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glass in a trembling hand, he poured himself a large shot and bolted it
down his throat in one sharp go. He found himself staring at the
star-and-moon sigil behind the desk.
"Santa Maria," he whispered to the empty room, "forgive me."
"This?" Judge Hiro snapped at the robot, "You called me from a
barricade under fire to show me this?" He stabbed his finger at the shape
of a broken-down moon rover as other droids in the airlock garage hauled
the dark, silent vehicle into the maintenance bay.
The robot supervisor missed his angry tone. "It rolled to a halt just
outside airlock four. Regulations demand that a Judge be present when
any such unaccounted-for vehicle arrives at a city dome entrance-"
Hiro waved the droid into silence. "Yes, yes, whatever. Just open it up
and I'll be on my way. There's a million psycho cits on the streets and I still
have a full clip of ammo." He patted the Hornet hand cannon slung over
his shoulder with affection. "War is coming and I aim to be on the
winning side."
The robot crew worked the rover's door. Hiro gave the vehicle's
registration a cursory glance - the code indicated an industrial unit,
probably a runaway from a factory dome. The SJS-Judge snatched a torch
from the supervisor and climbed inside. He expected to see a desiccated
corpse, probably some idiot who had set out with the rover on auto-drive
without filling up on air first. Instead, the first thing he noticed was the
head of a hunter-killer droid, speared in the windscreen glass by a
drill-bit. Hiro was about to say something when the cold metal shape of a
pistol pressed into his temple.
"Hello again," said Dredd. "Remember me?"
Hiro had an L-Wagon parked outside, his partner, Wright, was inside.
Kontarsky shot the other SJS officer with a stun bolt and took the flyer up
into the air. Dredd made sure that Hiro was safely handcuffed in the crew
compartment behind her.
The Sov-Judge flew fast and low, swinging between towers and
citi-blocks, making a fast beeline for the angular shape of the Spike.
Dredd considered the Hornet he'd taken off the SJS-Judge. "What are
you doing with this? It's not standard issue."
Hiro snorted. "It's not exactly a 'standard issue' day, -Dredd. Look out
the window, you'll see what I mean."
The senior Judge looked down on the streets flashing by beneath them
and saw they were alive with fire and explosions. Omni-Tanks fired frag
shells into crowds of armed citizens, Cyclops lasers sizzled through
glasseen and steel and everywhere lay the dead, some torn apart by bullets,
others trampled by mobs. "Grud! It's a warzone down there! What the
drokk happened?"
"Che grew a spine," Hiro retorted. "The SJS are in operational control
now, Dredd. Kessler's going to make sure the cits learn a lesson in
humility."
The hollow thud of an explosion floated past the flyer and Kontarsky
swore softly. "Multiple missile hits on Edward - Norton Block to the south.
I see five Mantas firing on the ruins."
Hiro shrugged. "Can't make an synthi-omelette without breaking-"
Dredd silenced him with a look. "Kessler likes the taste of blood, doesn't
he?"
"You ought to know."
The senior Judge looked away. "Where are we?" he asked Kontarsky.
"Landing now," she replied.
Neither the Sov-Judge nor Dredd saw Hiro touch a blister on his glove,
instantly sending an alert signal to Justice Central. '
The vast needle of the Luna-1 Computer Hub Tower, known throughout
the metropolis as the Spike, loomed large in the cockpit window. Hiro
sneered.
"You won't be able to touch down without a clearance code. They'll
blast you out of the sky first."
Dredd threw Kontarsky a nod and she pushed the throttle to maximum,
zooming toward the tower like a bullet. "It's not a problem," Dredd was
almost casual. "We brought a key."
The Sov-Judge took the L-Wagon into a controlled crash-landing on the
seventy-seventh floor of the Spike, shattering a wall of glasseen panels to
touch down in the middle of a small atrium. She feathered the controls
enough to nose it through walls and into the arena-like command centre
at the tower's core. Computer technicians and servo-droids scattered as
the flyer's hatch opened.
Dredd waved his STUP-gun at Hiro's head. "Stay here. Don't get cute."
The SJS-Judge said something foul enough to earn him a dozen
conduct demerits, but Dredd was already gone, climbing down after
Kontarsky.
She menaced a quivering compu-tech with an icy glare. "Show me the
main data processing monitor, now." The operator nodded a worried
assent and led her to a panel. Dredd noted Kontarsky's method with
approval. She had clearly picked up a few pointers from him on
intimidation.
"Run a sweep," Dredd told her. "Look for anything anomalous."
She nodded. Having glimpsed the commands on the XF6 screens at the
Oxy-Dome, Kontarsky now knew exactly what to search for - and in a few
moments, she had found it.
The Sov-Judge highlighted a series of tiny data strings hidden in the
streaming virtual traffic of the hub. To Dredd they looked like single
bubbles picked out of a churning foam of information. "Here. These match
what we saw earlier."
Dredd considered the screen. "If these hidden commands have been
here all the time, why didn't J'aele and Tek Division spot them?"
"It's ingenious," she marvelled. "The signals cloak themselves in the
background chatter. Unless you know exactly, precisely, where to look for
them, you'd think they were just glitches or junk data."
The Judge drew his pistol and set the gun's power pack to cycle. "The
Spike is shielded from electro-magnetic pulses from outside?" he asked
the technician. He got a wary nod in return. "But not from inside, right?"
Again, the man gave a nod. Dredd switched the pistol into self-destruct
mode. "Where's the main router hub?"
The sweaty little man pointed to a column of pulsing circuitry that ran
along the length of the Spike. "Uh, there& But it's beam-shielded! You
can't just shoot it!"
"I'm not going to," Dredd replied and tossed his STUP-gun into the
access channel surrounding the column. The weapon clattered against the
hub and began to emit a keening whine. "I'd advise you take cover."
Kontarsky rolled under the console just as Dredd's pulse pistol
overloaded. The computer centre was lit by an actinic blue flash that
turned the room into a still monochrome image and then everything went
dark.
Everything.
17. NEGATIVE RETURN
"Sneck!" yelled Foster from the saddle of his Skymaster. "Look at that!"
To his left, flying behind him, Tek-Judge J'aele felt his gut tighten as
every light in Luna-1 went out. It was like a huge blanket of darkness
racing across the city below them. From the Apollo Territory in the north
to Crater in the south, a wave of black enveloped the colony dome. J'aele's
gaze flicked to the screen between his handlebars, the direct link to the
central records computer at the Grand Hall of Justice - and instead of the
usual train of data and readouts, there was an error message: Data link
lost.
The only illumination came from torches down on the street, the odd
headlight beam from a vehicle or the twinkling orange-yellow reflections
from a fire. At first, the Simba City Judge suspected an EMP weapon, but
such a thing would have knocked out the controls of their Zippers as well
and sent them plunging toward the ground. "It's Dredd," he said with
grim certainty. "Who else could it be?" Overhead, the arc of a rising Earth
was clearly visible through the dome, shining a dusky light over the
metropolis.
Foster's voice carried through the rushing air. "Judge Hiro's beacon
signal is steady at the Spike. We're close."
J'aele nodded. "Let's move. If we don't get to him first, Kessler's SJS are
going to have Dredd's head before we find out what he's-"
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