Psykogeddon Page 6

  Taking it out would have been a waste of a perfectly good tactical nuclear strike.

  The ABC clouds drifting in from a desolated Continental Europe, however, turned much of the British Isles into a wasteland, ruled over by a collection of criminal warlords constantly competing for territory and advantage in the chaos of what was, effectively, a civil war.

  The more far-sighted of these warlords knew that this state of affairs could not last without a wholesale slide into barbarism, but years of divisive politics had left nothing around which the various factions might cohere.

  When the law-enforcement agencies of the USA took command of the remains of their country and established the Justice System, the British warlords took it as a godsend - or, indeed, as a Grudsend.

  Knowing a good thing when they saw it, the warlords came together in what became known as the Conclave, redeployed their various soldiers and assassins and enforcers along Justice Department lines, dressed them up as Judges and applied for as much US funding as they could grab.

  It might have seemed odd that the American Mega-Cities, who had troubles enough of their own, would have had anything to spare for any other country. The plain fact was, though, that the idea of the Law had taken the US citizens by storm and in the heady rush of implementing it, they were drokking-well going to spread it around.

  The Brit-Cit Justice Department began life as nothing more than a front, the purpose of which was to garner massive doses of relief aid, wipe out all opposition and establish a de facto government by direct force, with the meanest sons of bastiches ending up sitting on the top.

  It would be wrong to say that the system was corrupt, because that would be assuming that it had been honest enough in the first place, and that corrupting it would make any actual difference.

  All of which was to say that Brit-Cit was one of the few city-states on Earth that maintained ties and trading links with Puerto Lumina, and allowed it to exist in the first place. Indeed, if one could scrape together the cash, it was possible to use those trade routes to escape.

  Efil Drago San had scraped that cash together, making his escape over a pile of bodies numbering in the thousands.

  On his arrival in Brit-Cit, by way of a British Off-Planet Services shuttle which, ostensibly, had crashed with no survivors, Drago San had melted into the underworld that existed on account of Brit-Cit Judges looking studiously the other way.

  He had then risen through the ranks with such single-minded ferocity as to put the atrocities of the Civil War to shame... to emerge, in a matter of half a decade, as one of the Overlords who not-so-secretly ran Brit-Cit and its Justice Department from behind the scenes.

  For years Efil Drago San had run a number of rackets in Brit-Cit, from drugs, to certain highly specialised avenues of prostitution, to organised murder, with effective immunity. These happy days had come to an end, however, for two main reasons - the first reason being the basic fact that form and function, in this world, are inextricably linked.

  Over the years, quite simply, amongst the usual hordes of thugs and bullies, the ersatz Brit-Cit Justice Department had begun to attract those who truly did believe in the Law, people who genuinely wanted to be of service.

  People who were naïve enough that the question of whom they were actually serving never occurred to them... or bright enough to know the game was rigged, but that it was the only game in town.

  The former, of course, were in for a rude awakening, and lasted in direct proportion to how much noise they subsequently made about it. The latter settled in for the long haul, did their jobs as best as they were able and never lost an opportunity to throw a spanner in the overlords' collective works.

  The net result was that the overlords woke up one day to find that the Brit-Cit Justice Department that they thought was in their pockets suddenly seemed to be devoting most of its time to actually solving crimes and keeping order. And for some unaccountable reason, they seemed to think that the overlords themselves were a large factor in committing those crimes and disrupting order.

  The pressure was on and a scapegoat had to be found.

  As a foreigner, Drago San was not a favourite of the other overlords - and his taste for killing for the sake of it, often in a spectacular and extremely noticeable fashion, had caused them no end of problems.

  The other Overlords forced him from their conclave and hung him out to dry. An open season was declared on him throughout Brit-Cit.

  Drago San fled to Mega-City One, where he was able to take advantage of a flaw in the system. Since he had never, technically, committed a crime that had made it onto the Mega-City One transputer-files, he was allowed inside, to subsequently lose himself amongst the teeming millions.

  And there he might have remained, had he kept his head down and avoided throwing up a blip on the Justice Department sonar.

  It was his appetite for killing, however, and doing it as blatantly as possible, that got the best of him. Over a number of months he set up what became known as the Killing Zone - a subterranean arena, buried in the Resyk sewer-systems of Sector Nine, where cyber-modified killers fought in gladiatorial combat and the slaughter was broadcast to half the City.

  When his Killing Zone was finally tracked down by Judge Dredd, he attempted to set off bombs smuggled into the Sector Nine Resyk facility, which would have destroyed the entire Sector, or at least have made the survivors regret that they had the soft option, as they drowned in a billion gallons of raw sewage.

  The bombs had been defused before they could do more than minor damage, but Drago San had taken advantage of the confusion they caused to make his escape, heading off-planet, then out into the stars, thinking he was running far enough to escape the grasp of the Law, however long its arm.

  It was pure bad luck, so far as Efil Drago San was concerned, that he fetched up in the Boranos System and became embroiled in its power struggles - one of the plots of which involved the sudden arrival of the Mega-City starship Justice One and one Judge Dredd.

  The Boranos conflict resolved, Drago San was returned to the Meg and the hi-sec Iso-cubes, from which there had never been, under any possible circumstances, a means of escape...

  Until now.

  "My word!" Drago San exclaimed in the Mega-City Iso-block. "To think you'd make the time to come and visit me in my present, alas, sadly reduced circumstances. Such thoughtfulness shines out, don't you know, like a beacon of hope in a naughty world! And how are things with you, my dear chap?"

  Dredd ignored the question. It was standard procedure to refuse to engage with a prisoner by giving out personal details, even on the level of indicating a current emotional state - especially with this prisoner, who had a tendency to be able to lever apart the cracks in even the most innocuous of words.

  "You're looking... healthier than when I saw you last," he said at length, and it was true. Drago San's biological form, founded under lunar gravity, was every bit as extreme as any member of the Mega-City's Fattie cults - though where the Fattie cults were a fetish, and therefore unnatural, Drago's bulk seemed, in some abstruse sense, perfectly natural.

  When Dredd had run into him on Boranos, the privations of a torture cell awaiting various exsanguinations had given Drago San something of the aspect of a partially deflated balloon. Now he had bulked up again.

  "It's the diet, you see," Drago San explained cheerfully. "Your charming little cells here provide the precise degree of nutrition required by their inmates. I'm surprised they keep up, in my case. I await a starvation-diet with trepidation."

  "I wouldn't worry," said Dredd. "The Justice Department does not torture. We're not sadists like you. We don't go in for cruel and unusual punishment."

  Drago San's flab jiggled in what might or might not have been a shrug. "I'd submit," he said, "that 'cruel and unusual' is precisely what any punishment needs to be, if it's to be in any way effective. I seem to recall some suitably self-satisfied and rabid thinker saying as much, in history. Be that as it may, you're simpl
y storing up trouble by stockpiling people like this and keeping them healthy, if you want my advice."

  "I'll never want your advice, Drago San," Dredd said.

  "I'm merely saying," said Efil Drago San, "that with my... somewhat specialised experience, I'm in the ideal position to suggest improvements to your systems of punishment. Rather like I was able to do for the Boranos Accord." He grinned wolfishly. "I wouldn't even ask for any special consideration. Just the satisfaction of having been of help in some small way."

  "Just the satisfaction of knowing that you've made the lives of others that little bit more miserable," growled Dredd.

  "There is that, of course," said Efil Drago San. "We are all of us slaves to our most basic of impulses, are we not?" Again his flesh jiggled in what might or might not have been an unconcerned shrug. "Oh well, have it your own way. If we're going to talk about events out of the ordinary, then why are you here? I gather that it's not the usual practice to visit a prisoner after he's banged - I believe the term is - up."

  "Your old friends from Brit-Cit are exerting pressure," said Dredd.

  "Old friends?" Drago San pursed his lips in a somewhat overplayed moue of consideration. "I wasn't aware, to be frank, that I had any friends left there of any description."

  "The Brit-Cit Justice Department is demanding your extradition," said Dredd. "They want you to pay for your crimes committed on Brit-Cit soil and they're making a stink about it.

  "Ordinarily, we'd tell 'em to go drokk themselves, but... certain recent factors have left us overextended. We can't afford an increase in international tensions. It's been decided to hold a hearing."

  Efil Drago San regarded Dredd impassively for a moment, and then his face split open in a delighted grin.

  "Can it be?" he said. "If I understand you correctly - and please feel free to correct me if I don't - that you are actually contemplating putting me through the procedures of a fair trial? Bit of a first for you, there, Dredd, if I say it myself."

  SIX

  "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

  - Thomas Hobbes

  Leviathan

  The lower levels of Shangri La were basically the equivalent of the Servants' Quarters in one of those mansions owned by rich parasitical drokkers in the old days.

  One might have thought that, in these days of advanced cybernetics, the entire concept of human servitude would be redundant, but the opposite was in fact true.

  Almost anyone with enough money to speak of - could buy a robo-servant, and where was the cachet in that? And with the advances of automation in every other walk of life, the world was full of people desperate for any job at all, at any wage, people willing to spend their lives walking around in the costume of a manservant or a maid.

  Sheer population-pressure had turned these Servants' Quarters into a self-contained community in its own right, with its own pecking order and rituals - a whole quasi-spiritual pseudo-religion concerned with serving the People Above.

  The Shangri La Towers, in fact, contained two distinct worlds: Those Above and Those Below. These worlds only intersected at certain points - another way in which Shangri La was similar to a mansion, or some such, owned by rich parasites in the past.

  Dredd walked through access corridors packed with Butlers making stately Procession, like medieval abbots attended by their retinues of acolytes, and the bustling forms of Personal Assistants and their own attendants, every bit as splendid as the Butlers in their own way but with sharper suits.

  Footmen in their various liveries lounged in different corners of corridors in groups, smoking roll-ups of some substance still not illegal, due to trickle-down from the resources of the people above, eyeing their opposite numbers with speculative suspicion as though the first makings of a gang-rumble were in the air.

  Young ladies in a variety of chambermaid-style outfits lounged, similarly, on other corners, with an demeanour that left no doubt as to what they might supply by way of extra services.

  A place for everybody and everybody in their place, supposedly.

  There were, however, those in the microcosmic culture of Those Below who fell through the cracks. Those who had found themselves some perceived space in the culture but for whom there was no actual use.

  "Beggin' your pardon, yer worship," a ragged, wizened, crazed-looking individual said insistently, attempting to pluck at Dredd's uniform with a thin, crabbed hand. "I'm an ostler, me! Finest ostler you'll as ever like to meet! Got any 'orses you might want lookin' after?"

  "Get away from me, creep," Dredd growled, though it must be said, not quite as viciously as he might have.

  He recognised the type from the City outside. People so delusionally fixated on having some kind of job, on being of some actual use, that they starved themselves to death as beggars rather than accept the subsistence benefits that were, technically, every citizen's right. Such people were to be pitied rather than hated. If every one of them had turned around and demanded what was technically their right, after all, the Mega-City financial control systems would never have been able to cope.

  "Touch me again and you'll find yourself in the iso-cubes," Dredd said. A few months in the low-sec cubes, with their provision of nutrition, medical attention and anti-psychotics, would probably be a step up in the life of this creep.

  "Don' know anything about no eye-suck-ubes," said the half-crazed wretch. "I'm an ostler, me. Got any 'orses?"

  Dredd brushed him off and pushed on through the crowd. He realised that, without having really thought about it, some part of him was keeping half an eye out for traces of a missing cat.

  He'd left the Shangri La Proconsul, Lady Slocombe, with the impression that he was in fact here to look for the drokking thing, and his Judge-bred dislike for anything even approaching dishonesty was troubling him a little.

  Ah, well, drokk it. The life of a Judge was, in the end, packed with such niggling details. Cases that were never solved to complete satisfaction, leaving any number of loose ends. Fugitives escaping capture despite every effort. Street riots that could have been avoided if one factor in the chain-reaction that had escalated them into disaster had happened differently...

  Given all that, the knowledge of a lost drokking cat was like a drop of extra contamination in the Black Atlantic. It didn't mean anything and had no relation to anything else. It wasn't important.

  At length Dredd reached the area he was heading for. Litigation Row - the level and section of the Shangri La lower levels that housed its lawyers.

  As he prepared to enter, a segmented polycarbonate tentacle sprang from the wall and writhed before him, barring his way.

  "Be aware," an automated voice said, "that you are entering a designated NERF-field zone. Be aware, therefore, that any injury received while on these premises will be deemed a result of your wilful actions and responsibility will not be assumed by the proprietors and/or affiliates of Shangri La Towers.

  "Be aware, additionally, that an agreement of confidentiality does not extend to the withholding of any admitted crime, so far as it is defined in the Laws and Statutes of the Justice Department of Mega-City One.

  "Please state your name and business for the purposes of voice-verification. Statement of name and business constitutes an acceptance of the above terms, together with such additional terms as might subsequently be deemed necessary, up to and including punitive measures requiring the use of ultimately lethal force."

  "Let me get this straight," said Dredd. "I get past you by giving up every right whatsoever, and anything that might happen to me is my fault rather than yours?"

  "That's about the size of it, sunshine," said the automated voice. "Please state name and business for the purposes of voice-verification."

  "Judge Dredd," said Dredd. "Justice Department business. I'm here to see some creep by the name of Barnstable Wheems."

  The tentacle
whipped back into the wall as if had been physically stung.

  "Too rich for my hydraulic fluid," said the voice. "Go in and see who you like. No polycarbonate sheathing off my endoskeletal armature."

  Having never actually met a lawyer in his life, Dredd was unsure quite what to expect from Barnstable Wheems. In the end he found merely a pudgy, stuffy man in a suit.

  This would have been no problem, so far as Barnstable Wheems was concerned, had the suit been of the three-piece Saville Row variety, the sort one might have imagined a stuffy, pudgy English barrister from back in the early twentieth century wearing. The sort of perfectly-tailored suit cut to transform mere pudginess into an imposing look.

  Instead, the suit was trying to look like those sharp and shark-like suits that had been worn by US lawyers in the glory days of litigation, the twenty-first century.

  Barnstable Wheems looked completely wrong in it, as if he were playing an inept and childish game of dress-up.

  As a man, Wheems was balding, sweaty and more than somewhat twitchy - no doubt as a reaction to being in a job the pressure of which he was patently and innately not up to. Or possibly it was just a guilty conscience - it couldn't be easy being one of the last vestiges of a life-form the world regarded as the lowest possible order of slime, and would only breathe easy when such excrescences were finally extinct.

  "Let me see if I can understand you correctly," Wheems said, squirming uneasily in Dredd's gaze after the Judge had put matters to him. "You're mounting a trial and you require legal assistance.

  "What makes you think that I have the... relevant skills in prosecuting what is, after all, despite the scale and heinous nature of his crimes, nothing more than a common criminal? Where did you get my name? How did you come to decide upon me?"

  On Wheems's desk, Dredd noticed, was a little polyceramic plaque.