality and a last, loud explosion. The copper tang of burning circuitry wafted from the open doorway.

  Elize Hellermann soon followed, cuffed, bleeding from a cut above her close-cropped hairline and pushed ahead of Judge Mexter and his team. One of the Judges had hold of another tekkie by the ragged collar of his lab whites. Cuffing him had been unnecessary as one arm and one leg were a mess of shrapnel wounds - he must have been standing far too close to whatever it was that had exploded in the canteen.

  "Doctor Hellermann was bugging out just as we came in," Mexter greeted Dredd. "The canteen's been fitted out as a sterile operating theatre. Moment she saw us, she set the gruddamned robo-docs on us." He put a gloved hand up to a thin line of blood that ran the length of his jaw. "We hit them with a Hi-Ex each and they went to pieces. A couple of her assistants, too. But that was it for the power."

  Dredd nodded. "I'll see Attempted Judge Homicide gets added to her charge sheet," he replied. "It's already an impressive-"

  The lid of the growth tank next to him exploded outwards.

  Dredd turned his face away as shards of razor-edged plastic spun into the air. A heartbeat later the entire lid of the tank whirled upwards in a shower of fluid, as something vast leapt out and hurled itself forwards.

  In an instant Dredd was being battered against another tank. His Lawgiver had been slapped from his grip before he could react, and the thing had a massive hand around Dredd's throat, crushing his windpipe, and it was slamming him repeatedly against the growth unit behind him. If he hadn't been wearing a Justice Department helmet his skull would have been shattered.

  The grip on this throat was incredible, stronger than a robot. His vision had already started to grey out; Dredd could hear the other Judges yelling and shots being fired.

  "Hold your fire. You'll hit Dredd!"

  His vision narrowed until all he could see was the thing's face, or what it had for a face. Pure hatred with teeth, and eyes that held far more intellect than such a monster should possess.

  Enough, Judge Dredd decided, was enough. He sagged in the creature's grip and let his hand drop down to the top of his boot. When it swung up again, a broad, tempered blade protruded from his fist.

  Dredd slammed his boot knife into the creature's chest, but the grip around his throat didn't weaken and now the grey fog was turning black. With the last of his strength, Dredd stabbed again, driving the blade between its ribs and twisting, probing for a vital organ.

  With an involuntary squeal, the creature released its hold. Dredd hurled himself back. "Now!" he gasped, through a throat that felt as though he'd been eating glass. "Open fire!"

  "No!" cried Hellermann, but her protest was drowned out by the sound of four Lawgivers firing in unison.

  Dredd saw the creature's pale, unfinished skin explode in a dozen places. It reeled from the impact of the execution shells, then with a roar of fury it leaped towards Judge Mexter. A sabre of polished bone had already erupted from its forearm.

  "Incendiary!" Dredd dived for his Lawgiver, snatched it up even as it was acknowledging his voice command, and pumped three shots into the monster's side.

  Instantly it was ablaze - a bellowing, thrashing column of greasy flame. It staggered towards Mexter, but the flesh was already twisting off its bones. Within a metre it sagged onto its knees, and finally collapsed onto the factory floor.

  It didn't stop trying to get to Mexter until several minutes later, when Dredd tired of its squealing and put an execution round through its skull.

  "I'm just glad we caught them before they got shipped out," Mexter said later as Hellermann was being led away. "I can think of a dozen rogue states and twice that many crime bosses who'd pay good credits for just one of these killers. Imagine if they got their hands on an army of them."

  "Um, Judge Mexter, Judge Dredd. About that." One of the Ground Team's Tek-Judges, Corben, had commandeered a workstation. He stood up from his seat as Dredd and Mexter came over.

  "About what, Corben?" Dredd asked, aware that his voice sounded even more gravelly than usual. "Spit it out."

  Corben nodded. "I've only just skimmed the surface of Hellermann's system," he began, "but there's something you should know. These tanks are holding the second and third batches Hellermann has produced. The first was decanted a week ago with a better than seventy per cent survival rate. Seems the duds were rendered down and used to augment the nutrients for the next batch." Corben looked down at his feet with a grimace. He was standing in a puddle of the solution that was leaking from the ruined growth tank.

  "What happened to the first batch?"

  "They were moved to one of Big Jimmy's safe houses out by the Kennedy Hoverport while a credit transfer was arranged," Corben continued, reading the information scrolling down the workstation's monitor. "A big credit transfer. I haven't been able to piece together the name of the buyer, but I can tell you that they went over the Atlantic Wall."

  "When?"

  "Yesterday."

  "Dredd to PSU."

  Tek-Judge Gleick started at the sound of Dredd's voice, almost spilling the cup of fresh synthi-caf he had ordered from the roving robo-dispenser. Since the raid on the factory ended, he had kept the spy-in-the-sky clear of the street Judges, and of Dredd in particular. One reprimand from the legend was more than enough for one night.

  "Patch me through to the Chief Judge, Code Omega." Dredd was the only street Judge with the authority to demand a direct comm-link with Chief Judge Hershey. Gleick knew that Hershey and Dredd had a history - Dredd's recommendation had carried a lot of weight when it came time to elect a new Chief Judge, a little over two years ago.

  "Yes sir," Gleick's hands flew over the comm-keys, bypassing the normal channels of communication which ran from street Judge to Sector House and on up the chain of command. "Chief Judge, I have Judge Dredd on the line."

  Dredd spoke as soon as the channel opened. He didn't waste time with formalities. He didn't even wait for Gleick to get offline. "We're twenty-four hours too late," he growled. "Project Warchild is already in the air."

  2. SPLASH

  The Lindberg was flying low over the Black Atlantic, really low, and that made Taub nervous. To him, it seemed as though the cargo plane was barely skimming the tops of the highest waves.

  It was an illusion, he knew. The cargo jet's autopilot was keeping a good forty metres between plane and water, but the slate-black surface of the ocean was so featurel
ess, so vast, that it filled every part of the view from the cockpit. At times it looked as though the plane was barely moving, but then Taub would see a line of grey on the far horizon, and watch as it drew closer, speeding up, and resolving itself into a wavefront of scummy grey foam before it disappeared under the cockpit. The toxic surface of the Black Atlantic broke every now and then, but reluctantly.

  Mostly it was just oily swell, and that got old really fast. Taub yawned, stretched, and said: "Want another caf?"

  Hopkirk shook his head without looking up. The pilot had downloaded an e-zine to his dataslate the previous afternoon, and he'd been reading it continuously since switching the Lindberg to autopilot. Taub couldn't decide if Hopkirk was just a slow reader, or if he was just keeping his nose in the slate to avoid conversation. Neither explanation appealed to him very much, but who knew about these Brit-Cit types anyway? Stuck-up, at best. A serious stick up the rear at worst.

  "Suit yourself." Taub got up, steadying himself against the back of his seat as the Lindberg rose slightly to avoid a swell, and made for the dispenser unit set in the cockpit's rear wall. While his drink was gurgling into a plastic cup, Taub surveyed the choices offered by the energy bar dispenser set next to the caf-machine. Five fruit flavours, all of which he knew from bitter experience would taste like damp cardboard. "What the drokk is a dongleberry anyway?"

  "Sorry, a what?"

  "Dongleberry. This bar dispenser's got a new flavour - Delicious Dongleberry."

  "Yummy," said Hopkirk flatly. He still hadn't looked up from his slate. "It'll taste of cardboard."

  Taub nodded to himself and took the plastic cup of lukewarm synthi-caf from the dispenser. "Yeah, I know. Just making conversation. Thought it might break up the boredom."

  Hopkirk glanced up from his screen. "Bored?" He smiled thinly. "Well, if you want to break the monotony you could try working out whether we're still low enough to keep under Atlantic Division's radar, and high enough to avoid a megashark if one decides to jump up and take a bite out of the tail."