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  "If this is the right ship..."

  Dredd stooped and brushed a thick layer of stone dust off one of the canards. "Reckon that's enough evidence?" On the broken metal of the winglet were the letters "BF-176".

  "Guess so." Tyler pocketed his scanner. "Here's the hatch."

  Dredd stepped up. "Still sealed. If Loengard was aboard, how did he get out?"

  "Escape pods?" offered the Tek-Judge. "These VTOLs carry three lifeboats in a rear compartment. He could've got out that way."

  The hatch was corroded and stiff, but between them they got it open. Tyler flinched as a fetid, rotten meat smell wafted out of the hull space. Dredd gave him a level stare. "You up for this, kid? It's not gonna be pretty."

  Tyler gave a weak grin. "We got a job to do, right?"

  "Right," said Dredd, and he descended into the crashed ship.

  They found corpses in three compartments, most of them civilians in bland coveralls that bore the West 17 logo. Even in the ghostly dimness cast by their torches, Tyler saw the subtle hardening of Dredd's jaw when they came across a pair of Judges. The Luna-City officer suddenly felt compelled to say something.

  "Did you, uh, know them?"

  Dredd studied the badges of the dead men. "No."

  "You think they were COE?"

  "Whoever they were, they didn't deserve to be left out here to rot. Loengard's got a lot to answer for."

  Tyler ran his torch beam over the bodies. "Looks like energy weapon impacts. Close range."

  The senior Judge nodded. "Not just on the deaders, either. There's blast marks on the walls, and I saw burns on the fuselage outside. Reckon their Skorpion decided to bite the hand that made it."

  "That doesn't make any sense," Tyler frowned. "You think Loengard had something to do with this?"

  "We know he lied about Skorpion. Maybe we can find out what else he was keeping secret. There are answers here. We just gotta find 'em." Dredd pointed in the direction of the ship's stern. "Operations compartment is this way. Let's go."

  "Well, sneck," began Flex, hands on hips in a pose that wouldn't have looked out of place on the cover of Mega-Muscle Monthly. "This is a drokking mess, Alvin." He surveyed the blackened remains of Bendy's place, fire foam still seeping out of the windows and doors.

  The shuggy hustler coughed. Alvin was still dirty with the soot of the inferno and he smelled like burnt plastic. "Place went up like a bomb, Flex." He mimed an explosion with his hands. "Fwoosh!"

  "That would be Bendy's liquor in the basement." Flex shook his head. "The Eye's not pleased about this, Alvin. He wants someone to strangle." The thug gave the other man a look that said it would be him unless he gave the right answer. Flex was secretly glad he was here out on the street and not back at the Carnivale, where it might have been him Cortez was taking it out on.

  "Hey, I called you as soon as I saw him!" Alvin insisted. "Flex, I swear to ya, it went down just like I said."

  "Smythy killed Dwayne and blew Bendy's place up. That's what you're telling me? Smythy did it. On his own."

  Alvin nodded again. "Yup. I know, it's hard to swallow, ain't it? But he seemed, I dunno, creepy."

  "Creepy," Flex repeated. "Creepy how?"

  The hustler's hands made vague motions. "Well, Smythy, he's a greasy little twerp usually, ain't he? But tonight, he was different. Like, the lights were on but no one was home, get me?"

  "No," said the thug, "but never mind. Sneck, the chances I've had to kill that scrawny little dick over the years and now I wish I'd done him."

  "So, uh, you hear what happened to Bendy?"

  A nod. "Lost his hand. Damn near bled out. He's at the Sector Med but he won't be coming back."

  Alvin decided not to press Flex on what he meant by that. "Whatcha gonna do now?"

  Flex waved a thick finger in the hustler's face and Alvin recoiled. "You see that freak again, you find me, you drop whatever the drokk you're doing and find me, got it?" Alvin nodded and Flex sniffed back at him. "But take a shower first."

  The other man looked back at the ruined strip club. "What about, you know, my action? I mean, with this place gone I got nowhere to work the rubes." He managed a weak smile. "Maybe I could step up to the Carnivale, work the shuggy hall for Mister Cortez-"

  Flex shook his head. "You're the wrong kinda guy, Alvin. You know that. You're, whaddaya call it, more a low-end hustler."

  "But now I got no way to earn!" he shrilled. "I got no place to play now!"

  The thug was already walking away. "Better find a new line of work, then." He was halfway to his car when Alvin shouted his name out.

  "Flex! Flex! Wait! I got something! Something else, maybe could help you."

  "Let's hear it."

  Alvin wrung his hands. "Smythy. One of Bendy's girls, she was sweet on him for a while."

  Flex raised a thick black eyebrow. "That so? What, that one with the big gazongas?"

  "Naw, the skinny one. Jayni. Jayni Pizmo."

  The enforcer walked back to Alvin and reached into a pocket. He produced a thick wad of credit bills and began to thumb them off. "Keep talkin'."

  "She lives down in Fillmore Barbone Block, I think."

  "Smythy's got a girl, huh? Maybe Mister Cortez could give her a little hospitality. Encourage her boyfriend to come visit, eh?" Flex stuffed the bills into Alvin's open palm. "Here. Don't spend it all at once."

  BLOWBACK

  Deeper inside the transport ship, the hull spaces were distorted and choked with twisted metal. Parts of the fuselage were torn open, mostly from where falling masonry and chunks of roadway had toppled in on the crashed vessel; but there were other kinds of damage that didn't match that profile at all.

  "The way I figure it," Tyler said, "they must have made an emergency lift-off for some reason, but the ship didn't get too far before they came straight back down."

  Dredd agreed. "The pilot tried to land this thing on the freeway and it gave way underneath. The ship dropped into the pit beneath and the road came down on top of it. Instant burial."

  "That's about the size of it-" Tyler jerked suddenly and swatted at his helmet. "Aagh! What the drokk?"

  The other Judge turned his torch on him. "What's with you?"

  "Nothing!" The Tek wiped a gauzy string of fibres off his gloves. "I just blundered into something, that's all. Cobwebs. Nothing to worry about."

  "Don't be so sure. Bugs out here will eat you alive." Dredd pointed forward toward a hatch. "This way. Operations is through there."

  Dim emergency lights were still running in this part of the transport, and the feeble trickle of power from the battery packs opened the hatch in fits and jerks. It was hard to tell how many people had been in the operations compartment originally; the remains of bodies were strewn everywhere in dismembered disarray, frenzied claw marks cutting across dead flesh and inert metal alike.

  Dredd regarded the corpses with grim intent. "Execution pattern is erratic. Whoever did this wasn't just killing because they had to."

  Tyler gulped at the cloying air. "Dear Grud. Some of these poor spugs were ripped apart."

  The other Judge nodded. "This wasn't just murder. The killer was out of their mind." His face twisted. "What the hell was Loengard up to out here?"

  Tyler pushed away his disgust and began a check of the consoles and screens ringing the compartment, careful not to step on any fallen tides of paperwork or data discs dropped in the melee. It was a charnel house in here. "I can't figure something," he said. "We know Loengard and a few others got off before the crash. If whatever did this was running loose on board, why didn't they hit the self-destruct?"

  "They tried." Dredd pulled the top half of a dead body off a console that still glimmered with faint power. "Look here. The destruct control is smashed. This poor fool was going to hit the button when it killed him."

  "Whatever it was." Tyler gave an involuntary shiver. "Hey, how do we know that, uh, it isn't still alive, on board somewhere?"

  Dredd threw him a non-committa
l look. "Because we're both still breathing."

  "Good point." Tyler dropped to his haunches. "Here's the main telemetry monitor. Whatever Loengard's people were doing two years ago, they were using this to keep a record of it." He tugged open a panel on the side of the unit. "Some of the memory cores are still intact. I think I can pull these, Dredd, maybe salvage something..." When the senior Judge didn't answer, Tyler came up with his gun at the ready. "Dredd? Dredd!"

  "Over here." The lawman was bent over a carcass at the back of the compartment. "What do you make of this?" Tyler turned his torch on the corpse at Dredd's feet.

  "It looks human."

  "Barely." Dredd ran a gloved hand over the body. "There's some kind of coating on it. Almost like a polymer."

  "Organic?" said Tyler. "Something secreted? Maybe it's a mutant?"

  The Judge's eyes narrowed. "It's too engineered for that. This is biomechanical. There are synthetic components melded into the flesh." He held up one of the corpse's hands; the fingers were tipped with barbed metal claws, rusty with old blood. "Reckon we found our killer." The other hand was a club of distorted metal and meat ending in a bony gun barrel.

  The Tek-Judge nudged the corpse with his boot-tip. "You sure it's dead?"

  Dredd indicated the killer's head; most of the skull had been ripped away and slagged into molten bone by an energy blast. "I think that's a given, Tyler."

  He knew the pattern of the discharge instantly. "Plasmatic bolt, wide dispersal. Fired from point-blank range." Tyler licked his dry lips. "Drokk. The Skorpion."

  "Give the man a prize," Dredd replied sardonically. "This creep shot himself in the head. But look at this. Claw marks on the killer's other arm."

  Tyler blinked. "He was trying to stop himself from shooting himself? I'm not up on the terminology that the Med-Judges use, but isn't that what they call crazy-insane?"

  Dredd stood up and nodded toward the telemetry console. "Get those memory core outta there. If our snitch at West 17 knows about this wreck, then it stands to reason that others do as well."

  "The informant might have been one of the other survivors," Tyler said, voicing Dredd's thoughts.

  "Yeah. And all it took was the murder of a few dozen men and women to help him grow a conscience."

  Tyler was about to add something when the sound of twisting metal reached their ears; both men heard the noise and froze.

  One turned to glance over his shoulder at Three. Two and Four had not reacted to the sound, but as mission leader, it was One's job to ensure that the correct operational protocols were followed to the letter. Three's face, like all of the assassins, was hidden behind an identical breath mask and goggle suit. The only betrayal of any human behaviour from him was a slight cocking of the head, the very merest hint of contrition.

  One flicked a glance at the unsteady decking of the downed VTOL. He had no idea of Three's real identity, just as Two and Four were ignorant of each other, just as every field asset of the company was as faceless as any other. They were masked when they assembled for the mission, and they would die masked or return with the job complete, without ever showing anything of themselves to the others. It was the way things were done. Every agent was expected to show a certain level of skill; Three had made an error that had possibly alerted their targets, and One would have been well within his rights as mission leader to terminate Three for this mistake, if he felt so inclined.

  Soundlessly, One slipped to Three's side. He wanted an explanation. Three gestured at the deck. Beneath Three's boot was a large arachnid, black as pitch and thick with a matted coat of hair across its body. Clearly, the spider had attempted to bite the agent and Three had been forced to kill it. One gave Three a nod of acceptance. It would not have helped the efficiency of the mission to proceed with only Two and Four, and Three would have surely perished, screaming, if the mutant creature had been allowed to inject its venom. One signalled with the blade of his hand and the rest of his team moved on, closing the distance to the operations compartment.

  One hesitated; Three would have to be disciplined, of course, but that was a matter to address after the targets were dealt with and the mission was concluded. He gave the dead spider a cursory look and walked on. One was ignorant of the thin trace of arachnid pheromones the dead insect had emitted in its death throes, unaware that both he and Three were tracking the potent chemical marker deeper into the wreck on the soles of their boots.

  Outside, in the dark corners of the highway stanchions where sunlight seldom reached, web fibres were sent twitching as the alarm-scent touched the sense-palps of silent, patient hunters. Chemical switches in their simple, predatory brains were triggered, primitive animal indicators that spoke of danger, of invasion and prey. With quick motions, a tide of black forms emerged from their hiding places and funnelled into the gaps in the dropship hull, legs and bodies hissing over one another in a whispering chorus.

  There was a breakdown lane on the Danny Jackson Bridge, and every mile or so the yellow-and-black shape of an emergency signal beacon. At peak hours, traffic across the DJ was a blur of vehicles, and notwithstanding the logjam that had locked the bridge solid a few days earlier; by and large, it was one of the swiftest pieces of highway in the whole of the Big Meg. Wess could see this up close and personal as he staggered out of Jayni's podcar and listed toward the beacon box. Barely an arm's reach away across the white line of the emergency lane, huge roadliners and mopads thundered past. The wind from their passage tugged at Smyth's legs as he walked.

  The gun had explained to him that time was a factor. Security cameras would note his passage and, when they spotted the blue car had not left the bridge when it was supposed to, a patrol drone would be sent on its way to find him. Wess had a "window", according to the gun. If he failed to meet his target in that time, then, the weapon told him, in its clipped, matter-of-fact way, that it would punish him.

  Smyth sank to the road and crouched there, shivering. "What did you mean by reprisal?" The question bubbled out of him.

  For a moment he thought the weapon was ignoring him, but then he saw the telltale flicker of the processor lights. "Interrogative: What is the motivational force behind your desire to terminate Ruben Cortez?"

  "I asked you first," he grated. "Why are you doing this? You're just a tool." Wess regretted the words the instant they left his mouth. "Well, what I meant was-"

  "This unit will survive," said the gun. "For that to occur, all threats to continued existence must be eliminated."

  In the back of Smyth's mind the petty crook had a ghost-image of the man he was supposed to kill tonight. Trying to hold it in his thoughts was like capturing smoke; all he could see was a fleeting shimmer of a face, the impression of someone. He had the name, though. Dolenz. Chim Dolenz. Wess didn't understand how he could suddenly know this man. It was the pistol, the thing was stuffing his head with the knowledge whether he wanted it or not. "He's just some science geek," Smyth insisted. "What the sneck can he do to us?"

  "Target Dolenz is a clear and present danger." The weapon reinforced its point with a flicker of painful white light across Smyth's vision. "He must be terminated with extreme prejudice."

  Wess got to his feet, buoyed up by a sudden rush of sweet adrenaline. "He's coming?"

  "Affirmative. Target vector inbound."

  Smyth fought down a churn of bile in his guts. "I don't wanna do this anymore. Let me go." He hated how lame he sounded.

  "Negative. Proceed with mission."

  "NO!" He found the strength to shout and flailed around, fighting his own muscles. "I won't!"

  There was a sensation behind Wess's eyes, the equivalent of a sneer; then the white agony came crashing down on him and he wailed under the assault. For a split-second, he could feel every single one of the millions of nanodes teeming inside his bloodstream and organs, each a microscopic razor. The gun became him, turning Smyth to face the highway. The optic jelly of his eyes distorted in unnatural ways, zooming in on a mid-sized green slabs
ter as it made its way across the bridge in one of the opposite lanes. Up came the knot of flesh that had once been his hand, the venting ports and barrel array emerging from a clotted ball of fingers. Colour bled out of Wess Smyth's vision, everything reducing to a stark, solarised whitescape, needles of burning fire lancing into his skull. He released a burbling scream.

  The gun subsumed him. Time became fluid and slow, the passage of the vehicles leisurely and unhurried. He saw the kill shot unfold. The pistol spat a lance of congealed plasma, the bolt fleeing from the hot muzzle. The dart was immaculately timed, passing between the flanks of two roadliners travelling in opposite directions to find purchase in the front forward tire of Dolenz's slabster. Wess saw the sluggish pace of shock cover the scientist's face - then, with a sickening snap deep in his gut, things ricocheted back to normal.

  The green car went out of control, the steering shattered, and drove headfirst into the median strip. The impact was so strong that the kinetic energy of Dolenz's vehicle transferred instantly and sent the car flipping up and over the barrier, end over end.

  Wess dropped to the ferrocrete as the green slabster spun across the lanes of oncoming traffic, then over his head and off the edge of the Danny Jackson Bridge. He caught a fleeting glimpse of Dolenz, still at the wheel, strapped in and shrieking, and then the car was falling toward the Dust Zone below. Smyth pressed his face to the guardrail to watch the vehicle skip off a chimneystack below and burst into flames. The blazing ember of Chim Dolenz's four-wheel tomb vanished into a puffball of black smoke.

  "Target terminated," said the pistol. "Returning to safe mode."

  All at once the weapon withdrew its strength from his muscles and Wess's legs turned to water. He barely managed to stagger to Jayni's car before his knees gave way. He fell into the driver's seat, panting heavily. The roar of the traffic never stopped, the sound erasing Dolenz's death from the world around him.