PSYKOGEDDON

JUDGE DREDD

The Lady Tamara Whelpington-Smythe snatched up an unused fish knife - the fish course having not by this point arrived - and flung herself over the table, her face a snarling rictus of pure animal bloodlust and rage. She grabbed Malish's face with one clawed hand and then wrenched downwards - leaving deep, blood-spraying gouges rather than mere scratches, and bursting one of his eyes.

Then, as Malish hitched in breath to shriek in agony, before he could even bring his hands up to his ruined face, the Lady Tamara plunged the fish knife into his remaining eye, to bury it deep inside the brain.

JUDGE DREDD

#1: DREDD VS DEATH

Gordon Rennie

#2: BAD MOON RISING

David Bishop

#3: BLACK ATLANTIC

Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans

#4: ECLIPSE

James Swallow

#5: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND

David Bishop

#6: THE FINAL CUT

Matthew Smith

#7: SWINE FEVER

Andrew Cartmel

#8: WHITEOUT

James Swallow

#9: PSYKOGEDDON

Dave Stone

MORE 2000 AD ACTION

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#1: FEAR THE DARKNESS - Mitchel Scanlon

#2: RED SHADOWS - Mitchel Scanlon

#3: SINS OF THE FATHER - Mitchel Scanlon

THE ABC WARRIORS

#1: THE MEDUSA WAR - Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell

DURHAM RED

#1: THE UNQUIET GRAVE - Peter J Evans

ROGUE TROOPER

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STRONTIUM DOG

#1: BAD TIMING - Rebecca Levene

FIENDS OF THE EASTERN FRONT - David Bishop

#1: OPERATION VAMPYR

#2: THE BLOOD RED ARMY

#3: TWILIGHT OF THE DEAD

'To those fine people, who helped me out in an hour of refrigerator need.'

Judge Dredd created by John Wagner & Carlos Ezquerra.

Chief Judge Hershey created by John Wagner & Brian Bolland.

A 2000 AD PUBLICATION

www.abaddonbooks.com

www.2000adonline.com

1098 7 65 4321

Cover illustration by Clint Langley.

Copyright © 2006 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S."Judge Dredd" is a registered trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions."2000 AD" is a registered trademark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.

ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-059-4

ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-100-3

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

JUDGE DREDD

PSYKOGEDDON

Dave Stone

Mega-city one, 2127

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

- Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn

"The final catastrophe, when it comes, is effectively the result of millions upon millions of discrete events - impacting, interacting and escalating to a gestalt climax that is greater than the sum of its parts.

"Every squalid little assault upon some individual, for some imagined slight or other, and every retaliation by that individual, contributes to a general atmosphere that makes such attack, and counterattack, more and more likely - indeed, inevitable.

"One step leads to the next, then the next and the next... until one suddenly finds oneself a member of the faction herding people into labour camps, and building extra crematoria as a result of the conditions in those camps, and speculatively comparing the size of the ventilation ducts in the showers with a canister of gas. Without ever quite - and this is the crucial factor - understanding how it happened.

"The crucial factor is concerned with how precisely any discrete event impacts on the triggers of its context. The catastrophe happens when it's going to happen, in the same way that it famously steam engines when it's steam engine time. It is the result of millions upon millions of individual and apparently unrelated decisions and interactions.

"It can be imposed upon to the extent that the storm troopers kicking in the shop-fronts are wearing armbands and believe in the World Ice Theory as opposed to the delusions of some other syphilitic lunatic; it can be anticipated and imposed upon to the extent that some particular individual arranges for a sudden ice pick in a competitor... but it cannot be actively or consciously controlled.

"There is no way for a single person to start it. There is nothing a single man can do to stop it. The permutations are just too overwhelmingly innumerable for the human mind, unassisted, to grasp.

"Unless, of course, that human mind has direct access to several others, and together they have access to ultra high-powered computational devices. Some gestalt amalgam of mind and machine..."

- Professor Rupert Gillhooly, FMCRS

Multiple Pathways to Singularity, or, Why Things get so Frankly Buggered

PractiBrantic Press, 2047

Preliminary Information: Recursive Scheming

The dream again; the same dream. Waking cold and slick with sweat, the air pockets rattling through the ducts that wormhole through the Warren, now sounding akin to distant thunder, an explosion behind the wall or chattering teeth directly by the ear. Shadows twisting on the walls; the imagined, half-heard sound of needle-teeth on polythene.

In the dark, the shapes take on a life of their own. The toys one could not care less about - the threadbare, boring lumps of ratty fur and polymer that seem to fade into nothing next to the new bright things bought for your new little sister - seem to watch you with their big eyes, talking in their sawdust heads (a spoon, and sharpen it and slide it inside. I want to see what's inside and I want...)

You can almost hear the voices, buzzing and tickling inside your head, misshapen and uncrystallised, half-formed pupae crawling over the meat of the brain...

And woke.

For a long while little Robert remained immobile, absolutely still, his mind clicking over like cold clockwork - although "cold" is, perhaps, not the correct expression. It implies some sense of chilly, cerebral calculation and at the age of five, Robert Roberts was simply not that bright.

There was something broken inside of him, or perhaps it had not been present from the start: an emotional dead-zone and a fundamental inability to comprehend a reality outside of him, without the intelligence or force of will to compensate. The world outside him, in some basic emotional sense, was not quite real, and so it didn't count.

The imperfect mind of Robert Roberts ticked and clicked imperfectly over the facts of his life. The fracture in his mind precluded contact and made the giving and receiving of simple human warmth inconceivable to him, even from his mother and father. It was evident in the toys that littered the sleeping cubicle with the chilly untidiness of neglect rather than the innate entropic mess of childhood.

The mother and father of Robert Roberts had brought him toys in the same way that they fed him and tried to make themselves like him; it was something they were supposed to do, and they were damned well going to do it, even if they couldn't find it in themselves to put their whole hearts into it.

The toys, perhaps as overcompensation, were more expensive than those ordinarily given to a five year-old child. They were also pristine and almost utterly untouched. Robert Roberts would pick them up (because for some unconscious reason his parents would wrap them and leave them on the floor rather than give them hand to hand - they only touched him when they thought about it consciously), unwrap them, look at them blankly, take them to his cubicle because that seemed to be expected, drop them and never so much as look at them again.

Robert Roberts only continued to participate in this charade for the simple process of unwrapping the package and seeing what was inside. He had the unformed notion that, at some point, a package might contain something he actually wanted, though what this might possibly be he could not even begin to imagine. Robert Roberts had barely the imagination, at the age of five, to conceive that a dropped object might, at some point, hit the floor.

Robert's parents were a perfectly ordinary and amiable couple - or rather, they were no worse than any other occupants of the Shangri La Towers, a hab-block that had become something of a sinecure for the ultra-rich of Mega-City One.

They cannot in all justice - or even Justice - be blamed for their coldness toward their son; they were merely reacting on a primal level to the deadness within him, and would have been horrified and ashamed to learn that they were doing it.

Similarly, in the five years since their son had been born, they had followed advisory birth control procedures without a single lapse that might result in a "mistake", for their unconscious minds looked at Robert Roberts and flatly refused to countenance another one remotely like him. They only had another child when they actively and consciously made themselves decide to have one.

Robert had a little sister. She was called Roberta. The Roberts had a strong if somewhat limited tradition in family names, and they were sticking with it.

For the entire history of the universe (that being the four and a half years since he had first become aware of the existence of his self), Robert Roberts knew how the only living creatures of which he was really aware had interacted with him. Now he compared it to their interactions with the new baby. He saw how they touched and talked to her, and saw their genuine pleasure and joy.

It would be a mistake to think that it made him sad and hurt, because that would imply that Robert Roberts was capable of feeling such things. He simply didn't think it was right. He didn't like it and he did not want it to happen, and so, of course, it shouldn't.

For nights Robert Roberts had lain awake, the machinery of his mind ticking and clicking over the facts of his life, incapable of translating them into any active thought or word. It was not inside him. He was not and would never, of his own volition, be able to put his thoughts into action.

And then, on that particular and otherwise perfectly ordinary night, something changed. Little Robert, simply, and without caring much, decided upon what he had to do to change the world.

As the Roberts family went through its processes of grief for their new child who had suffered crib death in the night, as their minds very carefully prevented certain thoughts from even occurring to them, Robert made himself say, do and even think the right things, so that his mother and father started to like him, and realise that there was nothing wrong or slightly frightening about him after all.

Except inside, of course. Where such things really count.

So sensitive did he seem, so outwardly compassionate, that in the fullness of time he was ordered to report for Justice Department Psi-Division assessment, on the possibility that this was the evidence of some nascent psionic ability that might be of use. When that day came, his doting parents passed him into the care of the Judges with shuddering, suppressed sighs of relief that they could not acknowledge even to themselves.

Over the years, the med-techs of Psi-Division tried any and all manner of means to unlock the potential in Robert Roberts's head - ultimately without success. It turned out to be the absolute reverse of success, in fact.

Little Robert didn't mind. He didn't mind about anything. And he was learning quite a few other things than what the med-techs thought they were teaching him.

And the years passed...

Backflash: 01: 28: 2125

On the bridge of Justice One, the flagship of the Mega-City One space fleet, hovering over the fungus jungles of a Boranos system planetoid, Efil Drago San smirked to himself as slugs stitched into human forms and bodies blew apart under hi-ex.

"How perfectly marvellous," he said. "Our erstwhile heroes triumph, victory snatched from the claws of seemingly overwhelming odds. The forces of good - or what passes for it in a naughty world - once again hold sway."

As the only one available with the expertise to get Justice One off the ground, he had been left in charge of the bridge to offer aerial support while Judge Dredd effected a suitably daring rescue of his Justice Department comrades, who had been kidnapped by privateers working for the Boranos Accord, from the encampment below.

It was nice to have some relative degree of freedom again. Admittedly, thought Drago San, he was currently handcuffed to the Justice One pilot's chair, but it was a world of improvement over the last few days, the majority of which he had spent running through the fungus jungles as a fugitive, handcuffed to Judge Dredd.

Or actually, Dredd had been doing all the running. Efil Drago San had been forced to keep up by means of the null-grav paraplegic floater that was integral to his lower body and approximated the general effect of having legs.

It had been amusing, for a while, to slow Dredd up and have his so-called disability cause all manner of complications purely for the hell of it. By this time, however, such little amusements had long since paled to the point of becoming wearisome. It really was, Drago San considered, now time to elevate his state of relative freedom a little further.

"Time to add a little something of my own to the mix, Dredd," he murmured, regarding the death and destruction on the screen as it appeared to be winding down. "Time, I rather think, to tie the spotted hankie to the pole and go."

On the ground in the shadow of Justice One, Dredd fast-scanned the privateer compound for further signs of danger. Everyone who was down, it seemed, was down for good. Those who weren't dead were making it very clear that they weren't about to get up and pose any kind of threat.

"Looks like the last of them, Karyn," he said. He pulled the utility knife from his boot and handing it to her. "Time we were leaving."

"Yeah." Psi-Judge Karyn took the knife and used it to cut away the collar with which the privateers had fitted her and which served as a neural-damper, rendering her psi-talent useless.

That had been the privateers' big mistake. They had assumed that a Psi-Judge without her powers was useless, and so they had not even bothered to restrain her for torture as they had with other Justice Department personnel and the Justice One crew. They had simply shut her up in a makeshift cell and assumed she'd spend her time cowering in the dark.

Psi-Judge Karyn, however, had been made of sterner stuff than that. She had fought her way out bare-handed for as long as it took to score some weapons, then made it to the communications hut, where she had held off all attackers long enough to send out the tracking signal that had led Dredd and Drago San through the fungus jungle to the camp. Then they had been able to sneak aboard Justice One and retake it.

"Let's call this Drago San guy down so's we can pick up the wounded," she said, returning Dredd's knife.

Dredd stuck the knife back in his boot and pulled his personal comms unit from his belt. "Okay. Bring her down, Drago San."

There was a moment of silence.

"Drago San?" said Dredd.

"Oh, I don't think so," came the voice of Drago San, booming from the ship's external tannoy. "I rather don't think I want to at this point."

A weapons package in the belly of Justice One tracked round. A high-yield pulse slammed into the grounded ship that had been used by the privateers in their initial attack.

The privateer ship erupted in a detonation that knocked Dredd, Karyn and the surviving Justice One crew off their feet.

"The drokk!" Karyn shouted. "What the drokk did he do that for?"

"So glad you asked, Psi-Judge Karyn," came the tannoy-voice of Efil Drago San. "One does enjoy these little chats. Now, Dredd, you'll remember that I told you that I didn't have sufficient skill to pilot a ship, unaided, between actual star systems? Well, I lied."

"Drokk!" Dredd exclaimed.

"Dear me," said Drago San. "That single word does rather seem to define our relationship, doesn't it? I go and do something, then you go and say that particular word.

"Now, my first thought was to use the guns of your own ship to simply wipe you out, but on the whole, I think I'd rather prefer to leave you stranded here on this ultimately quite inhospitable planet." He chuckled. "The water, I gather, is drinkable - I notice from the bioscan-analysis - but the flora and fauna are completely incompatible with the humanoid metabolism. I estimate the first acts of attempted cannibalism within two weeks of the foodstuffs in the compound running out.

"I have half a mind to hang around in orbit to watch, don't you know. So far as I'm concerned, it would be a small reminder of home."

"Oh yeah?" Dredd growled. "I don't think so." He raised his personal comms-unit again. "Computer. Internal countermeasures system, now."

"Complying," came the voice of the Justice One computer system.

"Dear me, what?" Drago San got no further, because at that instant a collection of servo-powered blades burst from their housings in the ceiling and halted a bare millimetre from his throat. "Oh, I say!"

"Failsafe anti-personnel countermeasures have been deployed," came the voice of the computer system. "You will relinquish command-codes to authorised Justice Department personnel immediately."

The blades clicked threateningly.

"I relinquish command-codes to authorised Justice Department personnel immediately," said Efil Drago San, dispiritedly but swiftly.

"Thank you, unauthorised user," said the computer-system, as the thrusters of Justice One changed tone and wound down. "Automatic landing procedures commencing. Have a nice day."

"You never told me that you had those kinds of lethal countermeasures on board, Dredd," said Drago San indignantly. "Why would you neglect to tell me that you had those kinds of lethal countermeasures on board? Who knows what I might have done to trigger them, in all innocence, purely in the course of flying the support you yourself asked me to give?"

"You never asked," said Dredd. "A Judge's Lawgiver explodes if anyone but him touches it. You think we don't do the same with other stuff?"

"Strikes me," Drago San said, "that you could have used them when those erstwhile privateers were overrunning the ship."

"Activating them then wouldn't have stopped us being overrun," Dredd told him. "And it would have left us all stranded. They're for when some traitorous drokker tries to take over the helm."

"Now really, Dredd." Drago San exclaimed. "I resent that. That's criminal mastermind profiling, that is. I was of inestimable use to you, and now you simply chain me up again like an... urk!"

This last comment was rudely interrupted as Dredd gave the cuffs securing him to Drago San a more than necessarily vicious yank.

"I don't deal in your pathetic attempts to twist the truth, Drago San," he said. "I just deal with what's in front of me - and what's in front of me is a creep who'd turn traitor at the drop of a hat."

"Once again, Dredd, I must protest." Drago San turned thoughtful. "What kind of hat? Is it a nice one? I must admit that, on occasion, I could rather do with a new hat."

They had been making their way back through the ship toward the brig, where a Justice One crewman was tinkering with a collection of servo-powered blades in a cell.

"We're reinstalling the security countermeasures here, for the time being," Dredd told Drago San, "where they'll do the most good. First thing you do on the voyage home that I don't like, they start to slice and dice. Welcome to the mechanism of Mega-City Justice, Drago San."

Secondary Information: Dying on the Inside

Somewhere, someone is screaming that a tiny arm is hanging out of the pupil of their left eye. Pale and thin to the point of being skeletal, the homunculus within waves desperately with the last of its dying strength.

Arfie knows what "homunculus" means. It means "little man". Arfie knows things like that. In fact, he knows that it's the little men inside people's heads, looking back at you from behind their eyes, that make them real.

This has gotten Arfie into trouble at times. More times than he can count. It's why he's in trouble now.

A lot of people simply do not have these little men inside. This means that, although they might be walking around and talking - talking all the time, in some cases - they are not truly real and alive. You can do what you like to them.

The Judges hadn't liked that, for some reason. They especially hadn't liked it when Arfie cut up some empty people to see what made them go. He'd only wanted to see what made them move and breathe and act like they were alive when they had nothing inside.

They just didn't understand. A squad of them had burst into his con-apt as Arfie was peaceably flushing the last remains of a Fattie he had seen in the Eighteen Wheeler Velodrome, and had brought home on the promise that he had a big pie in the refrigerator. They had shot him in the leg. It had hurt worse than anything he had ever felt before.

They had their helmets on, so you couldn't see if there was anything inside them or not. Probably not, because otherwise they would have understood. They'd have understood that all the blood and blubber might look nasty, but it wasn't truly real, from a real person, and so it didn't count.

Instead, they had shackled him and dragged him out onto the walkway outside the con-apt. Arfie hadn't liked not being able to move his hands, and his leg was hurting very much. But that wasn't the worst thing that happened.

The worst thing was the Justice Department hover-wagon floating by the walkway, as if it had any right whatsoever to be there.

Arfie knew about hover-vehicles, obviously. He isn't stupid. But there had never been a hover-wagon outside his con-apt door before. It was just impossible for there to be one now. It was as if the whole world had gone fundamentally wrong.

He tried to explain this to the Judges.

"Jovus drokk!" one of them shouted. "He's having a total stomm-fit! Trank him and get him into the Meat Wagon!"

A Judge had pressed something cold and sharp against his neck. There was a hiss... and then just blank. Not darkness, but sheer nothingness. The world had just switched off.

It had switched on again here, some while ago, in this little room.

The walls might once have been white, but now they're grimed with a patina of filth from human use. Human bodies - whether something truly real lives inside them or not - have quite obviously been stored here over the years while waiting to be taken somewhere else.

Arfie has worked this out for himself - as we've said, he's not stupid. He knows how human bodies work, having thoroughly investigated the matter on bodies that don't count.

There is no sanitary facility here, and no evidence of a body being kept here for a long time without a sanitary facility. The only thing here, in fact, is the little bench on which Arfie sits.

There is nothing whatsoever that might spur him to do anything other than sit. So Arfie just sits here, listening to the voices of real people around him. Voices in his head.

"Autistic disassociation and decognition," says Call Me Doctor Bob, "to a high-functioning but profound, if not complete, extent. It might be fair to say that you simply would not be able to function in the world, even to the extent that you do, without the Magic Bullet in your brain."

Arfie now sits in a chair rather than on a bench. It's quite comfortable, with lots of padding. There is even padding on the steel bands restraining Arfie's wrists, which makes the bands a little easier to bear.

It's also nice that Call Me Doctor Bob is real. That makes it easy - indeed, possible - for him to talk and it means something.

"That Magic Bullet is what we call psi-talent," Call Me Doctor Bob says, meaning something. "You receive information from the external world, Arfie, and are able to process it after a fashion, but are unable to recognise a connection with another living thing. It's a dead circuit. You simply do not have the sense that other people exist.

"This is countered by your nascent psi abilities. You can, quite literally, see inside the minds of certain individuals and this gives them a reality for you. And it's just this ability that we intend to make use of. Your sense of identity, such as it is, is extraneous to the process. Fire up the cutter."

This last sentence is directed to the white-clad figures that came into Arfie's little waiting room and dragged him here and strapped him into the comfortable chair. Hanging over the chair, on gimbals, is something that looks a little like the sort of guns they use in off-world space-operas, but bigger.

Coils of glass tubing are wrapped around a metal spike. There is an electrical hum nearby, from the power and control units the thing that looks like a big space-gun is plugged into.

One of these white-suited figures moves across Arfie's field of vision. Arfie wonders what it might be doing - unreal people can still do interesting things, sometimes - but he can't move his head to look. His head is clamped, immobile, between two pads which run from his temples to his jaw line.

They put his head in these pads before they slice the top of his head off. There isn't much pain, so Arfie does not really mind.

The thing he carried himself around in wasn't actually himself, after all.

He suspects it wouldn't be that hard to get another one later.

The electrical hum of the power units changes tone and gets louder. Something starts to glow and pulse, just too high for Arfie's eyes to see. The space-gun thing, of course. Arfie, as we have said more than once, is not stupid.

"It's a little unfortunate, I suppose," Call Me Doctor Bob now says. Arfie gets the vague impression that he is talking to himself rather than Arfie. "Completely wasteful, in any rehabilitative sense. Still, the more palliative methods have led to failures, and our... patron is getting impatient. Let's get this over with, shall we?"

The pulsing light above Arfie's eyes suddenly becomes almost blinding in its intensity. There is still no pain, but the thing inside that makes Arfie real just dies, and Arfie becomes very stupid indeed.

Act 1: The Setup

"Now! Now!" cried the Queen. "Faster! Faster!" And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy. The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, "You may rest a little, now."

Alice looked round her in great surprise. "Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time!everything's just as it was!"

"Of course it is," said the Queen. "What would you have it?"

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to go somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

"I'd rather not try, please!" said Alice. "I'm quite content to stay here - only I am so hot and thirsty!"

"I know what you'd like!" the Queen said good-naturedly, taking a little box out of her pocket. "Have a biscuit?"

- Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking Glass and what Alice Found There

Act 1: The Setup

ONE

"Weaklings, fools, and knaves: dullards, fat profiteers, and starving dole-men; the chatterers, the rushers to and fro, the self-doubters and the self-satisfied; with snivelling piety and supercilious unbelief; with empty heads and full bellies; with ossified Tories and rattle-brained Socialists; with limping pettiness and ugliness too mean to hide itself..."

- Eric Linklater

Magnus Merriman

"Hey, I'm Danni Consart, and this is Mega-City News! Blip-to-zip when the hand hits the fifteen! First up, for those of you who even care, the Instant Death Alerts.

"Ultraviolet filter-shields have completely failed over Sectors Three, Eleven and Nineteen. Optimax fatal exposure, two point five seconds - so remember those sunscreens guys!

"The Law. Justice Department Control tells us that the current officially designated no-go Crime Zones are sectors Four through Seven, Nineteen and Thirty to Thirty-four inclusive - that's you guys, you sorry drokkers, out there by the City Wall! Betcha wouldn't be doing all that crime if you were living somewhere nicer, right?

"Zero tolerance policy has been declared for all of these Sectors - so don't even think of spitting on the pedway!

"Across the board, mutagenic compounds in the drinking water are now classified as borderline-terminal. Bottled water only, city-wide, and don't forget to check the seals!

"Today's unemployment riots have been scheduled for Sectors Seven, Eleven, Nineteen - what the hell, if your sorry ass happens to be in Sector Nineteen, you might as well scrunch down right now and give it a kiss goodbye!

"Those were this half-hour's Instant Death Alerts.

"On a lighter note, med-techs say the paracholera pandemic in Sector Nine has almost certainly run its course. The problems with the Sector Nine sewer-and-resyk systems that appear to be the source of the problem are being fixed as we speak. So it looks like all you nobs up there in Shangri La Towers are gonna be able to go back to the high life you think you deserve.

"That was this quarter-hour's Mega-City News. I'm Danni Consart. We'll be back with the conclusion to Xenomorphic Bondage Slaves XIV right after these important messages."

It was crazy season in the Big Meg, a city-state that skated on the lip of an insanity curve at the best of times. It was the end of summer, the time of the baking heat, when the earth itself absorbed all the heat it ever would and radiated it back.

Years ago, apparently, these were called the Dog Days. Back in the days when there were dogs. Now the non-existent dog was rabid, and chewing off its own leg.

The sheer mass of more than a billion citizens, crammed behind the city walls, had overloaded the air-scrubbers to turn the air miasmic, foetid and reeking. With every breath you took, it felt like you were breathing quantities of DNA.

Judge Dredd gunned his Lawmaster into the slipstream of a Pheromol tanker-truck, cruising at a sedate 250 kph on the mid-speed Sector Nine Interway. For a split-second he allowed himself the pleasure of the relatively cool air against those areas of his face not covered by an impact-visor. Then he cut in his comms link.

"Control? I'm on the board and running. What do you have for me?"

Every Judge, no matter what their position within the Justice Department, was required to make regular street patrols. It kept them in touch with the realities of policing a city-state the size of the Meg at the sharp end. Only the Chief Judge herself was exempt, since the sudden loss of her in something so inconsequential and random as a street-bust gone wrong would be a disaster in more ways than one.

The so-called Judges in Psi-Division, of course, didn't count as exemptions in the first place. Aside from the rare and unique talents that made them invaluable as a resource, the vast majority of them could not have hauled in a hundred and fifteen year-old granny for spitting on the pedway.

For everybody else, from the head of the SJS to the deepest-cover Wally Squad operative, you couldn't call yourself a Judge if you didn't put the time in on the street.

To the extent he allowed himself selfish pleasure in anything, Dredd enjoyed the requirement. It was the simplest and cleanest part of being a Judge that he knew. His only regret was that, these days, he wasn't allowed to do it more often.

It was his own fault, he supposed, for putting himself into the position over the years where people thought he was better deployed at a stomm-load of everything else.

"Hang on there a minute, Dredd," came the voice of Control, by way of bone conduction in his helmet. "We're still pulling down situations filtered for your, uh, calibre."

Control, of course, monitored the various sensors, bugs and Eyes in the Sky that blanketed the Big Meg, factoring their inputs transputronically to produce an optimum operational vector. Sometimes they even factored in calls from concerned citizens. The idea was to make the best possible use of any particular Judge's time and capabilities.

This worked in two ways. On the one hand the system ensured that the right forces responded to any particular incident. On the other, it allowed Control to steer those Judges who were valuable to the City away from too much actual danger. The head of the Forensics Division, for example, put his time in on the street just like everybody else, but there was no point in jeopardising his years of expertise for the sake of a random stookie-gland bust.

Dredd had fallen foul of this system in his time, due to the inflated notion everybody seemed to have of his value.

"If you're trying to set me up with a synthi-milk run, Control," Dredd growled, "if you're trying to keep me out of physical jeopardy, then you know what I think about it."

"You've made your opinions known," said the Control dispatcher, somewhat tartly, "so we're going the other way. Here we go. Shady Acres Thermosetting Preservation Inc. has a body-robbery in progress. Half a click north and up from you. The perps are using haze-suits to beat the securicams, but one of them's malfunctioning so we've got a bead. At this point they don't even know they're - hang on. Something coming in on Emergency Alert..."

"What is it?" Dredd asked.

"We got a shooter," said Control. "Cantilever City. Ten, fifteen citizens down as of now and it's getting exponentially worse on a body-per-bang basis. The guy's using a Screaming Meatgun."

In a Mega-City built and populated from the decimated wreckage of a country with a handgun fetish, the problems of gun control were overwhelming. There were just too many vectors of demand and supply.

For the Justice Department it was like running the Red Queen's race, or rather more like an endless, lethal game of Whack-a-Mole - the second you pry the gun from the cold dead hand of some psycho or other, another one pops up and tries to shoot you.

Things were made all the worse, if possible, by the widespread use of molecular-refabricators as a means of manufacture.

Portable ReFAB-units were used throughout the Meg to produce anything from boots, to nutri-paks, to holo-vid remotes, and their software templates could be hacked to produce pretty much anything one might like and which could fit the dimensions of the nanonetic skeining box.

The production of handguns had basically become a question of software rather than hardware design - and software designers tend to get a bit overenthusiastic when designing guns.

The fact that things weren't even worse was due to the relatively crude state of molecular-fabrication technology. It operated on a GIGO principle - Garbage In, Garbage Out.

It was quite possible, for example, to have your ReFAB cook up a tasty steak dinner, provided you were able to add the right chemical mix into the hopper - precisely the same constituents as a tasty steak dinner contains in the first place.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it was simpler to just cook the steak yourself - or of course, this being the Meg, to go without and subsist on extruded synthi-karob and triple-recycled fungus matter.

If you wanted to make something metallic and/or polyceramic like a blaster gun, basically, you had to put metal or polyceramics in.

The item that came to be known as the Screaming Meatgun had been happened upon after a battle between two rival gangs of gun-runners, the Sons of the Black Fandango and the Cool Right Hands.

The losers, the Black Fandangos, were subsequently dismembered and fed into the hoppers of their own molecular fabricators - one of which happened to be set for a gun-design based on a process which super-cooled the air around it to produce slugs, and thus an effectively endless supply of ammunition.

The idea had been to simply render the bodies unrecognisable and disrupt their DNA signatures, preventing forensic identification. What happened when the ReFAB processes interacted with human matter, however, was very odd indeed, especially when the Cool Hands came to dispose of the complex and organised synaptic matter inside the severed heads.

And especially, after some experimentation, when they learned that two heads were better than one.

The habitat known as Cantilever City was one of those semi-permanent and semi-official sub-structures, which had agglomerated on and strung itself between the hab-blocks of the Mega-City itself: kilometre-high shanty-towns eking out the last scrap of space in a city hemmed on one side by the Cursed Earth wastelands and by the Black Atlantic on the other.

The unique feature of Cantilever City, the feature that gave it its name, lay in the nature of the Blocks between which it was strung: the Carlos Ezquerra and the Brian Bolland, each a fine and distinct example of the architectural fashion of the times in which they were built.

Ezquerra Block was all extruded, flowing, fractal and somewhat organic-looking faux-geodesic forms. The Bolland Block took minimalism to the extreme: a clean, spare, oblongatic monolith, seven hundred storeys high.

Structures over a certain size, of course, must be dynamic rather than rigid, built to shift and sway under the cumulative effect of even the slightest breeze. The kinetic energy thus produced can then be stored, to supplement in some small way the power taken from other sources.

By some freak of positioning and form, the relationship of movements between Ezquerra and Bolland fell into a recursive and cumulative dynamic pattern. The base kinetic potential was immense, and to waste that kind of power in a resource-hungry City like the Meg would have been a positive crime.

Over the years, piece by piece, a complicated mass of cantilevers, gimbals and gears had congealed between the towers, hooked to dynamos and banks of storage cells, which churned and sparked respectively.

The portholes of the modular pods that served the inhabitants of Cantilever City as living quarters blazed with light, glutted with power even in full daylight. The trading platform, where power-pack recharges were sold to other, less fortunate Mega-City citizens, crawled with genuine, antique and hideously wasteful neon signs.

Those lights were nothing, however, to the screaming traceries of luminescence that currently tracked the panicked human figures on the platform, impacted and tore them apart...

"Drokk!" Dredd slewed his Lawmaster across an Ezquerra access ramp and hauled up on the friction-mat of a Justice Department jump plate. "It's a living slaughter up there, Control! Heavy-duty - looks like the creep has himself a double-header!"

He scanned the complicated mass of the Cantilever City habitat, looking for the source of fire. The impact-visor of his helmet had a track-and-zoom facility, but he didn't use it. It conflicted with his cybernetic eyes, replacements for the eyes he had lost some years before in the line of duty, and the conflict would have left him temporarily blind.

Fortunately, the cyber-eyes had just that track-and-zoom ability themselves. Dredd zeroed in on a thin and ragged-looking man lashed with what appeared to be a length of electrical flex to the support for a pawl-and-ratchet arrangement, several hundred inaccessible metres over the Cantilever City trading platform.

What it was that was actually securing the perp, though, was the very least of Dredd's concerns. The Screaming Meatgun the man held was indeed a double-header - doubling the firepower it could produce.

Assault rifle-like in general form, the gun seemed to have been built from human flesh and bone, frozen in the process of decomposing. The barrel was a spinal column, bulking out where the muzzle should have been in a lumpy, conjoined mass that might have once been a pair of human heads, their features atrophied save for two mouths each lolling open in a permanent scream.

From these mouths, as the man fired, burst gobbets of a plasma-like substance that, even under velocity, seemed to twist in on themselves, writhing and mutating.

Just as the original gun design had been intended to draw its ammunition from the air around it, the Screaming Meatgun drew energy from its surroundings and converted it into these plasma slugs. There was some debate as to the nature of he slugs themselves - they appeared to demonstrate qualities similar to those of living organisms, if extremely short lived.

In any case, quasi-living or not, their purpose in quasi-life was simple: they homed in on living human matter and quite comprehensively shredded it.

"ID-recognition pegs our perp as one Leon Gregor Sturlek," the voice of Control was saying in the helpful tones of one sitting well away from a situation and who doesn't have to actually deal with it.

"Unemployed. Fits the quiet-and-inoffensive-loner profile, but not so much that it threw up active flags. Med-records show some slight degree of latent psionic talent, nowhere near enough to put a blip on the Psi-Division sonar."

"Drokk that, Control," Dredd snapped. "I couldn't give a flying drokk. He's holed up out of reach. I need tactical response as of now."

"A Manta's on its way," said the voice of Control. "ETA four minutes, plus or minus."

Up above, the Screaming Meatgun was still firing. It wasn't going to stop, and when the last Cantilever City inhabitant died, the slugs would just start targeting the citizens slightly farther away in the supporting hab-blocks.

"Four minutes is too long," Dredd said, staring up at the Cantilever City structure and judging the angles. "Override the jump plate, this location. Yank the fail-safes."

"We can do that," said the voice of Control. "Not a good idea, though. If you-"

"Just do it, Control!"

"Okay, sure. Bite my head off, why don't you. It's done."

Dredd made a mental note to find out who was on duty in Control these days. The backchat was crossing the line to the point where a reprimand was in order. If not a boot up the drokking ass.

For the moment, he slapped the switch in his Lawmaster's micro-console that would trigger the jump plate, which shot into the air, taking the Lawmaster and Dredd with it.

Embedded into the basic architectural structure of Mega-City One were items that only members of the Justice Department could use. There were fast-tracks running parallel to the Interways and access hatches to hab-blocks, to efficiently deliver a Judge precisely where he needed to go.

The jump-plate was a null-grav elevator designed to deposit a Judge and his bike on the Cantilever City trading platform.

With the fail-safes off, the Lawmaster shot past the platform entirely, to the tune of several hundred metres. At the apogee of its lift, Dredd hit another control, tripping the one-shot detonation-thrusters designed to give it boost when jumping over obstacles.

The Lawmaster leapt upwards again. As it reached the top if its arc, Dredd swung his boots onto the saddle and jumped, gaining the final, crucial impetus to bring a girder in the Cantilever City support-structure within reach of an outflung hand.

Behind him the Lawmaster fell, tumbling, to glance off Carlos Ezquerra and smash into the trading platform below.

Dredd hauled himself up onto the girder. He was on the same approximate level as the perp, who was now bringing his Screaming Meatgun up and around to loose a round of plasma-slugs at him.

"Stomm!" Dredd hauled his respirator from a belt pouch and smacked it over his lower face, rendering his uniform effectively airtight.

The polycarbonate body-armour armature inside the Judge's uniform had recently been upgraded with an inset tracery of statically-charged microfilaments to mask the biometric signatures to which Meatgun slugs were so attracted. And with the respirator on, the last breath of Dredd's humanity was concealed.

The plasma-slugs hesitated in the air and then shot downwards. More bad luck for the people below, but it couldn't be helped.

Time to go to work.

In the Justice Department-approved propaganda holo-vids, there was a way these situations always went:

The psycho-perp is blasting away, gibbering psychotically all the while, when Heroic Judge arrives on the scene. Heroic Judge is then very careful to shout: "Stop in the name of the Law! This is your last warning! Be aware that you have voided any subsequent claim under the Health and Safety Statutory Procedures of Mega-City One!"

The perp, of course, ignores this and carries on firing - shouting how he'll never be taken alive and so forth - until his head is spectacularly blown off by a single well-aimed shot courtesy of Heroic Judge.

Then a graceful fall of the body from its vantage point and onto a vehicle of some kind, the alarm of which goes off.

This tends to beg the question: just what the drokk does the Heroic Judge think he's doing? Drokking around and wasting time by shouting things - and not to mention practicing his sharp-shooting on a small target like a head - while the perp is busily taking lives all the while and should be taken out as soon as is humanly possible.

Any putative holo-vid audience would have at this point been disappointed, to say the least.

Now that he had a clear line of sight, Dredd pulled his Lawgiver from his boot and pumped three rounds into the perp, aiming for the main mass of the body just to be sure.

There was a decided lack of spasms and agonising screams. The creep just slumped against the flex securing him to the support. Scratch one problem.

The Meatgun was still clutched in a lifeless hand. There was nothing suspicious about this in itself, but Dredd didn't like the idea of leaving a weapon on the body without confirming a clean kill.

He clambered over the support structure, dropping down onto the perp's vantage point and placing a finger on the body's neck. Micro-sensors in his gauntlet relayed the message to a small readout in his helmet that there was no pulse. Hardly surprising, given the state of the creep's chest. There was nothing left in there capable of producing one.

Dredd pulled the dormant Meatgun from the nerveless fingers and set it aside and out of the way against a girder. He cast around, looking for a way down to the trading platform below, and found none.

"Control?" he said. "The situation's under control. Have Tactical Response pick me up in the Manta when it comes. There's no way down."

He thought about this for a moment, looking around himself again. "There's something odd about this," he told Control.

"What's odd about it, Dredd?" asked the voice of Control. "The guy was committing suicide by Judge - he wasn't expecting to come down. Not in one piece, anyway."

"Yeah, but I can't see any easy way he could have got up here in the first place," said Dredd. "Not without access to a flier - and something like that should have been picked up any number of ways. I had to do something... noticeable... to get up here myself."

He looked down at the body again. "This creep is supposed to have managed to do it bare-handed and toting a Screaming Meatgun. I don't think so. I think someone actively placed him here. Have somebody check it out."

"Will do," said the voice of Control. "The Manta should be on the scene in two minutes, give or take. Message for you from the Chief Judge, by the way. You're pulled off regular patrol as of now and she wants you to meet with her ASAP."

Dredd frowned. "Any idea what it's about?"

"On the skinny it just says a 'sensitive and diplomatic matter'," said the voice of Control. "Bit of a stretch for you, there, Dredd, on a couple of counts."

Down below, a number of private-sector med-teams had made the scene. They'd have maybe a couple of minutes before the Justice Department Med-Division arrived, so they'd be making the best of them.

At least they'd leave the survivors alone, Dredd thought. A recent zero tolerance programme of punitive measures had put paid to that, but any number of bodies were going to be spirited swiftly away.

A number of those who could afford it were going to receive transplanted and untraceable body parts, and soon there would be a few more Screaming Meatguns on the street.

Fortunately for those who might care, the Tactical Response Manta finally arrived. It fired a couple of tracer-rounds and the private-sector meds took off like a pack of startled jackals.

The Manta banked in the air and headed towards Dredd, working its way up through the Cantilever City substructure.

"Here comes your ride, Dredd," the voice of Control said.

"Yeah," said Dredd. "Nice of them to finally turn up."

"Hey, you're the point-man. That's the point of street-patrol. Something happens, you go in and then you tell us what you need."

A number of responses crossed Dredd's mind, largely concerned with the subject of eggs, issued to grandmothers for the sucking of, but he never got the chance to speak, because it was at that point that the body of Leon Gregor Sturlek reached out and clutched at him with a crabbed hand.

"Drokk!" Dredd was caught completely off balance. Grud alone knew there were ways these days that a body could live on in some form after apparent physical death, but there had been no sense whatsoever that this creep Sturlek was still alive and any kind of threat.

There was still no sense of something living. No sense of possession, of the sort that had once caused so many problems to Mega-City One at the hands of the dead-raiser, Sabbat. And yet the body was still, for some strange reason, managing to move.

Dredd stumbled and recovered. The clutching hand fell away from him as though, having achieved its purpose, clutching was no longer necessary.

The body of Sturlek hung slumped and silent, dead as it had been.

Then the head jerked up again.

The chest and lungs hitched and spasmed, air sucking through the holes blown in them. The throat convulsed and the muscles around the mouth twitched. It was as though something had taken control of the body, somewhat ineptly, and was using it to move only those parts of it that it had to and nothing more.

The mouth worked, the tongue spasming within it, modulating air blown up from ruined lungs and a malfunctioning throat.

"Isss noghreal..." the body of Sturlek said. "Isss a choghpy of whassgh reelgh an so noghingh counts likgh issa reelghing... isss whasagh maghin ussagh doo..."

"What?" said Dredd.

The body slumped again into inertia, like a puppet with its strings cut. Whatever had animated it had gone. Dead meat once again - and this time, hopefully, finally dead.

The Manta had drawn level with Dredd. A hatch gull-winged open in its side.

"We're taking the body into Med-Division," Dredd told the Tactical Response Judges inside. "I want them to run every test they've got. There's something strange happening here, stranger than usual even for Crazy Season, and I'm going to find out what."

TWO

"If I were to answer the following question: 'What is slavery?' and I should answer in one word, 'Murder!' my meaning would be understood at once. No further argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death, and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: 'What is property?' may I not likewise answer 'Theft'?"

- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Qu'est-ce que la Propriété?

In his plush apartments in the Shangri La Towers, Barnstable Wheems surfaced into consciousness, knitting his sense of self together from the desiccated, aching skeins of a hangover.

Possession of alcohol was, of course, illegal in Mega-City One under the Antisocial Behaviour Statutes, but the prohibition was not actively enforced save in a Crime Blitz, when it was added to the total of crimes the luckless target had committed. And if your number came up for a Crime Blitz, you'd be going down no matter what happened.

Besides, if you paid enough, you could obtain a wide variety of Synthahols, chemically altered and constantly re-modified to give all the effect while escaping Justice Department detection entirely.

It was knowing such tricks, keeping one step ahead of the Law - often on a second-by-second basis - that allowed one Barnstable Wheems to make his living as a lawyer.

There were any number of those among the hideously wealthy - with the accent on the hideous - who would pay through the nose to prevent their activities throwing a blip on the Justice Department sonar. All you had to do was try not to mind how slimy your hands got in the taking of it.

And that, in the end, was the reason why he drank. Genuine article or not, the booze blunted the sense of worthlessness and selling out.

The clients treated him like dirt - at best like the high-priced equivalent of a sewerage maintenance technician, a mere functionary doing a necessary but repugnant job.

Still, at least the money meant that he could afford to live here in Shangri La Towers, the most expensive hab-blocks in the city. Glorified servant quarters the homes on this particular level of Shangri La might be, but they were big and luxurious, and he had them to himself. That put him above 99.999 per cent of a city-state population forced to scrape a living in any bolt-hole it could find.

He'd made them nice, filling them with such genuine antiques as had survived the Rad Wars and which he could afford. Waking up safe here in his home made up for almost anything.

Having put himself together to the point where we could face getting out of bed in the morning, Wheems stretched and, for the first time, actually opened his eyes.

When the world falls down around your ears, there are a few moments when the mind simply and flatly fails to register the fact.

The blood was everywhere. The room seemed drenched in it.

That was actually an exaggeration, which some cool and oddly dispassionate part of his mind told him. The human mind is just wired-up, on the fundamental level, to throw up all kinds of panic-flags at the sight of loose blood.

It isn't as bad as it seems, calm thread of consciousness told him. Just the standard spray-and-spatter of a single living creature stabbed brutally to death, no more than that.

Every other part of Barnstable's mind seemed to have shorted itself out, as though an iron spike had been driven through it. So when the personal comms-unit by the bed began to peal, he reached out and activated it automatically.

The virtual screen flashed the message: "NO INCOMING VISUAL SIGNAL", and went back into standby mode. The receiver-bead floated from its port and positioned itself by Barnstable's ear, where it would remain, wherever he moved, until the connection was cut.

"Hey, listen up," said a voice from the receiver-bead. Male, casual and friendly. The sort of voice, attached by the usual means, to a sympathetic ear you could tell your troubles to. "You've just this second realised that under normal circumstances you like people to see this really fine and tasteful place where you live, so you set your receiver to send visuals by default. That means I can see everything you can, even if you can't see me. All that blood.

"Now, I'm telling you not to worry about that, for the moment at least. I'm not going to be calling the Justice Department, and for a number of technical reasons I'm not going to bother going into, there is absolutely no way the Judges can be monitoring this call. Do you understand me?"

There was an edge to the voice, however. Not so much an edge of authority or command; more that it was simply, casually and sympathetically telling you how the world was going to be.

Barnstable tried to reply, but the voice overrode him:

"Aside from that," the voice said, "you're in a minor form of post-traumatic shock, what with waking up to see all that blood and all. Your mental switchboard's jammed with questions and possible scenarios. Just breathe easy and we'll clear things up a little, yes?

"First things first. You're wondering if you've been wounded in the night - maybe in a home invasion or the like - and you're still, somehow, at the point of not feeling it. You're wondering if you're in hysterical denial or some such, that when you can finally bring yourself to look down you'll see the ruin of your chest with a knife still sticking in it.

"You don't have to worry about that, either. The blood isn't yours. Except for trace-contamination, which we'll get along to in a minute, never fear.

"For the moment, look at the trail it makes, through all that wreckage that suggests a violent struggle. Through the door and into the bathroom...

"I'd go in there and have a look, if I were you. Watch your bare feet on the broken glass from that overturned antique jukebox full of classic static-blips from the Two Thousand and Tens - we wouldn't want to add any more direct contamination to the scene, now would we?

"And here we are at, well, let's be honest, what we might as well call the meat of the matter.

"It's quite amazing, really, what you can do with sufficient time and effort. You'll notice that, in certain respects, certain details have been left eminently identifiable.

"This is not some random individual who will not be missed. This is a personage who was quite well-known, in life, and who is known to be in personal contact with yourself. The disappearance will be noticed, make no mistake about that..."

Barnstable Wheems stared at the mess in his bathroom.

"How could you...?" he managed at last. "How were you able to...?"

"In case you're wondering," said the voice from the receiver-bead, "these are not the remains of a clone. A clone does not have all the cumulative imperfections and adaptations that are acquired by the phenotypical act of living. "This is the genuine and definitive article. And the physical evidence linking you to the death is incontrovertible. Look at your hands, please."

Wheems looked down at the barely healing scratches on his hands. He simply hadn't noticed them before, his mind being on other things.

"Acquired during the struggle," said the voice, "to all intents and purposes, and one of the more salutary sources for your contamination of the scene. Justice Department Forensics Division is quite capable of distinguishing between that and the contamination caused simply by living there, in the home where you happen to live. As I said, all the evidence matches."

Barnstable's experience as a lawyer came, somewhat belatedly, into play.

"Yes, okay," he said desperately, "that might be true, but the Judges have other ways of getting to the truth. Security-scans and psych-profiles, Birdie lie-detectors... Something out there, something along the line, will show I didn't do this.

"You have witnesses - I don't know - who say they saw me running into her in a synthi-milk bar and the two of us leaving together. I can prove they're lying. If holo-surveillance shows it, I can prove it's been doctored. Something, somewhere in the world will prove I didn't do this for the simple fact that I didn't, and whoever you are, you can't control the entire world."

"Who's to say that we can't?" said the voice, somewhat smugly. "All right. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that we can't. Such things are secondary evidence - the sort of things that you help clients to avoid in your work. That simply doesn't matter in this case.

"People like you are not, to be frank, first on the guest list for the annual Judges' Ball. We're willing to risk that the Justice Department will assume that you've somehow managed to beat the secondary evidence, and go with the open and shut case in front of them. Want to bet on that?"

For all his faults, Barnstable Wheems still held onto a breath of the romantic idealism that had, years ago, spurred him to become a lawyer. In addition, of course, to the potential for acquiring drokkloads of cash for not much actual work.

The fight for justice, as opposed to the Justice of the Department, still held an attraction for him. And whatever else it was, his current situation was a romantic's dream. Hero wakes up with a dead body, accused of a murder he didn't commit, forced to fight and clear his name, armed with only his wits in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

And just think of the name he'd make, let alone the compensation, if he could fight such a case and win!

"Of course," said the voice, "if it looks like you're going to get anywhere in proving your innocence, we'll simply kill you stone cold drokking dead. Extremely painfully, for preference."

"Oh," said Barnstable Wheems. There was that.

"All right," he said at last. "What do you want from me?" And because, after all, for all his vestigial romantic idealism, he was still a lawyer: "And what do I get out of it?"

"What you get out of it is that we send a very thorough cleaner to spirit the inconvenient evidence away - just not so far away that we won't be able to lay our hands on it, you understand? I think you'll be pleased with his work. We call him Mister Hand.

"As for what we expect in return, in the next few days, possibly the next few hours, you'll be offered a job of work which, under ordinary circumstances, your first inclinations would be to refuse, for the simple reason, frankly, that nobody in his right mind would accept. There will be no mistaking the job in question. You are expected, simply, to do that job and succeed."

"And, uh, if I were to fail?" asked Barnstable Wheems, even though he knew what the answer would be. It was just the way the script in this situation went.

"Does the phrase 'dead as day-old dog shit' mean anything to you?" asked the voice. "Bit of an anachronism on a number of levels, I'll admit, what with the fact of dogs as such not existing any more... ah yes, I see that it does.

"Good afternoon, Mr Wheems. You'll never know who I am."

Back in the bedroom, the wall-mounted comms unit briefly sparked as an EMP erased any signal-resonance trace of the call.

In the bathroom, the receiver-bead dropped to the floor, where it would subsequently be quite thoroughly whisked away by Mister Hand.

THREE

"We are for our own people. We want to see them happy, healthy and wise, drawing strength from co-operation with the peoples of other lands, but also contributing their full share to the general well-being. Not a broken-down pauper and mendicant, but a strong, living partner in the progressive advancement of civilisation."

- William Gallacher

The Case for Communism

The Chief Judge hated the sleep machine with a passion. To the extent that she allowed herself special privileges of any kind as a result of her position, she had dedicated the time of any number of Tek Division techs to overhaul the unit dedicated to her private use, tweak its processes to match the particular biological processes of her body, but in the end nothing seemed to do much good.

Sleep machines were really intended to be used by those Judges who had started out in life as engineered clones. A number of gene-sequences had been patched in at gestation and switched on in them, allowing them to mesh with the sleep machine processes more or less seamlessly.

The units were not recommended for sustained and regular use by Judges born in the more naturally human manner. The combination of slo-time to effectively compress six hours into as many minutes, the force-ejection of glucotic nutrients and rejuve-compounds to counteract the slo-time and the stutter-slits simulating REM seemed, increasingly, to leave the Chief Judge feeling simultaneously wired, enervated and subtly wrong inside.

Regular physicals still showed her to be in the best of health; it was all quite probably psychosomatic - but that, when you came right down to it, was the problem.

Chief Judges of Mega-City One did not exactly have the best of track records when it came to the subject of mental stability. There was something about the job that seemed to turn what had appeared to be the very best initial choice, comprehensively, and in some cases spectacularly, nuts.

Check out the famous case of Chief Judge Cal, who had promoted a small goldfish to the rank of Senior Judge and installed it as one of his advisors.

The Chief Judge had the uneasy suspicion that half the Justice Department was living in fear of the day she decided to instigate a Mounted Division and started channelling the spirit of Catherine the Great.

She clambered out of the pod and racked it shut behind her. A standby light pulsed balefully on its monitor display.

She rolled her sleeve down over the already-healing welts that the force-injectors had left, pulled on a gauntlet and her private chambers, rubbing absently at her inner arm.

She wished she could make time for a quick shower, but the uniform of a Judge, even the Chief Judge, was not designed to get out of and back into that easily. Fortunately, the uniform was, to a certain extent, self-cleaning.

Judge Dredd was waiting for her in her Audience Chambers, alone. Almost any other Judge, even the head of the SJS - especially the head of the SJS - would have been accompanied by a guard detail, but the Chief Judge had known Dredd for years. She trusted him implicitly.

Of course, she thought, one of the things he could be trusted on was to say and do things that she didn't necessarily agree with.

He was standing there with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing out through the big observation windows at the Mega-City spread below.

The Hall of Justice was the tallest structure in Mega-City One, rising to the centre-point of the ion-plasma dome that, effectively, sealed the city and its inhabitants from an atmosphere contaminated in any number of ways, by any number of wars. Or even wars.

The ionization-dome was in the process of polarising towards its night-time setting, shutting out the light from the Corona Maladictus - the suspended cloud of quasi-biological micro-particles released during the Apocalypse War, the decay of which could at times turn the night sky bright as day.

Corpse-light, basically: the suspended remains of the vaporised dead.

Lights were already coming on in the city below, to stave off the artificially boosted night. The whole arrangement was a colossal waste of resources, in the opinion of some - it was just healthier than spending the night under corpse-light.

"I expected you here later," the Chief Judge said. "There must have been any number of crimes you simply couldn't ignore on the way back."

"I ended up totalling my Lawmaster," said Dredd. "I had to come back directly."

He turned from the windows to face her. Usual procedure was for a Judge to remove his or her helmet when in the presence of the Chief, but Dredd made a point of never showing his face to any living soul. There was even a special dispensation somewhere in the Justice Department records.

Like a lot of clone-based Judges, the Chief Judge knew, Dredd's identity was engaged with the idea of the Law almost to the point of monomania. He was the living and iconic embodiment of it. Showing something so individualistic as his naked face would go against the very core of his being.

Besides, like a lot of clones, Dredd was without a shred of such a basic human weakness as vanity - even to the point of refusing reconstructive surgery for injuries received in the line of duty. There could be anything at all under there. On the whole it was probably best not to think about it.

Then again - and unlike a lot of clones - Dredd could turn around and suddenly display a surprising level of human insight.

"You're looking tired, Hershey," he said. "Just out of the sleep machine?"

"Yeah," said Chief Judge Hershey. "I've stopped complaining about it. Last time I mentioned it, Slithe gave me a week of oh-so-snotty and courteous enquiries about my hormone balance."

Slithe was a Senior Judge in the SJS - the Special Judicial Service - whose job it was, ostensibly, to Judge the Judges, rooting out corruption and abuse of power.

What the SJS seemed to do in actual fact was spend the live-long day hatching plots to stab Chief Judges in the back and overthrow them the moment they brought the faintest breath of humanity or clemency to their job.

Even more worrying, Hershey thought, was the uniform and general ineptitude of these various nefarious plots. It made you wonder how good the SJS drokkers were doing at their proper job of rooting out corruption and abuses and so forth. There could be any number of Judges out there, getting away with totally unnoticed murder.

"There's no reason why you shouldn't get some real sleep, Hershey," Dredd said. "Sure, a Judge has to be better and above human weakness, but there's no sense killing yourself doing the impossible." His lips twitched in the closest he had ever come in his life to a humorous smile. "It'd be like saying it was a sign of weakness to die when you're hit in the head by a hi-ex round."

"Believe me, Dredd," said Hershey, "I'd love to take the time - there just isn't any. Too many problems to deal with."

She gestured to the observation windows and the City beyond. "Out there we have one Judge for every hundred thousand citizens. The job never ends.

"It was different when the blanket-tranquilisation programmes were still active, and we could shift the resources to where they did the most good. But now the resources are just spread too thin. We're one big knock away from a mass-riot at the best of times - and it's getting worse."

"What about upping the number of clones on the strength?" Dredd said. "Or increasing the degree of automation?"

"Look what happened the last time," said Hershey. "Both last times. And the times before that."

"Genetics and cybernetics have evolved since then," said Dredd.

"Not to the point where they'll be accepted," Hershey said. "I mean, you, Dredd. You're an individual, as are the other clones on the strength. You were specially produced, as a kind, as a method of preserving the DNA of famous Judges from the past like Fargo and so on. Accent on the special. You know, like Special Edition?"

Dredd simply nodded. In this matter he was almost entirely ego-free, and did not take discussion of his basic clone nature in any pejorative sense.

Hershey sighed. "We start mass-producing faceless drones, DNA or cyber-based, and the city will revolt. No citizen is going to submit to the authority of something he can't think of as human, and at this point, authority is all we have going for us. Without it, we're just another armed gang."

Dredd nodded. It might have seemed odd to those who held that Mega-City One was a totalitarian police state, its jackbooted Judges forever stamping on the faces of the disenfranchised masses, but he truly believed in the democratic principle. Or at least, he found it less thoroughly appalling than any other alternative.

The Justice Department had, after all, come to power by popular acclaim. The fact that the Judges had been the only remaining organised force in the toxic, bloody chaos after the Rad Wars was neither here nor there. It had not been forcibly opposed out of nothing; people had simply recognised that it was the only chance for society to survive in any kind of coherent order.

The Justice Department remit had been reinforced, subsequently, time and time again by democratic election. The fact that some citizens never even bothered to pull their finger out and vote was entirely their prerogative.

"The way I see it," Dredd said, "a Judge must be above reproach. We can't resort to underhanded means - the blanket-tranque programmes weren't called the Big Lie for nothing.

"We're never gonna solve the problem of crime, once and for all, without lobotomising every man, woman and child on Earth - and even then they're gonna commit a whole bunch of incredibly dumb crimes.

"All we can do is the job in front of us. See a crime and deal with it. Do it hard and fast, do it without compromise and make drokking sure we do it fair. Justice must be seen to be done."

"However much it hurts," said Hershey. "However many problems it throws up in return."

She sighed yet again. She seemed to have been doing that a lot lately.

"That's the reason I pulled you in off street-patrol, Dredd," she said. "Something's turned around, come back, and bitten us in the ass."

The Sector around the Hall of Justice, Sector One, had the lowest citizen-based crime rate in the City. This was for the simple reason that its real estate was almost entirely devoted to supplementary aspects of Justice Department operations.

Here were the industrial plants where every item of a Judge's equipment from the boots up was designed, manufactured and tested.

Here was situated the Psyko-Block - known colloquially as the Kook Kubes - where the worst of those Judged too insane to be held responsible for their actions were housed, and some attempt was even made to treat them.

Then there were the high-security Iso-Cubes, where those in their so-called right minds were stockpiled, and no treatment or rehabilitation was attempted at all. All the effort was spent making damn sure that the drokkers never, ever got out.

Dredd walked through a series of armoured crash-hatches, which sprang into the ceiling a bare centimetre before he reached them and slammed back down a bare centimetre after he passed.

The mechanisms opening each hatch were triggered by the DNA signature encoded into his badge. The closing mechanisms were triggered by the DNA of Dredd himself, the flash-analysis of which lagged a fraction of a second behind - if the two failed to match, then the hatch would come down a crucial fraction of a second early, slicing him from head to toe.

Although, of course, slicing would probably be the wrong word. The bottoms of the crash-hatches were not exactly sharp.

The access-tunnel ran through the hundred metres of solid rockrete that formed the shell of the Sector One Iso-block - solid save for the buried micro-sensors, which would throw a small electronic fit if anyone so much as attempted to chip off a flake.

The tunnel ended in what appeared to be a colossal, empty chamber with a smooth matte floor... until you looked up.

Floating fifty metres above the floor under null-grav, and fifty metres from the rockrete walls, was a bank of monocarbon cubes as clear and impermeable as industrial diamond.

Each of these cubes contained a figure, each in some posture of listlessness, or stoicism, or stupor. There was not much actual movement. There was nowhere, much, to actually move.

There was nowhere, literally, for the inmates to go.

Flying Eye units drifted lazily around the bank of Iso-cubes, their sensors and receptors augmented with heavy-bore antipersonnel packages, just on the off-chance that some inmate might attempt chew through solid monocarbon with their bare teeth.

Waiting by the access hatch was a floater.

Justice Department policy of exposing citizens to personnel they could relate to as human did not extend to those who had forfeited their rights as citizens on arrest. The floater operator was a cyborg, melded to the chassis of the floater. Its biological components were derived from some Judge who had died in the course of duty, and had willed his (or possibly her) remains to the Department out of a desire to continue to serve.

"Take me up," Dredd told the cyborg. "MDU-790074-B. Drago San."

FOUR

"No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the greater part of the members are poor and miserable."

- Adam Smith

Wealth of Nations

An hour later, Dredd was back in Sector Nine.

Sectors Two through Nine were, naturally enough, arranged around Sector One in a square, three on a side, so the trip was not exactly a gruelling one.

His destination was of another and somewhat more salubrious nature than the street and its accumulated shanty-settlements like Cantilever City. Shangri La Towers rose bright and pristine, their spire-like forms unsullied, courtesy of a monomolecular coating on which no contamination could gain a purchase.

Nothing stuck to Shangri La. Things just slid right off.

The Justice Department personal flier, built along the same general lines as the floaters in the Iso-block, hovered over one of the cupola-like residential structures that capped the Towers. Inside, Dredd switched the PA-unit to the frequency of the Shangri La civil-def security.

"Official business," he said. "This is Judge Dredd requesting permission to enter Shangri La."

"You got a warrant, lawboy?" said Shangri La civil-def security, in not exactly the most courteous of tones. "'Cause if you wanna arrest someone here, boy, you know you gotta make it stick."

Dredd bit back his anger to the point where it only came out as barely-suppressed loathing. "It's not that kind of business," he said. "I'm not here to arrest anyone. That's why I'm requesting rather than ordering. For the moment."

The Justice Department and Shangri La existed in an uneasy equilibrium of tension. The fact that their lawyers kept them technically - and scrupulously - on the right side of the Law meant that for the most part it was not resource-effective for the Justice Department to actively go after the ultra-rich Shangri La inhabitants.

With other, far more serious battles to be fought in the Mega-City, it was simpler just to look the other way and leave the Shangri La inhabitants to their own devices in their sinecure. Leave them to stew in the juices of their own little world.

It couldn't last, of course. At some point the Shangri La inhabitants would come to believe that they were above the Law and actively flout it. Then the Justice Department would decide that a lesson needed to be taught and stomp them flat. It was only a matter of time before Shangri La pushed the Judges too far.

But today was not that day.

"Okay, Dredd," said the civil-def security. "You can come in. We got nothing to hide."

"Nothing I'm going to see, at any rate," growled Dredd.

"You said it, Lawboy."

Down below, a landing gantry was extending. Dredd touched the cyborg pilot of the flier on her shoulder. "We're going down."

"Gotcha." The cyborg's hands flew across her console, almost too fast for the eye to catch.

Unlike the operator of the floater back in the Iso-block, field-operational pilots were living human beings, artificially enhanced to jack their reflexes off the human scale. They had achieved their cyber-synthesis from the opposite direction.

There was, apparently, quite a self-enclosed community of them in their quarters back in the Hall of Justice. "Apparently", because they tended to keep themselves to themselves so far as was possible, only emerging when they were needed to fly their Mantas or personal fliers such as this.

The flier descended to hover over the gantry. Dredd shot the drop-hatch and swung himself down.

"Wait for me here," he told the pilot, raising his voice a little over the hum of turbines. "Somebody asks you what you're doing in their space, you ask them just how far they want to push it. These drokkers aren't some other country, however much they like to pretend."

"Gotcha," said the pilot.

Dredd strode along the gantry, through open double-doors and into a pushily decorated reception area, where a number of armed and armoured Shangri La civil-def security men levelled their impactor-blasters directly at his head.

An hour earlier, back in the Iso-block, the observation floater orientated itself in the air to face a particular monocarbon cube. Through its crystal-clear face the cell within could be seen in perfect detail.

The feeding tube and ablutionary arrangements hooked to the life-support systems situated behind the edifice of the cube-bank, and at least kept the inmates alive.

The cell could have been seen in perfect detail, had not the vast majority of it been obscured by the body of the inmate.

A monstrously fat and toad-like man, the pendulous weight of his bulk spilt over what, at first sight, appeared to be a large and highly-polished silver bowl where his legs should have been.

This was in fact a null-grav invalid-floater, operating on the same principles as the observation-floater on which Dredd was standing, and indeed the same principles that kept the Iso-cube bank floating fifty metres off the ground.

It was integral to the man, fused to his spinal column, and any attempt to remove it would have killed him, so far as any and every tech-analysis had strongly suggested.

The self-sustaining hydrofusion power cells, however, had been removed. The curve of the bowl rested on the floor of the Cube, and the only thing that prevented the man toppling over, like a Weeble without the wherewithal to get up again, was the fact that the cramped and one-size-fits-all nature of his cell held him effectively wedged.

The man squatted there, immobile, seemingly staring into space. The inner walls of the cell were one-way polarised, giving observers a view in, but the inmates no view out.

Clipped to the one wall was a set of goggles, designed to project moving lights and abstract shapes onto the retinas to stave off isolation-psychosis. They were still in their vacuum pack; the man had, obviously, never so much as used them.

"Take the polarisation down," Dredd told the cyborg floater operator. "Let him see what's happening."

There was no direct sign, from either the cyborg or the walls of the cube, that anything had happened.

Abruptly, though, the man's face animated. He turned to look directly at Dredd and his face split open in what was, to all intents and purposes, an open, friendly and unreservedly charming smile.

"My word!" Efil Drago San exclaimed, with every evidence of delight at meeting some warm acquaintance after far too long a time. "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?"

An hour later, in Sector Nine, the Shangri La civil-def security men stood easy, their guns held as though for parade-inspection. This meant that the guns were not, now, aimed at Dredd, but the civil-def men weren't exactly putting them away, either.

"The Lady Proconsul has granted you an audience," said the squad-leader.

"The what?" said Dredd.

The rich inhabitants of Shangri La were forever coming up with titles and little hierarchical rituals for themselves, as if it mattered a drokk in any real world.

"Honoria, Lady Proconsul of the Eastern Tower, Lady Slocombe," said the squad leader, with the cheerful roughness of someone who thinks he has the upper hand, though with no idea of how bad things could suddenly get if he put so much as a word wrong. "You want anything here in Shangri La, you talk to the Lady first."

Dredd considered simply telling the creep to go drokk himself; a Judge with just cause could go anywhere and everywhere he liked within the Mega-City walls.

Forcing the situation at this point, though, would cause needless complications. Better to wait until the Department got around to doing something about Shangri La Towers once and for all.

"Lead on, then," he said, keeping the anger out of his voice to the point that it was merely evident rather than overwhelming. "Take me to this Lady Slocombe of yours."

The security squad took him through access corridors and halls, which were lined with everything from colonnades and antique Classical statuary, to gemstone-woven tapestries, to ancient, genuine glossy-paper posters from before the War, screen-printed on actual paper and held up with actual and provenance-certified blu-tack.

Horded treasures from the burnt and irradiated remains of the past. The objects had no actual value in themselves; the value lay in all the time and effort spent in locating, retrieving and preserving those relics that had somehow survived in an intact and pristine condition. Some people made a big thing about that.

Every door Dredd passed was closed, with an air that they weren't going to be opened any time soon. They met no other people. Dredd got the impression that he was being very carefully shepherded away from anything of which he might take notice, anything on which he would be forced to take action.

At length, they came to a big set of double-doors flanked by periwigged footmen. The footmen smoothly swung the doors back, and Dredd stepped into an audience chamber.

Actually, it might more properly have been called a boudoir writ large. It was all plush velvet drapery and gilt, gilded statuettes of nymphs and satyrs, burning sticks of musky incense - the chemical components modified, no doubt, to keep them from falling foul of the Justice Department Proscribed Substances list.

Reclining on a day bed, attended by a pair of well-muscled young men in jockey shorts, who fed her slivers of crystallised fruit from little silver plates, was a woman of what some might call a certain age - and which others, with slightly more clarity if less goodwill, would point out as decidedly uncertain.

Years of cosmetic surgery and bootleg rejuve-treatment had taken their toll. The dry skin stretched over frail bones gave her the aspect of having at some point been mummified.

She could have been of any age over a hundred. The voluminous winceyette nightie and the bright purple fright-wig were the most natural things about her.

There was nothing frail, however, about her voice.

"You there, young man!" she ordered with the piercingly rude tone of command of the terminally over-bred. "It's about time one of you damn Justice Department chappies got your finger out and came here. I put out the order for one of you Judges simply hours ago."

Somebody from Shangri La Towers actually calling the Justice Department for help would have been notable, but if anyone had noticed it they hadn't told Dredd.

"What the drokk are you talking about?" he said.

"Why, the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton!" Lady Slocombe exclaimed, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. "My closest companion. She's been missing since last night, and not a soul has seen a trace of her."

A certain amount of light began to dawn. Lady Slocomb was under the impression that Dredd was here to investigate a Missing Persons case. And the fact that she thought Judges had the time and resources to investigate every Missing Persons case they came across just showed how out of touch the inhabitants of Shangri La were.

"Well, to be missing in any official sense," Dredd began, trying once more for some minimum semblance of diplomacy, "a citizen has to be out of contact for more than forty-eight hours."

"Don't give me that, you jumped up little functionary!" The obliviousness of Lady Slocombe was reaching dangerous proportions in every sense.

Insulting a Judge was not exactly a crime, as such - unless the Judge in question decided to define it as Verbal Assault Calculated to Cause an Affray. The tone of Lady Slocombe, so far as Dredd was concerned, was coming dangerously close to crossing that line.

"The Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton," Lady Slocombe continued, "would never leave my sight for so much as an hour. Why, even when I rub her up the wrong way, she merely shoots up the curtain and hisses at me from the pelmet."

Dredd looked at her as the wheels, at last, began to turn. "We're not talking about any kind of person at all, are we?" he said.

Lady Slocombe looked back at him with scorn. "The Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton," she said, "is my Felis domesticus. A pure-bred Abyssinian Blue. Suitably modified, of course, to withstand the rigours of our poorly misused world."

For a moment Dredd stood stock still, hands clenched inside their gauntlets.

"Let me get this straight," he said at last. "You think I'm here to investigate the unexplainable and mysterious disappearance of your drokking cat?"

"Yes, of course," said Lady Slocomb. "The Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton is my cat. What else would she be? Some foul fiend has had her away - so what are you going to do about it, eh?"

FIVE

"An idle, light, evilly deceitful and proud fellow who whispers insulting jests basely and obscenely, and is rightly called by the people by the name of Mimmus..."

- Milo

Life of St Amandus

Efil Drago San had been born in the slum-domes of Puerto Lumina, the single colony-outpost on Earth's moon that had not affiliated itself with the Justice Departments of what had once been the USA, or the New Sov Bloc that had once been centrally controlled by Russia.

Puerto Lumina was quite simply a Lawless living hell, its people driven insane by confinements and depredations that made the Mega-cities of Earth itself pale by comparison. Conditions that had those unlucky enough to live under them fighting tooth and bloody nail to survive.

Mass cannibalism had been merely one of the more obvious and least repugnant survival-strategies that had evolved.

The only way out, at the time, had involved the friendly treaty between Puerto Lumina and the European Mega-City-state of Brit-Cit; this in large part due to the basic nature of Brit-Cit itself.

The United Kingdom - as it had been then - had never played an active part in the Rad Wars that had decimated the world in the late twenty-first century. For all its sabre-rattling and dreams of an Empire long since gone, the UK was little more than (as was said, repeatedly, by informed commentators at the time) a banana-republic without the bananas.

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 simply 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.

"You don't have to be mad to work here," it read. "You have to be the sort of rabid and oleaginous jackal who'd sell their crippled old Grandma for the chemical-content value of her body while she's still alive!"

"You still misunderstand," said Dredd. "We don't need a creep like you for the prosecution. We can handle the prosecution on our own.

"Brit-Cit has demanded a reversion to the old forms of trial. Drago San supplied us with your name. You're gonna be acting in his defence."

In the Halls of Justice Med-Division, techs were working their way through the daily crop of bodies killed by Judges in the execution, as it were, of their duties.

Even with the winnowing processes that excluded all the cut-and-dried deaths and had the vast majority of these bodies packed directly off to Resyk, the numbers were still sufficient enough that the work had something of the quality of an assembly-line.

Given that the items on the conveyor belts were being disassembled rather than assembled, of course.

A med-tech checked the preliminary scans on the current body going past. On this level of triage he was just a Grade One, barely a step up from casual labour.

"Latent-psionic type, the scan says," he said unconcernedly. "Level too low to ever give him more than nightmares one night in three, usually, but just the sorta guy who tends to flip out this time of year when the atmo-systems start playing up. Run around, act up, get pulled down and stomped flat, you know?"

"Yeah," another tech agreed. "Bag him as standard suicide-by-Judge and... hang on, this one's tagged as 'further investigation'. What do you think? Did we miss him in the rush?"

"If you like," said the first. "I notice, though, that it's been tagged as 'further investigation' by Judge Dredd."

"Ah. Better actually do it, then. The last thing we want is an in-person visit from Old Stony Face."

The first tech shunted the body off the conveyor line and walked it through the secondary deep-scan processes that would give a fuller picture of its physiological state.

"Leon Gregor Sturlek..." he read from the display. "Cause of demise, well, we know about that... Massive trauma and systemic collapse due to the obvious... Previous neurological and synaptic disruption, together with an endocrinal shift consistent with a textbook schizophrenic break - now that is odd."

"What's up?" said the second tech. "You're the one with the basic neuro-training. I'm just the gut-guy."

"Well, the thing about what you can broadly call a schizophrenic break," said the first, "if I'm remembering it right, is that there's no such thing as a classic textbook pattern. It's like a kinda random shorting out and reallocation of synaptic pathways.

"Random being the operative word, apparently. The brain misfires and the victim experiences disruptions that could be literally anything, from hearing voices telling them to kill their mother 'cause she's a demon to being absolutely convinced that their mother is a small tub of synthi-cheese...

"Doesn't have to be about mothers, of course; the point is it could be anything. Thinking the whole concept of up is a tune you're whistling. Thinking Wednesday is a toad in a hat. Whatever. Just like this total nonsense. The reason so many schizophrenics seem to be similar is that the intact parts of their mind are trying, desperately, to explain the total nonsense and latch on to similar things and fears - that Grud's telling them to do things, that aliens are doing it, that it's all part of some Justice Department conspiracy pumping microwaves into their heads."

He tapped the deep-scan display. "The point is, this says, the synaptic disruptions here are entirely too organised in nature. It's as if they've been designed for a specific purpose. Not just to have this Sturlek guy flipping out in one of any number of odd, random ways - but to flip out in a specific and violently psychotic way. He was all charged up and just waiting for some kind of trigger."

"So what you're saying," said the first med-tech, "is that somebody actually did this to the guy?"

"Somebody did this to him," said the second. "Grud alone knows how or why. I think we're gonna have to pass this guy up the chain to the people who actually know stuff."

SEVEN

"Minds like ours, my dear James, must always be above national prejudices, and in all companies it gives me great pleasure to declare, that, as a people, the English are very little indeed inferior to the Scotch."

- Christopher North

Noctes Ambrosianae

On the rooftop strato-pad of the Halls of Justice, Dredd and Chief Judge Hershey stood together with a contingent of armed Tactical Response Judges. An hour earlier, Dredd had procured the services of Barnstable Wheems, Efil Drago San had been moved to a hi-security cell in the Hall of Justice and now they were waiting for the final component of the affair: the arrival of a contingent from Brit-Cit by way of intercontinental Strat-Bat.

The Tactical Response squad with them was, ostensibly, an "honour guard", but in a far more real sense it was a failsafe, a protective measure, just to be sure. The Justice Department of Mega-City One, despite any failings it might have in the eyes of its critics, was not, in the end, a bunch of drokking idiots.

The Judges had realised early on - though just slightly too late to prevent their funding of it - the true nature of Brit-Cit's so-called "Justice Department" and what was being done in their name. They had yanked that funding and support as soon as they had become aware of what it was being spent on, but by then the damage had been done.

A visit by senior Brit-Cit Judges was basically the equivalent of a visit to the US in the twenty-first century by the President of an unrecognised, rogue South American state - a drugs baron who had clawed his way to the top of the heap, and was bringing along an entourage of the enforcers and hit men who had helped him to get there.

The tallest structure in the Mega-City, the Hall of Justice caught the full force of the weather systems and the driving, torrential rain that would evaporate to nothing before it completely failed to hit the heat of the city below.

"Any clue as to who these drokkers actually are?" Dredd asked, teeth gritted more against the anger at being imposed upon by a bunch of Brit-Cit drokkers than against the rain. "Do we have ID and creep-sheets on them?"

"Nothing like that," said Hershey. "It's like the Brit-Cit Senior Judges are all part of a secret society or some drokking thing. The only name for them we have is the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber."

"Fine by me," Dredd growled. "Not knowing the names makes the creeps that much easier to shoot in the head, if it comes down to it."

"Probably a good idea to can the jokes, Dredd," said Hershey. "We all know you're playing to type, but outsiders like this Brit-Cit drokkers might not."

"Who says I was joking?" said Dredd.

The roar of engines cut through the hiss of the rain and a Strat-Bat hazed in through the ionization field that insubstantially domed the entire city.

The Strat-Bat banked in the air, firing its retros, and settled on its landing gear. A gust of Brit-Cit air plumed from the exchange vents as the oxy-exchange systems equalised the pressure differential from the flight across the Black Atlantic.

Then the Strat-Bat simply sat there.

"They're taking their own good time about it," Hershey said after a while.

"It's a power play," said Dredd. "The drokkers are making it clear that they're at no one's beck and call. That's what I'd do."

At length, an access ramp racked itself down from a side hatch. A figure emerged and strolled across to Dredd and Hershey, the collar of its synthi-leather jacket turned up against the rain.

As the figure grew closer, it became distinguishable as female, and Chief Judge Hershey recognised her: a strong-featured woman in her early thirties, of predominantly Afro-Caribbean/Chinese descent. Despite herself, Hershey found it a little incongruous - what with all the received-wisdom clichés of Brit-Cit being inhabited by pasty-faced, chinless, inbred Lords and Ladies, it was easy to forget that Brit-Cit was every bit as much of a mixed culture as the Mega-City ever was, if not more so.

"Wotcha," the woman said. "Detective Judge Treasure Steel, Brit-Cit Criminal Interrogations Division, Flying Squad, at your service."

"I know," said Chief Judge Hershey. "We've met before."

Indeed they had. Over a decade before, Chief Judge Hershey had been a Street Judge and Treasure Steel, a Brit-Cit Rookie, indentured to a certain Detective Judge Armitage for a year-long period of observation and evaluation, which she could have failed at a moment's notice at any time. Hershey had been ordered to Brit-Cit to locate and contain a rogue biological organism, which had originated in the Big Meg.

The Rookie Treasure Steel - as she was then known - had been detailed to act merely as liaison, little more than a glorified chauffeur, ferrying Hershey around as the mission required.

In fact, showing remarkable resource and acuity of mind even then, Steel had conducted an investigation into the matter on her own, and discovered that the "rogue" organism was in fact an engineered and prototypical bio-weapon. And that it had been engineered, at least in part, with Mega-City Justice Department funding.

In short, it had not exactly been the Justice Department of Mega-City One's finest hour.

"I remember," said Detective Judge Treasure Steel, as she was now known. "I told you to give me a call if you ever needed another hand."

As a part of their final confrontation with the rogue bio-weapon, now mutated into a ganglionic mass of borrowed meat and ravenous mouths, Hershey had been incapacitated, leaving matters entirely in the hands of Treasure Steel.

This was to some degree apposite, since Treasure Steel had used one of those hands to clutch a live grenade, jammed the resulting fist into the bio-organism's nearest maw, then used the other hand to slice off the first with a laser-cutter so as to fling herself away in time to avoid being blown to pieces in the resulting explosion.

"The guys are insisting you get us some kind of water-proof umbilical..." Detective Judge Treasure Steel began, jerking a thumb in the direction of the Strat-Bat.

Then she realised that Dredd was looking her with an expression (so far as his expression could be read behind his visor) of flat and furious repugnance. What was visible of his nostrils was flared with disgust.

"What?" she said. "I'm not exactly fresh from the flight out, but you telling me I'm reeking or something?"

"That jacket," said Dredd. "That isn't synthi-leather. That's genuine leather. Possession of unlicensed animal products is a violation carrying a mandatory sentence of..."

"You haven't changed, have you, Dredd?" said Detective Judge Treasure Steel. "You probably don't remember me, but I remember you. I was there when you came over and met with my boss. On that thing which ended up involving this Drago San guy, as it happens. Armitage sends his love, by the way, and regrets he's too busy heading up the CID and kicking at the pricks to get away. That's pricks in the sense of what you get from the end of a sword, by the way. I know how you Mega-City types get about language."

Treasure Steel grinned maliciously. "Actually, what he said was, in the note that came down from his office, 'Watch yourself over there, Steel. Those Mega-City tight-arses are just the sort of extremist gits who shoot you in the kneecaps for breathing in a funny way'. I've got it here, somewhere, if you want a look."

It took all the diplomatic fibre of Dredd's being - admittedly, a slender thread at the best of times - not to actively snarl. That particular strain of Mega-City urban myth, it seemed, would never go away, and seemed to be constantly rearing up its head to bite him.

"I have never," he said, "shot a man in the kneecaps, other than in the circumstances of hot pursuit, to prevent a perp from getting away. You'd prefer I shot them in the head, Steel?"

"Yeah, whatever," said Detective Judge Treasure Steel dismissively. "Let's stick to the point, yeah? This jacket, here, has never been on an animal of any kind - but what's the point of molecular engineering bio-vats if they don't produce the real thing, with all the proper look and feel and smell?"

Detective Judge Treasure Steel thoughtfully fingered the absolutely genuine leather that had never seen the back of an animal. "You're gonna have to get used to the fact that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily do things the same way as you Mega-City types, Dredd. You can take this jacket off me and burn it, but I warn you now, you'll be in for a one hell of a fight it you do. It has sentimental value. It was given to me by my wife."

The Brit-Cit Detective Judge indicated the waiting Strat-Bat again. "Anyhow, back to the main point. The guys want some sort of waterproof umbilical up against the hatch. They're not coming out in all this rain."

"Am I to understand that the Chief Judges of a major city-state are afraid of getting their feet wet?" growled Dredd. "That isn't a reasonable demand. That's sheer arrogance. The Brit-Cit Justice Department is trying to push us around, and have the eyes of the world see it pushing us around. No deal."

"It's not a question of pushing anybody around." Detective Judge Treasure Steel seemed conciliatory now, if anything. "It's on strict medical grounds."

She stuck a hand into the leather jacket and pulled out a slim data-pad. "Take a look at these bio-readouts and you'll see what I mean."

Sela Defane thought of herself as one of the new breed of Psi-Judges, one of the Psi-Judges who was a direct product of and suited to the world as it was, here and now.

Where the old guard had sold out and bought into the system lock, stock and Lawgiver - those who were actually allowed to have a Lawgiver - and where the idealists like Cassandra Anderson had been nearly driven mad when they found out how the system in fact operated, this new breed of psi just simply knew the score.

In a city that compulsively exterminated mutants on sight, Sela knew, psionics were only alive in the first place because the Justice Department had a use for them. They were allowed to live because the mutation locked in their heads was useful and invisible to the naked eye.

Maybe one in four million of the Mega-City population carried the psionic anomaly to any real extent, and with numbers this low, the policy was to locate anyone who possessed the trait. Bludgeon them into the Justice Department mould by any means possible and lop off the bits that didn't fit.

Psi-Division so-called training involved a degree of neuro- and psychological and narco-conditioning that would make a modern-day Spanish Inquisition look sick, and stretched even the toughest cadets to the point where they might snap.

It was a misconception that Psi-Judges - the ones who made it through training more or less intact - were given more rope than other Justice Department personnel. In the main, they were allowed no more leeway than the most ultra-disciplined of the Street Judges. It was not surprising, therefore, that within those limits they periodically went berserk.

A high-profile, hologenic psi like Cassandra Anderson might be allowed to come and go as she wished, the lucky bitch, but Sela, like most of her kind, knew she walked on eggshells. She lived her life under constant supervision, the threat of prefrontal lobotomy or a lifetime of incarceration hanging over her head.

So, she dealt with it. She did the job, got away with what she could and tried to bottle up the anger that constantly gnawed at her inside.

In this, she was probably the worst person to be psychically examining the body of one Leon Gregor Sturlek.

"We need a cold reading," the med-tech said. "Quick as you can, yeah?"

He was obviously one of the low-level techs, unused in the usual course of events to entering the Psi-Division levels of the Hall of Justice and liaising with Psi-Judges themselves. Sela didn't even need to run a passive scan to know that he was creeped out by the simple fact of being here and thought of her as a drokking freak. He was masking his unease by trying to lord it over her and make her feel like she was nothing.

Not for the first time, Sela wished she was one of those Psi-Judges, male or female, who actually looked good in uniform. One of those who wore said uniform a strategic size too small and had a bit of trouble keeping the zipper all the way up - the female Psis who looked good in uniform, anyway. Those who could spend the day bending over a lot, and having the norm contingent of the supposedly celibate Justice Department personnel roster clenching their knuckles white, biting their lips and seriously doubting their vocation.

Then, at least, she could have come on as the Vampire Bitch-queen or something, and could have had a bit of malicious fun scaring the stomm out of the little jerk.

The problem was, Sela knew, she was too plump for that. And it was the sort of plumpness that sagged rather than the sort that, well, plumped.

Plus she had really bad teeth. And incredibly bad skin, besides.

"What am I supposed to be looking for?" she asked the tech.

"Something about how his mind was restructured structurally," the med-tech said. "According to the guy who knows a bit about this stuff.

He shrugged. "I don't know all the details. I offered to bring the body up because, you know, I was coming off shift anyway. I asked if you were free 'cause I think I saw you once in the communal canteen and remembered the name on your badge. You looked, you know, like someone it might be easy to talk to about stuff..."

Sela tuned the jerk out. There was nothing she found more annoying than norms who seemed to keep trying to talk about the minutiae of their lives; like they were trying to rub in all the advantages they were given just through being norms, the privileges that were forever denied to her.

Some Psi-Judges used little rituals when they did something active like a cold read, which was a process of plugging energy into a dead brain and re-firing the synapses so that an imprinted scan could be taken. It was like the way, she had read, that junkies and other drug users had made up whole stories about the things they used, and the way they used them, back in the old days.

They built up entire internal mythologies about how they were contacting Higher Beings, achieving a new spiritual state, accessing some superior human potential as if whatever substance they had taken was some kind of sacrament.

The reality then, as now, was that you were simply plugging new instructions into the workings of the memoplex inside the ganglionic sponge that rode the meat machine of your body.

Sela didn't go in for any of that stomm. She simply removed a gauntlet and put a finger on the body's head - the bare minimum necessary to make galvanistic contact - and went inside.

Interlude: Cerebral Break

In the ZipCoTM corporate hab-block in Sector Nine, Employee Number RD0227-774R Juna Rae enters her sleep-capsule. A small woman, she is naturally inclined to plumpness, radiating a sense of solemn, childlike simplicity of which she is completely unaware.

It is not that she is unintelligent or uneducated. She has merely spent the entire twenty-seven years of her life within the corporate structure. It's safer in here than the Mega-City outside.

She has never gone hungry; she has never eaten too much. Every meal she has ever eaten has been nutritionally tailored to her precise physical requirements and served to an optimally devised schedule.

She has never suffered from more than minor illness. She has been inoculated from birth against all major diseases with which she is liable to come into contact, and the process is repeated every six months. She has a natural resistance to the hepatitis B vaccine so she will never, ever be allowed to come into contact with this particular virus.

Neuro-scanning shows that she is one of that small minority poised precisely between homo and heterosexuality, and who would require recreational facilities distinct from and more complex than the norms of either, were this not deemed far too resource-wasteful to supply. She has therefore been hormonally and subliminally conditioned from birth to tip the balance in a direction chosen more or less at random; in this case towards heterosexuality.

There is no sense of coercion about this, merely gentle guidance. For twenty-seven years Juno Rae has been guided gently through schooling and employment precisely suited to her aptitudes, and which have not caused unnecessary distress by stretching her in any way at all.

Corporate psychologists the whole world over agree that employees must have an outlet through which to express themselves. Juno collects reproduction beer mats, when she remembers, because her therapist told her to. She gets them pristine from the printers in presentation packs.

Juno has a therapist because her behaviour occasionally lapses into a pattern - that, if left unchecked, might tend towards the suicidal.

Not the attention-seeking act of jumping out at someone with a couple of carefully slashed wrists and shouting "Look what I've done," but the simple act of going home and locking the door and switching it all off.

There is nothing she needs. There is nothing she wants. She cannot imagine any other life.

This morning, however, she seems restless, distracted, toying with the food her capsule has placed thoughtfully before her; then dropps it uneaten into the waste slot. The capsule control chip makes a note to factor this nutrient deficiency into the next two meals, and alerts subsidiary systems that emotional counselling may be needed at some later time.

Absently, Juno discards clothing, which will be collected by drones when she sleeps for dissolution and re-synthesis.

For a while she uses her MAX IV - human in form, gestated from the gene codes of long-extinct chimpanzees and quite mindless, supplied by ZipCo[tm] for safe and pleasurable recreation - before tiring of it and shoving it away. It wanders off to its compartment where it will be scrubbed and disinfected and shot with insulin to shock it into dormancy.

RD-0227-774R Juno Rae drifts into a fitful sleep.

There is a marked degree of rapid eye movement. The capsule control stores this for use in the eventuality that counselling might ultimately be needed, in the life she lived during the time that she... woke...

She woke up.

Little Juna woke up.

For a long time little Juna lay immobile, absolutely still. It was in the room with her, something in the room with her, waiting for her to move.

Just one move.

Eventually, her breathing slowed. The hammering in her chest went away. She forced herself to turn over in the warm bed. Nothing happened.

Outside it was raining.

In the next room of the apartment, her father and her mother were sleeping. They would be angry if she woke them; their annual ZipCo[tm] aptitude tests were the next day and they needed to sleep. But the dream memory of the clockwork monkey-man hung huge and dark and ragged in her head. And she needed them.

No. No, this is wrong. This isn't me, I'm not six, I'm...

The thought slid away from her. Feet rasping on hard and scratchy flooring, she went to the door and tentatively slid it open.

Her mother and father lay on the bed, stringy shreds of skin trailing to the shattered window. The blood saturating the bed was purple and glistening in the cold pale light from outside.

A peeled thing hung on a fleshy cord from a hole in her mother.

He looked up.

At her.

He looked up at her.

Her father sat up, slithering through his own warm blood, a hideous concern in his eyes. He climbed off the bed and lurched towards her, his ragged feet making soft, wet sucking sounds. He took hold of her with broken swollen fingers and pulled her to him.

"So nice," he said, bubble-flecks of blood and mucus spattering against her face. "So nice..."

His mouth opened wide - and kept on opening. The sound of wet silk tearing. His skin split and fell away from him like a snake's slough to reveal the blazing, pulsing, swirling thing inside.

And then she was somewhere...

...else...

I KNOW YOU THE CLOCKWORK MONKEY SAID IT (TELESCOPIC RAZORS FLASHING THROUGH MY SOFT RED YELLOW RED YELLOW BURNING HOT AND WHITE AND IT HURTS AND SOMEBODY DIED HYPODERMIC JAWS RETRACTING WITH A CLASH FROM ITS WET THROAT) NO SHE SCREAMED AND TUMBLING (FIRST HE WILL EAT MY HEAD AND CHEW MY TEETH AND SPIT THEM OUT IN BLACK AND WHITE AND RED AND YELLOW RED YELLOW AND I SAW IT OPEN BUT I CAN'T) YOU WALK AND TALK AND I WIND YOU UP SAID THE MONKEY (SPINNING AND SPINNING AND I'M TAKING NO NOTICE BUT I'M LITTLE AND ALIVE AND I) HEADFIRST

Blank.

(A limp and skeletal body hanging atrophied from a head more than six feet across, hanging by a thread of vertebrae and cartilage. Viscous green-grey fluid hanging in ropes from the holes of its eyes and its mouth, slick with mucus.)

It was her face.

That didn't fool her. It was really the clockwork monkey inside.

Its clotted mouth worked. Whom do you love?

Splitting sliver pulse the slither and slip of it, it-

BURN!

Ropes of viscid drool hanging from a loose, soft mouth, teeth like knives extending from their sockets and closer now and fast! Slitted eyes burning hot and close, its bubbling flesh, bursting flesh like boiling fat and clotted hair; it...

Ate.

Her.

It ate her up. Anaesthetic acid injected in her head. Lacerating and cauterising memories and identity and oh so very painless.

I get out of bed and I was and I dress and I go I go go go I went to school. I went to, I must have gone to school my father and my brother and my sister and my and my mother and my child; everything I was and everything I ever will be will be.

Nothing left now. Nothing left.

The space between the stars.

"Hello, Juna," said a voice in the darkness.

It was a friendly voice. It was a voice to which you could imagine telling anything. "Forgive the lack of lighting, please. The cocktail of medication you're currently on dilates the pupils and over-sensitizes the retinas to the point where any lighting, even so much as a candle, if we had such a thing, would burn out any number of rods and cones, and physically blind you.

"Likewise, please don't try to move your head. Your vertebrae are calcified and friable - you'll wrench your neck like a green stick if you try to move, if not snap it like a twig altogether. The restraining pads are there for your protection.

"You no doubt have questions. That's perfectly natural. And I'm the man with the answers, yes indeed. You can call me Doctor Bob.

"The plain fact is, Juno, you're in... call it a mental facility, existing in a state of coma, effectively.

"You suffered deep psychic trauma as a small child, when you witnessed the death of your family - your mother, father and small baby brother - during Earth's Resurrection War with the dead-raiser Sabbat. They died, quite horribly as it happens, and then started to move again before your eyes. And they attacked you. They would have killed you, little girl that you were, had not Sabbat quite coincidentally died before they could and his controlling influence fled them.

"Now, the interesting thing - the really interesting thing - about that, is that your nascent psionic talents, the Magic Bullet in your brain, allowed you to see what was happening in a depth of terms simply unavailable to an ordinary human being. That is to say, you didn't just see what was happening, you saw what it meant on some quite profound and fundamental existential levels.

"Your mind and identity couldn't cope. You retreated, as I say, into a state of catatonia. Into a false-memory construct, built up over the years from overheard scraps, so that you believe your true life to be that of a woman your true biological age, living in a corporate hab-block hive, whose dreams are punctuated by horrifying and quite visceral nightmares.

"Have you never stopped to wonder why that corporate-hive life of yours is so utterly smothering and safe? It's because that's what you want it to be. Well, I'm here to tell you, Juna, that you'll never find a life like that in the real world - and certainly not in Mega-City One. It's the horror and the nightmares that are real.

"We've brought you out of the coma, as I say, with a cocktail of reagents - methamphetamine and lithium, for the most part. The combination is, I'm afraid to say, lethal with prolonged use - but never fear. You'll last well enough, for long enough.

"There's going to be some light now. Several million candles' worth, I'm sorry to say. I really am. Ah, well, when your eyes are fried from the inside, who knows what wonders you might see with new eyes inside the mind..."

Act II: Trial and Error

"On Justice:

...Then Cesare Gonzaga remarked, 'Well, I don't know what virtues appropriate for a ruler can spring from temperance, if temperance, as you say, removes all the emotions from one's mind. This might be fitting in a hermit or a monk, but I can hardly think that it is becoming for a prince, who is magnanimous, liberal 'and valiant in arms, whatever the provocation, to never display anger or hatred or indeed kindliness or scorn or lust or any emotion at all. For how could he otherwise exert any authority either over his people or his troops?'

Signor Ottaviano replied, 'I did not say temperance completely removes or uproots the emotions from a man's soul, nor would it be well for it to do so, since there are good elements even in the emotions. But what it does do is make what is perverse and opposed to the right conduct in the emotions responsive to reason. So it is not right, in order to remove conflicts, to extirpate the emotions altogether, for this would be like trying to suppress drunkenness by legislating against the use of wine, or forbidding men to run since when they do men sometimes fall over.

'You are well aware that when a man is breaking in a horse, he does not stop it from running and jumping, but ensures that it does so at the right time and at the command of the rider. So, when they are modified by temperance, the emotions are conducive to virtue. Just as wrath strengthens fortitude, hatred against wicked men strengthens justice, and the other emotions strengthen other kinds of virtue. And if they were killed altogether this would leave the reason weak and languid, so that it would be ineffectual, like the captain of a ship that is becalmed after the winds have dropped.

'So do not be surprised, Cesare, if I said temperance is the source of many other virtues, for when a man's soul is attuned to this harmony, reason makes it readily receptive to true fortitude, which in turn makes it intrepid and unassailable, and immune to human suffering. And this is just as true of justice, the true friend of modesty and goodness, and the queen of all the virtues, because Justice teaches us to do what should be done and eschew what is wrong. Thus Justice is wholly perfect, since the other virtues perform their work through her, and she benefits both the just man and others as well. And without Justice, as it is said, Jove himself could not govern his kingdom well. These virtues are also followed by magnanimity, which enhances them all, though it cannot exist alone since anyone lacking the virtues cannot be magnanimous. And for their guide, the virtues have prudence, which consists of a certain quality of Judgement in making the right decisions.

'The other links in this happy chain of virtues are liberality, munificence, the desire of honour, gentleness, charm, affability and many other qualities there is not time to name. But if our courtier behaves as we have suggested, he will discover these flourishing in the soul of his prince, and every day blossoming there more delightful flowers and fruits than there are in all the lovely gardens on earth. He himself will know great contentment, when he reminds himself that he gave his prince not what fools give, namely, gifts such as gold and silver, vases and garments (of which the prince has too many already and the giver only too few), but what is doubtless the greatest and rarest of all human virtues: the manner and method of good government. This alone would be enough to make men happy and return to earth the golden age which is said to have existed, once, when Saturn ruled.'"

- Baldesar Castiglione

The Book of the Courtier

Backflash: 07:14:2124

"Yes, this looks like the end, folks - there's no way the Sliceman is gonna be getting up from that smacking from Hammerhead. It looks like a... Hello, what's this?

"This is amazing, sports fans! With the last of his dying strength, Sliceman has triggered his trademark power-blades into overdrive, reducing Hammerhead to a bloody pulp! We end this cycle of the Killing Zone with a simultaneous double-kill!

"Well, there's nothing left to do but clear the bodies away and prepare for an all new cycle of the Zone - and do we have something special lined up for you! Do we? Yes we do. Bookmark your download-boards and prepare yourself for what is truly gonna be the Killing Zone event of a lifetime!"

In his lair beneath the Sector Nine Resyk plant, Efil Drago San turned from the monitor with a smirk.

"Ah, me," he said. "The rich, thick panoply that is life. An extremely spectacular bloody death, indeed. Tell me, computer, what are our figures like at the moment?"

The computer was in fact an ArViD, which stood for Artificial Virally-Induced Destabilisation - a means of producing cheap, disposable Artificial Intelligences by way of pseudo-viral spores eating through a block of biogel to produce the equivalent of synapses.

The combination of a short life span and of basically being a diseased lump of mechanically-reclaimed quasi-meat tended to make these Artificial Intelligences somewhat unstable at the best of times. Drago San's computer was currently suffering from a variety of schizophrenic dementia.

This was useful in that one of its split personalities was sufficiently rabid as to serve as a Commentator out in the Killing Zone, while others were suitable for administration.

When it spoke, its voice was as mild and clipped as any major domo:

"Gambling revenues remain constant, sir," it said, "though extrapolated viewing figures are slightly down. That always happens towards the end of a cycle."

"Ah, yes," said Efil Drago San. "The Little Old Lady Factor."

"I beg your pardon, sir?" the computer asked politely.

"People tend to pick favourites," Efil Drago San explained. "The little old lady demographic in particular. The old biddies pick a fighter to follow, and when he dies they simply tune out. That isn't offset by an actual sense of occasion when the cycle ends - the last fighter standing, in the Killing Zone, is just the last one left alive. And then we shoot him."

He became thoughtful. "I should tweak things a little, possibly."

"Make the end of the cycle an occasion?" The ARViD-processes might have given the computer a short shelf-life and made it effectively insane, but they also allowed it to push the envelope so far as intuitive thinking was concerned. It could make actual suggestions, which was a big deal in terms of computer technology. "Have the last survivor actually win something?"

Drago San grinned. "I was thinking more along the lines of something to wipe out the whole little old lady demographic entirely," he said. "Much more fun. In any case, when this current cycle of the Killing Zone ends, when will we be ready to initiate the new?"

"Almost immediately," the computer said. "The new crop of fighters is implanted and prepped and ready to go. We had some pretty good material to work with this time - thanks to that windfall we had, courtesy of the Justice Department."

A week before, a squad of Judges from the Undercover Division,commonly known as the Wally Squad, had targeted the Killing Zone and attempted to infiltrate Drago San's lair.

They were currently being... modified, in preparation for a closer look at the Killing Zone than anyone with an attachment to their sanity, and not to mention their limbs, could wish.

"One can always rely on the Judges," said Efil Drago San happily. "And speaking of which, how are their investigations proceeding now? Any new offensive that might be of concern?"

"It's all over the Mega-City newscasts," said the computer. "You really should keep up with the news, sir."

"I never watch the news, computer," said Efil Drago San. "I prefer to make it. So what are the Mega-City newscasts saying?"

"That Judge Dredd has been assigned to the case," the computer said. "Arrests, detentions and all kinds of Judicial mayhem are expected momentarily."

"The notorious Judge Dredd, eh?" Drago San exclaimed with delight. "My word, that opens up some distinct possibilities."

He sat for a moment, considering the distinct possibilities. Then: "Computer?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Hold back on starting a new cycle when the current one ends," said Drago San. "Clear the boards and ready the heavy-customisation skeining-vats. I have in mind the setting up of a very special event."

EIGHT

"Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."

- The Mikado

"The Defence has attempted to contend," said SJS-Judge Slithe, "that there is no evidence, other than pure hearsay, linking Efil Drago San to the sickening and utterly deplorable slaughter that was broadcast city-wide from the Killing Zone. As you can see in this reclaimed footage, however, Drago San is culpable in every respect..."

"Objection!" cried Barnstable Wheems.

"Oh, Grud, what is it now?" said Chief Judge Hershey.

"Veracity of this so-called evidence," said Wheems, rising to his feet and glaring about himself in an attempt to be imposing.

"As I understand it," he continued, "the complex which housed this so-called 'Killing Zone' was completely destroyed, along with all its records, when several million tonnes of raw sewerage was blown through it, as a result of a completely unrelated accident in the Sector Nine Resyk facility, which necessitated what I believe is called an emergency core-dump."

Wheems smirked a little, in anticipation of some coming and supposedly humorous comment. "Am I to understand that a number of Judges are slightly more... fragrant than before in reclaiming this so-called footage?"

The humorous comment, of course, went down like a lead dirigible.

"The footage was reclaimed," said SJS-Judge Slithe, "from material imprinted on the synaptic network of one Psi-Judge Janus, who was forced to psionically interface with the transputer-based control system of the Killing Zone before it was destroyed. This material and more was imprinted on her living brain by the psychic backlash."

"Then Defence contends," said Barnstable Wheems, "that all of this is still merely hearsay. Some delusional hallucination resulting from that action - if it ever happened in the first place - or actively and maliciously made up."

"Give it a rest, Wheems," said Hershey. "You're the only guy in the world, it seems, who even wants to question the fact that he actually did it. For one thing, we have surviving and unimpeachable witnesses - Dredd, Janus and an Undercover Operations Judge whose actual name has no bearing on this hearing.

"For another thing, we have Drago San's sworn statement, which roughly boils down to, 'Did it? Course I bleeding did it. What are you going to do about it?" You're on a hiding to nothing here, Wheems, if the main thrust of your argument is that he didn't do it."

"Of course," said Wheems. "I am merely serving the best interests of my, uh, client, and bringing up that first possibility as a matter of form. The purpose of this hearing, however, is to decide other issues than the point of simple culpability."

"Hey, I'm Danny Consart, this is Mega-City News - a fistful of fun every fifteen minutes! Coming up, environmentalists - should they just get the drokk over themselves or what? We went through hell, after all, to pretty much make sure there's no environment left so's they'd stop banging on about it. That's a special report, with Hartley Whipple, coming up.

"Also coming up, N'Synthetic sole-survivor and solo pop sensation Manda T talks about her new daughter, Pixie Astroflash. She's a right little star, says Manda, as you'll see when she uses the holo-vid footage of the birth in her stonking new data-wafer. Way to squeeze one out for the guys, Manda!

"And we'll be talking to hot-rockin' Xeno-porn director Jason Kane about his upcoming and utterly original holo-sim, Xenomorphic Bondage Slaves XXXVII. I can hardly wait! Jason appears courtesy of Dead Dog in the Water PreProductions, and wishes it to be known by any Justice Department forces who might be watching that any similarity between him and the notorious Cursed Earth brigand 'Captain' Jack Harkness is a purely unfortunate coincidence. He's had a bit of trouble in that area, apparently.

"All that, coming up soon. But first, our Public Service remit under the Laws and Statutes of Mega-City One require that we inform you of, ahem, a very important event happening as we speak in the Hall of Justice. The Justice Department of Mega-City One itself, it seems, is on trial, as they hold an extradition hearing for Efil Drago San, the Brit-Cit criminal Overlord who entertained... I mean, shocked and appalled us a few years back with the shocking, sickening and utterly appalling slaughter known as the Killing Zone.

"You might get to see some old Zone footage, for what it's worth, but it mostly just sounds like a bunch of talking heads arguing the toss, quite frankly. You can't even vote on who gets evicted from the city-state. If you really feel the need, set your interactive blip to channel 4,971.

I'm Danni Consart, this is Mega-City News. Up next, Manda T, right after these truly and sincerely important messages."

The public chamber of the Chief Judge had been chosen as the venue for the hearing, more or less on the basis that the space was big enough, and the fact that the imposingly looming statue of an Eagle, the symbol of Mega-City One Justice, was suitably impressive.

Hershey sat before it on what was basically a throne - an arrangement she hated at the best of times, calling to mind as it did images of kings and tyrants and despots, sitting in front of people in their audience chambers throughout history.

On the other hand, in the current circumstances, it did lend a certain sense of authority to one who was serving as the final arbiter for this hearing.

The rest of the chamber had been hastily remodelled as needed. A public gallery of bleachers had been thrown up, since it was a requisite, apparently, that justice be done in front of anyone who might like to turn up and watch the people doing so. First come, first served.

Since no Mega-City citizen in their right mind would walk into the Halls of Justice voluntarily, the bleachers were only occupied by a smattering of Mega-City journalists, supplementing the floating microcams that were relaying the proceedings to the various news services of Mega-City One and Brit-Cit.

The only other occupant was a single, old and possibly senile woman, who sat muttering to herself and knitting. Nobody quite knew how she'd got there, but then again, nobody ever quite got around to caring enough to ask.

A reinforced Plexiglas cabinet had been set up before the Chief Judge to house the defendant, Drago San, and then replaced with a number of immobilising field emitters when it was realised how ridiculous Drago San looked in it. Rather like a Plexiglas box half-filled with dough. Sitting beside him was Barnstable Wheems, who, as we've seen, was acting as Counsel for the Defence.

Also sitting before Chief Judge Hershey were Dredd - the arresting officer and the single most visible and identifiable symbol of Mega-City Justice - and SJS-Judge Slithe, who was handling the procedural bulk of the actual prosecution.

The Special Judicial Service was commonly regarded as a bunch of conniving twisters, every bit as bad as the lawyers of the judicial system the Justice Department had replaced. So it was good, in some small sense, that someone had finally found a use for them.

The chamber also contained a number of technicians, to operate the various consoles that might be required to display evidence, and a guard under the command of the Master at Arms, Brit-Cit Detective Judge Treasure Steel, comprised of Street Judges from both the Mega-City and Brit-Cit, to keep order should any crowd of observers actually turn up. This was the basic setup for the first procedural trial the Mega-City had experienced in a century. The problem was, by this time, nobody really had a clue as to what the drokk they were actually doing.

The old process of laying out the case for the prosecution, laying out the case for the defence and then summing up a (a process that, apparently, had taken months at a time) had seemed just too tedious for words, so the hearing had devolved into one of point and counterpoint, in the hope that, under the guidance of the Arbiter, one point of view would eventually prevail.

If the presence of the Chief Judge of Mega-City One might have been seen as skewing the process in a certain way, however, that would be to forget about the final collection of people in the chamber, who we have thus far failed to mention.

The individuals in the process that it had proved hardest, in the end, for the Justice Department of Mega-City One to get its collective judicial head around.

The jury.

In Mega-City One there was no such thing as an old Judge, at least, not in any active sense. There were various personnel from the ancillary services, like Med or Tek-Division, of such an age and degree of experience that they were kept around as an invaluable resource, but there were no old Judges out there on the streets.

Rejuve-treatments might keep a Street Judge physically healthy and extend the active life of his body, but the mind in that body was a different matter. When a Judge reached a sufficient age that his Judgement, as it were, started to go, the punishment of the streets was merciless and lethal, nine times out of ten.

And for that one in ten who might survive, watching the disastrous results of his Judgement failing him, the only alternative was the Long Walk - out into the badlands of the Cursed Earth beyond the Mega-City walls, there to bring the Law to the most lawless place on Planet Earth.

Many a gang-razed settlement in the Cursed Earth, in short, now rang to the terrifying, righteous cry of, "Hold it right there, you scum! Prepare to face the leaden wrath of - aw, drokk, I've fallen off my Zimmer frame."

In Brit-Cit, it seemed, they did things in another way. When a Judge got too old to be of any use, they simply promoted him.

The jury - or more properly, the Board of Adjudicators who would make the final decision on the result of this hearing under the direction of Chief Judge Hershey - was made up of five Brit-Cit Senior Judges. The Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber.

Senior being the operative term, in the same way that "senior citizen" is the polite way of saying "drooling, piss-spraying waste of space who, in any reasonable world, should be shot in the head, as a matter of course, for standing at a store checkout, paying for a single tin of cat meat (which they probably eat themselves) with the exact change from a coin purse."

The other sort are even worse, of course. Whether of the curtain-twitching sub-variety who have passersby shuddering with revulsion as they sense the mordant presence of a Nosy Parker skulking in the dark, or the variety who just blunder around white-knuckled and seething with barely-suppressed ire at the goings-on of the youth of today, they seem to exist in a state of mean-spirited spite at the fact that those younger than them (everyone else in the world) have the audacity to go around breathing oxygen like they own it.

Such people were, of course, the last ones who would wish to be in the business of pronouncing informed Judgement upon anything. They sat here now, in the Chamber of the Chief Judge, dressed in a variety of scraps culled from Judges' uniforms over a century of Brit-Cit styles. Several of them were plugged into portable life-support systems, which wheezed and creaked and bubbled almost as much as the bodies of those who weren't.

You could tell by their eyes - those eyes that were not filmed by cataracts or simply vacant with terminal senility - that this Board of Adjudicators wasn't going to let these Mega-City upstarts get away with anything.

In the case of Efil Drago San, things were looking black - or at least, a quite appalling shade of urine-stained beige - for the Justice Department of Mega-City One.

"On the matter of evidence," said Barnstable Wheems, "we have evidence of our own to present. Evidence concerning events in the Boranos system, shortly after my client was taken into custody, gathered by means of recording equipment situated inside his mobility-pod..."

"That's impossible!" Dredd growled, from his position beside SJS-Judge Slithe. "Drago San has spent a year in the Iso-cube system. No recording devices of any kind showed up in the security scans. What are you trying to pull here, Drago San?" He glared at the immobilisation-field containing the accused.

The field was supposed to allow full facial movement and speech, but Drago San just stared out blankly, his eyes glazed, nothing but a sense of deadness inside them.

If Dredd didn't know better, hadn't had a perfectly normal conversation with Drago San mere hours before - so far as any conversation with a mass-murdering master-criminal can be considered normal - then it was almost possible to believe that he was suffering from Cube-psychosis.

"Passive recording and storage," said Wheems, taking it upon himself to answer. "Integral to the structure of the unit. A troubleshooting measure, I believe, allowing the manufacturers to run diagnostics as to the situation and circumstances of any failure of the unit. There's no reason why it should show up under anything until power was plugged through it to play that gathered material back."

"I don't believe you," said Dredd, shortly. "Our sensors are sophisticated enough to pick up anything like that, active or passive. And believe you me, we'll be taking Drago San's drokking floater apart under a microscanner to prove it."

"Do so," said Wheems. "You'll find matters are precisely as I say, now that you know what to actually look for. In the meantime, I suggest that I be allowed to present my evidence - on the understanding that you are at liberty to confirm or deny, at any time, whether it conforms to your recollection of events."

"That seems fair," said Chief Judge Hershey, glancing over to the board of adjudicators to see how they were taking it all in.

The Brit-Cit Senior Judges, in fact, didn't look like they were taking much of the proceedings in at all. Each of those who were not merely sitting and drooling, every bit as blank as Efil Drago San, appeared to be looking in a different direction, in the celebrated manner of one following the flight-path of a nonexistent fly.

"I'll allow it," said Chief Judge Hershey, somewhat lamely. "Proceed."

"Very well," said Wheems. His own sense of confidence and authority seemed to be growing in direct proportion to the degree which the Mega-City Judges were finding themselves nonplussed. He gestured to the techs manning the consoles. "Proceed, if you'll be so kind, with the playback..."

Backflash: 01:27:2125

"Drokk!"

In the fungus jungles of Boranos, the floater-pod of Efil Drago San stalled against the marked unevenness in terrain caused by the felled mass of some decomposing mushroom the size of a tree.

The pod was calibrated for flat surfaces, like the floor of a corridor off the gangways of a ship, and continually overcompensating. The reaction jerked Dredd back and almost caused his feet to slither out from under him.

"Apologies," said Efil Drago San, in the unconcerned tones of one who is not, in fact, sorry in the slightest. "I do so hate being a burden."

"You're a drokking liability at this point." Dredd grabbed for the floater-pod to steady himself. "I should just pitch you out of this. Leave you shackled somewhere and see if I can use this thing to gain some height. See if I can catch our bearings."

They had been wandering lost in the fungus jungles since crash-landing their escape pod, ejected from a Justice One hijacked by privateers working for the Boranos Accord.

The "vegetation" of the jungle was incompatible with human biological processes; their only hope was to locate the base to which Justice One was being taken before they died of starvation.

In this the pair was handicapped, somewhat more than they might otherwise have been, in that they were handcuffed together. The smack-shackles were standard Justice Department issue when transporting a wanted fugitive - their failsafe mechanisms would not open until they were back in the secure environment of the ship.

"A fine idea in principle," said Efil Drago San. "Though unfortunately, entirely unworkable in practice. After the... incident, years ago, that cost me the use of my legs, the control systems of the pod were directly melded to my spinal column. Man and machine inextricably linked, as it were... unless you really do feel competent enough for a spot of microsurgical whittling with your boot knife?"

"Well, at least you could use it to drokking keep up," Dredd snarled.

Drago San snorted. "As ever, Dredd," he said, "you're rather missing the point. The functionality is such that the floater is a replacement for my legs and nothing more. Too inherently powerful and I'd be forever braining myself on ceilings and shooting through walls - not my idea of a good time."

"I could think of worse for you," Dredd said. "Shame you didn't die in the landing, all things considered. I could have just hacked myself free of you and left you behind." He paused thoughtfully. "That still might happen, you give me any more trouble."

"Empty threats, Dredd?" said Efil Drago San. "That's uncharacteristic of you. I shall put it down to the stress of recent events. Need I remind you that I'm in your custody? That works both ways. It means, in a very real sense, that I am under your protection."

"Yeah," said Dredd. "Well let's see how long that protection lasts when I'm forced to choose between protecting a creep like you and protecting someone relatively innocent."

"Oh, come now, Dredd," said Drago San. "Surely, any small misdemeanours I might have committed in your fair city-state-"

"Misdemeanours?" Dredd exclaimed. "You killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands in that Killing Zone of yours, and broadcast the results to half the city. And when we finally caught up with you, you tried to destroy an entire Sector!"

Drago San shrugged. "Well, we can none of us be held to blame for the mistakes made in our youth."

"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 quite 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."

"And the Sturlek body itself?" asked Karyn.

"Believe me," said Shenker, "you don't want to know. Let's just say she did some other things after she tore the throat out of the med-tech."

"Marvellous," said Psi-Judge Karyn.

She popped the hermetic seals and opened the hatch of the holding cell. And then she did her very best not to read anything into the fact that it closed, extremely hurriedly, after she had gone inside.

"So, what do we do?" said Chief Judge Hershey, in the smaller, private chamber that was situated off to one side of the public and which served her as an office and living quarters combined. "If these old Brit-Cit drokks don't take a telling, what do we do?"

"I vote that we let them take him back to Brit-Cit and have done with it," said SJS-Judge Slithe. "No skin off our nose. One less mouth to feed in the Iso-cubes."

"You've made your opinions known on that score," said Hershey sourly. "According to you, half the people in the Cubes are more trouble than they're worth and should be shot in the head."

"Oh, there are more people than that who we feel are more trouble than they're worth," said Slithe pointedly. "I simply fail to see what advantage we can possibly gain by holding on to the man in the face of all opposition."

"It's not a question of advantage," said Dredd shortly. "It's a question of principle."

"A principle worth instigating a police-action over?" said Slithe. "In the eyes of the world we'd be seen as the aggressor, landing on a smaller, weaker city-state simply because we can. The world's going to wonder to whom we're going to turn our attention next, and the global political situation is precarious enough at the moment as it is. This is, after all, why we agreed to this rigmarole of a hearing in the first place."

"If we don't stand on our principles," said Dredd, "even when it's hard, we end up standing on nothing. The basis of our authority is that we dispense Justice without compromise - and I'm not going to let that go without a fight."

"Fine sounding clichés," said Slithe. "Unworkable in real life."

"Only if you're afraid of getting into an honest fight with everything out in the open, rather than creeping around and stabbing people in the back - which it seems is more the SJS style."

"I resent that remark!" Slithe exclaimed. "The Special Judicial Service performs a valuable function. Our remit is to judge the Judges, and for a responsibility like that we need a singular, and quite specialised, degree of procedural power."

"Yeah, well, seems to me," said Dredd, "given your track-record, it's more a case of that little bit of extra power corrupting just that little bit more."

Brit-Cit Detective Judge Treasure Steel, for her part, was wondering just what the hell she was doing there.

The Brit-Cit Senior Judges were taking advantage of the recess to have their saline nutrient packs replaced, their blood exchanged and - in the case of more than one, due to the number of artificial components of their bodies - their oil changed.

Detective Judge Treasure Steel had been set to accompany them as part of the contingent of Street Judges serving as their guard, but the Mega-City Chief Judge had indicated quite strongly that it would be a good idea to attend this meeting.

No coercion or anything like that, just the hanging question of what might happen if she refused to attend without coercion.

"What do you want out of me?" Steel said. "I'm not empowered to broker any kind of deal."

"We just need information," said Chief Judge Hershey.

"If you're thinking I'd betray confidential information about my city-state," said Treasure Steel angrily, "you've got another thing coming. Do what you like, you'll get no soap out of me."

The Hendon-trained part of her that was constantly alert, evaluating every situation for potential threat, chose this moment to point out that it was probably not a good idea to put ideas in Mega-City heads.

Through contact with Hershey years before, she had learnt that Mega-City Judges, as individuals, were not necessarily to be despised, but their rockrete-solid sense of self-righteousness meant they were capable of anything, if they could only convince themselves that they were in the right.

That SJS-Judge Slithe, for example, for all his talk of taking a conciliatory stance, seemed just the sort to be breaking out the pentothal and mind-probes before you could say "sharp torture-implement".

"Nobody's asking you to betray anything," said Hershey. "Cards on the table, here, okay? None of us know what we're doing, Mega-City or Brit-Cit, and we're pretty much making it up as we're going along. I'm telling you this because I know you, and trust you, and know you'll have worked that much out for yourself. I just want to impress upon you the fact that we are seriously and honestly looking for the best solution for all concerned.

"I just want your general thoughts on what Brit-Cit is expecting out of all this. What you want, what you won't give up and how you think this is all going to pan out."

Treasure Steel shrugged. "Okay. Keeping things nice and general. You know as well as I do - it's common knowledge - that the so-called Senior Judges of the Star Chamber are basically a front. At least, they have been since some people, who shall remain nameless, contrived to cut them off from some quite illegal rejuve-boosters. They're all gonna die, quite soon, and good riddance, frankly. They're just hanging on to their last gasp like nobody's business.

"Anyhow. The order to extradite Drago San came down through them, from one or several of the Overlords - and you can stop looking at each other like that, thank you very much. Us Brit-Cit guys, we've heard enough of this 'City run by criminals' shit to make you sick.

"I mean, it's true in one sense, I suppose - the same way that you could say the Royal Family, back in the twenty-first century, were a bunch of land-thieving whoresons who had somehow managed to clamber to the top of a pile of bodies on a battlefield while waving a bloodied sword.

"In any day-to-day reality, of course, these days that just ain't so. The guys are more or less just in the business of keeping things ticking over and working. I'm not gonna stand here and try to defend it. It's just the way things work. And as such Brit-Cit's not particularly better or worse, in and of itself, than anywhere else."

"A system founded on corruption," said Dredd sternly, "cannot be anything other than corrupt."

"Do you know," said Treasure Steel, "I've never looked at it that way. Thank you, Dredd, for removing the scales from my eyes and helping me see the error of my sinful ways. Why, it's as if I come from a country where the first leaders grew narcotics on a mass-production basis and kept slaves."

Treasure Steel scowled. "And let's get one more thing straight, while we're at it. What with most of the landmass on your continent being a total no-go zone, Brit-Cit is in actual fact bigger than Mega-Cities One and Two combined, with marginally more international goodwill and one hell of a lot better natural defences - so less of this talk about a police-action against a poor little city-state, if you please. If it ever came down to it, it'd be flat-out war and you know it.

"Anyhow, the order came down from up top, via the Star Chamber, that the Big Boys want Drago San back. It's not what you're worried about. It's not a question of sending him back to his friends - Drago San's fresh out of friends in Brit-Cit.

"It's a question of him giving the Overlords a bad name. I mentioned how the Big Boys aren't criminals as such, but Drago San's excesses, in the name of being an Overlord, had brought the whole question up again and tarred the Big Boys with the same brush. That was okay when he was safely off and imprisoned somewhere out there in the stars, but the simple fact of him being back on Earth, even in Mega-City custody, is a constant reminder and an insult."

"Can you give me some assurance, then," said Chief Judge Hershey, "that if Drago San were returned to Brit-Cit, he would be seen to pay for his crimes?"

"Probably not," admitted Treasure Steel. "That's not the way things happen. What would probably happen is, Drago San very quietly disappears without a trace and is never seen or heard from again, but everybody, somehow, happens to know about it."

"Sounds like a perfectly equitable arrangement to me," said Slithe. "We have all of us much to learn from the Brit-Cit way of doing things, I'm sure."

"Completely unacceptable," said Dredd.

"Hey," said Treasure Steel, "I'm just saying what the Overlords want, some of them at least. I don't think it's unanimous." She shrugged. "Personally, I'd be happy to go home with a reason why they can't have it that's good enough so's I can keep my neck."

Hershey sighed. Not for the first time, she found herself stuck with the basic quandary the Justice Department presented by its very nature. How do you find some compromise between opposing points of view, when one of those points of view is an absolute refusal to compromise?

"Your comments have been noted," she said to Dredd and Slithe. "And thank you for your candour, Ms Steel."

Detective Judge Steel shrugged. "Any time. I'm told it's my most endearing character trait. By the people I'm actually on speaking terms with, anyhow."

"I think," Hershey decided, "that all we can do at this point is let things ride. See if some new facet comes to light that gives us an acceptable way out for everyone concerned."

The five Brit-Cit Senior Judges of the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber, meanwhile, were down in Med-Division, undergoing such medical maintenance as their ancient bodies required. Or rather, frankly, the hugely excessive amount of medical maintenance that their ancient bodies required.

The Mega-City med-techs had never had to deal with people that old in their lives, people so old who weren't dead, anyway, and certainly could not connect these crumbling wrecks with Judges in any way, shape or form.

They performed the necessary procedures as though running maintenance on machines. They certainly didn't recognise the vague mutterings and mumblings of their temporary charges as human speech.

This was useful to the Senior Judge of the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber, who in certain specialised areas were not quite so senile as they let on in public.

"Mm... heh..." muttered one Senior Judge, the lion-based Brit-Cit badge pinned to his knitted, hairy string jersey reading "CHOLMOLDLY-SHRIKE". "Time soon... heh... Time to say what we have to..."

The others turned to listen, picking up his meaning through long years of practice. Except, of course, for the one in the Paisley-check flat cap, whose name-badge read "HUCKFONT", who jammed an ear-trumpet in his left ear and bellowed, "HUH? WHUH?"

"Can... hng... mnh... do you think we can trust him, do you think?" wondered the one in the ocelot-trimmed Burberry parka and espadrilles, whose name-badge read SLEE. "What do you... mm... think, heh, Whimslowe?"

"I like strangling moles," said Whimslowe, who was in actual fact senile to the point where he was incapable of following anything, years of practice or not. "'Cause they lay their little eggs in me when I'm asleep."

All the rest of the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber looked at him for a moment before continuing:

"We... have to trust him," said the final Senior Judge, who had lost his name-badge somewhere along the way. "He's the only one who can... give us what we need. Make us... young again."

"Yes," agreed Cholmoldly-Shrike. "Give him what he needs... heh... He gives us what we need to make us young again."

ELEVEN

"When a felon's not engaged in his employment -

Or maturing his felonious little plans -

His capacity for innocent enjoyment -

Is just as great as any honest man's."

- The Pirates of Penzance

Psi-Judge Sela Defane sat, knees drawn up as far as they physically could be to her somewhat disproportionate torso. Her forearms were buried in a slightly squashed-looking globe of mimetic polyceramaline. The material was such that if you moved very slow and relaxed, it would stretch like taffy, leaving your hands encased in two smaller, connected globes. If you made any kind of violent move, it instantly snapped back and became rock solid.

Karyn happened to be one of those people who fit the height-versus-body-weight profiles almost perfectly. On the other hand, she was also one of those people who insisted on having a uniform that was the right cut for her frame, and made a point of keeping the zipper all the way up, and ate whatever she felt like whenever she wanted to.

Body image was just something she had never particularly thought about. Okay, so people had sometimes mentioned her skin tone and mane of flame-red hair, but what the drokk was she supposed to do about it? Cut it all off and break out an industrial sander?

Trying to cut off her skin and sand down her scalp would probably cause even more comment. The point was, in a world where some people Judge others by appearance, and others thought that judging by appearance was something to be thoroughly ashamed of, Karyn simply didn't care much either way.

All the same, even in this hunched-up state, there seemed to be something slightly off about Defane's body in a purely physical sense. It was nothing as blatant as a Fattie piling metric tonnes on a birdlike skeletal frame, but there was some subtle sense that this was a body that had been made to do things for which it wasn't suited, put through contortions that were wrong for its basic frame, over a period of years.

Of course, this sense of wrongness might have had more to do with the blood and other matter smeared over her face than anything else.

She had bitten her lips and tongue, doing not quite enough damage to make it worth Psi-Division personnel, afraid as they were of whatever communicable mental disease she now had, coming in to fit her with a mouth-guard. Then, by the look of the holding-cell wall, she had smeared her own blood on it, then rubbed her face against the wall to daub herself.

The result, in the end, looked as if she had been trying to put on a mask.

"You dare," said Psi-Judge Sela Defane with a cold and murderous calm. "Don't you dare."

Her voice was slightly mushy, due to the self-inflicted damage to her mouth, but Karyn could hear what she said perfectly - automatically reading the speech-centre impulses being sent to the damaged lips and tongue.

"What?" said Karyn. Not because she hadn't heard; she just didn't know what Sela meant.

"Don't you dare put your grubby fingers in my head," said Sela. "I know where they've been."

"What?" Karyn said again. "I've never..."

"The fingers you think about," said Psi-Judge Dela Defane. "Don't put the fingers in your mind in me. Don't you dare."

"I... just want to talk," said Karyn, making absolutely drokking sure she didn't do the thing she sometimes did with other Psis who she actually liked, of actively synchronising speech-centres to some extent. "I want to know about the body you read."

"What do you want to know about the body I read?" For all the world it was as if Sela Defane was a transputer-routine. Ask a question and you get an answer - but you only get what you ask for. Garbage in, garbage out.

"What happened to you?" Karyn said. "What happened to you when you read the body?"

"I felt... I saw..." It wasn't as if Defane was groping for the right words in any human way. It was more in the nature of attempting to access information, looking for data-files that simply were not there.

"What do you mean?" said Karyn.

"It was like the world wasn't there," Psi-Judge Sela Defane said at last. "It was there but it wasn't real. It was like a copy of it, right down to the last detail, so it didn't matter. I could do what I wanted. I could do what I liked..."

Across the public chamber from the Chief Judge's private offices were cells designed for those rare occasions when the Chief Judge was directly involved in dealing with a prisoner. Since the Justice System operated, for the most part, on the principle of Instant Justice, administered by the Judge on the spot, these cells had not actually been used in months.

The last time this cell had been used, in fact, was to detain a would-be assassin who had somehow managed to evade the guards - and for that matter every other Judge in the Halls of Justice - and attempted to blast the Chief Judge with a Screaming Meatgun.

The SJS were swearing blind that it was impossible to discover precisely who the would-be assassin was, particularly since he had, unfortunately, committed suicide by way of a bomb-implant that had resulted in the almost complete vaporisation of his body, shortly after being placed in their care by Hershey after she had taken him down.

This had, however, been the impetus for the Justice Department to start dealing with Screaming Meatguns slightly more seriously than they had before. So that was all right, then.

In one of these cells, alone with Efil Drago San, the worst single day of Barnstable Wheems's life was getting worse. The façade of confidence and equilibrium he had worn in public for the hearing was deserting him by the second. He had been given barely an hour to prepare for the hearing, and five minutes into that hour he had come to the conclusion that he was completely out of his depth.

His expertise, such as it was, was in evading the Law by a variety of statutory hand-waving techniques. When it came to the processes of Criminal Law - International Criminal Law - he wasn't waving his hands by any stretch of the imagination; he was drowning.

He'd only gotten this far by sheer bluff. It couldn't last.

And then there was the matter of Drago San himself. Efil Drago San was the first actual criminal Wheems had ever met - his job, after all, was to keep his rich paymasters from ever being defined as criminals in the first place.

And if you're going to meet your first actual criminal, it is probably better for the nerves if that criminal is not a mass murderer with a death count score in the thousands.

It did only a little for Wheems's peace of mind that the man's paraplegic floater was still without power, Drago San having been manhandled into this cell by way of a pair of burly techs and a heavy-duty gimbal-rig.

As it was, Wheems stayed back against the far wall and out of reach of the hugely strong arms under the fat. As far as he knew, Drago San preferred to kill at a remove, by some device or by delegating the matter to some minion, but there was no telling what he might do while stuck in a cell, with only the option of a single person on which to slake his thirst for killing.

And that, broadly, was what this private conference with his client was about.

"That is an entirely unethical suggestion," Wheems said primly. "I cannot be party to-"

"Oh, give it a rest, Wheems," said Drago San wearily. Now that he was out of the public eye of the hearing-chamber, his façade of catatonia had left him, and he was entirely in possession of himself.

"You're no doubt thinking that these walls are simply packed with monitoring and recording devices," he said, "busily monitoring and recording away, as a matter of course. You're probably right, as it happens - in the fact that they exist, but not that they're busily monitoring away and recording."

He smiled a little gloatingly, which seemed, to Wheems, to be something of his default state, whether he was actually smiling or not. "For somebody who makes such a good living besting the Judges at their own game, you seem to have a profound paucity of understanding as regards the innermost workings of their minds."

"Why don't you enlighten me, then," said Wheems, in much the same way that one cannot allow fear to show to an angry dog. If dogs had still existed.

Again he reminded himself, there was nothing that Drago San could actually do, here and now, with his paraplegic floater disabled.

"You have to remember," said Efil Drago San, "that the Judges of this fair city-state tend get a little, shall we say, over-zealous about the procedures of their Law. The unkind might say they're entirely and positively fetishistic about it.

"Look at the way they dress - I mean, all that black polypropylene and padding might be just the ticket when they're riding around on their glorified scooters, but they're just plain silly when investigating murders, conducting door-to-door-searches or holding interdepartmental meetings. Even the most heavily equipped combat-troopers of history, I gather, didn't wear their combat gear when they were off the battlefield. In that respect, I've always thought the Judges of Brit-Cit had the right idea. The Brit-Cit Judge with the highest clear-up rate in the city goes around with no more protection than a grubby old raincoat.

"In any case, I digress. It's a bad habit of mine. I really should do something to curb it. I'll be talking away, don't you know, completely going off on some tangent or other, utterly oblivious to the fact that some people regard it a form of slow torture while they wait for me to return to something even so much as approaching the point.

"For some reason they seem a little hesitant about simply telling me to shut up and get to the point. I can't imagine why. I mean, it's not as if I'd take umbrage and start busily contriving some manner of bringing about their slow and excruciating deaths. Most of the time, anyway. A significant minority of the time, at least. If I really did go around killing absolutely everyone whom I considered would be better dead, I'd never be stopping.

"What was I talking about? Oh, yes. The point about this fetishisation of the Law is that they find themselves entirely bound up in it, as it were. It leaves no room to think about anything else. They've got it into their heads that the rules of this so-called hearing require private consultation between defendant and counsel. It would never even occur to them to break that privacy. It's like a blind spot in their minds.

"The upshot is, I believe, that you can tell me anything in here, without having to worry about how it sounds. Do, please, tell me your objection to the direction in which I see my defence proceeding, without the self-serving rigmarole of whether it's ethical or not."

"We'll never get away with it!" Wheems wailed. "They'll never stand for it!"

Some detached and coldly clinical piece of his mind realised, without really caring either way, that his voice was cracking. There was something of the quality of an upset child. "Whatever happens to you, they'll make it their business to go after me. They'll destroy me. I should go now. Rescue myself from the hearing. Maybe they'll go easy on-"

"You will do nothing of the kind, Wheems," said Drago San.

"What?" Barnstable Wheems was momentarily puzzled by the abrupt change in Drago San's tone. It took him a moment to get it.

"I've gone to quite a considerable amount of time and effort, off and on, over the years, to put myself precisely in this current position." The smooth inconsequentiality of Drago San's demeanour had gone completely, to be replaced by an utter, dead and vicious coldness.

His tone was entirely informative - it didn't threaten you with death, it flatly told you that you were dead. All that was left, at this point, was the quibbling over the details and how long you had left.

"I haven't gone to all that time and effort," he continued, "just to have you fall apart on me now. You're worried about what the Mega-City Justice Department can do to you? Well, believe me, that's nothing to what I, in my small way, can cause to happen. Unless you've forgotten the unfortunate incident of the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton."

Just the standard spray-and-spatter of a single living creature stabbed brutally to death, no more than that.

And this was, of course, the threat that had been hanging over the head of Barnstable Wheems all this time.

"All it will take," said Efil Drago San, "is for the Lady Honoria Slocombe to learn of the evidence connecting you to the disappearance of her cat to make your life... interesting in a wide variety of ways, if extremely short. You know how these old biddies get about their pets.

"She'll spend the last dregs of her wealth and power getting to you, even if you manage to place yourself in Protective Custody - and I have no doubt that she'll think of things to do to you, once she has you, that would not occur even to me."

Every effort had come to nothing, then. Walking away now would put Wheems back in square one. It was, however, still preferable to carrying on like this.

"Then I'll fight to prove my innocence," Wheems said. "I'll prove it somehow, because I know that I did not kill the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton and cut her up with a big knife and throw the bits around my bathroom."

"Ah, well, the thing about that," said Efil Drago San, "is that actually, you did."

There was another of those moments of blank incomprehension.

"What?" said Wheems.

"Physically, it was your hand on the big knife, and your brain and body making it do things," said Efil Drago San. "The fact that certain mental-conditioning techniques and mind-restructuring nanospores were involved, courtesy of an associate of mine who shall for the moment remain nameless, is neither here nor there."

"What?" Wheems said again, as this new information took its own good time to sink in. "You're telling me I was... conditioned somehow so that I actually killed the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton and cut her up with a big knife?"

Efil Drago San sighed. "As ever, you have it the wrong way round. The plain fact is, over your years of association with the Lady Honoria Slocombe, you came to loathe and despise what I believe you would passionately term 'that filthy, disease-ridden excuse for a flea-bag'. And you were none too fond of the cat, either. It took nothing more than a bare minimum of influence - light contact-hypnosis, I understand - to have you experiencing a psychotic break, abducting the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton, killing her with a big knife and enjoying it all the while.

"That was when my associates went to work in earnest, wiping all memory of the incident and actively restructuring your mind. You are, in actual fact, a slightly but significantly different person in several respects.

"A person who, for one thing, would never kill the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton with a big knife... and would find it impossible to even so much as imagine doing so. That's why, of course, you have been so blankly - even hysterically - sure of your fundamental innocence, without the thought that you might have, somehow, been made to do it even occurring to you."

Drago San sighed again. "The upshot is, fight as you will, there is absolutely no way you can wriggle out of taking the consequences for killing the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton with a big knife... with the extra twist, in fact, that you will be the only person in the entire world who believes that you didn't do it. Even though you know that you actually did."

Drago San regarded Wheems with reptile-eyes. "That is what will happen if you don't get out there and say precisely what I need you to say. I leave it up to you to decide whether it's worth it or not."

"I'm Danni Consart, this is Mega-City News - plugging fact into your news-hole like we were pretending it was a penis made out of news and we were doing sex!

"Coming up on channel 17,412, Big Dan Ratersnap and his Cavalcade of Country Pickin' Glee, sponsored by Whimslowe Shirts, the only shirt to wear if you feel the sudden need for a shirt. But first, hot news that could change the very face of the Big Meg forever!

"It seems that the Lady Slocombe of Shangri La Towers hab-block has lost her cat - that's her animal companion of the feline persuasion, apparently, and not any kind of euphemism at all. Not exactly all that hot in the ole news stakes, you might be thinking, but you'd be thinking wrong.

"Seems like the old biddy is so desperate to get her small domesticated animal back that she's offered a reward of half her fortune - that's the order of seven hundred million creds - no questions asked. This has prompted a large number of citizens to turn up with anything from a stuffed child's toy to an Undercity para-rat scavenger spray painted tortoise-shell brown over its more usual fluorescent green.

"The area immediately around Shangri La Towers, Sector Nine, has now been declared an official No-go Zone until the riots are brought under control and the bodies, together with various inextricably-lodged feline forms, are hauled away.

"In other news, new developments in the trial of Drago San mean that it looks like dragging on for hours yet. Live feeds are available if you want, but for the moment, we here at Mega-City News will be providing up-to-the-minute animated artists' impressions of what might ultimately happen to the prisoner if a gang of Janie-crazed Lesbian shok-punk chicks were to storm the Hall of Justice and start opening fire with a Screaming Meatgun.

"Big Dan Rattersnap, coming next, after these important messages."

"Having received instruction from my client," said Wheems, when the various personnel attendant to the hearing had at last been reassembled, "I should like to present further reclaimed evidence that I believe is pertinent to the case in question..."

Backflash: 01: 28: 2125

In the fungus jungles of Boranos, Dredd became aware of a change in Drago San's tone. The constant litany of bad-tempered muttering had become, by this time, little more than background noise. Now the specifics of what Drago San was saying percolated through into his conscious mind.

"I mean," Drago San said, "it's not as if the chap didn't have better things to do, like shooting jaywalkers in the knees or some such."

It was a large part of a Judge's nature that he or she did not rise to the bait of insults and slander. If they did, after all, they'd never be stopping and things would rapidly escalate out of control.

To the extent that he allowed it to be, however, the rumour that he went around shooting jaywalkers in the knees purely for the hell of it was a sore spot. It had never actually happened, but it was one of those urban legends that never seemed to die.

"What did you say?" he growled.

"I was merely going to say," said Efil Drago San, "that if you hadn't come all the way out here in the first place, in your needlessly obsessive hunt for this so-called Justice of yours, then we would neither of us be in our present sorry circumstance."

"You'd have preferred to be left where you were, would you?" Dredd said. "They were going to hang you for selling poisoned foodstuffs, eventually."

"There is that, I suppose," Drago San admitted. "People around these parts tend to be more... forthright in these matters than those of the Mega-Cities. No bad thing, in my opinion. I'm all for it. Keeps the population down, if nothing else."

"No bad thing until it comes to you, you mean," growled Dredd.

"But of course. Suffering and misery and shrieking bloody death are just the very ticket, until it comes to me. I'm happily hypocritical in that respect and I've never pretended otherwise. Whereas you, Dredd, are simply a hypocrite."

"What did you say?" Dredd asked. Drago San was just trying to needle him - but he was getting drokking tired of these continual snipes.

"You heard me. The truth is that this Law you serve has, in the end, nothing whatsoever to do with crime and punishment - as you know full well. In the end, it's a system of expediency. It changes by the day, reverses itself on a credit and then attempts to justify itself in terms of keeping order."

Yet again, there was the sense of Drago San's taunts striking slightly too close for comfort. There was not a word of truth to them, but yet again they could be twisted to fit the facts.

"There are two billion people in Mega-City One," Dredd said. "Two billion potential creeps and perps. Measures - harsh measures, sometimes - must be taken to keep them in control."

"And control is the actual point," said Drago San smugly. "That's what you want - in just the same way you tried to control Puerto Lumina.

"You could have gone all out to organise resources so that every one of your so-called citizens could have a life worth living, or frankly taken measures that would... shed the surplus population. Instead, you took the weasel way. Isn't it lucky that a job riot occurs, just when those possessing obsolete skills become unnecessary? Isn't it fortunate that a hab-block war occurs just at that point where the overcrowding in those particular hab-blocks becomes problematic?"

"That's not how it works," Dredd growled. "You drokking know it. Things flare up and we have to deal with them. The only way to deal is hard. We do what we have to do and no more."

"Oh, yes," said Drago San. "These things flare up. You do what you have to - no other choice - and so your hands stay clean. Tell me, Dredd - have you ever, perchance, heard of what they call the Big Lie?"

"Objection!" This from SJS-Judge Slithe, who had leapt from his seat as though it were wired to the power-grid at the mention of these words. "The use of that term is derogatory and entirely inappropriate for a public forum!"

"Come now," said Barnstable Wheems, looking for all the world as if he was entirely in command and control. Of the situation and himself. "The Big Lie - there, I used the term again - is common knowledge in Mega-City One. And it is common knowledge, also, that the procedures and processes that went under that name are no longer in place. Unless you're telling me," he added meaningfully, "that these procedures and process are still being used...?"

"Nothing of the sort," said SJS-Judge Slithe, hurriedly. "I'm merely saying that there are secondary and supplementary aspects to what was quite erroneously called the Big Lie - without having any direct relationship, whatsoever, of course - that might be damaging to city-state security if made public." He indicated the floating news-service microcams. "I merely ask that we have the chance to vet the information contained in this evidence until we see where it leads."

Chief Judge Hershey thought about it. There was always the possibility that the evidence for the defence might drop a bombshell, but she couldn't quite see where. Then again, of course, the point about dropping a bombshell is that, nine times out of ten, the people it lands on never see it coming.

On the other hand, the Special Judicial Service obsession with secrecy for its own sake never failed to stick in her craw.

"I think we'll risk it," she decided at last. "The point about city-state security, as I understand it, is to keep potentially harmful information out of the wrong hands - and if it's already in the hands of someone like the defendant then I'd say that horse has bolted.

"Besides..." she glanced pointedly at the news-service microcams. "What with several thousand channels out there, with anything from All Nude Hydroponic-vat Makeovers to Xenomorphic Hentai Slash, I doubt there's anyone out there watching who's awake enough to care."

"What are you talking about?" Dredd said. The casual mention of the Big Lie had caught him off his guard.

Drago san snorted. "Give me some credit. The biggest secret of the Mega-City One Justice Department - and so, of course, everybody knows. Everybody who matters, anyway. The blanket tranquilisation of entire Sectors, keeping the population quiet and down..."

"That was ended," Dredd said. "That was ended years ago-"

"Oh come now, Dredd. You know as well as I do that it still occurs sometimes. In special circumstances. Without anybody actually mentioning it."

Drago San paused for a moment, thoughtfully. "Then again, could it really be that you've bought into the official line? Hook and sinker? Like a blind spot that has you failing to see the perfectly obvious even when it's right under your nose? Has it never so much as occurred to you that your 'explosions of mass-violence' still occur precisely when and where someone, or something, decides that they should be? Something to think about, in any event."

Dredd was lost for words. This distortion of the way things were was so basic, so fundamental, that for a moment he did not know what to say.

"Be that as it may," said Efil Drago San. "We're getting somewhat off the point, which is this: I'm a killer, Dredd. I glorify in it, and I've never so much as pretended otherwise. What I have never done is to set a killing up so that I can sanctimoniously pretend that it was necessary or right."

Act III: Walking through Walls

"In science - in fact, in most things - it is usually best to begin at the beginning. In some things, of course, it's better to begin at the other end. For instance, if you wanted to paint a dog green, it might be best to begin with the tail, as it doesn't bite at that end. And so-"

"May I help oo?" Bruno interrupted.

"Help me to what?" said the puzzled Professor, looking up for a moment, but keeping his finger on the book he was reading from, so as not to lose his place.

"To paint a dog green!" cried Bruno. "Oo can begin wiz its mouf, and I'll-"

"No, no!" said the Professor. "We haven't got to the Experiments yet. And so," returning to his notebook, "I'll give you the Axioms of Science. After that I shall exhibit some Specimens. Then I shall explain a Process or two. And then I shall conclude with a few Experiments. An Axiom, you know, is a thing that you accept without contradiction. For instance, if I were to say "Here we are!", that would be accepted without any contradiction, and it's a nice sort of remark to begin a conversation with. So it would be an Axiom. Or again, supposing I were to say, "Here we are not!", that would be-"

"- a fib!" cried Bruno.

"Oh, Bruno!" said Sylvie in a warning whisper. "Of course it would be an Axiom, if the Professor said it!"

"- that would be accepted, if people were civil," continued the Professor, "so it would be another Axiom!"

"It might be an Axeldum," Bruno said, "but it wouldn't be true!"

"Ignorance of Axioms," the Lecturer continued, "is a great drawback in life. It wastes so much time to have to say them over and over again. For instance, take the Axiom, 'Nothing is greater than itself'; that is, 'Nothing can contain itself'. How often do you hear people say, "He was so excited he was unable to contain himself"? Why of course he was unable! The excitement had nothing to do with it!"

"I say, look here, you know!" said the Emperor, who was getting a little restless. "How many Axioms are you going to give us? At this rate, we sha'n't get to the Experiments till to-morrow-week!"

"Oh, sooner than that, I assure you!" the Professor replied, looking up in alarm. "There are only," (he referred to his notes again) "only two more, that are really necessary."

"Read 'em out and get on to the Specimens," grumbled the Emperor.

"The First Axiom," the Professor read out in a great hurry, "consists of these words, 'Whatever is, is.' And the Second consists of these words, 'Whatever isn't, isn't.' We will now go on to the Specimens. The first tray contains Crystals and other Things." He drew it towards him, and again referred to his notebook. "Some of the labels - owing to insufficient adhesion-" Here he stopped again, and carefully examined the page with his eye-glass. "I can't read the rest of the sentence," he said at last, "but it means that the labels have come loose, and the Things have got mixed..."

- Lewis Carroll

Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

TWELVE

"My object all sublime

I shall achieve in time -

To let the punishment fit the crime -

The punishment fit the crime."

- The Mikado

"And there," said Barnstable Wheems, "lies the crux of the entire case before this hearing. Throughout the evidence presented here, my client has demonstrated a profound moral sense - a profound sense of right and wrong - to the extent that he can cogently, if self-righteously, argue against flaws self-evident in the fundamental nature of the Justice Department of Mega-City One itself. With some justification, I might add, though the ultimate validity of those arguments is quite beside the point.

"There is a vital, area, however, where this profound moral sense is singularly lacking. There are some questions he simply, and glaringly, fails to consider for the simple fact that he is unaware they even exist."

"I've got a little man in my head," said Efil Drago San, with perfect calm. "His name is Jeremy and he wears a little hat."

Every single person in the chamber - including Barnstable Wheems, but with the exception of the drooling and senile Brit-Cit Senior Judges - turned to look at Drago San with surprise. Not only at the fact that this was the first time he had actually spoken during the proceedings, but at the sheer stupidity of what he had said.

Barnstable Wheems, having something to say on tap, recovered first.

"My client," he said, "despite his profound moral sense, has throughout his life, if there has ever been the possibility of killing another human being, arranged matters to do so. It is an innate, absolute and uncontrollable compulsion. He does not even so much as attempt to justify this, because the morality, or lack of it, in his actions never enters his head. It quite simply never occurs to him.

"In this particular and specialised case, he is utterly unable to distinguish right or wrong - and in such a circumstance there is only one verdict possible in the eyes of the Law. My client, I submit, whatever the nature of his crimes, cannot be anything other than not guilty by reason of insanity!"

There are some lies, some distortions of the truth, that are so basically at odds with the world as it is that they can stun you with their sheer enormity. There are so many different reasons why the lie is wrong that, for a moment, the mind short-circuits as it tries to work out which one to put forward first.

During which time, more often than not, the liar has safely made his escape or won an election.

The moment of stunned silence was broken by a sudden uproar from the Brit-Cit Senior Judges making up the board of adjudication.

"HE'S RIGHT, Y'KNOW!" shouted the one with the ear-trumpet, with the over-loudness of the profoundly deaf. "MAN'S AS MAD AS A BOX OF FROGS, PLAIN AS THE NOSE ON YOUR FACE! CAN'T BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR HIS ACTIONS OR MY NAME'S NOT... Oh, blast, I've forgotten my name."

"I must... heh... admit that if the defendant is criminally insane, then his... ungh... punishment falls outside of the direct remit of the Law," said another one.

"HUH? WHUH?" said the one with the ear-trumpet.

"I like strangling moles," said another Brit-Cit Senior Judge. "Got any moles?"

It was as if the board of adjudicators had been waiting for this, primed to react in a specific manner and by rote - except, quite possibly, on the matter of moles.

For her part, with the question of insanity hanging in the air, Chief Judge Hershey felt as though the world was sliding into it. The situation had turned utterly ridiculous, but it was the ridiculousness of a psychotic break.

It was the equivalent of dealing with a schizophrenic, say, who believed that the Machine Germans were killing people and replacing them with physically identical robots. You could point out how flat-out stupid the delusion was all you liked... but that wasn't much help in dealing with a schizophrenic trying to stab you believing you were a robot made by the Machine Germans.

In one fell swoop, the possible outcomes of this hearing had changed from a simple contest over rightful custody to a situation where anything could happen. The Brit-Cit board of adjudication could even, conceivably, decide that Efil Drago San should be released into care-of-the-community - to let him, effectively, loose. The Mega-City Justice Department would then be forced to absolutely refuse, for no technically valid reason under the Law - and that was just the situation this hearing had been set up to prevent in the first place.

It was only a small matter, in the greater scheme of things, but small in the same way cancerous cells are small compared to the overall body they infest. As Dredd himself seemed to be forever saying, Justice Department authority depended to a massive extent on the rightness of the cause. Even a small crack in that edifice might prove unsustainable.

As if in response to her thoughts, Hershey realised, Dredd was now on his feet.

He didn't cry out for silence or do anything to overtly draw attention to himself at all. He simply stood there, radiating an innate sense of authority until the uproar in the chamber settled down.

Dredd waited until there was silence and then, with all eyes on him, said, "I agree."

"What?" said Chief Judge Hershey. She had no idea what she'd expected Dredd to say, but it certainly had not been this.

"I agree," Dredd repeated. "If Efil Drago San is legally insane, the creep can't be held directly culpable for his actions under the Law."

"What?" said Chief Judge Hershey, and pretty much everybody else.

Dredd turned to look into Drago San's somewhat smug face.

"The fact remains, however," he continued, "that directly culpable or not, he remains a danger to himself and others. I say we hold him in the Mega-City One Psyko-Block, pending psychiatric evaluation."

Efil Drago San's face fell.

"Objection!" cried Barnstable Wheems, a little desperately, as though this development had caught him unprepared and he was missing a page of the script. "We have still not established proper custodial jurisdiction, and I understand that Brit-Cit itself has, er, any number of highly regarded secure psychiatric units and rest-homes set in big leafy gardens..."

"That's why we're holding him for assessment," said Dredd. "To make sure he's in a stable state to make the trip." He turned to Chief Judge Hershey. "I get the feeling that such an evaluation might be tricky. It could take years."

Hershey, for her part, was feeling nothing more or less than relief. Dredd could sometimes be so single-minded that it was possible to forget the steel trap of a mind that lurked behind the impassive planes of his impact-visor.

Not for the first time, he had seen the clear and direct way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Sometimes that clear and direct way might be the simple application of a daystick to the head, or a tactical nuclear strike - and sometimes it was a simple application of the procedures of the Law.

"That sounds about right," she said. "A proper and thorough evaluation could take years. Quite possibly the rest of his natural life."

And this was why, less than half an hour later, Efil Drago San was being dragged under Tactical Response guard into the Mega-City Kook Kubes.

"Dragged" was the operative word, in a literal if not actually violent sense. Power had been restored to his paraplegic floater, making the handling of his bulk easier, but the guidance and impellor systems had been yanked so that he floated under his own inertia and nothing more.

Such motive power as was required was currently supplied by Dredd, to whom Drago San was handcuffed. The cuffs could only be unlocked by a specific sequential key, confirmed by Justice Department Control.

"Do you know, my dear chap," Drago San said, "this reminds me distinctly of those pleasant hours we spent in the fungus jungles of Boranos. Ah, happy days, and to think I'd feared that they had gone for good."

"Can it, Drago San," Dredd growled.

"And still the same quite scintillating level of dialogue," said Efil Drago San. "Oh, dear me, how I missed it." He grinned. "The loneliness of the Iso-Cubes drove me quite mad, you know - or it would have, of course, were I not criminally insane in the first place. Do you think I'll get a padded cell with a view?"

"Keep playing the game," Dredd said. "The result's still the same. We get to keep you. You lose."

"Now I wouldn't talk too loosely about winning and losing," said Drago San, "until the final results are in. Did you enjoy that little bit of extra play I did, incidentally, back there in the hearing? Dropping in a sudden, little bit of extra nonsense, at just precisely the right time to catch everybody on the wrong foot, so Wheems could deliver the actual killing blow? Little bit of the old one-two-there. That's skill, that is, even though I say it myself."

"Yeah, and like I say," said Dredd, "you still lose."

"And as I say, again," said Drago San, "don't count on it."

The external butterfly-wing blast-doors of the Psyko-Block racked themselves apart and up on their servos. Inside, in a stainless steel-lined antechamber, beams of light washed over them - visible projections of the ID, personality and weaponry-scans from the superconductive sensor arrays in the walls.

Dredd was generally aware that these scans were of two distinct types, depending on their targets, and were in actual fact looking for mutually exclusive things. In the case of Efil Drago San, who would be subsequently undergoing a positive barrage of psycho-neurological testing in any case, the scans were looking for the smallest sign of anything so much as approaching a weapons-signature.

Since Dredd and the four Tactical Arms guards, who had accompanied him and Drago San from the Manta, were crawling with weapons as a matter of course, the scans weren't even bothering to look for them. Besides, all weaponry carried by Justice Department personnel was chipped and coded to their precise biometric patterns; if anyone else laid a hand on them, the weapons would explode their directional charges, effectively vaporizing the unauthorised user.

Instead, the scans were checking for abnormal synaptic and neurological patterns that might indicate the target to be acting under duress, psycho-conditioning or the like. There was even a distinctive and recognisable pattern, apparently, that would show up if the target had recently taken a bribe.

All of which was to say, effectively, that if the Mega-City Iso-Cubes didn't drokk around with their security, the Psyko-Block systems could reject you for knowing what the term 'drokking around' even meant. The pulsing lightshow attendant to the sensor-scans meant nothing in itself - but it went on long enough to have you feeling a little relieved that Justice Department personnel were commonly celibate, so the question of being able to have babies in the future would never come up.

At length, the sensors awarded the escort party a grudging pass, and the inner doors of antechamber racked up, airlock fashion, to allow them access to the entrance hall of the Psyko-Block.

And, although nobody in the Mega-City, or in the whole world for that matter, save for two particular people, knew it... something changed, at that point, in the Psyko-Block.

The Psyko-Block security system spontaneously went mad. It was a quiet sort of madness, the sort commonly suffered by sad, quiet little men who the neighbours believe would not hurt a fly. It would be a little while yet before the madness took any overt form. For the moment it was merely running the acid-bath and sharpening its knives.

That explained why nobody noticed the slightest sign of its cybernetic mental collapse - save for the two particular people who knew about it.

Something else happened, too, at the same time Dredd and Efil Drago San entered the Psyko-Block.

For months, years even, the Block had been pumping out a psionic, psycholeptic pulse, on a metafrequency undetectable on the conscious level by even the most sensitive Judges in Psi-Division. Over the months and years, the power of this pulse had been building incrementally - and now, abruptly, it went into overdrive.

Only one person - one of the particular people who also knew about the Psyko-Block sec-system - knew the cause, but everybody would soon notice the effect...

Elsewhere:

There are worlds outside the world we know, no more than a hand-width away. Everybody knows this, deep down, which is why sorcerers, mystics, conjurors, magicians and shamans, priests and all the others who purport to deal with the mystical and spiritual are forever waving their hands around.

It's not just a question of hand-waving, distracting the audience from a trick, a con, or a severe logical flaw, it's the subconscious hope that if one moves the hands in a certain and particular way, and does it just right, then those movements will somehow slip between the dimensions and engage, like the lands and grooves of a key in a lock, and open up portals and vistas to some whole new other world.

And sometimes it even works.

For the most part, though, it's a good job that it doesn't. Most of the universe, any universe, consists of an utter vacuum - and most of the actual things in it are of no more use. Opening up portals and vistas to an ontological point that happens to occupy the same quasi-space as a sun, for example, is nobody's idea of a good time. If an extraordinarily brief one.

It gets no better even if, somehow, one manages to open a portal to a place that isn't absolutely nothing or instant annihilation. Alternate Earths, for example, where Nazis won wars and/or presidents didn't get shot simply do not exist in any way, shape or form. They only ever existed in potentia, and the fact of the world we know collapsed the probabilities entirely. Like being pregnant or dead, you can't have a world just a little bit different.

There is, or possibly was, a world where the Dark Judges took power, defined all life as a crime, and busily wiped out the entire population on an industrial basis. Not so much of a change from our own world, you might think, if a bit twisted and extreme - until you realise that the base constants of that particular universe allowed the use of Magicks that were quite horrific - and not just in the sense that they were being wielded by people who couldn't even spell "magic" properly.

That world is a dead wasteland now, and worse, contact with it has allowed its surviving entities to cross over into our own, their sojourns killing everyone and everything with whom they come into contact, death and devastation trailing in their wake. And this is the closest world - sufficiently different, sufficiently self-consistent to cohere and exist - to our own.

There are worlds more different and worse. Worlds so different, their inhabitants so inimical to life as we know it, that direct contact would obliterate all that we know, and everything we ever can know, as easily as the pricking of a soap-bubble...

The chamber is just one that exists in an infinity of rock, one of the countless bubbles that make up the known universe entire. There appears to be nothing out of the ordinary about it in the physical sense - save for the objects that are scattered through it. Strange objects that have no business being here in the bubble-world, and never will. To human eyes, if human eyes were here to see, and were able to actually see things in the infra-red radiating from the chamber walls, these objects might include:

A big, freestanding brass barometer, its workings shot and the dial set permanently on "blustery".

A small occasional table, the scorched and crazed varnish on its top still showing vestiges of a partridge and peacock-feather inlay.

A wooden tea chest filled to the brim with a tangled collection of wire spectacle-frames.

A crucifix, from which the little man has fallen, leaving only one pale leg behind, screwed to the wood.

A bakelite radio with the majority of its innards missing...

And any number of other, apparently random items, all clotted with the ichorous slime that the inhabitants of the bubble-world constantly exude. We shall call these inhabitants the Slaarg, purely for the sake of something to call them, although that is certainly not their proper name, which cannot be heard by human ears and is unimaginable to the human mind.

The chamber is alive with Slaarg, a seething mass of them in a variety of sizes and states of development. Slaarg begin life as spores and exist in a state of continual growth, feeding on the slime exuded by the larger of their fellows and the bodies of those smaller they can catch.

They are metamorphic, their skeletons telescopic, enclosed by viscera the consistency of mud and, in turn, enveloped by a muscle and a carapace of chitinous platelets. Within their basically obloid forms they carry a full component of sensory and manipulatory appendages. They can assume new forms more or less at will - none of them particularly pleasant.

Off to one side, perched on the bulk of an overturned nineteenth century Victrola, something the size of a rat, with an extensible and yawning mouth, envelops something the same general shape as a lobster. The plated mass of the devourer ripples, momentarily, then suddenly constricts with a muffled yet perfectly audible crunch. A blast of acidic vapour shoots from a sphincter-vent, scorching the wood of the Victrola and raising bubbles on the varnish.

The continual frenzy of feeding and being fed upon seems to be prompting a kind of accelerated evolution as the immature Slaarg attempt new and tentative shapes to gain some small advantage. Something snakelike with the pseudo-hood of a cobra strikes repeatedly at something that, briefly, tries a generally insectoid form. A kind of animated mantrap writhes in agony as it is pecked apart by a flock of birdlike forms, connected by a tangle of fleshy tubes and in fact a single Slaarg organism...

...and on and on, in every combination. All in all, it's a sight that might put even H P Lovecraft off his calamari and chips.

None of it is noticed by the hulking forms in the centre of the chamber. Slaarg only achieve what passes for sentience at a certain size, and the feeding frenzy going on around them is as unimportant and unnoticeable - if, occasionally, as annoying - as the buzzing of insects.

The largest of these Slaarg, the Dominator, has produced a collection of surprisingly delicate-looking pseudopodia and is brushing them, speculatively, against an apparently empty patch of humid air. The ends of the tentacles seem, in some manner, to fade into nothingness - though whether that is because they divide and sub-divide at their ends in a fractal manner that means their ends are ultimately and effectively infinite, or whether they are in actual fact disappearing into some other dimension, it is impossible to say.

<speak> Interesting... <\speak> The Dominator says, in a manner that has about as much relation to the forming of audible words as a denial-of-service DataNet spam-attack has to an item of junk mail pushed through a letterbox. <speak> You tell me, my <name> Scientificator <\name> that there is some new instability within the <nomenclature> Dimensional Rift <\nomenclature> ? <\speak>

The Slaarg, who has taken on the form of a cerebellum the size of an elephant, extends an eye on a stalk and turns it in the direction of its Dominator:

<speak> <preamble=worshipful> O Grand High Dominator of the Nine Known Dimensions! On whose stout and mighty axis those dimensions spin! All hail he whose smallest pseudopodium has ground continents to dust and from whom every utterance is a profound and roaring wind. O Dominator, from whom issues a bright and most effulgent radiance, as if from - [interrupt]

<speak> I believe, <\speak> says the Dominator, <speak> that a slightly less formal mode of address might be permissible, just this once. Otherwise we could be here all squeem. <\speak>

<speak=informal> Right you are, squire. <\speak> says the Scientificator. <speak=informal> Now you'll remember this here chamber is the site of what you might be calling an ontological instability. Over the decasqueems it's been throwing out all manner of crap. Stuff we don't have the first clue about what it is and how it's used. We've never quite been able to get a clear sensorial-complex of what's beyond it - I mean the crap that comes though could have just been spontaneously generated, completely at random, for all we knew... <pause for effect> <\speak>

<speak> Go on, Scientificator <\speak> says the Dominator.

<speak> Now there seems to have been some change from within, <\speak> says the Scientificator. <speak> The basic nature of the Multiverse is, basically, tied into the processes of sentient consciousness on the quantum level. Something has shifted, beyond the <nomenclature> Dimensional Rift. <\nomenclature>We are able to detect creatures in the world beyond. The world beyond, in fact, is <emphasis> infected <\emphasis> with them. <\speak>

<speak> Infested, eh? <\speak> says the Dominator.

<speak> Infested, <\speak> says the Scientificator. <speak> Crawling with them. A variety of primate. Filthy little things. Leaking biological contaminants out of every pore and orifice of their bodies, pulsing psychoneurological waste from every synapse in what passes for their brains. Direct contact would, I am very much of the opinion, be fatal. <\speak>

The Dominator regards the Dimensional Rift thoughtfully - or at least, contemplates the sense-input from its sensory tentacles, as they probe at apparent nothingness, in a clinically dispassionate manner.

<speak> Fatal? <\speak> it says. <speak> For us or them? <\speak>

<speak> Both, ultimately, <speak> says the Scientificator. <speak> What with the degree of cross-contamination and all. You're probably picking up a whole bunch of secondary micro-resonances as we do what to physically speaking is a macroturgle to a squeem. <\speak>

The Dominator's sensory pseudopodia whip back from the dimensional rift as if they have been stung.

<speak> This won't do, <\speak> says the Dominator. <speak> This won't do at all. <decisive> Scientificator, keep a sensory-apparat on events beyond the <nomenclature> Dimensional Rift. <\nomenclature> The first sign of destabilisation, dispatch an <nomenclature> Assimilation Drone. <\nomenclature> Sterilise this other world of its human filth immediately. <\decisive> <\speak>

<speak> I shall give the orders, my Dominator. All shall be arranged. It shall be done. <\speak> The bulk of the Scientificator collapses in on itself and reforms into a complex arrangement of planes with fractal-ragged edges, as it conveys said orders and arrangements to its various minions - the equivalent of technicians - in other, nearby bubbles of the bubble-universe.

The Dominator, for its part, manoeuvres its hulking form through the chamber, heading for the tunnels which, with suitable locomotive assistance from its retinue, will take it back to the rather more extensive complex of chambers that serves it as a stronghold.

Idly, feeling the need for a small snack, it turns an eye-stalk to regard a smugly well-fed, immature Slaarg perched on top of a big brass barometer with a needle permanently stuck on "blustery". It shoots out, from its main mass, a kind of bone grappling-hook trailing a length of thin tendon.

The speared immature Slaarg squeals and attempts to resist by planting a sucker. The big brass barometer falls over with a clash and a splay of ichorous sludge. The immature Slaarg is dragged, big brass barometer and all, into a gaping sphincter-maw, ringed with teeth, that the Dominator has opened up especially for the purpose.

THIRTEEN

"Away, then, with these Lewd, Ungodly Diversions, and which are but Impertinence at the best. What part of impudence, either in Words or Practice, is omitted by the Stage. Don't the Buffoons take almost all manner of Liberties, and Plunge through Thick and Thin, to make a Jest?"

- St Clement of Alexandria

Works

The effects of the psycholeptic pulse had been building for months, subtly damaging the neurosystems of those in the Sectors surrounding Sector One.

Initially, this had merely led to an increase in mental illness, an escalation of random acts of violence, or served to trigger specifically structured varieties of psychosis in certain pre-damaged individuals who had been carefully manoeuvred into positions where they could make the most impact, or cause the maximum of confusion and damage when they flipped out into mania.

Now, however, the influence of the psycholeptic pulse jumped several entire orders of magnitude...

In Shangri La Towers, in an intimate little bistro-chamber, the Lady Tamara Whelpington-Smythe smoked an arch cigarette - of a camomile and modified-cannabis mix that would still be technically legal for another two hours - and regarded the man seated opposite her with flat distaste.

The man, an uncouth lout by the name of Joey Malish, was nothing more in life than a chauffeur-for-hire, and had no prospects of ever bettering himself into anything else. Not that this was automatically to be despised, Lady Tamara allowed, being, she believed, staunchly egalitarian to the core. Slumming it with a bit of rough had been, after all, part of the attraction in her involvement with him.

Now, however, certain factors meant that the attraction of the affair had most definitely begun to pall.

"It was out of my way to come here, you know," Malish now said. "I'm completely off my level."

"Myself, too," said Lady Tamara. "Ordinarily, one would rather be seen dead than in a low-class 'joint', as I believe you and your 'mates' are inclined to call such an establishment as this. I simply didn't want either of us to be seen where we might be recognised. We have things to talk about, Joseph."

"That we do, ma'am," said Malish with heavy sarcasm, miming a little pull on a nonexistent peaked cap.

He glanced at Lady Tamara's cigarette, and at the glass of high-strength customised synthahol before her. "Do you think you should be doing that? You know it's a bad idea to drink and smoke when you're..."

"When I'm what, precisely, Joseph?" asked Lady Tamara sweetly. "Who says I'm anything?"

"But you told me..." Malish trailed off as the implication of what she was saying hit him. "You mean you've...?"

"No I haven't," Lady Tamara said. "Not yet, at least. My point is that, until I decide what I'm going to do about it, nothing has happened. This could be the last drink I take and cigarette I smoke for quite a while. Or it might not. That's my decision. It has nothing to do with you."

"Now hang on-" Malish began, but the Lady Tamara overrode him.

"No, no, Joseph," she said. "You hang on. I happen to like my life, Joseph. I like the clothes and the hangers-on and the credits - I'm rather shallow in that respect, I suppose.

"Certain things are... necessary to that life, and some are disposable. Some of them I get to decide whether or not to keep."

"But you can't just leave me out of the picture," Malish said. "You can't just... oh. You're not talking about the other. Leaving me out of the picture is the thing you're talking about."

Lady Tamara smiled coldly. "Precisely, Joseph. Whatever I decide about the other, you are at the moment a complication I simply don't need... and I'm certainly not going to let you spoil things with my Fluffy - I mean, Lord Whelpington.

"So this is the deal. If you'll bother to check your credit-account, you'll find that this week I deposited... well, let's just say that so far as you're concerned, compared with what you're used to, it's quite a substantial sum."

"Now listen here," Malish snapped. "If this is your idea of trying to buy me off..."

The lady Tamara waved an airy hand. "Nothing of the sort," she said. "Keep it, spend it, give it to the poor or pour it down your neck in the form of that low-quality synthahol you and your kind drink - I couldn't care less. I spend more on shoes, quite frankly.

"The important thing, Joseph, is that the cred-records say I paid it."

She regarded him with cold impassiveness. "If you make any kind of fuss," she continued, "if it even seems to me that you're going to make any kind of fuss, then, well, I'm going to have to show those records to my Fluffy - I beg your pardon, Lord Whelpington - and confess everything." She smiled. "And do you know what I'm going to tell him?"

Malish shrugged sullenly, sensing immanent defeat. "What are you going to tell him?"

"I'm going to say that some months back, when you drove me home to Shangri La from a certain charity event in Sector Twelve, you assaulted me. You were quite... violent and brutal about it, told me you would kill me if I said a word. I was terrified and confused, not quite in my right mind, so I kept it from my Fluffy - my Lord Whelpington. We were going through a bad patch in any case, and I was afraid that this would be the end.

"I thought I could put it behind me, but then you developed a twisted obsession with me. You began stalking me, sending me little notes and presents - I can produce all the evidence I need, if I need to. I tried to pay you off, but you still refused to leave me alone. So in the end I was forced to go to my Fluffy and tell him everything."

"You bitch!" Malish roared, leaping to his feet with sufficient force to send his rustically-designed chair skidding back across the faux-parquet flooring. "You think you can get away with something like that? Well you probably can, with your position, and your money, and your connections - but I'll tell you this for nothing. I'm gonna fight. I might go down, but I'm gonna go down fighting and making a stink all the way!"

He stood there, breathing heavily, grating at the Lady Tamara.

The Lady Tamara, for her part, regarded him with a sense of complete equanimity.

"I take it that's your final word on the subject?" she said.

"Yeah," said Malish. "That's my final word."

"Very well then."

The Lady Tamara Whelpington-Smythe snatched up an unused fish knife - the fish course having not by this point arrived - and flung herself over the table, her face a snarling rictus of pure animal bloodlust and rage. She grabbed Malish's face with one clawed hand and then wrenched downwards - leaving deep, blood-spraying gouges rather than mere scratches, and bursting one of his eyes.

Then, as Malish hitched in breath to shriek in agony, before he could even bring his hands up to his ruined face, the Lady Tamara plunged the fish knife into his remaining eye, to bury it deep inside the brain.

Malish spasmed and jerked, then sighed and collapsed bonelessly.

If the altercation between Malish and the Lady Tamara Whelpington-Smythe had caused some degree of consternation among the other patrons and the waiters of the bistro, these last events had provoked absolute and unbelieving shock.

The Lady Tamara sat calmly back down again and took a genteel sip of her drink. "Nothing to worry about," she said, with perfect calm. "This isn't real. It's just a copy. So it doesn't count."

Those who had never been in the Mega-City Kook Kubes tended to think of them as a bedlam horror show out of a slasher holo-vid. The place from which the psycho escapes before terrorising a hab-block populated entirely by, uncommonly enough, well-built girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one who don't wear many clothes. Or alternatively, in a few cases, the place where a number of well-built girls, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, find themselves locked in for the night during a power cut.

Crumbling plaster walls that might once have been white, but any white that remains is merely to set off the smears of blood and excrement. Rusting iron cages containing the ragged and shadowy forms of gibbering, whooping maniacs. Brutal lard-assed orderlies, who, if anything, are worse than the inmates - who they spend their time butt-drokking in the cells, in the ablutions and pretty much everywhere else. Wild-eyed doctors, who if anything are worse than the orderlies, creeping around the corridors and looking for anyone at all to use their ECT-machines on.

This, at least, was the common conception of conditions inside the Mega-City Psyko-Block, and the Justice Department encouraged it, possibly because, if people knew what the inside of the Kook Kubes was actually like, and if you survived the Judicial process long enough to get there in the first place, citizens would be flipping out at the drop of a tinfoil-lined hat.

The plain fact was that, while space and building resources might be limited in the Mega-City, advanced construction and molecular-refab techniques meant that when something was actually built, it was easier to make it perfectly suited to its purpose.

The Psyko-Block was not there, ostensibly at least, to punish the criminally insane. It was there to contain them, even treat them. The very definition of "criminally insane" is a fundamental inability to grasp the criminality of one's actions, or that they deserve punishment. So, simply throwing the criminally insane into a living stommhole is completely counter-productive.

The entrance hall of the Psyko-Block was bright and airy, the bright and airy space elegantly supported by slim colonnades of refab-marble. Actual genetically-fortified foliage rustled, faint and calm, in the soft cool breeze that stirred the lightly scented and conditioned air. There was the faint tinkle of wind-chimes. It was coming from the ambient sound-system, it seemed, rather than from actual chimes, so as to precisely gauge their calming effect.

Drago San looked around with barely-concealed delight.

"Do you know, Dredd," he said, "I believe I could learn to like this place."

"Yeah, well, wait until they start taking your personality apart to see what makes it tick," said Dredd. "I'm told it makes a Precinct-house interrogation look like a walk through the Arboretum of Assisted Euthanasia."

"Oh, really?" said Drago San, apparently unconcerned. "Well, fortunately for all of us, I've got quite enough personality to go around."

Waiting for them at the reception desk, which appeared to have been carved from a single lump of porphyry, were a pair of women wearing nurses' costumes. Although "wearing" was almost entirely the wrong term.

The word "costume", on the other hand was entirely spot on.

"My word," said Efil Drago San. "Things just keep getting better and better, don't they? Tell me, Dredd, did the Carry On Interminably series of holo-vids ever make it on to the Mega-City DataNet? How about Confessions of a Thermodynamic Coolant-exchange Systems Repairer?"

"I'm Nurse Pebbles," said one of the girls, who had a strapping, Scandinavian look about her.

"And I'm Nurse Bambam," said the other, who appeared to be a mix of Indonesian and Korean descent.

"Delighted to make your acquaintance," said Efil Drago San. "I do so enjoy a happy end - urk!"

Dredd, who had had enough, gave the cuffs connecting them a yank to shut him up.

"Sorry for the, uh, you know, look," said Nurse Pebbles. "We were pulling duty on the Grade II Aphasics Ward - and you have to project an extreme and basic image for them to even recognise you as medical personnel."

"We've been detailed to take you up to Dr Roberts," said Nurse Bambam, "for initial consultation and evaluation." She glanced at the Tactical Arms guards. "Would you like to leave your men here? We have a number of... highly effective security measures in place."

There was not a wall, floor or ceiling in the Psyko-Block, to Dredd's knowledge, that was not packed with those security measures, from technically non-lethal restraining-field emitters to decidedly lethal cyborgs permanently charging in alcoves behind slam-shutters. There was almost no conceivable circumstance with which these measures, designed as they were to contain criminal psychotics in their thousands, could not cope.

On the other hand, as he knew to his cost, when dealing with someone like Drago San it was better not to take any chances.

"Drago San stays under guard until we have him secured," he said.

"As you wish," said Nurse Bambam. "If you'd like to come this way?"

Doctor Robert Roberts, Dredd recalled, had been notable enough to make the Justice Department Internal Bulletins, years before, when he had been a Cadet training for Psi-Division. He'd scored off the scale for passive psionic talents - empathy, Rhine-card reading, psychometric reading, remote viewing - while evidencing no active talents whatsoever.

The reason for this, it had transpired, was that Cadet Robert Roberts was possessed of absolutely no psi talent at all - not even the vestigial breath possessed by the vast majority of norms on the planet. He had produced the effect by way of a massive amplification of the mundane skills that in usual cases supplemented psi talent: the reading of faces, the extrapolation of data that the mind was aware of only subconsciously, and so forth.

All of which was interesting and notable, but of about as much actual use to Psi-Division as a one-legged man in the hundred yards dash. Cadet Roberts was shunted into Med-tech Training, where psycho-profiling showed that he was perfectly suited to that brand of psychiatric medicine concerned with the criminally insane. It was a path that had led to a rapid rise through the hierarchy of the Tech-Divisions, culminating in him being appointed Surgeon in Chief in charge of the Mega-City Psyko-Block.

It was Doctor Roberts, in fact, who had introduced the innovations to the Psyko-Block environment over recent years. Innovations which might have jibed a little with Judges of the old school - the school that held that perps should drokking well get what was coming to them, whether they were in actual fact responsible for their actions or not, but there was no doubt that they seemed to work. A serious problem had not come out of the Psyko-Block in years. It had become a place, effectively, where you could leave a problematic case and forget about it.

That was going to change, Dredd thought, as the elevator carried him and Drago San, together with their Tactical Arms guard, to the offices of Doctor Roberts.

The elevator itself was little more than a null-grav platform in a shaft, used for the transport of administrative staff rather than inmates, so there was no need for an actual cage. Access hatches to the various levels of cells and wards zipped by at speed. It was still some time, however, before the platform came to a stop in a large and somewhat cavernous chamber.

A geodesic superstructure of what appeared to be brass supported a dome of LCD panels, currently showing the lava-swirls of an abstract fractal pattern in different shades of green. In the centre of the chamber, the segmented, polyceramic cones of a galvanistic transformer flared and Jacobs-laddered with plasma-fire.

Standing before him, bathed in this shifting light, was a man. Recognisable as Doctor Robert Roberts from the Justice Department files - if rather more pale and twitchy than those files suggested, to quite some degree.

He wore a spotless surgical laboratory coat, offset by jet black polymer gloves and sunglasses with circular lenses, to the sides of which had been clipped microfilament lights. An ophthalmoscope was strapped to his head, which at some point he had shaved completely bald.

The somewhat menacing effect was only slightly spoilt by the speculum sticking out of his pocket and the stethoscope dangling from his neck. Then again, it might depend on what he ever decided to do with them.

Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam now crossed the chamber to join the doctor, taking up positions that seemed to fire danger signals in Dredd's mind, despite the fact that they appeared to be nothing more than somewhat affectedly posing. It would only be later that he learnt why this was...

Dredd had never sat down and actually watched an entertainment holo-vid in his life, but there are some things one picks up by simple osmosis. The little tableau presented by Doctor Robert Roberts and the pair of nurses was straight out of an action-adventure spy show, where the Villain stands rather camply, flanked by his Cool Chick Assassins - only here and now there was a sense that those concerned had bought into it totally and were trying to do it for real.

"How do you do," said Doctor Robert Roberts, with the sort of languid and affected calm that would have had anyone - anyone who had watched an action-adventure spy-show holo-vid in their lives, anyway - heading for the nearest available equivalent of the tree line. "I'm pleased to meet you. I see you've met Pebbles and Bambam. You'll have to forgive them if they seem a little down, but we were expecting a bulk order from the Otto Sump Corporation. For reasons that shall quite possibly become evident, they practically live on synthetically-modified sucrose. They're a little disappointed that you weren't in fact the Umpty Candy man."

He gave a stiff little bow of the sort that should really have been accessorised by a heel-click and a monocle. "Doctor Robert Roberts at your service. Call me Doctor Bob."

A burst of electrical energy arced from an accumulator and struck Dredd before he had time to react - already caught wrong-footed by the apparent lunacy of Doctor Bob, he had no chance against the speed of light, which as the song says is the fastest speed there is.

Plasma-fire crackled around him. The pain was immense, as though every nerve in his body was being flash-fried. Beside him he heard Efil Drago San exclaim, "Oh, I say!" as the charge was partially earthed through the null-grav field of his paraplegic floater.

Sheer physical shock seemed to slow time to a crawl - the rabbit-in-the-headlights state where one can see the truck coming and knows, with an absolute and aching clarity, that the near future will contain the crunch and burst through flesh of bones shattered under motor wheels, but somehow cannot force the body to move fast enough to get out of the way.

The Tactical Arms guard detail were bringing up their MFG rifles - the big Multi-Function Guns that traded off the portability of a Judge's Lawgiver for sheer stopping power.

They never got the chance to stop anything. Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam launched themselves at the Tactical Arms men with inhuman speed, and killed the nearest in a fraction of a second - Nurse Pebbles simply by snapping the neck of her victim, Nurse Bubbles by literally punching stiffened fingers through a supposedly shatter-resistant visor and into the eyes inside.

"Metaneurological rewiring," said Doctor Bob a little smugly. "The cerebral motive-to-act is hooked directly to the core libido-complex without cortical involvement. The subject tends to burn out fast, but they burn very bright indeed."

As he was speaking, Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam had grabbed the MFG rifles of their victims, and yanked them free of the chains that tethered them to their bodies. Then, simultaneously, they hurled the weapons at the remaining Tactical Arms men, who were still in the alarmed process of bringing their own MFG rifles round.

The force behind the stolen weapons was so strong, the aiming so precise, that they split through the Tactical Arms uniforms and speared their respective owners. The move had happened so fast that the security-chips of the guns themselves only now woke up to the fact that they had been taken by users with unauthorised biometrics - and triggered their self-detonation charges.

The Tactical Arms men went to pieces in a spray of burning polymer and meat. The force of the blast knocked a still immobilised Dredd off his feet, disrupting a nervous system and brain that were already in none too good shape.

The last thing Dredd heard before he lost consciousness was Efil Drago San, not a little irately, saying, "You took your damned showy time about it, didn't you? And you could have allowed me sufficient time to get free of the fellow before giving him a couple of hundred thousand volts where it does the most good."

FOURTEEN

"He has occasional flashes of silence that make his conversation quite delightful."

- Sydney Smith

(On Macaulay)

If, when he was a child, you had asked Carlos Cica Mendez what he wanted to be, he would have instantly replied: "a Judge." Actually, this was not quite true. Carlos Cica Mendez would probably in fact have replied: "that's classified information, creep", and rabbit punched you in the kidneys. And if he had happened to be holding something sharp while doing so then that would be your bad luck.

He was as completely sociopathic as one can be and still function in human form: he simply had no concept of the effects of his actions in the world. At the age of ten, he had been arrested by the Judges after interrogating and summarily executing fifteen of his playmates.

Upon his capture, he had honestly expected to be congratulated upon being first-class Justice Department material and sent to the training complexes without delay. He was therefore puzzled hurt and angry when he was in fact dispatched to the kook kubes.

Those he had aspired to had spurned him completely; they had taken the one thing he coveted from him and obliterated it. The need for revenge was all-consuming.

Carlos Cica Mendez was an extremely bright child, and cunning. For more than fifteen years, with an almost inhuman sense of purpose, he said exactly the right things, and did exactly the right things, and made himself think exactly the right things until he was eventually released as cured.

This was during an abortive and short-lived experiment in leniency, which lasted a grand total of forty-eight hours, and Carlos Cica Mendez had just happened to fall between the cracks.

After his release he had gravitated to the criminal world, mostly due to a vague emotional feeling that criminals were actually allowed to kill people - and that they were especially allowed to kill Judges.

The Judges had rejected him. They were nothing more than scum. They deserved to be wiped out.

All in all, and what with the influence of the psycholeptic pulse, Carlos Cica Mendez was probably not the ideal choice for a group of kids in the Sector Three Hydroponic Arboretum, where they were playing Judges and Perps, to run up to and shout, "On your knees, Creep! Justice Department, Mega-City One!"

In the cell-chamber that had served so recently as a conference room between himself and Efil Drago San, Barnstable Wheems sat at the desk, in one of the pair of chairs provided, and put his head in his hands.

Since it was, basically, a charging-cell, the door could not be locked from the inside. All the same, Wheems had attempted to wedge the second chair against the door. It would do no good at all if anyone - especially any Judge with a grudge - took it into his or her head to come in, but all the same it was a symbolic gesture.

It occurred to him that for the vast majority of his life, everything he had ever tried to do, was to escape being called by idiots who didn't know any better - a loser. The impetus of his being had been, plain and simple, not to lose.

His work for the rich and, by their lights, powerful in Shangri La Towers had been, after all, nothing more or less than an attempt to stop the rich and powerful losing out. That was a different thing from winning. He had never been in the position of actually winning a thing.

Now, definitively, he had won. And wasn't the feeling just so good. It wasn't at all like a feeling of clinging to the ragged edge of suicide by the nails.

Barnstable Wheems noted, absently, that this was not a cell for those who had lost their reason and might become violent - as was evidenced by the fact that the chairs were not bolted to the floor and could be moved. Further evidence was presented by the fact that the desk had nice sharp corners.

Just the sort of corners you could imagine dragging the inside of your arms against, over and over again.

Only, who would be doing it? If he could believe what Efil Drago San had told him, would it be him doing it and would it mean anything at all?

Besides, there was one thing left that he had to do.

So much of his life and identity - what he could only assume, he supposed, to be his life and identity - was tied up in doing the job he had been contracted to do. Whether he had wanted to or not, whether he had realised the consequences or not, he had agreed to perform a certain function and he could not do anything other than perform it.

Barnstable Wheems picked up his attaché case - a symbol of a lawyer, from time immemorial, as much as his badge was a symbol for any Judge - and headed for the unlocked door, that could never be locked on his side, on his part, however much he might wish it.

The contents of the case had been given to him by a certain Mister Hand, in exchange for the removal of the mortal remains of the Contessa Trixi von Paddlepatch-Wuffleton.

There would be, he knew, no impediment to going where he must, but he did not wish to go.

He had a delivery to make.

"Awake at last, my dear chap?" said Efil Drago San. "I was beginning, I confess, to fear for your general health and well-being."

"The drokk...?" Dredd looked around himself. He was lying on a mattress in an airy, pleasant and quite spacious room, for all the world indistinguishable from the sleeping quarters of some well-off citizen in any hab-block.

There was nothing cell-like about it, no sense of the kind of establishment the cell might be situated inside - until you realised that there were absolutely no sharp corners anywhere, and no arrangement whatsoever for the door to lock or unlock on the inside.

This was once again part of the principle, Dredd recalled, that if you're going to incarcerate those who have lost their reason, you might as well incarcerate them in surroundings that are more pleasant than otherwise, rather than drop them down a hole.

On the other hand, light and airy and pleasant, or not, that didn't change the basic fact of being locked in a cell with no way out.

Dredd was, he realised, still cuffed to Drago San. He used the leverage against the paraplegic floater to haul himself up off the mattress. His muscles and nerves crawled with a desiccated, blown-out pain. The pain was still there, but in a subtle sense it couldn't quite be felt. Grud alone knew what internal damage Doctor Bob's electrical blast had done. The only thing to do at the moment, though, was to push right through it.

"Do you mind, Dredd?" said Drago San as the floater wobbled precariously. "That nearly had me over. Such ingratitude - I gather that it was only my presence in the first place, earthing the charge, that prevented the electrical blast from killing you outright."

"Oh yeah?" said Dredd. "Seems to me that my death would be just what you wanted."

"There is that," said Drago San with a wolfish grin. "The plan was, when we thought you were dead, to have the good Doctor Roberts - or Doctor Bob, as he seems to insist upon calling himself these days - cut me loose. Then we realised you were still alive. Doctor Bob was all for whipping out his scalpel for a spot of whittling, of course, but no, I said, let us wait." The grin became more wolfen, if that was possible. "That way you'll be awake and aware for it."

Dredd attempted to lunge for Drago San, haul the floater round and smack him down, but he was still too weak. He staggered. It was an effort even to stand upright.

"Now you don't think," said Drago San, "that I'd allow myself to be locked in here, alone with you, if there were a chance you could actually hurt me? The effects of the blast are more or less temporary, I gather - if you were to make it to some medical facility with nerve-regeneration capability in time - but you're currently as weak and debilitated as the proverbial kitten." Again the grin. "I doubt you'd be able to so much as hold your gun, far less fire it, even if you had it on you at this point."

Dredd had already noticed, in a secondary kind of way, that his Lawgiver, boot-knife and several other items of equipment were missing from him. This had been so obvious that it had not even been a factor in his thinking.

"I have to admit to a slight disappointment when your gun was removed by servo-manipulator," said Drago San. "The Psyko-Block personnel, I gather - those in a sufficiently modified state to do our Doctor Bob's bidding - are quite rare and valuable, at this point."

Gone, also, were the radio-units that kept Dredd in contact with Control. That was good in the sense that someone, at some point, would realise that contact was down for some other reason than a systems-glitch, and decide to check it out. It was bad on the other hand, of course, in that there was no way to contact control and drokking tell them to check it out.

It also meant that there was no effective way to remove the cuffs tethering him to Efil Drago San.

"All right," he said. "What's the score? The Surgeon in Chief of the Psyko-Block has somehow been... corrupted. You have some kind of deal in place with him. That much is obvious, but what the drokk do you think you're gonna achieve?"

"Do you ever watch the holo-vids?" asked Efil Drago San, inconsequentially. "No? Well let me tell you, there's a standard scene in them, at least of late, where the noble hero finds himself in the fiendish power of the villain, at his very mercy and so forth, and so takes the opportunity to demand that he be told just what the hell is going on.

"The fiendish villain then says something along the lines of, 'Aha! Don't think you can get the better of me that way! You know as well as I do that the moment I gloatingly reveal my master plan - and am in the very throes of crowing about how nothing in the world can stop its realisation - something explodes, or several hundred soldiers rappel down the walls, or something else of that nature happens so my master plan goes effectively tits-up! So you shall die without hearing a word of my plans from me, so there!'

"It was a good joke once, I suppose, as such jokes go, but by the hundredth repetition is becomes inexpressibly wearisome. Just another inept bit of metatextual nonsense by some creator convinced he's being all knowing and metatextual rather than simply inept. And the plain fact is, it doesn't make a spot of difference. In any real life, things just don't happen that way. Events proceed along their course whether the villain of the piece reveals his fiendish Master Plan or not."

"Look, does this mean you're gonna drokking tell me what's going on or not?" said Dredd.

"It means," said Drago San, "that all things being equal, I do tend to enjoy the occasional gloat."

"Now you have to understand," said Efil Drago San "that one doesn't achieve the sort of position I had in Brit-Cit, once upon a time, without certain resources of defence in place. The rivalries between the Overlords can become a little... complicated, and it's always a good idea to establish fail safes and procedures for the time when one finds oneself on the outs.

"The so-called Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber, for example, are pretty much an appendix so far as command and control of the Brit-Cit Justice Department is concerned. The Overlords use quite other avenues these days, since Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber turned into drooling senile wrecks, but those basic procedures of command and control are still in place. All it took was for something to reactivate them.

"I was the source, in actual fact, of the bio-customised Stookie-glands that extended the lives of the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber so unnaturally long, longer than any other known rejuvenation-procedures allow - and, due to one thing and another I was instrumental in cutting off their supply.

"There was a standing arrangement, however, that if they found some way to make reparations for - well, for a number of slights and infractions we need not go into here - if they found some means of winning back my gratitude, there was a chance that they might get their access back. A whole new lease on life. Wouldn't that be lovely?

"Fortunately for all concerned - for anyone who matters, anyway - at least one of the Order still had sufficient lien on their faculties to notice that I was being held by Mega-City One. After they managed to impress that fact upon the others, of course, and repeated it enough so that they could at least halfway remember, all they could think of, in terms of what to do, was to revert to territorial squabbling and senile, mean-spirited spite. Demanding that I be returned into their jurisdiction, insisting on it even to the point of war - hence the procedural hearing we've all so recently enjoyed at such great length.

"Fortunately, again, I had... associates in place, here in Mega-City One, for just this kind of eventuality: people who could procure such allies as I might need in such an eventuality and ensure their absolute loyalty. The Wheems individual was one such subject, his loyalty ensured by means that are neither here nor there, but he was merely a way-station in my progress, as it were. Once in direct contact with him, I was able to direct matters so I ended up here, in the Psyko-Block, with the man who has for some unaccountable reason started to call himself Doctor Bob.

"The plain fact is that one doesn't have to change all that much to change the world - the world of one's adversaries, at least - completely. You just have to change enough so that situations and people are in a state and position to use if they ever become useful.

"There's a long and... well, you can't exactly call it honourable - tradition of it. Centuries back, your own country was infested by those who had a vested interest in global tensions, subjugating entire populations on the excuse of war or the immanent threat of it. Simple enough when the world was divided into two or three Power Blocs - and rather like the situation we have now, what with the Mega-Cities, the New Sov-Cities and Hondo-Cit. How times roll around again.

"In any case, the thing about that was that the whole idea of these Power Blocs fell apart, largely because the world was going through a phase where the people in it weren't quite as dumb as a bag of spanners, and couldn't impose quite such a patently venal interpretation on it. The people with a vested interest had to get creative, pouring massive funding into the training up of potential enemy factions - and, whoops, just when we needed a new enemy, that enemy turned up to commit their acts of terrorist atrocity.

"Suitably iconic acts of terrorist atrocity, I might add, that just happened to kill less American citizens, on a per capita basis, than they otherwise might have. The destruction of a building packed with foreign nationals, for example, as opposed to similarly famous landmarks, packed with Americans and effectively situated next door.

"You have not the slightest clue as to what I'm talking about, do you, Dredd? You really should look to reading up a bit, and wider. Or, indeed, reading at all.

"In any case, with a little bit of lowest common denominator jiggery-pokery, these vested interests managed to parlay what they called a War on Terror into what was, basically, a War on the Foreign. You see the beauty of that? Any squalid piece of opportunism that occurred to them, they could justify it in terms that they were grasping that opportunity in the name of protecting Citizen Joe Soap, his fat ugly wife and their appalling brood of incipiently diabetic offspring from the Foreigners. And the thing about 'foreign' is that you can define it as anything - from the people who leant you money you don't feel like paying back, to the people who would rather eat falafel than a Big Mac.

"But I digress. It's a habit, I must have mentioned before at some point, that I really should look into learning to curb.

"The point is, years ago, I set up some situations that might prove useful someday here in Mega-City One. Situations on another level entirely than oleaginous weasels like Wheems. I toyed with subverting and planting agents within the Special Judicial Service - but they were doing such a good job by themselves, and nobody trusted them in any case, so the whole idea was counterproductive.

"Then I chanced on the case file of a certain Robert Roberts, and you can tell by the name that this would be a person with certain issues. The same sort of issues a person might have when parents going by the name of Head decide to call their son Richard. Or when the erstwhile Hunts decide to call their son Michael. The best you can say about the parents of our Robert is that they gave him a stupid name out of the delusion that it was cute, rather than being actively malicious.

"In any case, in actual fact, our Robert was flunked out of Psi-Judge training with the express opinion that he belonged in what I believe you call the Kook Kubes. It was but the work of a few extremely bright people, who I employed back in the day, to change those recommendations to say that he belonged in charge of the Kook Kubes.

"That was all it took to set our Robert on the path to becoming the Psyko-Block Surgeon in Chief under a process of accelerated promotion. And, once he was established, he was able to give the small quirks of personality he had: megalomania and certain degree of control-compulsion, I believe; full rein. He's built up quite the little sinecure here; his own little world. And he's suitably grateful to me for giving it to him.

"As I said at the start, all it takes is a small change to create a situation of which I can take advantage. All I had to do was arrange and direct things so that I ended up here. And here I am. I do so love it when a plan comes together."

Drago San floated there, in a smug and somewhat boastful manner, as though he was waiting for applause.

"This is insane," Dredd said. "This plan of yours relies on all sorts of complications and coincidences. Nobody could plan that way."

Efil Drago San's face fell. "Have you been listening to a single word?" he said, a little snappishly. "I told you I don't plan. I set up situations with which I can improvise. If the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber hadn't set events in motion, well, something else would have occurred. Any number of other minions would have served just as well as Wheems. And as for ending up here in the Psyko-Block... well, let's just say that there are other possibilities, which I don't propose to mention, on account of the fact that I might want to use them someday.

"The point is," he concluded, with the smug grin back on his face, "that here and now, in actual fact, I win and you lose. What do you have to say about that, eh?"

"I say, again," said Dredd, "that what can you hope to drokking achieve?" He gestured, so far as his debilitation allowed him, in a general manner to take in the whole room and the entire Psyko-Block beyond it. "I go in, I don't come out, and the Justice Department is gonna notice. We'll land on the Kook Kubes hard and pull you down."

"I think you'll be in for a hell of a fight," said Drago San. "Our Robert has laid on some quite extensive external defences, I gather, since assuming control. I understand he has the capability of holding off the most heavily armed Justice Department forces indefinitely."

"A siege situation?" said Dredd. "That still leaves you stuck in here with no way out. You're no better off now than you were before."

"Oh, really?" said Drago San. "I've caused a bumper crop of inconvenience to the Justice Department and ended up with the run of this place. More than enough reward for my effort, I think. And besides, on the subject of being 'stuck here', I believe our good Doctor Bob is working on a little something in that department. Shall we go and see?"

The paraplegic floater rose and headed for the door, half-dragging Dredd as he stumbled to keep up.

"I thought the impellors on this drokking thing had been disabled," Dredd grunted.

"Along with everything else," said Efil Drago San, "my floater has some quite extensive self-repairing capabilities. Did I never think to mention that? Ah, well, it's always a good idea to save a few surprises for the end. Such as they are."

FIFTEEN

"Wherever God erects a house of prayer,

The Devil always builds a chapel there;

And 'twill be found, upon examination,

The latter has the largest congregation."

- Daniel Defoe

The True-Born Englishman

"Hey, and welcome to A Larder in your ReFAB! Hints and tips to get the most out of any old piece of stomm you happen to have lying around! Only here on Mega-City DataNet, Sector Seven, channel 4,379.

"Now as you can see, I've just driven my long-time partner Mica's head in with the flat end of a standard lamp! I don't know why. I just felt like it.

"Once the remains have decomposed sufficiently, of course, they're just the thing to ReFAB into tasty nutri-blocks containing all the proteins, carbs and trace-element minerals necessary to keep the human body in tip-top healthy condition!

"But for the moment, what the hell, it would be a positive crime to leave all that fresh juicy meat to go to waste while it's still on the bone.

"I'll be showing you how to prepare the choicer cuts later, but a personal favourite of mine is something you might not have thought of: boiled head stuffed with giblets! For this, you have to first remove the head from the carcass, using the dismembering implement of your choice. I prefer to use the trusty chainsaw, myself.

"And remember, if any of you out there are feeling a little bit squeamish about murdering your long-time partners, chopping them up with a big knife and eating them - just remember, hey, this isn't real. It's just a copy, so it doesn't really count..."

Barnstable Wheems knocked on the door to the strato-pad lounge currently occupied by the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber, then timidly opened it on receiving no response. The Brit-Cit Senior Judges, he saw, were staring blank and insensate into space, as though they were nothing more than programmed automata awaiting further orders.

All of them, that is, except for the one in a hairy-string pullover, who was looking frantically around and about himself, presumably in search of possible moles to strangle.

"Got any moles?" he asked Wheems, confirming the presumption. "I like strangling moles."

"No, ah, I have something I was told to deliver to you," said Wheems. "Something you've been waiting for."

He set his attaché case on a low table that, if this had been a normal stratoport lounge, would have supported racks containing data-wafer magazines extolling the concerns of those who were leasing this particular departure gate. As it was, it supported bound copies of The Laws and Statutes of Mega-City One - printed earlier that evening and therefore hopelessly out of date.

Wheems snapped the locks and opened the case, the contents of which had been classified as Evidentiary Resources for the hearing of Efil Drago San, and so had been allowed into the Hall of Justice on a basis of technical confidentiality.

The Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber, as one, including the one with a penchant for the defenestration of small burrowing animals, gazed at the contents of the base, nestling in a slab of pre-cut foam, with a kind of senile awe.

"Is that... heh.... what I think it is?" said one.

"I suppose so," said Wheems, though he had no idea and cared less what the Brit-Cit Senior Judge thought it might be.

"WHUT?" bellowed the Brit-Cit Senior Judge with the ear-trumpet. "WHUT THE FELLER SAY?"

"He said," said the first, "that... heh... at last we have our reward. A down-payment on it, in any case." His face split open in what he might or might not have thought of as a joyful smile, but was in fact a leer of infirm glee. "Now, at last, we truly shall live forever."

In the Mega-City Psyko-Block, Dredd and Drago San - that is, Efil Drago San dragging Dredd behind him - left the holding cell and headed for the elevator that would take them up, again, to the chambers of Doctor Bob. The corridors were empty, as ever, and there was, as ever no reason for them to be anything else. Indeed, the simple fact that Drago San was out, and apparently able to move at will, was bad news enough.

There was a smell in the air like ozone. The walls seemed to buzz with accumulated static charge, the sense of it pulsing on the brain with an enervating pressure.

Dredd, for his part, in his weakened state and after realising that struggling was doing no good against the impellors of Drago San's floater, had gone limp to conserve what was left of his energy, taking his weight on his kneepads. His resources were so exhausted now that it was an effort to even speak. The only hope, at this point, would be for some new factor to occur and change the situation.

They reached the chambers of Doctor Bob to find that the situation had indeed changed - it had changed for the worse. As the elevator platform locked into place, Dredd hauled his head up to see the somewhat underdressed forms of Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam, standing stock-still, their vacant faces turned to the form of Doctor Bob in a kind of mindlessly worshipful awe.

Doctor Bob, his dark form cradled in a crawling tracery of electrical tendrils from the emitters, was floating two feet from the floor, his arms akimbo. Around him the accumulators juddered and roared. His floating form rotated slowly, light from the emitters playing over his face, shifting and reforming it by some real-time variety of subsurface-scattering. His eyes were closed in what appeared to be, in the shifting light, a state of absolute serenity.

"My word," said Efil Drago San, loudly and jovially. "What a quite impressive degree of lift. Now, if we've all quite finished playing around, it's time we thought about arranging my final escape."

He raised the hand attached to Dredd by cuffs, the deceptive and disproportionate strength of his upper body lifting Dredd off his knees in a parody of a rag doll.

"And the first order of the day," Drago San continued, "is to cut this inconvenience off from me once and for all."

The slow rotation of Doctor Bob came to a halt. The flat black disks of his spectacle-masked eyes regarded Drago San and the captive Dredd impassively.

"Years," he said, simply and in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice.

"Years?" said Drago San, still all smiles and joviality. He merely wished for some expansion on what it meant for someone to go around saying "years" for no immediately apparent reason.

"Years, I spent," said Doctor Bob, "in Psi-Division Training, looking for the magic key that would unlock the things in people's heads and open them to me. Years of trying, years of failing, and when they found out I was pretending, they just threw me away."

There was no trace of bitterness or anger, just the flat tones of one coolly working on some interesting puzzle out loud.

"And how lucky that was for all concerned," said Efil Drago San. "It put you in the perfect position for me and my associates to give you a whole new life. Do you remember that, Robert? Who it was who gave you a whole new life?"

There had been a slight but marked shift in Drago San's manner, Dredd realised. Before, he had merely been talking with a subordinate, telling that subordinate what was going to happen next. Now it was as if he was being forced, however gently, to remind this supposed subordinate as to who, in actual fact, was in charge here.

"I remember..." said Doctor Bob. "I remember not having any choice. I made the best of it. I made friends. I took people and cut their heads up and made them into friends. Put them all together and linked them up."

"That's right, Robert," said Drago San. If his sense of amiable suggestion had been slipping, it was now on the point of becoming a positive landslide. He spoke in the voice of one speaking to a child - one who was getting angry at that child's antics.

"You took some of the inmates," he continued, "hundreds of them, those with a sufficient degree of latent psionic talent. You rewired their minds, set up a resonant mesh that you can control - but you'll remember why you did that, Robert? Who you did it for? You set it up for me, Robert. A psionic bomb, set to blast this sector of the city, sending those with a propensity for it into mass and instantaneous psychosis and allowing me to slip away in the confusion."

"Made it nice," said the floating Doctor Bob. "Made it into my own little world."

"You made it for me, Robert," said Drago San. "It's not your world, you made it for me, and you're damned well going to do what I tell you with it!"

"I... don't think so." For a moment the floating Doctor Bob sounded uncertain.

And then, abruptly, as though some internal switch had been thrown, he became decisive.

"Do you know," he said resolutely, "I don't think I shall. Years, as I said, I spent building up this little sinecure, setting up the processes which will extend it, set the city outside to rights... and if you think I'll allow you to come traipsing in as if you own the place, telling me what to do, and bringing the attention of the Justice Department with you, then you've got another thing coming."

It might have been Dredd's imagination, but it seemed that the more Doctor Bob gained in confidence, the more his speech-patterns and tone echoed those of Efil Drago San himself.

"Now you listen here, you jumped-up little lunatic with a god complex," snapped Efin Drago San, now with genuine anger. "I made you; I can damn well break you. You'll do as you're told."

"Shan't," said the floating Doctor Bob with finality. "Who are you to tell me what to do? And if it's a matter of people breaking..."

Tendrils of energy arced from his splayed fingers, striking the still forms of Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam. The energy seemed to be of a different nature than that which had recently struck Dredd, energizing rather than debilitating in its effect.

The bodies of Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam shuddered, and then turned to advance on Drago San and Dredd. Their movements now were not of the lightning-quick variety they had been when they had killed the Tactical Arms guards. Now they held a stiff and lurching quality, as though in some manner zombified.

A sickly light pulsed from their eyes. Their progress seemed inexorable.

"Things not going exactly how you planned?" Dredd croaked to Efil Drago San.

"You might say that," said Drago San. For the first time there was an active note of worry in his voice. "You might say that indeed. I rather think, in the figurative sense at least, that now might be the time to run."

SIXTEEN

"Those who believe they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something."

- Aldous Huxley

Point Counterpoint

Judge Tregan didn't bother to hit the suspect hard. You didn't have to hit hard to break the nose. There was a wet crack and blood gushed down to stain the man's skinny chest.

"Groke," the suspect blubbered. His name was Gorban Wiggles and he was a low-grade street kif dealer. Hardly worth the effort. "Oo groke by dose!" Also a master of the drokking obvious.

"Settle down, creep." Tregan produced the envelope he had "found" behind the couch, which Wiggles had not technically been holding at the time he had made the bust. "Lot of stuff here. Looks like it isn't even with Intent to Deal. Could be with Intent to Supply."

The difference was in degree the effective variation being an exponential jump in cube-time.

Wiggles looked desperate. There were now two practical options open to him. Unfortunately for all concerned he chose the wrong one.

"Lissen," he said. "I can give you people. I can give you names and-"

"Hello?" Tregan rapped him sharply upside the head. "Try again."

Wiggles shrugged. "Usual?"

"Triple," said Judge Tregan. "Otherwise some people might find out you tried to give them up."

Tregan left the conapt and headed for the hab-block transit racks with his Lawmaster, keeping an eye out for potential threat. A lone Judge was an easy target for anyone who felt like having a crack, and Tregan was quite relieved that his shift was almost over.

In the Sector Seven Precinct House, he met up with Judge Martok, fell into step with him and strolled through corridors that were, quite by chance, more out of the way and less frequented than others. "No problems," he said. "The Widows and Orphans Fund is healthy as ever."

"I'm glad to hear it, Chris," Martok said. "Look for a little something extra when we spread it out."

Tregan nodded. Felis Martok had been his supervising Judge years back, when he had been nothing more than a green Cadet.

Martok had shown Tregan the ropes and kept an almost paternal eye on him thereafter, giving him a hand up after he himself had made full Judge. Every operation in the Precinct worth talking about went through Martok - at least, every operation that involved the unofficial lining of the utility-belt pouches of the Judges on the street.

He was a good friend to have in your corner, what with the SJS taking their orders from Chief Judge Hershey these days, and actually doing their proper jobs. The crackdowns on the worst of the corruption that notoriously infected the Precinct Houses of Mega-City One were getting worse, but through long years of experience Martok had managed not to put so much as a blip on the Special Judiciary sonar.

Martok stopped by a drinking fountain and drank. His eyes, however, flicked from one end of the aisle to the other, making sure that they were effectively alone.

"I hear that one of the new lambs in the precinct has gone astray," he said.

"Breen?" Tregan said. Breen was one of the new crop of Cadets who had yet to be told the score in all its slightly dodgy details. Details that were only dodgy if you didn't have your mind right, of course. "I know him. Friendly enough, just a bit too fond of being shocked to the knickers at the minor sins of the world. He'll wise up."

"I hear a rumour that he might be Covert Ops."

The Justice Department Covert Operations Squad was to the Wally Squad what the East-Meg crater was to a hole in the ground: same general deal, but seriously worse news. Whereas the SJS liked throwing its weight around, and thus were relatively easy to see coming and avoid, Covert Ops were capable of very slowly and deliberately sneaking up and planting a knife in your back.

"Really?" Tregan became thoughtful. "I don't know. I don't think so. I usually have a nose for these things."

"Unless they're running him on deep cover." Martok shrugged. "Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn't. I do know for a fact that he's tried to make a couple of appointments with Hall of Justice personnel, and he won't take a telling. I think Breen needs to be told a little bit harder, you get me?"

"How hard?" asked Tregan.

Judge Martok had a thoughtful look on his face, then pulled his Lawgiver from his boot and, very calmly, unloaded a hi-ex round into Tregan's stunned face.

"Oh, about as hard as that, I should think," he said.

In the Hall of Justice stratopad comms-centre, Detective Judge Treasure Steel sat at a console that could have probably contacted Mars and run the entire colony by remote control. She had come here after being informed, somewhat brusquely, in her opinion, that the Justice Department did not lay on such fripperies for visitors as simple payphone call-boxes.

"Missing you, babe," she was saying. "We should be heading home soon, though, once they get their collective finger out and finish prepping the strat-bat for launch. How's Callum?"

"The little bastard's having one of his days," said Terry, in the kind of exasperatedly loving tone that allows mothers to get away with calling their offspring little bastards, on the basis that the words themselves are diametrically opposed to the true facts of the matter. "You know, if I didn't know it was impossible, I'd say some of your boss's bloody DNA got into the mix. He gets that look, you know what I mean, just before he starts throwing a tantrum."

Terry was, of course, Detective Judge Steel's wife, and Callum was their infant son, the production of whom had involved a "naturally-based" procedure currently popular with female Brit-Cit couples, in which the genetic coding of one mother was implanted in the gene-cleaned spermatozoa of a donor. The precise method of combining the resultant material with an egg was then a private matter between the couple concerned.

Rather than involve a stranger, the motile component had been provided by Treasure's superior officer in the New Old Bailey, Chief Detective Judge Armitage, who, as he had said, didn't have any other use for it.

"Speaking of the miserable old bugger," said Terry, "he's looking for you."

"What?" said Detective Judge Treasure Steel. "Why would he be looking for me? He knows where I am. The order to guard the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber came from his office."

"That's news to him, apparently," said Terry. "His precise words to me were 'what the - Bzzzt! - is that silly bitch doing in Mega-City One? Tell her to pull her head out of her arse and - Bzzzt! - call me!' Then the language got more extreme."

Some small part of Detective Judge Steel idly wondered why the Mega-City comms-console would leave the words bastard, bugger and so forth alone but buzz out the F-word. Admittedly, some words could be considered worse than others, if you were of a mind to make the distinction, but to make the distinction seemed to go against the Mega-City Justice Department's all-or-nothing attitude and its sledgehammer way of going about things.

The far larger part of her, however, recognised the above as merely the displacement-activity of one who is suddenly very worried indeed, and can't quite bring oneself to think about why in one go.

"Listen, Terry," she said. "I'm gonna have to go. There's another call I really have to make."

"He's toying with us," said Efil Drago San as his floater powered down a corridor, dragging Dredd behind it, sec-system plasma bolts from an ejector in the ceiling hitting the floor less than a metre behind them. "This is all low-yield stuff, if I'm any Judge - with a small capitalisation, naturally. If he wanted to kill us outright, he'd have set the countermeasures to full lethality."

"That's good to know," Dredd managed, the effort of speaking costing him dearly.

The various forces involved in making it back to the elevator in time to evade the zombie-like clutches of Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam, riding it down until the sec-system cut its power, and then barrelling off through the Psyko-Block corridors had battered his already damaged body to hell and back. It was almost a relief that his nervous system was shot so he couldn't feel how bad it was.

"That's not going to last," Drago San continued. "Sooner or later he'll get tired of it, and come after us, and simply kill us. I know I would. What's needed, here, I feel, is some modicum of an edge to... aha! This'll do."

The floater pulled up to a stop before a door marked "MED STATION", Dredd smacking face-first into it from the momentum.

"Let's just see if our Robert hasn't remembered to rescind my biometric clearances," said Drago San, trying the door's control panel.

It had occurred to Dredd more than once to wonder just what had happened to the vast majority of the Psyko-Block population during the months and years that Doctor Bob had been building up his private little world.

The short answer was that the lives and work of the inmates and personnel - those inmates and personnel not intimately involved with rewiring the minds of latent psionics into one big mind-bomb, in any case - had simply carried on as normal. The micro-societal hierarchies of med-techs and their patients were in place and self-sustaining, after all, and there was no particular reason to know or care that the man at the top was a complete homicidal loon.

In this respect, of course, the Mega-City Psyko-Block had the same kind of relationship with Doctor Bob as corporate employees throughout history have had to their CEOs, or countries with their ostensibly elected presidents: happily splashing about in the pond, completely oblivious to the bloated, poisoned toad squatting in the centre.

The Med Station was simply a first aid point for dealing with any physical injury the Psyko-Block inmates might cause, either to those who were in the business of treating them or to themselves. It was currently occupied by a Med-Division tech and an orderly - one in a paramedic uniform reminiscent of a Judge's, though with medical-based insignia and a hypo-gun instead of a Lawgiver, the other in a white if somewhat grubby smock.

"What's happening?" the med-tech asked, automatically and a little slow on the uptake. "The level's locked down, there's no contact with Justice Department control and... uh..."

The med-tech trailed off as he belatedly realised the nature of these new arrivals and the state they were in. He had no time to react any further, because Efil Drago San reached out a hand - the hand on the arm not currently cuffed to Dredd - grabbed his face, and smacked his head into that of the orderly. There was a crunch of bone from a blow so powerful as to be instantly, and mutually, lethal.

"I do so abhor getting my hands dirty," said Drago San conversationally. "Ah, well, needs must, I suppose."

"You didn't have to do that," Dredd croaked. "There was no reason to drokking kill them."

"Oh, can that really be so?" said Drago San, in utterly mortified tones. "Have I really sunk so low as to take human life without cause? Why, it's as if I were a mass-murderer whose every impulse is to kill if I can possibly get away with it."

All the while he was busily scanning the medical equipment on offer in the Med Station.

"Stasis and anaesthesia field emitters," he said, as though compiling a small mental list. "Dermal-regeneration unit for those minor and unavoidable little scrapes. Micropore and microsurgical sutures and - ah, yes, what do we have here? A good heavy-duty laser saw. Just the very ticket!"

In addition to these items was a wheeled gurney suitable for transporting the physically injured. With his massive upper body strength, Drago San hauled Dredd off his feet and heaved him onto the gurney.

Dredd gasped for breath and attempted to struggle, but his debilitations were such that it was all he could do to flop weakly.

"The time has come," said Efil Drago San, "to do something that I've been putting off. Believe me, Dredd, hard though it might be, this is something I really do not wish to do. But the fact is, amusing as your company might be in your present state, you've become something of an unsupportable dead weight.

"Now just you lie back. You might feel a bit of a brief sting."

Detective Judge Treasure Steel kicked open the door of the strato-platform lounge, barrelled through, slipped on blood to pitch back and landed on her backside. Fortunately, though blood-soaked, the carpeting was lush and thick: a rare Justice Department consideration for visiting dignitaries.

The lounge was awash with blood, other fluids and certain... items that were definitely not fluid at all. There were various items of human anatomy, but they were not connected to each other or, indeed, anything much at all.

In fact, the only relatively intact human item was cowering in a corner and whimpering to itself. Treasure Steel recognised him: Barnstable Wheems.

His left arm appeared to have been shattered. What with one thing and another, Detective Judge Treasure Steel was not in the best of moods, and not inclined to be kind, so she used that arm to drag him out of the corner. Wheems shrieked in agony, then stopped abruptly. The pain had crossed over the threshold where he could feel it in any human sense.

"Tell me what happened here," Treasure said curtly.

Wheems worked his mouth. It was like trying to speak of some vision that was too huge and horrible to come out.

Steel slapped him. "Tell me!"

"They exploded!" Wheems cried. "There were these injections, and they took their injections, and then they looked at each other and they swelled up and they all exploded!"

Treasure Steel glanced around the room, noting the remains of hypo-guns strewn through the mess. Wheems was not, in fact, telling her anything she didn't already know.

She shook him. "I want to know what's going on," she said. "All of it. Tell me about it now."

It seemed that his initial hysterical outburst had somewhat calmed Wheems. Twitching with agony though he was, he twisted his head to look at her with what he probably thought of as guile, but merely came off as low cunning.

"I know my rights," he said. "I'm a lawyer. I know my rights. I surrender myself to your custody, and once I'm in your custody, you have to protect my life and you can't torture me."

Detective Judge Treasure Steel walked him over to the wall and smacked his face into it. Not hard enough to do much more damage than a broken nose, but hard enough to make it clear that she wasn't messing around.

"Wrong city-state," she said.

SEVENTEEN

"Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine - they are the life, the soul of reading! - take them out of this book, for instance - you might as well take the book along with them."

- Laurence Sterne

Tristram Shandy

Out in the city, the influences of the disruption increased: a single, random and apparently meaningless psychotic episode became two, then four, then eight, as incidences increased exponentially. Innocent victims were stabbed by crochet needles, pushed out of hab-block windows, flayed by cheese graters, choked by roller skates, maimed by tables, decapitated - in increments - by belt sanders, drowned in vats of malmsey, impaled by curling tongs, exsanguinated by trocars, bludgeoned by rolling pins, sliced by sharpened coins, defenestrated by pillows, choked by razor blades, buried in salt, scarred by acetic acid, dissolved by lye, trepanned by spoons, savaged by teeth and nails, skinned by filleting knives and murdered by any number of objects that were lying about the home... and more, and more, in any and every combination.

For some reason, it was later said, only the Judges of Mega-City One were immune to the influences of this disturbance. That was not strictly true. A number of Judges suffered homicidal psychotic episodes along with everybody else - they just had more opportunity to call it something else and get away with it.

And more deaths, and more, and ever more. The rate was increasing rapidly. It was not impossible to imagine, if this were left unchecked, an entire population winnowing itself down, by degrees, until a single man was left, whereupon he would, in all probability, kill himself.

In a room, hung with a variety of artificial human figures, Jonathan Michael Stobie manipulated the limbs of a genuine wooden artist's marionette into a vaguely ballet-like pose. It is a question of attitude, he thought, a question of posture. The moving of a hand through a specific and consciously thought-out trajectory.

It was simple. Life was simple, if you only supplied the correct answers, either verbally or by way of body language. He remembered, when he was a child, how the juve-psychologist had laid out all these cards with pictures on them. He had been supposed to make up a story about them.

He had been quite proud of his story, which had involved a man jumping into a pool to save a little girl, and then giving her the kiss of life... and it had been a completely different story from the one he had made up in his head.

He studied the wooden doll for a while, then turned his attention to the thing on the bed. His latest acquisition, picked up in the Sector Three Smokatorium twelve hours before. He pulled back the polythene sheet.

It twitched under his gently exploring hand, and then coughed. Its eyes opened onto black, encrusted holes. His latest acquisition whimpered, possibly in anticipation of what was going to happen next without a visual cue as to what it might be.

Jonathan Michael Stobie leaned forward, preparing to make the ham-string cuts that would make it easier to get his acquisition onto a position more or less matching that of the wooden marionette.

With enormous force, a hand shot out from the thing on the bed. It was enough to snap the straps that had restrained it, and certainly enough to plunge a stiffened finger into Jonathan Michael Stobie's exposed throat. And that was the last he knew.

"You're insane, Drago San," Dredd snarled. "You're drokking sick!"

"And this is news?" said Efil Drago San sardonically. "I seem to recall us spending several hours in a hearing to establish just that precise point. And on any level playing field, that point is in actual fact valid. When a person is innately incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, it might or might not become necessary to deal with him, but terms of actual blame cannot and should not be attached."

"You know what evil is," Dredd said. "You get off on it. You're stone cold drokking evil to the bone!"

"And so?" said Drago San. "Let me tell you something - and bear with me, because it really does lead to something with a bearing on an actual point. Centuries ago, before the development of clone-matter grafts and forced regeneration made the issue nonexistent, there was a significant minority of people who went in for some quite horrifying, to a certain frame of mind, elective surgeries. People who were absolutely convinced that they were occupying the wrong bodies.

"I'm not talking about gender reassignment, of course. The fluidity inherent in the processes of building a functioning phenotype from a genotype means that ending up as the wrong sex is a perfectly common event - and something that can be reset, these days, or for that matter experimented with just for the hell of it, by a short course of retrogenic tablets.

"No. I'm talking about those who were deluded to believe that the biological age of their bodies was wrong - this was before the rejuve-processes that could reset the biological clock itself - and went through procedures that altered the grosser physical aspects of age, while in actual fact accelerating the destruction of still-viable cells. Peeling off safely dead and protective layers of skin, for example, to expose apparently fresher-looking layers. They couldn't get it through their heads that a biological organism only gets so many layers in its natural span.

"There were others, also, who attempted to modify their bodies drastically, in an effort to make them conform to the body-image in their heads. Not just by the way of piercings and tattoos, some would contrive to mutilate themselves, actively and irreversibly, even to the point of amputating entire limbs."

"Get to the drokking point, Drago San," growled Dredd. The current situation made the subject of amputating limbs something of a sore one.

"The point being," said Drago San, "that the physical and medical implications of missing a limb, or having a face fall off for that matter, are precisely the same whether the person concerned did it to themselves or not. Small-minded individuals, however, felt justified in sanctimoniously judging these people, even to the point of withholding necessary assistance, on the basis that they were culpable and deserved everything they got.

"You'll find that kind of holier-than-thou attitude throughout history, and often with the most specious of justifications... good freedom fighters and bad terrorists, good and bad AIDS, the atrocities committed, historically speaking, by so-called honest citizens upon the wretches in the stocks; the murder of family-planning counsellors, on the basis that all life is sacred so they have it coming - or for that matter, the terrorising of medical doctors because the best brains involved got all confused about the meaning of the world paediatrics..."

They were still in the Med Station, Dredd still cuffed to Drago San.

Initially, Dredd had thought that Drago San had been planning to cut himself free from him and simply kill him. Apparently, this was not to be the case.

"Do try to think things through, Dredd," Drago San told him. "If the little... procedure I have in mind works, you'll be in a state to be of considerable use, as opposed to the dead weight you are at the moment. Can't have you scampering off and leaving me to my own devices.

"Besides, so long as I'm cuffed to you like this, I'm still directly and absolutely in your custody. That works both ways. As long as I'm in your custody, and presenting no immediate threat, you can't kill me in cold blood - indeed, you'll have to do your utmost to keep me alive."

"You used that argument back in the Boranos system," Dredd reminded him. "And then you turned around and tried to kill us all."

"Oh, hardly," said Drago San. "Not directly, in any case."

"You tried to commandeer Justice One and left myself, the crew and Psi-Judge Karyn stranded on a planetoid to starve to death."

"Yes, well," Drago San said. "It wasn't as if I were holding a gun to your heads. And with judicious use of your... resources, who knows how long you might have survived, waiting for someone to notice you and pick you up? Some of you, at least."

Thoughts on the subject of cannibalism were, at this point, distressingly apposite to say the least.

Dredd was currently plugged, by way of subdermal electrodes, into the Med Station's portable dermal-regenerator, which was in turn slaved back via data-leads into the workings of Efil Drago San's paraplegic floater.

The floater's self-repair capabilities were nanonetic in nature, operating on the same principles as a ReFAB unit. Its internal workings were almost infinitely reconfigurable to a variety of templates - thus explaining why any number of its extra features had completely escaped some quite intensive Justice Department scans. They simply hadn't been there at the times when the floater had been scanned.

The floater's rep had boosted the power of the dermal-regenerator to the point where it was capable of repairing Dredd's damaged nervous system - at least well enough, and long enough, for them to make it out of the Psyko-Block alive.

The "cannibalistic" aspect of the procedure, however, lay in what was bridging the gap between the regenerator and Dredd: human tissue, from the med-tech Drago San had killed, material that the GIGO-processes of matter-refabrication could break down and use.

Fortunately, this tissue sample did not have to be anything more extreme than a pack of extracted blood. Using it was no more reprehensible, almost, Dredd supposed, than if it had been possible to use the genetically-cleaned plasma from the Med Station chiller.

If he kept telling himself that, he might even come to halfway believing it.

The process, though, had given Efil Drago San an idea, one which Dredd had flatly vetoed. This was what the current argument was about.

"...and the point is," said Efil Drago San, "that there really are worse things in the world than evil. There is nothing more repugnant than smug, self-satisfied 'good' doing what it's positively convinced is its duty.

"The worst things are the self-important, self-righteous morons and prigs who do evil under the delusion that it's right. Or in this case, refuse to countenance an act that is simply, self-evidently and pragmatically right out of moral turpitude and squeamishness.

"Think it through in your own terms, Dredd. Our Doctor Robert is currently plunging your City into chaos by means of his psychic bomb-"

"A psychic bomb that you had him putting together in the first place!" Dredd snapped.

"Here and now," said Drago San, "that's neither here nor there. The fact remains, here and now, that you don't stand a hope in hell of stopping him without weapons. And here and now, where else can we possibly be getting a weapon from?"

"How the drokk did you get in here?" Psi-Judge Karyn demanded, after Detective Judge Treasure Steel had produced her warrant card and Karyn had let her up off the floor. "The city's going crazy out there, Sectors Two through Nine. Some kind of neurological contaminant is causing people to flip out wholesale, it's spreading like wildfire and the whole of Psi-Division's supposed to be on Quarantine Alert while we try to find a way of stopping it."

"I have my methods," said Detective Judge Steel. "Only, I'm not going to tell you about some of them. You'll have to actively pull them out of my head - and I expressly refuse permission for you to do that."

"Suit yourself," said Karyn. "I couldn't care less. What the drokk is it you want?"

"I just want to talk," said Steel. "I've got what might be useful information in this current problem of yours, what with your city going crazy. All right, with your city going crazier. And by all accounts, you're a useful person to tell it to."

Karyn was no-nonsense enough of a Judge to recognise the plain fact that the Brit-Cit Detective Judge was not merely yanking her chain, and that what she had to say might help.

"Okay, spill," she told Treasure Steel. "What have you got?"

"The Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber," said Treasure Steel. "The adjudication board for the hearing of Efil Drago San, are dead. Killed by the self-administration of what was basically a nanonetically-based neural accelerator - it sent what was left of their nervous-systems into overdrive and blew them apart. Apparently, they thought they were injecting themselves with customised Stookie-extract, a rejuve-shot more powerful than anything else you'll find in the known universe.

"The accelerator was provided by Drago San, as a 'reward', via his lawyer, Barnstable Wheems. Wheems survived the blast. I was able to... interrogate him. Well, quite frankly, I just kept kicking him in the head until he told me what I wanted to know. He'll probably live. It might be a good idea to get him some medical attention quite soon, though.

"The whole purpose of Efil Drago San's hearing, apparently, was to see that he ended up in the Mega-City Psyko-Block, while having the Justice Department think it was all their idea. I discovered this when I finally got around to calling my boss back in Brit-Cit - and he was as surprised to find I was here discovered as I was to find he didn't know a thing about it. The whole thing was a setup from start to finish.

"To perform his part in this, Barnstable Wheems was subjected to some quite sophisticated mental conditioning... Do you see where I'm going with this? Little bit suspicious, don't you think, what with the population of every surrounding Sector suddenly experiencing what you might call mental problems?"

Psi-Judge Karyn scowled. "Give us some credit. Don't you think that was the first thing we checked up on, purely on the basis of an obvious association of ideas? The Psyko-Block sec-systems reported no problem."

Detective Judge Treasure Steel snorted. "Instant bleeding Justice. Do it fast and do it hard and just don't think about it. Tell you what, would you do something for me? You know, just as a favour?"

"What sort of favour?" asked Karyn guardedly.

"You know, just as a favour. Why don't you call up the Psyko-Block sec-system reports and read them properly. I'll bet you credits to day-old crêpes that what it actually says is something like: 'No problems here, none at all. And if anyone happens to be pulse-pumping out a psionic signal that's making entire Sectors flip out and go ape shit, it certainly isn't us. Honest'."

EIGHTEEN

"The figure performed its purpose admirably. Keeping perfect time and step, and holding its little partner tight clasped in an unyielding embrace, it revolved steadily, pouring forth at the same time a constant flow of squeaky conversation, broken by brief intervals of grinding silence."

- Jerome K Jerome

The Dancing Partner

In her private offices off from the public chamber in which the hearing of Efil Drago San had taken place, Chief Judge Hershey pored somewhat desperately over the death count figure streaming through her data-pad.

"Tens of thousands," she muttered, "and accelerating exponentially."

"If I can bring the subject up yet again," said SJS-Judge Slithe, "without, you know, having my head bitten off, I really think it's time we considered biting the bullet and going into big lie mode."

Hershey sighed. "The physical infrastructure is still in place?"

"Of course," said SJS-Judge Slithe. "Purely in readiness for the eventuality that it might ever be needed again, naturally. There have even been a number of maintenance upgrades over the years, apparently."

"I'll just bet there have been." Hershey sighed again. "Just what are we talking about here? Run it by me."

"Blanket-tranques and stumm-gas," said Slithe. "Riot-foam to deal with core disturbances, Mantas stationed around the perimeter, weapons packages set on auto-fire to deal with targets attempting to leave their designated area..."

"And when does the body count for that stop exceeding the body count we've got?" said Hershey.

"We're talking in terms of less than an hour," said Slithe.

"Oh Grud," said Chief Judge Hershey. "So, basically, we're less than an hour away from one of the worst disasters to strike the city, or precipitating one of the worse active atrocities. If we could only-"

It was at this point that her personal communicator on the desk began to peal. Since it had been set to allow only those calls of the utmost importance, Hershey nearly fumbled it in trying to snatch it up.

"Yeah?" she said. "This had better be... Psi-Judge Karyn? Yeah, Karyn, what is it you want?"

Overhead, the ion-shield was going through one of its periodic malfunctions. The stuttering light was like two jagged slivers of Plexiglas hammered straight into the living brain behind the eyes. At least, that's how it seemed to the eyes of Mona Valdez.

This was an area of Sector Three given over to transit stacks: thousands of credit-operated self-contained living modules lashed to scaffolding, originally intended as cheap spillover accommodation for passengers and transients using the Mega-City/Brit-Cit Bore. The shuttles hadn't run for more than a year now. Something about how Mega-City One and Brit-Cit had stopped being friends, so easy travel between the two had been suspended. Mona didn't know the details and didn't care.

It was that magic time of the night when the stacks seemed dormant, almost deserted. The night-people gone off about their business, the day-people curled up asleep or staring, muscle-locked and speeding away on methamphetamine. Mona stumbled through the ground level, giggling a little, heading for the ladder to the capsule that she currently called home.

The gaiety was entirely physical and automatic. Her body was just doing it; she wasn't feeling anything either way. She had ended her shift at the synthahol-bar hours before and a customer had wanted to party. Middle grade exec-type, working for one of the control-incorp subsidiaries. Seemed he was a good customer, a very special client. Volana had gone along with it like a shot, and basically, one Mona Valdez better go along with it too if she wanted to keep her credit fix.

It hadn't been a total loss. The very special client had access to some serious Janies, and Janies went with everything. It was funny how the Judges kept on saying how they were narcotics, like they were endorphin triggers or something. Endorphin triggers screwed you up, and Janies weren't like that at all. They made you bigger, in your head, like you knew everything. Like you could see everything that ever was, and everything that ever will be, and it was like it was all made of these little jewels and filled with love.

They made you feel like a goddess.

Until the point when you come down off them, of course. Mona had pulled out of the crash somewhere out there on the city Wall Orbital, on a cattle truck road train, sandwiched between the partition and some human dosser pressing the crusty growth on his bald grey head into the side of her neck.

She had started laughing and couldn't stop. It was just the residual, vestigial effect of the drug. Her credit tags were gone from her pouch, but in the mindless chaos of finding her way home, back here through the morning rush-hour, she had begun to wonder whether she had ever got them or not. One thing was for sure, though, if nothing else was. Volana would have already taken her cut. Volana would have taken it right off the top.

It was as if the pulsing of the corpselight in the sky was slamming at her head like fists. The giggling turned into a wracking heave of the lungs on the suddenly oven-hot air. Her heart accelerated and hammered.

Mona leant against a scaffold piling, staring with eye-bursting concentration at absolutely nothing until her breathing eased. After a while, the purple and black explosions behind her eyes faded.

She looked down at herself. She was slathered and crusted with blood. For some reason she'd forgotten about that.

A vision came back to her.

She's with the very special client, putting her face very close to his and lapping the saline crust of dried tears from his cheeks. Then she gently plants the tip of her tongue against his wide-open eyes. First one, then the other.

He tries to speak. She shushes him, kisses him softly on the mouth, moulding her lips around his to seal them completely, sliding her tongue slowly between the remains of his teeth, which she has shattered by way of a heavy soapstone figurine that he keeps by way of an ornament by his bed.

Now she sees herself crunching a heel of her hand down on the ruins of a nose, broken in the same blow that shattered his teeth. This shuts off his air supply completely...

The vision passed. It wasn't like Mona forgot about it, just that it had not been real. Less real than the hallucinations you sometimes got under the Janies, even. It wasn't worth thinking about.

Mona shuddered a little in the night time chill. It was time to find the transit-capsule she was currently calling home, before she crashed and burned completely. She clambered onto an access gantry and headed along it, smearing blood on capsules as she checked the embossed ID-numbers by touch.

As she walked, she stuck her hands in the pockets of her jacket and felt a sudden elation as her left thumb hit the small shape of a pill lodged in the lining, felt the distinctive double God-head embossed on it, the design that gave Janies their name.

That would at least soften the comedown for a little while.

"I can't believe it," Dredd growled, stalking down a Psyko-Block corridor with Efil Drago San in tow. "I can't believe I did this."

"Well, now, Dredd," said Drago San. "In actual fact, you didn't do a thing. I did all the actual work."

"I can't believe you talked me into going along with it," Dredd said, with more accuracy.

"Do you know," said Drago San, in the tones that left Dredd with the depressing certainty that he was going to go off into yet another one of the lengthy digressions that served him as a form of attritional torture, "I recall a time, long ago, when I had literary pretensions. A time when I thought I had it in me to be a Man of Letters."

Short of shooting Drago San in the head, an option that was becoming increasingly more attractive, Dredd had learnt to his cost that any response at all would merely prolong the agony. The only option was to bite his tongue and hope to drokk that Drago San would wind down of his own accord - or at least wind up at something like a point.

"Nothing much, you understand," Drago San was saying. "Just a small historical drama. I was merely intending to chip my two penny's worth of dreadful into the eternal mystery of the most horrible and ghastly murders of Jack the Ripper. Unfortunately, I became a little too involved in certain aspects of the research. So much so that I never got around to writing a single word.

"In any case, one of the things I remember from the attempt was the advice, from someone or other, that the last thing anybody needs to see in a text is what I believe is called a 'signal from Fred'. That's when Fred, or whomsoever the character might be, looks at something he's quite patently done, something that apparently came out of nowhere, and simply cannot believe that he did it.

"The implication, I gather, is that the writer of the text has just pulled something entirely out of, er, entirely out of thin air and is feeling subconsciously guilty about it. The idea is that such incidents and sudden reversals just don't happen in real life.

"The reality, of course, is quite the reverse. In reality, wives stab their husbands for no apparent reason - save for the crawling resentment that's been boiling up, over the years, for something hurtful he said a number of years before. Suicides are triggered by a random smell, reminding the suicide of some buried and long-forgotten trauma. In real life, straws really do break camels' backs.

"In real life, people say or do things they would ordinarily never do or say - for the simple reason that, at the time and in the circumstances, it's the only possible thing they can. If you want my advice, trite as it may be, the best thing you can do is-"

Quite what Efil Drago San's advice would have been, trite as it might be, nobody would ever know - because at that point the corridor walls seemed to melt and flow. A voice reverberated in Dredd's head:

"Is this on?" it said. "Are we on? Are we getting it on?"

"Ak!" Drago San exclaimed, slapping a massive hand to his head with a meaty smack. "What in all the various gods' names was that?"

"Ah," said the voice. "I see that we are. You know who this is, who I am. You can call me Doctor Bob."

"The Drokk?" Dredd growled. "What is this? What are you doing? Getting into my mind?"

"Easiest thing in the world, Dredd," said the voice of Doctor Bob. "For a psi. Unfortunately for me, I never was one. All the data streaming into me, all the thoughts of a thousand rewired psionics, the dementia of a hundred thousand maniacs... and I can't put a thought into a single head. I'm talking to you by ultrasound, from the security system speakers. I'm doing it by conductive resonance.

"I've been tracking you by the sensors, my mindless little familiars in the walls. You can't get out, there's no way out, there's nothing for you to do but blunder around and about. My girls are after you. They're slow but they're inexorable. There's nothing you can do before they catch up with you, and the metaceleration kicks in, and they slice and dice you.

"You're armed now, though. That might be a problem. You might find yourself in a position to do some damage. I can't allow that. Time to take you down."

"Oh yeah?" Dredd snarled. "You're the king of a hundred thousand psychos. You're gonna set them on me? Bring it on."

He hefted one of the items that he could not believe he had been talked into acquiring. At this point, here and now, it was hard to remember how acquiring it had been any kind of problem.

"What?" said the internally-reverberating voice of Doctor Bob. Strangely enough, it seemed more puzzled than anything else.

"Bring them on, you bastich!" Dredd roared.

"I beg your pardon?" said the voice of Doctor Bob. "Are you entirely in your right mind at this point, Dredd?"

"Oh, I say!" Drago San exclaimed. "Being the homicidal criminal mastermind who still happens to be the voice of reason, I'll have you know, is my bit! I've a good mind to - ak!"

This last as a positively audible and ultrasonic shriek (coming, if you could believe the voice of Doctor Bob, from the speakers attendant to the Psyko-Block sec-system) sent him lurching in his paraplegic floater and Dredd staggering on his feet.

"Can we have a little bit of quiet while I'm talking?" said the voice of Doctor Bob. "Good. Now, Dredd. Do you have the faintest idea of what it actually means to be psychotic, criminal or otherwise? Are you confusing it with psychopathic, which is a term that only applies to the actions, or the issues directly arising from those actions, in the two seconds of an entire lifetime when psychosis goes overt?

"You want me to set all my 'psychos' on you? Sure, then, why not? I'm opening up those cell doors now - be prepared for the horrific attack of a horde of catatonics, cataleptics, people cowering in a corner because they just can't bear to be touched, and people wandering around bemused because they can't connect when they're recovering from ECT or dosed up on lithium. Oh my Grud, the crawling horror of it!

"Or, what, do you want me to release the Psyko-Block security staff from their lockdown and tell them that we have some intruders? They'll take one look at you, see your badge and soil their underwear as a result of the spinal-jarring when they salute.

"Luckily, as you know, I have a third kind of people here - well, not precisely people, of course, not as such. All it takes is a minor tweaking of their control program, the shutting down of certain friendly-pattern-recognition routines."

Panels in the corridor walls slid back. Humanoid figures emerged. They had not quite the shambling and zombified aspect to their movements as Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam, but their movements were similar in that they held a sense of unstoppable power. With any last breath of their function, they would just keep coming.

"Cyborgs?" said Efil Drago San. "Now, I hope you're not going to get all squeamish on me again, Dredd. What with the fact, I gather, that their more human components are drawn from Justice Department personnel."

"Don't worry," said Dredd. "The Judges who willed their cerebral matter are no more alive and aware than the bones they allowed to be reconstituted into speed-bumps in slow traffic areas." He hefted the item that Drago San had contrived to procure for him. "Let's just hope there's enough human matter inside them to be recognised by this."

He brought up the item and fired. The slugs, completely ignoring the nearby Efil Drago San by means of the damping-field emitted by his floater, streaked for the cyborgs then, metres from their target, dissipated in an impressive but entirely harmless flare of light.

"Drokk!" Dredd shouted.

"That's one way of putting it," said Drago San dispiritedly.

"It is indeed," said the voice of Doctor Bob. "You'll be pleased to hear, Dredd, that certain obvious recent events aside, we here in the Psyko-Block have been scrupulous about following Justice Department directives - including the one about upgrading our cyborg-guards to protect them from a Screaming Meatgun. The entire Psyko-Block, in fact, is covered by a blanket nerfing-field, keyed to rewrite what passes for a Meatgun's targeting mechanism - quite simply, the slugs cannot harm living human matter.

"Oh, and it also might interest you to know that, in addition to disabling the friendly-pattern-recognition routines in the cyborgs, I've disabled the fail safes for non-lethal force. The cyborgs won't be trying to kill you as such - it's just that they won't know they're doing so. Have fun."

NINETEEN

"If all mankind, minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person was of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."

- John Stuart Mill

On Liberty

When Justice Department techs had finally run their diagnostics in detail, it was discovered that the Psyko-Block sec-system had spontaneously undergone a complete gestalt collapse: the cybernetic equivalent of personality fragmentation and a total nervous breakdown.

In the same way that a schizophrenic, for example, knows that the Machine Germans can't possibly be controlling his mind, it's just that he can't think straight at the moment because, you see, the Machine Germans are controlling his mind, the sec-system was simultaneously believing a number of things, most of which were mutually exclusive. In no particular order, it believed that:

(a) The Psyko-Block was suffering some internal emergency, so those inside must be evacuated in an orderly fashion.

(b) The Psyko-Block was under external attack, and so the blast shutters must be lowered and people kept inside for their own protection.

(c) Everybody had been evacuated.

(d) Everybody was already dead.

(e) Everything was perfectly all right.

The failsafe routines, being merely concerned with the system's function within a given scenario, had been unable to recognise that it was the scenarios themselves which were illusory.

And this was why Psi-Judge Karyn was currently outside an emergency maintenance crash-hatch, plugging a data-unit into the workings behind a cover plate, and pumping the Psyko-Block sec-system with the electronic equivalent of Largactil.

"You realise, of course," said Detective Judge Treasure Steel, who was watching her, "that the moment this takes effect the security systems are going to go from simply being crazy to thinking the Psyko-Block is under attack."

Detective Judge Steel had come along on this hastily-mounted operation on the basis that (a) she had been instrumental in finally pointing the Mega-City Justice Department in the right direction of the threat, (b) as a Brit-Cit citizen, the factor of having had no exposure to the Psyko-Block's disruptive influence might turn out to be a crucial factor, and of course, (c) who the hell was feeling up to trying to stop her? Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

"I predict," she said cheerfully, hefting the big MFG rifle that had been issued and converted to her biometric pattern, "that given the sort of defences you say this place has, we're gonna get our arses roundly kicked."

"Not necessarily," said Karyn. "Why do you think I've bought my friends?"

Indeed, behind them was a large contingent of Street Judges tooled up for riot-control, and an even larger contingent of Tactical Arms troops. There might have been less of them than were being held in reserve, should the reactivation of Big Lie procedures prove to be necessary after all, but there was enough firepower assembled here to fight a small war.

"We're in," said Karyn, as the data-unit bleeped and the hatch slid back. "Let's do this thing. Go, go, go!"

In a Sector Five hydroponic rec-park, where force-accelerated algae was trained over frames in an ultimately doomed attempt to simulate plant life in an aesthetically pleasing manner, a member of the janitorial staff named Simon Deed came upon the hunched form of a derelict in the shadow of one of the tanks. Obviously, the man was taking advantage of the heat-bleedthrough from the biomass-reaction. It was somewhere warm to sleep.

Deed decided to leave him where he was. It was not as if the rec-park was crawling with visitors who might have their day spoilt, after all.

On second thoughts, Deed decided to go over and stick his finger in the derelict's eye. There was no emotion attached to the thought; he just felt vaguely like doing it.

Deed strolled closer, the smells of urine and old sweat emerging to blend with the all-pervasive reek of the tanks.

The derelict was maybe seventy years old, possibly older. He lay there like a puppet with the strings cut, brittle hair clinging to a crusted scalp, an open sore flowering on his left temple, gurgling snores issuing from the back of his throat.

The snores changed in pitch and tone as Deed knelt down and reached out a hand. They became a kind of rumbling growl, as though some bare thread of consciousness had sensed the proximity of threat, but could do no more than issue the mildest of warnings.

Bursting through the cornea and gelid mucus, the feel of the optic nerve against his fingertip was... Deed didn't know what it felt like, quite, save that it made him feel slightly weird inside. He increased the pressure, sunk his finger in up to the third joint. It was harder than he had imagined, like pushing his finger into a lump of raw meat, which was basically what it was, he supposed.

The derelict shuddered, mouth working. His teeth had rotted to the gum line.

"Muh," he said. "Muh. Muh. Muh..."

After a while the body stopped shaking and was still. Deed pulled his finger from the socket, reclaimed his discarded mop and bucket and peaceably returned to his janitorial duties.

Absently, from time to time, he licked at his finger. There seemed to be some thing on it. It was almost as if sticking his finger into the eye of the derelict had been real.

"Drokk!" Dredd exclaimed as heavy shutters came down behind them, blocking off their line of escape.

"Do you know," said Efil Drago San, "that really is a bad habit. You should look into it. I mean, it's not even as if it's proper swearing, after all. What the hell is all this drokk, stomm and bastitch nonsense about, anyway?"

"Judges do not swear," Dredd told him, somewhat stuffily. It wasn't one of the things that Judges usually talked about, but the alternative would have been to have Drago San continually pestering him on the matter. "Occasionally, however, we need the stress relief that swearing brings, so we use null-words that don't really mean anything."

"I understand completely," said Efil Drago San. "'Prick' shall never pass your lips, but you'd kill for a nice relaxing drokk."

There was a pause.

"You've been saving that up for a while now, haven't you?" said Dredd.

"Well, I thought I might as well spend it," said Efil Drago San. "While we still have time."

The relatively slow progress of the cyborgs had given Dredd ample time to try the makeshift weapons they had manufactured in or taken from the Med Station. An anaesthetic dart from a hypo-gun in the leg of one cyborg had it proscribing a single circle before its automatic processes overrode its vestigial biological components and it carried inexorably on.

The restraining field emitter, used to immobilise injured bodies for minor surgery on the fly, had proved to be of no use at all. The cyborgs simply and mechanically shrugged it off.

A somewhat disgusting-looking article reminiscent of a handgun, which Drago San had fabricated out of... spare parts when constructing the Screaming Meatgun, had actually proved useful. Dredd had been able to take down two of the cyborgs by way of compressed bone-shard bullets to the head. The problem was, it had limited ammunition, and that had soon been used up.

All he had left that might be of practical use was the daystick he had liberated from the body of the orderly.

"Well, it looks like this is the end, old friend," said Efil Drago San.

"What?" said Dredd. "I'm not your friend and never will be!"

"I'm perfectly aware of that," said Drago San. "As the man whose name I'll momentarily recall says, when all you have left is the fall, it's how you fall that counts. I only said it to irritate you, and make your last seconds just that tiny bit worse."

From somewhere distant and below there came the muffled crump of an explosion. Alarms began to sound.

"Dear me," said Efil Drago San. "Whatever can be happening now?"

The cyborg guards, Dredd realised, had halted their advance. In unison, they turned and headed in the opposite direction. Later, it would be learnt that their modified command systems had been overridden. Dredd and Drago San were merely anomalous presences who must be detained - the fact that they would be unknowingly killed in the process was neither here nor there. Now the Psyko-Block was actively under attack, and the cyborgs were issued orders to meet that attack with lethal force.

Dredd did not have the chance to think about any of this at the time, however, because at this point something tore through his mind. It was like lightning, like the galvanistic discharge that had hit him so recently and all but disabled him. Only, here and now, it seemed to be coming from inside himself. From the centre of his head.

"Drokk!" He staggered, clapping gauntlets to his helmet. He felt an almost overwhelming urge to tear the helmet off, as though that would make it easier to plunge his hands into an unprotected head and tear the thing inside it out. He was only prevented from doing so by sheer force of habit: aside from entering the sleep-machines, and an extended period of time, some years before, spent wandering the Cursed Earth, he had never voluntarily taken his helmet off in his life.

"What?" said Drago San, with the surprised concern of one who was concerned for himself, but was actually feeling nothing. "What's happening?"

Dredd? The voice came like an explosion of static in his head. Can you hear me, Dredd? Is this getting through?

"Who is this?" Dredd snarled through gritted teeth. "What are you doing in my head?"

This is Karyn, Dredd, the voice said. Psi-Judge Karyn. A few years back, Psi-Judge Janus set a lock on you, set up a mental link. I'm coming in through what's, well, basically, the structured brain-damage that caused. It's probably hurting you like drokk, what with different psionic energy-levels and all. Sorry about that.

"Karyn!" Dredd exclaimed, the speed of direct mental transfer meaning that his exclamation of recognition had been going on even though Psi-Judge Karyn had continued talking for quite some while. "You took your drokking time getting here."

Yeah, well things have been getting pretty hairy out here, said Psi-Judge Karyn. And for a while we were looking in totally the wrong direction. Tell you about that later. For the moment, though, we're finally on the right track. We've breached the Psyko-Block perimeter and we're in the process of gaining partial control of the sec-system. That is, we would be if these drokking cyborgs would take a telling and lie down - die! Die, you motherdrokking piece of stomm! Why won't you - oh, you have.

"Are you okay, Karyn?" asked Dredd.

"Who are you talking to?" demanded Efil Drago San. "What is this? I demand to be told what's going on-"

"Can it, Drago San!" Dredd thundered, with such force as to momentarily shock Efil Drago San into silence. Then: "Are you okay?"

"Hardly the better for being spoken to in that tone," said Efil Drago San grumpily.

"Shut up! I was talking to Karyn!"

Yeah, I'm okay, came the voice of Karyn. We got Tactical Arms and Street Judge backup out the ass. It's still gonna take a while to get through, though. The signal causing the disturbances out in the Meg.

"Disturbances?" said Dredd. "How bad is it out there?"

Let's go into that later, yeah? said Karyn. There's disturbances. And the signal causing them is being relayed from the top of the Psyko-Block tower, but the actual source seems to be at a point maybe two floors under your current location. You're closer than we are. You wanna check it out?

"It's as good as done," said Dredd. "Can you give me an easy route?"

I can do you better than that, said Karyn. We have sufficient control of the sec-system to open up a couple of maintenance hatches. Get you there directly.

"Come on, Drago San." Dredd yanked on the cuffs tethering him to his prisoner. "We're moving."

"Well drokk me sideways with a pole and call me Felicity," said Efil Drago San cheerfully. "How perfectly lovely."

TWENTY

"And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you,

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you

I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

- T S Eliot

The Waste Land

If the private chambers of Doctor Bob had seemed a little excessive, in a holo-vid lair of a villainous mastermind sort of way, then the chamber to which Karyn had guided them via the maintenance ducts was something of a utilitarian disappointment. It was simply a large space, packed with racks containing rows and columns of translucent polyceramaline pods, from within each of which could be glimpsed a shadowy and wasted human form.

The pods were interconnected by tangles of electrical flex, data-cabling and tendrils of some fleshy substance that seemed disquietingly organic. The cables and tendrils clumped together to run up into the ceiling and thence, presumably, to the private chambers of Doctor Bob.

And that was all, in one sense - or rather, to one set of senses.

(A woman with vulpine eyes ranged an amorphous landscape of ponderously interflowing molten glass, her feet on fire, clutching the ragged bundle of a child to herself and sobbing. The face of the child was featureless, perfectly smooth.)

The chamber thrummed with psionic energy. Physical forms seemed to warp and shift, as though the mind was experiencing the vertigo of an endless mental freefall. Impossible images and thoughts sleeted through the cortex; words that no human ear would ever hear, no human mouth pronounce, burst in the vocal-centres. The buzzing and sparking of thought-fragments was overwhelming.

(A splintered, wooden parody of a dog flexed tendons seemingly wound from lengths of oiled rope, dragging its flaking, faded, painted bulk across the scraggy patches of a lawn burnt black and yellow. A wasted man, nearby, in striped blazer and a tattered straw boater, regarded the dog for a while, until it had dragged itself from sight, then turned his mad, black holes of eyes up to the sun.)

It was like being on the inside of a collective mind, a hive mind, and that collective was schizophrenically split.

"Little bit overstated, for my taste," said Efil Drago San. "All I asked the chap for was some means of creating confusion so I could make my escape." He sighed. "That's what one gets, I suppose, for leaving these busy little buggers to their own devices."

From what I can tell, you seem to be at the main source of the disruption, came the voice of Psi-Judge Karyn. Any way you can take it out?

"I can try." Dredd scanned the racks and pods, getting some idea of their number and coming up with a ballpark figure of maybe fifteen hundred. "You know better than me what's happening out there, Karyn. What sort of BC-factor are we talking about, here?"

BC-factor, of course, was the Justice Department technical shorthand for what kind of body count might be appropriate for any given situation, while still falling under the remit of Reasonable Necessary Force. In some situations it was better to think in shorthand technical terms.

Couldn't begin to tell you, said the voice of Psi-Judge Karyn. Last count put the deaths out in the Meg at tens of thousands and escalating.

Dredd came to a decision. "We have to try it."

He brought up the Screaming Meatgun and loosed a stream of slugs into the nearest rack of pods.

The slugs wavered in the air, as though hunting round themselves in puzzlement, and then dissipated.

"And that was supposed to help precisely how?" said Efil Drago San. "Our Doctor Robert already told you that the entire Psyko-Block was blanketed by a nerfing-field."

"And we were supposed to take his word for it without testing it out?" growled Dredd. "Oh well. It looks like we're gonna have to do it the old-fashioned way." He dropped the Screaming Meatgun with a wet and organic-sounding thump. "Go round these racks and start yanking leads."

"Now I really don't," said the voice of Doctor Bob, "think I can allow you to do that."

("We stumbled through the tunnels 'till we found the husk of Nail: desiccated and flaking and propped against the wall, crumbling into paper grey ash. The Strata Angel was there, a construct now, like gelid glass, shot with wormholes filled with lambent fluid. Shadowplay on translucent surfaces, macroforms splitting and flickering and pulsing. Somewhere somebody was shrieking, clawing at his face in the room of the broken machine...")

Shutters in the wall of the chamber racked back to reveal the forms of Doctor Bob together with Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam, standing in a loose kind of clinch reminiscent of the little tableau that had been presented to Dredd and Drago San on first entering Doctor Bob's private chambers. Though certain aspects might give rise, to a certain sort of mind, to dark suspicions as to precisely what it was Doctor Bob got up to in his off-moments.

Chief amongst these, perhaps, was the fact that Pebbles and Bambam were naked, their Nurses costumes having no doubt proved overly restrictive to any number of endeavours. The silver traceries of cybernetic implants were now clearly visible in their flesh.

"Can't have you throwing a monkey wrench into the works at this point," said Doctor Bob. "If the Justice Department has time to catch its breath and notice me, who knows what might happen?"

"Yeah, well I've got news for you," growled Dredd. "If you didn't know it anyway. Your perimeter's breached. Tactical Arms and Judges are coming for you as we speak."

"A small force, nothing more." Doctor Bob waved a negligent hand. "Easily dealt with in due time. For the moment, though, it's time to deal with you. And the good news is, my girls are fully charged-up. Ladies?"

The eyes of Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam blazed with light and they flung themselves forward with inhuman speed.

As the cyber-enhanced women flung themselves forward, their forms seemed to change. Something streamlined and demonic, their jaws elongating, their hands extending into talons.

Dredd had barely time to register this, because at that point Efil Drago San grabbed hold of him and held him in his powerful arms, in what for all the world was an embrace.

"What the drokk do you think you're playing at?" Dredd barked, trying to kick himself away.

"Hold still!" Drago San hissed, pinioning him. "We have to see if this... ah, yes, I see that it has. Work, that is, being the operative word. For the moment, anyway."

Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam had now stopped dead and were casting about themselves in feral puzzlement, like tracker dogs who had lost the scent.

"So glad that worked," said Efil Drago San smugly. "Since the masking-field that was supposed to protect me from Screaming Meatgun slugs was, as it were, redundant, I thought I'd modify the output to flummox cyborg sensors, should we happen to run into those chaps again. I'm glad to see that these charming young ladies here operate on the same general principles. Over to you, Dredd."

The first weapon to come to hand was the daystick Dredd had acquired back in the Med Station. Like any Judge from the streets, he was adept through long years of experience at cracking heads - but those had been predominantly human heads. There was no telling how far Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam might be enhanced in the armour-plated skull department.

Still, it was the only option going. He launched himself away from Drago San's bulk, flipping head over heels in mid-air - a vague creaking in his spine telling him it was probably about time he signed up for another round of rejuve-treatments - and felled the pair of enhanced women with a crack and follow-through and crack. Each blow was designed to transfer the maximum force possible through the skull and into whatever passed for the contents of the brainpan.

Amazingly, it seemed to have worked. Pebbles and Bambam went down as though poleaxed. For good measure, still hefting the daystick in his right hand, Dredd pulled the Med Station hypo-gun from his belt with his left and pumped a bunch of anaesthetic darts into the apparently unconscious bodies.

"Scratch one problem," he said.

It was only then, belatedly, that he realised what had been wrong with this scene. He looked down at the hand holding the hypo-gun to see the set of cuffs dangling from his wrist, the circlet that had up until recently been secured to Drago San quite definitively open.

He spun to see Drago San giving him a sardonic little wave.

"You appear to have things well enough in hand," Drago San said. "It seems to be a propitious time to reveal that I could have opened your handcuffs pretty much any time I liked. It's been useful to be under your custody and protection, but now, I feel, if I understand correctly from your incoherent mutterings, that the arrival of a number of other Judges is imminent. I think it's time I made my excuses and left."

"Hold it right there, Drago San!" Dredd snapped, training the hypo-gun on his former prisoner. "You make one move and-"

"And what, precisely, Dredd?" Drago San smirked. "Given my... well, given my bodily mass, and the number of darts I imagine are left in that hypo-gun, there's not a lot you can do. Nothing that would disable me enough to prevent me from doing what I need to do, in any event. I have, in fact, set my floater's self-repair routines in addition to disrupting the sensors of cybernetically-enhanced and comely young ladies. Allow me to demonstrate."

A bluish glow flared from beneath Drago San's paraplegic floater - and then, quite suddenly, he simply dropped down through a perfectly circular hole.

"Drokk!" Dredd pelted forward and looked down to see a perpendicular shaft, comprised of holes in successive Psyko-Block floors, the distant glimpse of what might or might not have been Efil Drago San dopplering away.

What the drokk was that? came the voice of Psi-Judge Karyn. Tracking shows something heading downwards, and it's going at a hell of a rate.

"That was Drago San," Dredd snarled. "He's making his break. Heading for the Undercity, probably. Do we have a Scumcatcher Detail down there?"

State of the city at the moment? said the voice of Karyn. I very much doubt it. We're over-extended here as it is.

"Oh dear me," said a voice from off to one side. "Do I take it that you've experienced a small inconvenience?"

For his part, what Dredd experienced at that point was a moment of complete and utter confusion. He simply could not, momentarily, work out who or what had spoken.

It would only be later that he had the time to wonder about this. The sudden escape of Efil Drago San was a distraction, to be sure, but there was just no way it could have made a trained Judge forget about the important matters and dangers at hand.

The nearest he could come to explaining it, when he had time to think about it, was that Doctor Robert Roberts (aka Doctor Bob) had some yoga-like ability to switch his essential self off and fade into the background. Become the equivalent of some dull little man, standing next to you somewhere crowded, who you only notice when you turn and walk right into him. Some form of protective colouration.

Whatever it was that he might have switched off, however, Doctor Bob had quite definitively switched it back on.

"This is becoming tiresome, Dredd," he said. "In a very real sense, the Psyko-Block is my home - and you've been blundering through it, making all kinds of noise and mess, and now you've brought along some equally noisy and destructive friends. I'm sick of having to think about you. I think it's time we ended it."

"Oh yeah?" Dredd hefted his daystick. "Bring it on, then. Let's end it, once and for all."

"So glad you agree," said Doctor Bob.

Energy-tendrils burst from the racked pods, striking Doctor Bob full in the chest. He lurched and staggered, flesh crawling and mutating on his bones, his body bulking at such a rate that his black polymer coat burst apart in shreds.

"LET'S DO THIS THING," he said, his voice taking on the aspect of a booming, bestial roar. "LET'S DO IT NOW!"

TWENTY-ONE

"I wish I loved the human race;

I wish I loved its silly face;

I wish I liked the way it walks;

I wish I liked the way it talks;

And when I'm introduced to one,

I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!"

- Sir Walter A Raleigh

In a place outside of space and time as we know it, creatures we have elected to call the Slaarg slopped and slunked around a Rift between the worlds.

<speak> Is all in readiness, <designation> Scientificator? <\designation> <\speak> said the All-high Dominator.

<speak> Yes, my <supplication> Dominator. <\supplication> <\speak> said the Scientificator. <speak> There is a consciousness on the other side of the <nomenclature> Dimensional Rift, <\nomenclature> attempting to control vast energies with which it is not compatible. Soon that basic incompatibility will tear the consciousness apart. All it will take is a single lapse. The rift will open up. We shall send the <nomenclature> Assimilation Drone <\nomenclature> through.

<paragraph>

It shall feed on the life there, and expand. It shall proliferate and eat that other world, converting it into that which we ourselves need to live. And then what they appear to call the sun... <\speak>

The monstrous form of Doctor Bob stalked into the chamber, its feet pounding the floor with such weight as to make it tremble. The polyceramaline pods shook in their racks with a sound like a giant shaking a box of Christmas tree ornaments.

There was something oddly familiar about Doctor Bob's new form. It was a kind of cross between an ape and the idea of a troll or the like, but there was something specific and particular that rang a mental bell. It was a moment before Dredd was able to access that specific and particular bit of general knowledge.

It was a neurological man, an illustrative demonstration of how the nervous system was connected to the brain, the size of each anatomical item and appendage mapped in relative size to how many connections there were. The hands, lips and sundry other items were bloated and distended, other elements atrophied; as a whole, the body had the aspect of a ridiculous grotesque.

Any sense of ridiculousness, however, was tempered by the fact that the new body of Doctor Bob was over thirty feet tall and still growing.

"YOU COME TO ME HERE, LITTLE MAN?" he roared. "HERE WHERE THE POWER OF A THOUSAND PSIONICS COURSES THROUGH ME? ALL RIGHT, FIFTEEN HUNDRED, IF YOU WANT TO GET PEDANTIC ABOUT IT!

"THE POINT IS, LITTLE MAN, HERE AND NOW, IN THE VERY CENTRE OF MY POWER, HOW CAN YOU EVER BELIEVE YOU'LL GET OUT ALIVE?"

Dredd glanced down briefly at his daystick and depleted hypo-gun.

"Karyn?" he muttered. "What's the ETA on you guys meeting up with me? I could really use some extra firepower here."

We're through the worst of the active resistance now, came the voice of Psi-Judge Karyn. Two or three minutes, maybe.

"I think that's gonna be too late, Karyn," said Dredd.

What? said the voice of Karyn. What are you talking about? I can't - hang on, let me access your sensorium for a sec-

There was a burst of quasi-lightning in Dredd's head that made those he had experienced before seem like scuffing his feet on a carpet and touching a radiator-pipe. Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone.

"GOING TO DIE NOW, LITTLE MAN!" the thing that had once been Doctor Bob roared with diabolic glee.

Dredd, came the voice of Psi-Judge Karyn. I think I've got a handle on what you're up against. I want you to do something for me, Dredd, and do it now.

"What to you want me to do?" Dredd asked.

Smack yourself in the eyes. Do it now!

"What?" said Dredd.

Oh for Grud's sake! the voice of Psi-Judge Karyn exclaimed in exasperation. Smack yourself in the eyes, Dredd! Do it!

Whether Psi-Judge Karyn had exerted some form of psionic control, or whether it was simply the tone of command in her voice, Dredd would never know. In that instant, in the here and now, it just seemed like the right and perfectly natural thing to do.

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.

<speak> Now, Scientificator <\speak> said the Slaarg All-high Dominator. <speak> The <nomenclature> Rift <\nomenclature> is breached. <command> Send the <nomenclature> Assimilation Drone <\nomenclature> through now! <\command> <\speak>

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.

Funnily enough, after its latest round of maintenance, the sleep machine dedicated to the exclusive use of Chief Judge Hershey now provided her with the best and most relaxing sleep she'd had in as long as she could remember. The banning - and scrupulous enforcement of that ban - of any SJS-Judge from within a hundred metres of her chamber was almost certainly pure coincidence.

The Psyko-Block was secured and its population of administrators and staff released - many of whom had not the slightest idea of what had been going on, having spent their shifts watching over secure, soundproofed wards and so forth with not the slightest idea that a small war had been waged in the corridors outside.

It also emerged that, over the years, Doctor Bob had... well, doctored the records of a large number of patients, giving them criminal records so they fell within his remit and ensuring a steady supply of warm bodies on which to perform his psionic experiments. There was some talk of releasing these bogusly criminalised patients into other facilities, but in the end it was realised that there were no facilities in the city quite as good as those in the Psyko-Block itself.

The Justice Department Psi-Division, indeed, had a field day. The contents of the pods that Doctor Bob had wired together, when decanted, had resulted in almost nine hundred survivors - at least in the sense that they were technically alive and breathing.

Of those nine hundred, two hundred were eventually awakened to the point where they might be generally classed as alive and aware. And some of those two hundred, with their awakened psionic powers, even managed to find a place within the Justice Department.

As opposed to the alternative, for anyone tagged as a psionic, in Mega-City One.

In a place outside of time and space, a somewhat shamefaced Slaarg - if that term can be applied to a creature that does not in actual fact have a face - prostrated itself before its all-high Dominator.

<speak> All hail the Great High Dominator, Regent of the Nine Dimensions, Conqueror of Worlds, whose very spittle is the- <\speak> it began.

<speak> Yes, yes, all right. We get the picture, <\speak> said the all-high Dominator. <speak> So tell me, my trusted Scientificator, just what the <nomenclature> Hell <\nomenclature> went wrong with the <nomenclature> Assimilation Probe <\nomenclature> in the world of these puny so-called <nomenclature> humans? <\Nomenclature> <\speak>

<exclaim> It was a complete success, my Dominator! <\exclaim> exclaimed the Scientificator. <speak> Well, a qualified success... <\speak>

<speak> Oh yes? <\speak> said the all-high Dominator. <speak> Qualified in what way, pray tell? I only ask in the interests of information, you understand. <\speak>

As was the Scientificator, and every other Slaarg who had been present at the time when the Screaming Meatgun slugs had come barrelling out of the dimensional rift and chewing everything in their path, the all-high Dominator was currently sporting a number of gaping and Screaming Meatgun-slug-chewed holes. It would be a matter of squeems before they healed up again.

<speak> Well, it was a complete and utter failure to tell you the truth. <\speak> said the Scientificator after a while.

<speak=heavy sarcasm> Oh really? <\speak> said the all-high Dominator.

<speak> Yeah, <\speak> said the Scientificator. <speak> The stress of crossing the Rift all but tore it apart as a coherent entity, but the backup operating systems survived. It was still do-able. It was busily assimilating puny humans like nobody's business, and then the so-called puny human world, and then the sun... then one of the puny human buggers hit it with those eating Things!> <speak>

The all-high Dominator slumped in on itself dispiritedly. It absently flicked an immature Slaarg, who was speculatively chewing on the matter seeping from a Screaming Meatgun-eaten hole, away with a tentacle.

<speak> I suppose we'll just have to give this puny-human world up as a bad loss, <\speak> it said. <speak> Turn our baleful attention to the Liquid Cheese Dimension or some such. <\speak>

<speak> Oh, Scientificator <\speak> it added, as an afterthought. <speak> Report to the Worms of Exquisite Flensing Agony for summary execution and send your replacement in, would you? <\speak>

<speak> Right-oh. <\speak> said the Scientificator.

<speak> And don't you dare just swap your pseudopodia around, change your head and pretend to be your replacement. <\speak> said the all-high Dominator. <speak> I'll check, you know. <\speak>

<speak> Oh. <\speak> said the Scientificator.

Treasure Steel walked off the Strat-Bat, onto the landing platform of the New Old Bailey - the central headquarters of the Brit-Cit Justice Department - fighting back a bad case of strat-lag and shouldering the holdall containing an almost excessively large amount of hi-tech Mega-City weaponry.

Once a Mega-City Justice Department gun had been keyed to someone's biometric signature, it apparently couldn't be reset for anybody else. She made a mental note to find a safe place somewhere to sequester them away - you never knew when a sudden gun might come in handy these days.

Especially now.

She'd spent the flight home on the Strat-Bat becoming increasingly worried, in fact. Whether her mission to Mega-City One had been legitimate or not, the fact remained that she had gone with five of the highest-ranking Judges in the Brit-Cit Justice Department, and was returning with them left behind and exploded over several walls.

She had simply not known what she might expect on arriving home.

What she certainly had not expected, on stepping out of the Strat-Bat, was to be greeted by a crowd of Brit-Cit Judges cheering her and a band playing.

Admittedly, the band was comprised of three of the younger CID-Judges, who got together in the New Old Bailey Level Nine refectory after-shift, and were forever trying to revive skiffle, despite all the howls of protest from people who wanted them to stop - but they were here now, and playing, and making a relatively decent fist of "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow".

Terry was there, also, which was surprising in itself - as an installation artist, who used every scrap of media coverage that her installations bought to denounce the Justice Department as an abomination subjugating and suppressing the common man and/or woman, she was about as far from being a Judge, and welcome in the New Old Bailey, as a person could get.

At least, welcome as a guest of any kind, rather than banged up in the cells on some trumped-up charge after participating in a Civil Rights march.

For a dizzying moment, Treasure wondered if she had died or something, and this was one of those visions of all the people you knew acting weird that you were supposed to get.

The reality of the situation, though, was instantly reconfirmed when she was hit by her son, Callum, in that ballistic way that three-year-olds - who are supposed to be barely able to toddle - slam into you at chest-height like they've bounced off a trampoline.

"Mama Tesher!" he shouted. "Whaaya bringme?"

Detective Judge Treasure Steel very carefully held her bag full of Mega-City weapons keyed to her biometric signature away from her three year-old son's flailing hands.

There's an experience that Mega-City Judges are never gonna have, she thought.

She wondered what Callum was doing up this late, before realising that was the strat-lag talking. It was making her forget that, until he was enrolled in some school or other, and thus needed a set routine, Callum could stay up any time he liked.

Terry rescued her by grabbing Callum with one hand, lifting him up by his overalls like a cat is lifted by the scruff of its neck, and holding him out of the way while she grabbed Treasure with the other and planted the sort of kiss on her that makes time stop for a while.

"God, but I'm proud of you," she said when time started again. "What is it about you? You're supposed to be all Establishment, but you just go around doing this thing of screwing them over."

"What?" Treasure had heard what her wife had said; she just didn't know what she meant.

"She means how you went to Mega-City One and ended up telling them how to do their job," said her boss, Chief Detective Judge Armitage, who was standing off to one side, hands thrust into the pockets of the crumpled raincoat he habitually wore. He wasn't exactly smiling, but he was coming as close to it as he ever did. "And also how you single-handedly got rid of what was basically the Brit-Cit Justice Department's single biggest embarrassment."

"What, the Sacred and Most Worshipful Order of the Star Chamber?" said Treasure. "That wasn't me, that was Drago San."

"Yeah, well." Armitage glanced sardonically at the assembled Brit-Cit Judges, several of whom were giving Treasure the thumbs-up. "The rumour-mill word is saying that it was down to you. I wouldn't disabuse them if I were you."

A thousand kilometres southwest of Honolulu, in international waters, lies Leviathan - five cubic kilometres of floating platform, originally a Japanese landfill that was detached and set adrift during the Rad Wars, when a misdirected cobalt bomb triggered the eruption of Mount Fuji.

Leviathan has grown over the years, feeding on the seaborne detritus of the Rad and any number of other wars. It has absorbed oil rigs and shipwrecks, implosively decompressed submarines and the tsunami-hit remains of kelp-processing installations.

Banks of salvaged heavy-duty turbines allow it to move more or less at will - provided it restricts its moments to international waters. It subscribes a random course, for the most part, dishes on its patchwork superstructure tracking bootstrap-launched geostationary comsats through the crystal-clear waters of the Pacific - crystal clear because the Pacific Ocean has been thoroughly sterilised. It's as dead these days as the Black Atlantic... just a little bit easier to wash off.

Over four hundred thousand people live on Leviathan - the flotsam and jetsam of the world. There is a massive clash of cultures, of vestigial religions, of ideologies. There is no apartheid, so far as that term applies to the city-states of the world - there is no bar or restriction upon mutants, or alien-crossbreeds, or what the city-states of the world regard as bio-engineered freaks. The simple fact of being here and being alive means you have the right to survive here - however long you may manage to survive.

Leviathan falls under no jurisdiction and asks for none, operating as a clearing house for the various black economies that run under the skin of the world and stretch their tendrils into even the most so-called civilised of city-states. It has become the testing ground for technological and biological experiments outlawed in even the most draconian of city-states, who tend to believe that they can subject their citizens to almost anything.

Leviathan appears on no official maps, remaining fiercely independent of any external influence. The basic nature of its tactical position, remaining as it does, in relative terms, equidistant to four separate continents, means than any attempt to annex it would tip the international balance of power irrevocably. Besides, Leviathan has any number of salvaged missiles and similar weapons, pointed at any of the city-states which might attempt to cause trouble, and some of them may even still work.

The clans who slice the Leviathan raft between themselves agree on this if nothing else - if much of the world outside of the city-states and their Justice Departments has devolved into chaos, Leviathan is the last bastion on Planet Earth for the simply and frankly Lawless.

Just the sort of place, thought Efil Drago San, to hole up for a while and catch his bearings.

The plain fact was that, since his escape from the Psyko-Block, Drago San had found himself at something of a loose end. So much of his mind, he realised, had been taken up with plotting his escape, and orchestrating events so as to make it possible, that he had quite forgotten to plan what he was going to do once he actually escaped.

Using the matter-disruptors built into his paraplegic floater to tunnel his way through several layers of Psyko-Block had depleted his power-reserves quite a bit, so by the time he had broken through into the Undercity, he had barely enough left to make a controlled landing on a dank and slimy pile of rubble. He had sat there, in the dark, while the floater replenished its power cells, wondering whether the Undercity scavengers or the Justice Department patrols would find him first.

In the event, he had been found by what he had come to think of as Morlocks - the engineered, half-human minions that he himself had introduced into the Mega-City One Underlevels when he had been running a small enterprise known as the Killing Zone.

Even though it had been several years, these Morlocks had seemed to recognise him - revere him, even. They had dragged him back to their makeshift encampment, where he had participated in a number of their quite repulsive rituals in the part of what appeared to be a minor deity. He'd had no idea if it was the sort of part that ended up being sacrificed, because as soon as he had sufficient power, he'd called down one of the self-contained flier-pods that he'd installed on the Undercity roof in case of eventualities just such as this.

The Morlocks had seemed quite sad to seem him go. Then again, that might have simply been due to the demolition charges he'd left behind in their encampment when he went.

In any case, the brief Undercity sojourn had given him time to contemplate his options, if not actively brood upon them. He could escape off to the stars again, but his short time out in space had left him heartily sick of it. That might have seemed a little odd, he supposed, given his Puerto Luminan origins, but the point was that Puerto Lumina had been an entirely human colony - however inhuman the conditions had become. There simply weren't enough people, human people, out there in space itself to keep him amused. And amusing himself with alien life forms just hadn't been the same.

Showing so much as his face in Brit-Cit wasn't even an option, let alone attempting to resume his previous position of power. Well, there were other cities. The main thing had been to simply get out of Mega-City One.

After a somewhat tortuous route that had involved a sub-orbital commercial jump-canister, a stolen flier and a gun smuggler's hovercraft, Drago San had arrived on Leviathan, and had gained entrance by the time-honoured method of defenestrating one of the Clan guardsmen, posted on one of the more peripheral pontoons, and relieving him of his weapons and identification. The decided advantage of a paraplegic floater, when set to simply serve as a replacement for legs, was that it was utterly silent.

Time to keep his head down for the moment, Drago San decided, memorising the body's Clan-markings for the time when it might be appropriate to assume them himself. Take the time to learn how things work around these parts, and then, who knew? There might just be a first-strike missile-system here on Leviathan with his name on it.

Dredd was back on the street, shaking down his senses. His vision was coming in just that little bit too sharp and bright. He had no idea if this was the result of the nerve-regeneration Med-Division had given him, or because of his new-model cybernetic eyes. There had been several generations of upgrades, apparently, since the last time he'd had them replaced.

Sector Nine seemed subdued in the aftermath of the Psyko-Block's psycholeptic pulse. It wasn't that there were less crazies around, Dredd knew, because the number that had been pulled down by Judges when they had flipped out had hardly made a dent.

The secondary effect of the influence that had turned people, briefly, into homicidal maniacs was to leave them with the unconscious and fundamental conviction that their acts, while under the influence, had in some sense not been real. Even confronted with the hard - or, rather, in most cases, the soft and sliced up - evidence of the bodies, they had been unable to comprehend that it mattered in any real sense. It was like a blind spot in their heads.

There were killers out there now who had killed and then just simply got on with their lives without giving it a second thought. Too many to catch by normal means. There were plans, apparently, to issue a questionnaire with one of the questions reading, "Did you brutally murder someone last week?" - in the hope that people would tick the yes-box without thinking or caring about it. What the drokk, it might work.

Dredd gunned his Lawmaster down a slipway and through a junction, noticing that all the traffic he encountered was being actively and somewhat pointedly on its best behaviour. Even though the whole point of a Judge's uniform was to signify the job rather the man, there was something about him that citizens recognised and responded to. Said response, basically, was that of having the fear of Grud forcibly inserted.

People didn't exactly fall over themselves to tell Dredd jokes, but he seemed to recall one about how the Queen of Brit-Cit - or Little Britain, or whatever it had been called when they'd had a Queen - thought the world smelled of fresh paint, because ten yards ahead of her there was always a man with a fresh pot and a brush.

It was gratifying in one sense, he supposed, to see people showing such respect for the Law around him, but on occasion it could get tedious. Every person in the world was committing a crime, of course, however minor, if you decided to make it your business to go after them. But go down that route too far and you would end up thinking in terms of that drokking story about jaywalkers and kneecaps.

"Anything for me, Control?" he said into his comms pickup. "You know, anything you think might be important enough for a Judge of my, quote, calibre, unquote?"

Rockets on the subject of leaving him out of the action, on the basis that he was too important, had been duly delivered. This made the fact that Control wasn't currently streaming him crime-data a little bit worrying.

"We got stuff," said the voice of Control. "We're just holding you back a little for when the thing starts."

"Thing?" said Dredd. "What thing?"

"Hey, you okay, Dredd?" the voice of Control asked. "Have you forgotten what day it is? It's Swami Whompa Day."

"Drokk!" What with one thing and another over the previous days, this had gone completely out of his head. Maybe it really was time to book in for another rejuve.

The Thirty-seventh Day Whompatarian Adventists were one of those religious sects based on a creed that had originated on Earth, been taken up by aliens and then imported back to Earth again. They were one of the few religious sects whose observances were banned under Mega-City Law - something that ordinarily only happened with activities like ritual human sacrifice.

The Thirty-seventh Day Whompatarian Adventists weren't quite that bad, but their celebrations on the day of their leader Swami Whompa's birth had been banned in response to the city-wide chaos it tended to cause.

The details would be too long and tortuous to go into in an account such as this, but the simple upshot was that, due to the Chinese-whispering nature of their creed, Thirty-seventh Day Whompatarian Adventists celebrated their holy day by sacrificing livestock, which had been genetically engineered and bred for that especial purpose.

Large livestock. By catapult.

From the tops of hab-blocks.

At the precise moment that Dredd was recalling all this, the time-readout in his helmet incremented noon, and from above came the approaching and terrified lowing of cattle.

The first Jersey cow hit a hov-cab, flattening its canopy and sending it skewing into the side of a tanker truck. From then on, things only got worse.

As the world went to hell around him, though, and he gunned the Lawmaster forward on overdrive, Dredd found that he had to control what might have been a relieved sigh. There had been a few days of complications, of having to deal with subterfuge and vested interests of all kinds; of having to cope with any number of different factions, each and every one of them with their own agenda.

It was good, in a sense, to have a clean and simple job in front of you.

A return to sane reality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Stone studied Fine Art and Visual Communication. After a spell in advertising, he found that most of his energies were being transferred to the written word. Scripting for computer games and comics led to writing full-length novels for such well-known titles as Judge Dredd and Doctor Who - work which he continues to this day. His experiment in self-publishing an original novel, The Mary-Sue Extrusion, can be obtained from: www.cafeshops.com/extrusion.

Extract

Other Titles

Indicia

Title Page

Prologue

Act I: The Setup

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Interlude: Cerebral Break

Act II: Trial and Error

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Act III: Walking Through Walls

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Epilogue

Author Biography