The Cold Light of Day (7 page)

“We might get lucky,” Dredd replied. “Repair team will be here in a day or two, citizen. Until then, stay put.”

“But I was gonna go watch the race!”

“Not my problem.”

Dredd left the man complaining and groping around on the sofa for the TV’s remote, then made his way back down to Chalk’s apartment.

A Judge met him in the doorway. She was in her mid-twenties and barely came up to Dredd’s shoulder. “Brenna, forensics. We’ve scanned the place upside-down and inside-out. Chalk definitely spent some time here, but not much, judging by the amount of DNA evidence. We’ve got eight other traces. We’re running them now against the database, but nothing’s flagged on the perp list.”

“The roof?”

“Minute particles of metal lubricant at the spot you figure he shot from. It’s WD-400, common stuff. Very simple ingredients, so there’s no way to tie the sample into a specific batch. Not that that would help much. You can get the stuff at any hardware store in the city. We also got some boot prints in the dust, pretty fresh, too. Weather control ordered a downpour last week to wash the road surfaces for the race—guess they wanted to make the city look clean for the foreign viewers, too—so we know the prints aren’t more than five days old.”

“But you can’t say whether the prints belong to the shooter.”

“No way to be sure,” Judge Brenna said. “For all we know, the shooter came in on a skysurf board. That’d explain how he got away, too. I’ve taken the liberty of polling the spy-cams, but I don’t expect much—almost every cam has been on the race’s route since early this morning.” She took a small step back, and peered at Dredd for a moment. “You look like him. Not identical, but there’s definitely a resemblance. Fargo, I mean. I met him once.”

“I ordered a check on the building’s security door.”

She smiled at him. “Not one for chit-chat. Got it. Yeah, I heard about the door. But I don’t get the point. The camera wasn’t linked up.”

“That model is fitted with a Pentakon PerfekteAugen. Reliable camera, decent resolution, minimal circuitry. Powered by solar energy absorbed by its own lens. Its memory can store about a year’s worth of footage.”

“So...?”

“So the PerfekteAugen is
always
on, Brenna. It’s got built-in motion and proximity detectors. It’s easier and cheaper for the door’s manufacturers to build the one model and just not connect the camera’s output if the buyer doesn’t want it. So the camera’s always recording, even if it’s not connected to anything. Get that footage analysed. We’re looking for anyone who might have come looking for Percival Chalk.”

The young Judge nodded. “Okay... How do you
know
all that?”

Dredd stepped past her into the apartment. “I read.”

Inside, another Judge was examining the bullet-holes in the window, but otherwise the apartment was bare, its few contents having already been removed for closer inspection.

Behind him, Brenna said, “I heard what everyone is saying about you, Dredd. For what it’s
worth
...”

He turned to face her. “It’s not worth anything. My judgement was sound back then. I bear no responsibility for Chalk’s subsequent actions.”

“Sometimes we make decisions—
judgements
—that feel right in the heat of the moment, but later, in the cold light of day...” She shrugged. “You’ve only been on the streets a year. You’ll learn.”

The Cursed Earth

2075 AD

Nine

J
UDGE
R
UIZ LAY
on the rough ground, breathing slowly and steadily as she tried to build a mental picture of her location. Her captors had stripped her of weapons, tied her wrists and ankles, and pulled a mouldy canvas sack over her head.

Now, the voice of Mayor Genesis Faulder came from somewhere close behind her. “Tomorrow. You were told that Ynex would be here tomorrow! Why in the seventeen hells did you have to come here
today
?”

Ruiz said nothing. She hadn’t spoken since her capture, and had no intentions of breaking that streak now. There were at least five of them, she knew, though two of them would never harm anyone again. One had had his throat torn out when they’d grabbed her, and the other was now missing his eyes.

But another of her captors had proved to be considerably stronger than he looked: the mutant was short and thin, but his muscles were like steel cables. He had grabbed her from behind, one arm around her neck, crushing her throat, and a filthy, bony hand pressed hard against her mouth. She had been within seconds of passing out when something slammed hard into the backs of her knees. Ruiz had collapsed, the fall dislodging the man who’d been choking her but allowing several more to move in on her with heavy boots and hard-edged rifle butts.

Several ribs had been fractured, and her face was a mess of cuts and bruises, but they hadn’t killed her yet. That, at least, was a positive sign. Though a sign of
what
, she wasn’t yet sure.

Ruiz had already been scheduled for the hot-dog run when word reached Mega-City One that Ynex was using the town of Eminence as one of his trading points. The man—it was assumed Ynex was male, since most of the nomadic mutant tribes were led by men—scoured the Cursed Earth for caches of pre-war weapons, and somehow those weapons found their way into the hands of perps inside the city.

An automated message pod had been despatched to Eminence, informing the mayor that help was on the way. Though the Judges officially only ruled within the city limits, it wasn’t uncommon for them to extend their reach into the Cursed Earth, especially when doing so would be to the city’s benefit.

Now, Mayor Faulder crouched close to Ruiz and hissed, “You screwed up the
plan
! When we learned you were coming, we were going to turn a bunch of low-life nomad scum loose on you. You’d shoot them down and you’d go away happy thinking that you’d stopped Ynex. Grud-
damnit
!”

A second man’s voice said, “Keep your stomm together, Faulder. Man, you are one major drokkin’ idiot! You should have done nothing—be a damn sight easier to deal with her and the cadets if you’d left it to us.”

“So now what do we do?” a third man asked. “We kill them, the Jays’ll swarm on us like bees after an open sugar-truck. We
don’t
kill them, same thing’ll happen.”

The second man replied, “And we’ve still got these here drokkin’
scavengers
to deal with.”

So
that’s
how they’re getting hold of the weapons
, Ruiz said to herself.
They ambush the teams of scavengers. Makes sense—get someone else to do the digging and excavating for you.

Then Faulder said, “They never arrived here. That’s how we play this. In a week, maybe two, more Judges’ll come looking for them. We make damn sure that everyone in the town knows the story. They never showed up. ’Fact, when their back-up does arrive, we make like it’s them we’re expecting. We’ll be all, ‘You Judges were supposed to be here
ages
ago, what kept you?’”

The third man said, “Yeah. Yeah, that could work. But it won’t be just the four of them—there’ll be others, camped outside of town. Probably all cadets, but we can’t underestimate them. These kids are, what, fifteen or sixteen? That means they’ve got a decade of training behind them. They’re kids, but they’re not
children
, if you get me.”

“Think you mean that the other way around,” the second man muttered. Then, louder, he added, “All right. The three in town, we get them back here. Deal with them before we go after the rest of their party. Faulder, that crippled kid you sent out to distract the cadet who was waiting outside... Send someone out to find him. Be easier if we lead them in one at a time.”

J
OE FOUND
G
IBSON
and Rico poking around a store that sold unfathomable objects made out of baked clay.

“What the hell
is
that?” Rico asked the store’s owner, a misshapen man with an abundance of extra fingers. He lifted up what looked like a beverage mug with an irregular row of holes in the base. “Hey, Joe, what do you make of this?”

“Outside.”

Gibson put down an object that could have been a water bottle, had it not been solid. “We’re just having a look around.”

Joe threw a glance at the store’s owner, then grabbed Rico’s arm. “Let’s go.”

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

S
HOCK 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.