Psykogeddon (29 page)
He brought the daystick up to smack into his helmet, hard enough to crack the faceplate, judging the blow every bit as precisely as he had with the cyber-enhanced Nurses Pebbles and Bambam, so that the main force of the concussion centred upon the bridge of his nose and the contents of his eye sockets.
From the feel of it, his nose was spraying blood. He didn't see any of it, since his entire field of vision sparked and plunged into blackness as his cybernetic eyes shut down.
For an endless fraction of a second there was nothing but darkness. Then alphanumeric flashed before him in a bright LED-green:
SYSTEM MALFUNCTION
RESET
SELF-DIAGNOSTIC MODE
A pixel-grained and monochromatic world blipped back into view - the basic throughput of the implant-patches to his optic nerve as they devoted most of their run-time to running diagnostics. This basic vision of the world was unchanged save in one important respect: the thin and patently human-sized figure of Doctor Bob, simply standing there in his loosely hanging polypropylene coat.
"TIME TO KILL YOU, NOW," he said, his voice amplified by the battery-powered bullhorn he was holding to his mouth. "SQUASH YOU FLAT AND... uh, listen here, are you quite sure you-
Ughn!"
This last as Dredd walked over to him and, eschewing the use of his Med Station acquired daystick, delivered a straight-armed and impact-gauntleted punch that knocked him flat.
Tactical Arms-issue shaped-directional charges detonated, and a section of the chamber wall came down. Through the hole came Psi-Judge Karyn, a number of Tactical Arms and Judges, and the Brit-Cit Detective Judge Treasure Steel.
They were battered and bloodied by their progress through the Psyko-Block defences. Later, Dredd would learn that there were several dead and wounded, being looked after by guards stationed along their route, but at the time it was simply something of a relief to see that the squad had got through pretty much okay.
Dredd looked up from the unconscious and entirely human form of Doctor Bob, and glared at Detective Judge Steel.
"What the drokk's she doing here?" he said.
"You have her to thank for us being here at all," said Karyn. "She's the one who put it together and pointed us in the direction of - what was it again?"
"The totally bleeding obvious," said Detective Judge Steel. "I'm the master of it, according to some."
Psi-Judge Karyn looked around, scanning the racks and their contents. "Whoo-ee! Look at all the power in there. I can feel it sleeting through me. We're gonna have to find some way of shutting down the signal - hopefully without killing all these guys in the process."
"I thought this Doctor Bob creep was supposed to be controlling it," said Dredd.
Karyn shrugged. "Maybe he deluded himself that he was. He was certainly able to affect it by way of his implants and other artificial means - but the guy has no active Psi-talent at
all
."
"That's what I saw a little while back, when you thought this big and monstrous thing was attacking you. He wasn't serving as a conduit for any arcane psionic power, he was just feeding junk data into your brain and creating an illusion. Flummery and hand-waving, nothing more. The best solution was to short out your eyes, let the implants in your visual cortex fall over and reboot, so's you could see what was really going on."
Karyn gestured to the unconscious form of Doctor Bob. "Good job you didn't kill him," she continued. "I need to pick his mind for details on how he's rigged things so the disruption's being broadcast to the city. It's always helpful if the subject's actually alive, so you can - what? What is it? What the drokk are you staring at?"
In the natural course of things, Dredd had glanced at the unconscious body of Doctor Bob when Karyn had indicated it, and now he was staring at the...
thing
it had become.
"Oh my Grud..." he breathed. "What's happening to it? Can't you see what's happening?"
"What the drokk are you talking about, Dredd?" said Psi-Judge Karyn.
In the grainy and monochromatic vision of Judge Dredd, the body of what had once been Doctor Bob seethed and bubbled. Tendrils of a sickly light that seemed to bear no relation to any known kind of energy - electrical, psionic or otherwise - crawled across the inert bodies of Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam, sucking on whatever it was inside them that counted as life until they crumbled into dust.
"Is it me," said Detective Judge Treasure Steel, "or did those two really fit birds over there just vanish?"
The churning horror of what had once been the body of Doctor Bob had swollen and now it sent its sick tendrils of light probing out towards the nearest polyceramaline pods. As the insubstantial pseudopodia played over them, the surfaces of the pods dulled and the supposedly indestructible shells buckled and collapsed in upon themselves.
Further tendrils struck a number of the Tactical Arms troops. They screamed and crumbled.
"What the drokk is this?" Psi-Judge Karyn, and everybody else other than Dredd, was just standing there and looking around in alarm. She could see what was happening to the pods, what was happening to her men, but had not the faintest idea of what was causing it.
Dredd, daystick aside, was effectively unarmed. Briefly, he considered liberating a Lawgiver from Karyn or one of the other Judges and just opening fire, before rejecting the notion out of hand. Not only did he not feel like having that hand blown off as an unauthorised user, but there was no guarantee that it would do the slightest bit of good against this thing that only he, apparently, could see.
There was one weapon, however, that just might work. Dredd dived off to one side, a whipping tentacle of sickly light narrowly missing him, bounce-rolled into a crouch and scooped up the Screaming Meatgun he had discarded earlier.
Psi-Judge Karyn stared at him, every bit as aghast as Dredd had been when looking at the thing that had once been the body of Doctor Bob.
"Grud, is that what I think it is?" she asked, in the anxious tones of one who was drokking well certain what it was, and did not have the protection against Screaming Meatgun slugs that was built into the uniform of a Street Judge. "Jeez, don't do it, Dredd! Don't-"
Dredd hoped that the nerfing-field, which would protect human life from the Screaming Meatgun slugs, was still operational, that it hadn't died with what had once been Doctor Bob. Either way, he thought, if this doesn't work then we're dead in any case. All of us, here, in this chamber. And then the Psyko-Block. And then the city and quite possibly the entire world.
It all depended on whether the thing that had once been Doctor Bob could, in any sense, be considered as alive and aware.
He brought up the Screaming Meatgun and loosed a stream of slugs, keeping his finger on the trigger, which was the matter from an actual human finger modified to serve the function of a trigger. It even had a vestigial nail.
The Meatgun slugs swarmed uncertainly, whatever passed for their instinct to shred and kill countermanded on a fundamental level, but still desperate to perform their function in the world. They were surrounded by things they had to kill but could not, and the sensation was maddening, in what passed for minds to be maddened, and it was tearing them apart.
But there was something else. Something that certainly was not human, but something that might serve to slake the bloodlust.
Their rudimentary senses scanned the former Doctor Bob, sensed the rift that it was tearing in the world... and sensed the consciousnesses behind it. Yes. Those consciousnesses would serve.
As one, the Screaming Meatgun slugs swooped on the thing that had once been Doctor Bob and left the world, shredding as they went.
The implosion knocked Judge Dredd, Psi-Judge Karyn, Detective Judge Steel and every surviving Tactical Arms trooper and Street Judge off their feet. A number of the racks toppled, the majority of their contents landing intact, but those pods which had been tainted by the energies of the thing that had once been Doctor Bob shattered like rotten eggs. A black and noxious fluid slopped out.
Sheared cable-connections sparked. There were a number of small electrical fires. The thrumming of psionic energy, the psychic pressure that had pressed against the brain whether that brain had any Psi-talent or not, abruptly lessened. The gestalt-interaction that, relayed to the transmitters in the top of the Psyko-Block, was causing so much disruption to the minds in the city outside seemed to have ceased.
Treasure Steel, having none of the minor debilitations and nerve damage that Mega-City citizens had cumulatively acquired by way of exposure to the Psyko-Block in previous months, was the first on her feet. She helped Psi-Judge Karyn upright, then turned her attention to Dredd.
"You okay there, Dreddy boy?" she said sweetly.
Dredd was flat on his back and shaking. "I think that drokking nerve repair job Drago San gave me is shot again," he said.
"Oh, yeah?" said Detective Judge Treasure Steel. "And speaking on the subject of Efil Drago San, where the
hell
is he? We turned him over to you, and this Psyko-Block of yours, and now he's legged it. If he had legs. Which he didn't, last time I counted. Anyhow, you let him go, and what do you think Brit-Cit's gonna have to say about
that
, eh?"
"You what?" Dredd snarled. "That Star Council of yours handed Drago San what he wanted in a drokking nutri-pak! You try anything and we're gonna drokkin'-"
Treasure Still grinned. "Hey, settle. I'm just having a laugh. The Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber are all dead - I'll tell you about that later - and I don't think anyone else in the Brit-Cit Department gives much of a toss. It's just a pity we lost track of him, though."
"He'll resurface," said Dredd. "And when he does, I'll pull him down."
"Not if me or Armitage see him first," said Detective Judge Steel.
Psi-Judge Karyn, meanwhile, was picking her way with distaste through the mess of those pods which had been broached, and examining a number of those that were still intact.
"Looks like Psi-Division is gonna have a field day," she said. "If we can find a way of extracting all these guys alive." She frowned. "That... thing at the end. What was it you saw, Dredd? I didn't get anything, not even a blip on the psionic sonar."
"That can wait," said Dredd, hauling himself up into a sitting position with some effort. "That can wait until Tech-Division manages to pull some kind of playback and analyse it. Sometimes it's hard to be sure if I can trust the evidence of my own eyes."
Epilogue: Loose Ends
"
It has become apparent what the modern conservative critic really is: a creature moving about in words not realised. His trade is one which requires, that it may be practiced in perfection, two qualifications only: ignorance of language and abstinence from thought. The tenacity with which he adheres to the testimony of scribes has no relation to the trustworthiness of testimony, but is dictated wholly by his inability to stand alone... And critics who treat MS evidence as rational men treat all evidence, and test if by reason and by knowledge which they have acquired, these are blamed for rashness and capriciousness by gentlemen who use MSS as drunkards use lamp-posts - not to light them on their way but to dissimulate their instability.
"
- A E Housman (1859-1936)
Preface to
Manilius
Slowly, although rather more slowly than it had wound itself up, the Big Meg wound down to what, for Mega-City One, approached normalcy. The ultimate death toll, as a result of the psycholeptic pulse being broadcast from the Psyko-Block, was in the end less than it might have been.
This was largely because the Justice Department forces, which had been assembled in preparation for a reactivation of the Big Lie, were able to change their basic agenda - once the psycholeptic pulse itself had stopped - to providing aid and assistance to the those wounded victims who were still alive, with remarkable speed.
Basically, as they finally remembered, the primary remit of the Justice Department was to maintain public order and to save lives.
The other reason was that the death count itself - at least, the death count as related to Chief Judge Hershey via SJS-Judge Slithe - had been for some unaccountable reason grossly over-inflated. This is not to say that there had not been casualties, and that the number of those casualties had not been horrific, but it was a number on the order of tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands.
SJS-Judge Slithe was subsequently performing what was euphemistically known as Traffic Duty - the euphemism lying in the fact that it actually entailed being stuck on a rockrete island in the middle of the 700-1,000 kph crossover-junction of the Sector One Interway. He was perfectly welcome to come back to the Hall of Justice at any time, if he could contrive some means of getting there.