Psykogeddon Page 10

  "Youth?" Dredd spat. "That was six months ago."

  "Well, we're none of us getting any younger."

  "Jokes?" Dredd was used to creeps who cloaked their acts in irony, masking their confessions of atrocity with a sarcasm that spoke of a recognition of how bad those atrocities had ultimately been.

  With Drago San, however, there was no sense of anything but a massive unconcern - as though he genuinely believed every word he said. Maybe it was this famous dry Brit-Cit wit everybody was talking about.

  "You see human life as so worthless you can make jokes?" Dredd said.

  "Such as they are," said Drago San impassively. "Oh, I'm quite aware of the value of human life. To their credit, truth be told. You're forgetting I grew up in Puerto Lumina, one of the few places in this world that never lay down, rolled over and bought into your so-called Justice system."

  "And Puerto Lumina is a living hellhole," said Dredd.

  "A hell - as you so rightly say - hole. And who made it so? We saw how you stamped out all opposition in Luna-Cit and the other lunar colonies, crushing thousands as you shoved them into the mechanism of your Law, and how you kowtowed down and licked the hands of the oxy-corps like lapdogs.

  "What did you get for it, Dredd? How much did they pay you to sell off-world humanity into slavery?"

  The accusation, coming as it did from out of left field, caught Dredd utterly unprepared. He knew that the situation had never been like that in the Luna colonies, effectively stranded by the post-Rad War breakdown, but he could see how the facts could be twisted to fit the accusation.

  "The Justice Department never takes bribes," he said flatly. "Mega-City One isn't Brit-Cit."

  "You mean you never even got anything out of it?" said Drago San in some astonishment. "That just makes it all the worse."

  "In the harsh environment of a Lunar colony," Dredd said, "measures had to be taken. Sacrifices made. Discipline enforced."

  "Quite possibly," said Drago San. "That does not, however, automatically have to involve the crash-depressurisation of entire family living quarters on the basis of getting a little behind on the air-tax. Even at worst, we of Puerto Lumina wanted no truck with things like that. We refused to join your Bright New Dawn for Justice - and what did you do to us?"

  "We left you alone," Dredd said. "Left you to your own devices. You wanted your own little world, and that's what you got. You made your bed and we let you lie in it, nothing more, nothing less."

  "You instituted a blanket embargo!" Drago San spat.

  For the first time, it seemed, cracks had appeared in his shell of utter insouciance. Dredd could see the anger and hatred boiling beneath.

  "Knowing what that would mean! Nothing going out, nothing coming in. We had air and water recycling facilities in place, of course - but our food production was still in its first stages. Have you seen food riots, Dredd? Have you killed an entire family for a single nutri-pak? Have you seen a society degenerate into cannibalism?" Drago San sighed and abruptly fell silent. It was as though the shutters of disassociation had come crashing down again. Once again, there was nothing to see but suave calmness.

  "An equilibrium was eventually achieved, of course," he continued, in composed and perfectly reasonable tones. "We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, with some small degree of help from our friends. Order was finally restored, though it was of course too late for me. I'd acquired something of a taste for it."

  Dredd recalled the tenebrous savagery of Puerto Lumina the footage of which was commonly used in Justice Department propaganda concerning the alternatives to the Justice system as a means of governance.

  "You acquired a taste for cannibalism?" he asked.

  "Not as such. Nothing so on the nose, however pleasantly it might be cooked. More for the act of killing as the preferred option for anything I might want." Drago shrugged massively. "Who knows? Had I been born into other circumstances, things might have been quite different."

  There was a pause.

  "And that's it, is it?" said Dredd. "After all that, the point of your story is that you're not responsible for your actions? That society's to blame?"

  "Oh, no, Dredd!" For an instant Drago San seemed quite genuinely shocked. "Heaven forbid that I should for one second attempt something so trite!

  "I simply choose to kill, as and when I may, and I make no bones about it. At least, not since the dietary conditions of my surroundings improved. I just thank your Justice Department for handing me that option on a plate."

  NINE

  "I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmic, primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable."

  - The Mikado

  "Judge Joe Dredd," said Barnstable Wheems, consulting the information streaming across the screen of his data-pad. "The 'Joe' being your full name, as opposed to a contraction of 'Joseph' or some such.

  "A designated clone-organism, developed from the genetic strain of one Chief Judge Fargo. Gestated in the year 2066, decanted from the maturation vats at a biological age comparable to mid-adolescence, in 2071. Are these facts, without delving too deeply into the minutiae of technical terminology, broadly correct?"

  "Yeah," said Dredd.

  "You graduated from the Academy of Law in the year 2079, together with your genetic twin, Rico. As a Street Judge, subsequently, you were instrumental in the arrest of Judge Rico Dredd and his deportation to the penal colony on Titan. That must have been a bit of a wrench. Rico Dredd was more than a brother, even a biological twin. He was a man absolutely identical to yourself in every quantifiable respect."

  "What does this have to do with anything?" Dredd growled. "I fail to see what this has to do with-"

  "Please bear with me. In 2099, in what has become known as the First Robot War, you were instrumental in quashing this mechanoid insurrection. In the year 2100, you personally commanded a medical convoy across the Cursed Earth, taking plague vaccine to the stricken Mega-City Two, the first such successful ground-level crossing on record.

  "In the year 2102, you were the most prominent member, the leader in all but name, of the resistance movement that successfully deposed the despotic, and clinically psychotic, Chief Judge Cal. And his little fish, too.

  "In 2104, you led the last-stand tactical strike that effectively obliterated East Meg One, and destroyed the New Sov Block as a coherent geopolitical force."

  "Yes, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with-" Dredd began again.

  "Proper relevance will be shown," said Wheems, overriding him, "if you will only allow me to continue.

  "Records from the atrocity that became known as Necropolis are largely unavailable, and patchy in the extreme where they are, but all remaining sources agree that, once again, you were instrumental in bringing that atrocity to an end. In much the same way, in fact, that later you led an international task force of Judges to locate and kill the dead-raiser, Sabbat.

  "And so on, and on, and on. Even so much as a few years ago, you were active and highly prominent in the investigation of an organised network of Black Squads, operating within the very structure of the-"

  "Objection!" SJS-Judge Slithe cried. "I find myself in complete agreement with Dredd - a thing which, believe you me, is almost entirely unprecedented. All these matters are well-known, overly well-known, in my personal opinion, and I fail to see what relevance they have to our current situation."

  "I'm going to have to ask you to show relevance," said Chief Judge Hershey. "We'll be here all night singing praises to the Life of Dredd, otherwise."

  "The relevance is simple," said Wheems. "The function of a Judge, according to the Mega-City Justice Department, is to serve the Law. Personalities do not enter into it. A certain sense of anonymity is, indeed, required, no Judge can be bigger than the Law he serves."

  "He?" asked Chief Judge Hershey sweetly.

  "No Judge can be bigger than the Law he or she serves," continued Wheems, barely missing a beat. "However, it doesn't qui
te work that way where you're concerned, does it, Dredd? You're the single most famous, and visible, and feared Judge in Mega-City One. Chief Judges come and go, but when you want to put the fear of Grud into someone, you send in Dredd.

  "As you can see from the recorded evidence, the Boranos Accord had Efil Drago San in custody for crimes committed in its jurisdiction: the selling of proscribed black market foodstuffs which he had deliberately poisoned, resulting in the deaths of the order of a thousand, I believe. Due process was served, due punishment had been meted out.

  "Sending you, Dredd, to demand the extradition of Efil Drago San for prior crimes committed in Mega-City One, was an attempt to apply strong-arm tactics - an act of bullying, no more, no less - and a tacit admission that Mega-City claims of jurisdiction could not stand on their own merits."

  "I was intimately involved with Drago San's... prior crimes," said Dredd. "He attempted to murder me by placing me in that Killing Zone of his and forcing me to run the gamut. Far as I'm concerned, I was still in hot pursuit."

  "Taking a break of six months to do all kind of other things, I submit," submitted Wheems, "rather stretches the definition of 'hot pursuit'."

  "Stretch it how you like," growled Dredd. "It still fits. And as to the merits of our prior claim, the nature of Drago San's crimes in Mega-City One make those merits self-evident."

  "Are you telling me that the mass-murder of anonymous off-worlders is somehow less important than the murder of a Mega-City citizen?" said Wheems. "So much for Justice Department notions of impartiality."

  "I'm saying that some crimes cannot be allowed to stand," said Dredd. "Drago San killed thousands, many of them Judges, and defiled their bodies, for no other apparent purpose than his own amusement. His plans of escape, when located, involved the destruction of an entire Sector and the deaths of millions, as a matter of course - deaths that were only prevented by extreme measures on the part of Psi-Judge Janus."

  Dredd scowled. "In such cases there can be no compromise or quarter. Justice must be done, and seen, unequivocally, to be done."

  "As it was already being done, I remind you yet again, on Boranos Prime," said Wheems.

  "When I ran into him on Boranos Prime," said Dredd, "his life was being preserved in comfort, so he could provide suggestions and ideas for the Accord torturers. Give him a year and he'd have been running the drokking place. Whichever way you slice it, the prior claim of Mega-City One was valid."

  "Very well," said Wheems. "You contend the validity of a prior claim. What about, therefore, the prior claims of Brit-Cit - and for that matter Puerto Lumina? Efil Drago San committed other and worse crimes in those locales before he ever so much as set foot in Mega-City One. You can't have it both ways, Dredd."

  "Oh yes we drokking can," said Dredd shortly. "Puerto Lumina is a lawless hole. Transporting him into the care of what passes for the authorities there would be the equivalent of letting him escape scot-free. Likewise..." Dredd gestured with an impact-gauntlet to take in the senile Senior Brit-Cit Judges. "...the whole world knows whose pockets the so-called Justice Department of Brit-Cit are in. The people into the hands of whom we'll really be delivering Drago San, if Brit-Cit can make its claim of jurisdiction stick.

  "You seem to be under a misapprehension as to the nature of this hearing, Wheems. You think this Adjudication Board is gonna rubber-stamp a foregone conclusion and let Drago San trot off back to Brit-Cit and his Overlord friends. That's not the case."

  Now Dredd's gesture took in the floating news-service microcams in the otherwise all but empty public gallery.

  "The purpose of this hearing is to ensure that Justice is seen to be done in the eyes of the world. The... representatives of Brit-Cit can decide what the drokk they like. The purpose of this hearing is to make damn sure that, when we go against it, we're fully and completely justified in doing so - up to and including the use of armed force."

  "So to clarify," said Wheems, "what you're telling me is that whatever the board of adjudicators decides, you're going to keep hold of my client anyway, under force of arms, if necessary? Are you telling me that this entire hearing is a farce?"

  "What we're telling you," said Chief Judge Hershey, "is that it's not the particular kind of farce you thought it was. You're not here just to go through the motions and pick apart our reasons for keeping hold of Drago San. You're here to find some utterly compelling reason why we shouldn't - and that's something you haven't even begun to do."

  It was at that point that the seemingly catatonic and immobile face of Efil Drago San moved. There was the sense of something informing him, something living behind the eyes - even if that thing was simple bemusement at precisely who and where he was.

  Drago San turned his head and muttered something to Barnstable Wheems. The actual words were lost to everyone other than Wheems himself, muffled by the restraining stasis-field as a part of client-to-counsel privilege.

  At length, Wheems stood away from Drago San and turned to address Chief Judge Hershey.

  "My client has suggested certain, uh, other directions my defence might take," he said. He seemed markedly less sure of himself now, knowing that the result of the hearing was not a foregone conclusion. "I'd like to request a short recess so I can talk with him more fully."

  Chief Judge Hershey shrugged. "Sure, why not? Knock yourself out."

  TEN

  "The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, have nothing to do with the case."

  - The Mikado

  "You, uh, understand why I called you in on this?" said Senior Psi-Judge Shenker to Psi-Judge Karyn. "You're the most... well, you're the most forthright psi we have on tap at the moment."

  "Yeah, well," said Psi-Judge Karyn. "What you get is what I think."

  Whereas most Psi-Judges had been enlisted purely on the basis of their psionic talents, their Justice Department training imposed on them, and in a large sense were Judges only in name, Karyn was one of the few who would have almost certainly been a Judge in any case.

  Indeed, she had spent several childhood years as a Cadet, on the fast-track to end up as a Street Judge, before her psionic talents had made themselves evident.

  The upshot was that she tended not to have much of the kind of screwed up, human-level baggage that other Psi-Judges brought to the job, and were forever having to control.

  Even Senior Judge Shenker himself - respected, honoured and decorated as he was - was known to have recurring thoughts about [DELETED FROM JUSTICE DEPARTMENT-APPROVED RELEASE. NEED-TO-KNOW BASIS] and spent a significant part of his brain-capacity ensuring that it never evidenced itself in any overt mannerism or act.

  "The effect the cold-reading had on her seems to be contact-resonant," Shenker said. "That's why we had to put her in containment. If I went in there now, I'd probably develop the compulsion to go around skinning people alive."

  "I get you," said Psi-Judge Karyn. "She's been exposed to something with a flip-out factor and it's contagious. What happened with her?"

  "What did you make of her?" Shenker asked, seemingly changing the subject slightly. "As a person. As a Judge."

  Did, Karyn thought. This does not bode well.

  "You know as well as I do that we don't go around reading each other," she said, "passive or active. Not without express permission or a warrant. Don't ask, don't tell. That's as basic as having to read The Demolished Man in Psi Training One Oh One.

  "As a person, though... I didn't like her very much. Bit of a whiny bitch, to tell you the truth. One of those people who have a poor self-image and decide to spread it around. Putting the worst interpretation on anything and everything. Making assumptions and snap-Judgements and - forget about doing Psi-stuff like a passive read - not even doing the human-level thing of even asking."

  "So that's what she was?" said Shenker. "Far as you're concerned, that's all she was?"

  Was, thought Karyn. Twice.

  "Well, you know," she said. "That's just how you peg people. Like the way you peg someone
as a narcissist, or a sentimentalist, or how you know when the guy from Stationary Division gives you a writing-stylus it's like tearing a piece out of his soul. That doesn't actually define a person, it's just a useful way of pegging them so's you can get on with your life."

  Stationary Division, incidentally, was just one of Divisions within the Justice Department that was not commonly known to the Mega-City at large, on the basis that such commonplace and workaday things were not worth knowing about in the first place, save for those who were actively involved with them. Such Divisions also included Catering and Janitorial. Propaganda Division was unknown, on the other hand, for the simple reason that it was exclusively concerned with promoting a positive image of the Justice Department in the public mind and coming out and saying you had a Propaganda Division would not, exactly, be a positive thing to do.

  "Yes, well," said Shenker. "In this case, the cold-read of the Sturlek body seems to have precipitated the condition of that part of the personality completely overwhelming her. A spontaneous form of cortical-collapse. It seems that the med-tech who brought the body up was trying to make conversation while she was doing the reading - and she just suddenly went for him."

  "Went for him?" Karyn said.

  "Tore his throat out with her bare hands. She'd taken a gauntlet off, of course, to make the galvanistic link. Dug the nails in, and hooked them, and severed the jugular. Screaming incoherently all the while - Defane, that is, in addition to the med-tech - the gist, apparently, being how dare he try to get into her head and keep talking to her as if he were pretending he was a real person."

  "So, uh, there's not much danger that she's going to do something like that to me?" asked Karyn. "You know, what with me going in there and trying to talk to her like a real person?"

  "She's restrained," Shenker reassured her. "All we need is for you to question her. Don't try to direct-link - in fact, it would probably be better for you to keep your mental blocks up. Just try to find out what she learnt from the Sturlek body."