The Cold Light of Day Page 6

  Gibson followed them out. “Come on, Joe. It’s not like—”

  “Ynex is here.”

  “You sure?” Rico asked.

  Joe nodded. “The mayor’s working for him. Apparently we got here a day earlier than they’d expected. There’s a dozen, maybe more—kid who told me can’t count past twelve.”

  Gibson stepped back from the others and glanced along the main street. “Damn... Wondered why everyone seemed a little uneasy. Thought they were just intimidated by us.”

  “All right,” Rico said. “We have to assume that Judge Ruiz has already been taken. We can’t do this alone. Gibson, get back to the camp, bring the others. On foot. Set the bikes on full auto, send them around to approach the town from the west. That should create a big enough distraction for us to get inside the mayor’s store and extract Ruiz.”

  Joe saw movement reflected in the store window. “Behind me... Someone’s coming, heading right for us,” Joe muttered. “Gibson, get moving. And take it slow and casual—we can’t let them see that we’re suspicious.”

  The cadet began to move away, but it was too late. The approaching stranger called out, “Fellas? Hey, fellas! The Judge sent me out to find you!”

  Joe turned and saw an unshaven, barrel-chested man grinning at them.

  “If you’re not busy sight-seeing, that is,” the man added with a light chuckle. He inclined his head back toward the mayor’s store, and the cadets fell into step beside him. “I’m Hieronymus Planter. I keep the local inn. Say, if you guys want to stay in town tonight, I’ll give you a good price. I’m sure we’ve got enough space. How many are in your party?”

  Gibson said, “Forty, including us.”

  Damn it, Joe thought. That’s the wrong approach! You don’t tell the perps that there’s more of us in order to scare them off—you tell them there’s fewer so they’ll be unprepared!

  “Forty, huh?” the innkeeper said. “Jeez, that’s more folks than we have rooms. Some of you’ll have to double-up. You be OK with that? It’d still be more comfortable than sleeping outdoors.” He turned to Joe. “Young Lamb’s not with you? Thought I saw him talking to you earlier.”

  “He wanted to play,” Joe said, keeping his attention on the street, wondering how many eyes were on them right now. “I’m a cadet. We don’t play.” After Lamb had told Joe that Ynex’s men had captured Judge Ruiz, Joe had told him to find his mother and take her as far out of the town as possible.

  “You guys go ahead,” Gibson said. “I should get back to the others.” To the innkeeper, he added, “I’m tending the heavy weapons. Manseeker missiles, mortars, the chain-guns...”

  “I’m sure that can wait,” Planter said. “She told me to bring all three of you. She insisted.”

  Joe saw Rico glancing at him, and knew what his brother was thinking: one of them should hang back a little to get a better handle on the situation. Without turning to Rico, he gave a slight nod.

  The innkeeper stopped outside the store and gestured that they should enter ahead of him. “Go through to the warehouse out back. That’s the mayor’s office.”

  Gibson pushed open the door and Joe followed him, but Rico stopped in the doorway. “Say, you get a lot of visitors to Eminence, Mister Planter? Can’t be too easy keeping an inn going around here.”

  “The river brings some custom,” Hieronymus Planter said. “Hunters and prospectors, mostly, during the rainy season. Go on in. What Mayor Faulder has to say isn’t for my ears.” He gave a small laugh. “I’m just the dogsbody.”

  “Sure, yeah,” Rico said. “Right behind you, guys.”

  Joe looked back to see Rico leaning against the doorjamb as he pulled off one of his boots.

  “Damn sand gets everywhere,” Rico muttered.

  Rico couldn’t delay for more than about twenty seconds without drawing suspicion. Joe hoped that would be enough, because in about thirty seconds he and Gibson were going to draw their weapons, no matter what was happening.

  Mega-City One

  2080 AD

  Ten

  SHOCK EASED OFF the throttle as he neared Treat Williams underpass, the twenty-four-kilometre-long tunnel that marked the quarter-point of the race. Ahead of him, the first-placer Desmond Redmond—one of the few freelancers in this year’s race—was keeping up the speed, a brave strategy. Three years ago an enthusiastic juve had been turned into flesh-jam when, to win a bet, he’d suspended himself from the tunnel’s ceiling armed with a spray-paint can. Tagging a rider would have given him ultimate bragging rights; instead, the juve’s ropes had slipped and he’d managed to get his head squashed by the front wheel of Natalie Harbinger’s souped-up Steamrover.

  The Steamrover had spun out of control following the collision, and, in a blind panic, Harbinger had hit her vehicle’s “Eject” button. Not the wisest move when you’re in a tunnel, Shock thought. Harbinger’s widow was now one of the race’s most vocal opponents, a bitter woman who still wore black and cringed every time the spectacular accident was shown on TV. Which, around the time of the race, was about every ten minutes.

  Shock pulled wide as he approached the tunnel’s entrance, and the proximity warning on his bike’s screen started flashing—someone was coming up fast behind him.

  Shock swore under his breath as the rider’s name appeared: Napoleon Neapolitan.

  Neapolitan was riding a custom-built two-wheeler, a precarious-looking vehicle that on its unveiling the previous week had had all the bookies in a panic. His machine didn’t look stable, but then this was Napoleon Neapolitan, judged by many to be the greatest biker the city had ever seen. If anyone could ride the contraption to victory, it was him.

  Almost any wheeled vehicle was permitted in the race. The only checks the officials made were to ensure that no one was hiding an anti-grav motor somewhere inside their machine. Not that they didn’t try to smuggle them on board, or disguise them as something else. Only a few minutes before today’s race started, two riders were disqualified for using tiny AG motors pulled out of skysurf boards.

  Napoleon Neapolitan’s new ride was definitely wheel-based, but its twin two-metre-diameter wheels were side by side instead of in sequence. Each wheel had its own engine, with Neapolitan’s seat suspended between the two.

  Shock’s screen blipped again: a call from Neapolitan.

  Great, Shock thought. He’s going to try to psych me out. Neapolitan would record the call and endlessly play it back later on the chat-show circuit, as he had done for previous races. Still, however bad Neapolitan made him look, at least it was publicity. Better to be laughed at than ignored.

  He muttered, “Accept,” and Neapolitan’s grinning face appeared on the screen, flickering light and dark as he passed under the tunnel’s lights.

  “Hey, Shock.”

  “Napoleon. That’s a nice little toy you’ve got there. What’s the power?”

  “About ten per cent more than yours. Listen, how about you quit now and save yourself the embarrassment? Just pull over to the side and let the big boys play. You can spend the day doing something productive, maybe. Or, here’s an idea, you could go to a bar and watch TV. I hear there’s a great race on at the moment. You might enjoy that—there’s a rumour that you’re interested in racing.”

  Shock ignored him and drew close to the next rider in front, a member of the three-man Chief Cog team, a group of popular TV-show presenters who always participated for laughs. This one was The Ferret, the smallest and cheekiest of the three, a chirpy daredevil who—along with his pedantic teammate Sergeant Dawdle—was forever failing to crawl out of the shadow of their leader, the brash, craggy-faced know-it-all Jeremiah Kentson.

  “What do you say, Shock?” Neapolitan asked. “I’ll give you fifty credits if you quit. That’s more money than you’ll make coming in last.”

  Ahead, The Ferret was weaving from one side of the tunnel to the other, and Shock could see the top of his helmet bobbing about, a sure sign that the man was recording a commentary. The Ferret
was riding a reconditioned Shuddermeister, painted in pink with yellow dots, its colour-scheme no doubt the result of some hilarious prank by his teammates.

  Shock increased his speed and came up alongside the Shuddermeister, took a moment to glance at the smiling man inside the bike’s bubble canopy, then pulled ahead. He debated for a moment whether to remain in that position, in full view of the cameras bolted onto the front of The Ferret’s bike. It might mean more screen-time when the next special episode of Chief Cog was shown.

  But Neapolitan was still on his tail, still goading him. Shock continued to accelerate, and behind him Neapolitan pulled up next to The Ferret and gave him a friendly salute.

  Damn, Shock thought. I should have done that—that’s a couple of seconds of air-time for sure, even if he doesn’t win.

  But Shock was determined that this time Napoleon Neapolitan was not going to have much in the way of bragging rights. Spacer pride was at stake. The Mega-City 5000 was a dangerous race, and accidents happened. One way or another, Napoleon was not going to cross the finish-line.

  THE PERFEKTEAUGEN CAMERA built into the door of Zederick D’Annunzio’s building had proximity sensors that turned the camera on when a person approached. It had recorded a little over four exabytes of footage in the past year.

  Facial recognition software discarded ninety-seven per cent of the footage, flagging one hundred and fifty-five citizens who’d visited the building in that time. Most were eliminated immediately—known relatives and friends of D’Annunzio or his tenants, delivery people, maintenance workers—leaving four names for Dredd to check.

  The entire process took less than fifteen minutes, most of that time due to delays on the Justice Department networks caused by the extra surveillance on the Mega-City 5000.

  Dredd sat on his Lawmaster outside D’Annunzio’s building as he ran checks on each of the four citizens. Three of them had visited the building several times before Chalk’s release from the iso-cubes. That left one name: Riley Moeller. Moeller had been suspected—but not charged—of trading illegal weapons back in 2075. Around the time of Chalk’s arrest.

  “Control—Dredd. I need the current location of one Riley Moeller, Jeffrey Abrams Block.”

  “Stand by. System’s a little overloaded right now. I’ve added Moeller’s name to the queue.”

  Dredd fired up the Lawmaster and peeled away from the side of the road. “En route to Jeffrey Abrams Block. You find Moeller elsewhere, point the nearest Judge at him. I want him conscious and unharmed.”

  Dredd roared along 4007th Avenue, weaving in and out of the slow-moving traffic. Ahead, the lights at the junction with Alston Buck Road turned red. Dredd hit the traffic override controls on his Lawmaster and the light switched back to green.

  Jeffrey Abrams was one of the city’s newer blocks, a two-hundred-storey-tall cylinder that towered over the rest of its sector. Dredd had visited the block before, investigating a domestic disturbance; its interior didn’t live up to the promise of its gleaming glass-and-metal shell.

  Inside, the walls were unfinished, the electrics and plumbing exposed. Uncovered light fittings cast sharp-edged shadows across the bare floors, and the poor sound-proofing allowed the slightest noise to travel from one side of the block to the other. The Mega-City One housing authority had basic standards for what were considered to be habitable conditions, and Jeffrey Abrams Block only passed inspection because its aggregate score was boosted by its high resistance to fire—and that was because there was little in the block that could burn.

  Dredd pulled onto the slip-road leading off 4007th Avenue and checked his screen for Riley Moeller’s apartment number. “Dredd to Control.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Approaching Jeffrey Abrams Block, ramp entrance. Send an elevator to the thirtieth floor, locked for my use only.”

  “Uh, Dredd, that procedure’s only for priority cases. If—”

  “This is a priority, Control. Just do it.”

  After a tiny, almost imperceptible pause, Control replied, “Acknowledged. Elevator will be waiting for you.”

  Dredd grunted a reply and shut off the comm-link. Justice Department Control was manned chiefly by cadets, invalided Judges and tech support staff, and usually they gave him anything he requested, but today some of them seemed slow in responding. He didn’t know whether that was because of the increased workload due to the race, or because many of the senior Judges blamed him for the deaths of Collins and Pendleton.

  It shouldn’t be like this, Dredd told himself. Judges are expected to be impartial when dealing with the citizens; we should be the same with each other.

  It was a leftover from the days of Chief Judge Solomon. Before Goodman was appointed, corruption among the Judges had been rife. Or if not out-and-out corruption, at least incompetence, which was just as bad.

  Though Clarence Goodman’s administration, working with the Special Judicial Squad, had done great work in straightening out and clarifying the role of the Judges, some of the old squabbles and grievances had yet to be eliminated.

  Many of the older Judges resented Dredd and Rico, solely because of their link to Solomon’s predecessor, Eustace Fargo. Fargo had been a hard-lined, no-nonsense Judge who had always made it clear that the Judges existed to serve the citizens, not the other way around. “We’re not their rulers,” Fargo had once told a gathering of senior Judges. “We’re their caretakers, if anything.”

  Dredd had always held true to that belief. Some Judges had friends among the civilian population. A few even had lovers, though that was strictly against the rules. They saw judging as a career, not as a life.

  And Dredd knew that many Judges thought of him as “Junior Fargo.” He didn’t have friends outside of his own class at the Academy, and even then he didn’t socialise with his former classmates. They were just Judges he knew better than other Judges, that was all. Rico, on the other hand, did sometimes socialise. Though they were genetically identical, their personalities were quite different.

  Joe Dredd had often wondered why that was so. He and Rico had had the same experiences when they were cadets. Neither had been shown favour by their tutors—most of the time the tutors couldn’t tell them apart—and all of their test scores matched almost perfectly. But still, somehow, they had ended up as two very different Judges.

  Judge Morphy, one of Dredd’s mentors during his time at the academy, once asked them—separately—what they’d intended to achieve when they graduated. Rico had told Morphy that he wanted to be the best possible Judge. He’d keep the citizens in line. He’d be firm with them, but compassionate. “I’ll uphold the law,” Rico had said.

  Joe’s response to the same question had been briefer, and very different: “Justice.”

  “Meaning?” Morphy had asked.

  “Sometimes the law will be wrong,” Joe had replied in a matter-of-fact manner. “In those cases, we change the law so that it serves justice. That’s what’s important. That’s why we do this.”

  Even now, many years later, Dredd had not changed his opinion. The law was the law, but wasn’t eternal. It wasn’t immutable. Like Judges, it existed to serve the people, not censure them.

  The situation with Chalk only strengthened his resolve. Dredd knew that what had happened five years earlier in Eminence could have been played differently, but he still believed that he had made the correct decision then—despite the outcome—and he had no regrets.

  The Cursed Earth

  2075 AD

  Eleven

  THE WEAK LIGHT from the grimy windows faded further still as Joe followed Cadet Gibson through the labyrinthine racks toward a door set into the back wall of the store.

  Under his breath, Gibson muttered, “What do you think? Ambush?”

  “Could be,” Joe said. “Could be nothing, though. Stay alert.”

  “Good idea. Never would have thought of that.”

  Joe took another glance back, and spotted his brother entering the store, followed by the
innkeeper. “Rico’s in.”

  Gibson reached out to grab the door handle with his right hand, allowing his left to casually drop closer to the gun on his hip. “I’ll take point—hang back a second or two, Joe.”

  Joe nodded. A couple of seconds could make all the difference if someone was waiting for them on the other side of the door. With Rico taking up the rear, they stood a good chance of at least one of them making it out alive.

  Gibson pushed open the door and strode through into the large warehouse.

  There was no immediate sign of danger, so Joe followed him. The warehouse was dark and damp, and this side of it was almost empty. Heavy wooden beams—some way down the road to rot—supported a patchwork roof of rusting corrugated iron strips, peeling plywood sheets, and the hoods of old pre-war cars, bolted together. The floor was nothing but packed dirt, stained with oil and engine grease.

  “Over here, boys!” Mayor Faulder’s voice called from the far side of the warehouse, where a flickering electric light in one corner showed tall stacks of wooden and plastic crates.

  “Damn,” Gibson muttered. “This does not look good.”

  A voice off to the left said, “Drop your weapons, baby Judges!”

  Joe threw himself forward, spinning to land on his right side, Lawgiver already drawn, aimed and fired while he was in the air. His shot streaked past the back of Gibson’s head—the cadet was crouching, in the process of drawing his own weapon—and buried itself in the shoulder of a shotgun-wielding man.

  Joe rolled to his feet—a thud from the doorway behind him told him that Rico was already dealing with Hieronymus Planter—and spun as a mutant dropped from the rafters. The mutant was tall and lithe, naked except for a loin-cloth, thick boots and gloves, and swinging a heavy circular saw blade fixed to the end of a chain.

  As Joe was taking aim at him, another mutant, almost identical but considerably shorter, rushed at him from the shadows to his right, spinning twin swords so fast that Joe could barely see them in the weak light.