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  "Control, Dredd. Fire on floor 177, Chet Hunklev," the senior Judge spoke quickly and carefully into his helmet microphone, his measured tone level and even. "Improvised incendiary device. We need fire-fighter droids, expedite immediate."

  "Control, responding," said a voice in their ears. "Fire units inbound."

  Behind them, Keeble staggered forward, clasping an extinguisher canister. The gold Eagle of Justice on his right shoulder pad was warped with heat damage. He emptied the fire foam on the flames, but it might have been spit for all it did. The napalm fire was taking hold, chewing eagerly into the structure of the 177th floor.

  "The perp?" Lambert asked, jerking a thumb at the cheese-lover's apartment.

  Keeble shook his head. "Took a backdraft in the face. One less grub smuggler."

  Dredd rounded on them, the flames framing him like an orange halo. "Evacuation protocol, now! Get these cits out of here!"

  Older blocks like Chet Hunklev were constructed around a tower of ferrocrete and steel that concentrated the elevator shafts, drop tubes and repair conduits in one location for ease of maintenance. Radial corridors extended out to the habitat floors from the core to allow quick movement for residents and service mechanoids, but they also gave freedom of movement to smoke and flames, and as Wess ran through the growing crowds of panicking Hunklev blockers, the fire came wandering after them.

  Perhaps on some level, Wess understood that the unfolding disaster was his fault; but if he did, he wasn't allowing it to get in the way of his very finely honed sense of self-preservation.

  At the elevator bank there was a group of people shouting and banging on the lift doors. Despite the fact that the fire retardants had failed to operate, the citiblock's so-called smart internal sensors knew enough to deactivate the elevators. The null-grav drop shafts that accompanied them had never worked in all the years that Smyth had lived in the squalid building; local legend had it that drunken gang members from neighbouring Daisy Steiner Block had sabotaged the tubes way back in the 2090s after mistaking Hunklev for their archrival, Tim Bisley Block. The tubes had never been fixed, just blocked off and left to accumulate trash and dirt. Wess shoved his way past the screamers and pushed open a panel. He squeezed into the dark access channel and smelled the sour gust of trapped air. There was a chemical bio-lume pack flickering feebly on the wall, warning him not to come closer for fear of stepping out into the open shaft, and he ripped it open, tearing out the light stick. Smyth let it drop, and watched the greenish dot fall away, growing smaller.

  For one brief instant, the smarter part of Wess's brain reminded him of where he was and what he was thinking of doing, but encroaching panic smothered that rational thought, and Smyth produced the can of Boing®. He flicked off the cap with his thumb and began to spray himself, feeling the thick, gelatinous plastic expanding and enveloping his legs, then his torso and finally his face. The Boing® hardened into an egg-shaped sac around him in seconds, still porous enough to let him breathe, but rigid enough to resist all but the most severe impacts. Wess closed his eyes and tipped forward, letting gravity take hold of him. Like a pinball in a chute, the plastic-encased Smyth dropped down the inert shaft, bouncing from wall to wall, falling nearly two hundred storeys in as many seconds.

  Wess had been a Boinger in the years when the craze had first hit the Big Meg. These days, Boing® was passé, the thrill sport crowd having migrated to sky surfing and rocket jumping, but in its heyday the miracle plastic-in-a-can was the craze of crazes in a city with millions of bored, unemployed people. Now, as then, Boinging anywhere except inside a regulated park like the Palais de Boing® was against the law - but Smyth suspected the Judges would have more to concern themselves with than him. He struck the basement parking level with a whoop of fearful excitement; but it took another ten minutes of bouncing and up and down, before at last he could roll sideways and out of the empty drop-shaft. By then, the plastic ball was already puckering from the heat snaking down the tube after him, and Wess clawed his way free, a beady-eyed newborn escaping from his protective shell.

  He quickly found the sewer grate and dropped into the ankle-deep slurry below. Ignoring the screams and the noise of the alarm sirens as they finally kicked in, Wess left Chet Hunklev block behind and splashed away, a free man.

  "Grud. What a mess." Keeble pulled his helmet from his head and ran a hand through his hair. His arm felt tight where the robo-doc's dermal knitter had sewn a patch of fresh plastiskin over his burns. "Maybe we should've just let it burn." He nodded at the citiblock towering over them, still wreathed in smoke like a stubby volcano. Four complete floors of Chet Hunklev had been gutted in the hour following the explosion in 427/T, and the death toll was still clocking up. Beyond the staging area for the Justice Department H-Wagons and drone tenders from the fire department, a crowd of smoke-blackened people shifted back and forth like a grey sea, quiet with shock and worry.

  Lambert glanced at her partner and narrowed her eyes. "These people live here. Sure, it's a slum, but it's their slum."

  Keeble's teeth flashed. "It's a breeding ground for crime, that's what it is. Drokk it, man, you were there, you saw it! What were they making up there? Bombs? I'll bet it was those Democrat spugs or some other terrorist kook crew!" He made an angry gesture. "Rat-holes like this one are infested with perps! Chief Judge oughta get 'em dozed-"

  "I'll pass that along," Dredd's voice sliced into Keeble's tirade like a razor, silencing him as he approached. "Meantime, look sharp and keep an eye on the cits. Fire's got them spooked, and scared people turn into perps real easy."

  "Right," Keeble replied in a sour voice. "Whatever you say, Dredd."

  The senior Judge leaned closer and gave the other man a measuring stare. "Yeah. Whatever I say. Now get your gear on and start acting like you fit the uniform."

  Lambert approached him as Keeble stalked away. "I'm not making excuses for him, but he's had a tough time recently, Dredd. The SJS picked him up for a random physical abuse test last month and this week Central turned him down for a transfer to MegWest. He's a little short on patience."

  Dredd gave the smallest of sneers. "You are making excuses for him, Lambert. Don't turn it into a habit."

  "It's just been, y'know, difficult days for him."

  The senior Judge studied the huddled forms of the Hunklev blockers. "Those cits over there just lost everything they own - if they were lucky - so don't talk to me about 'difficult days'." Dredd took a breath. "Right now, what they need is order, and that's what we do. Order." He threw her a nod. "Get to work."

  Lambert followed Keeble as Dredd took a moment to replace the filter in his respirator. In the ear-bead speaker of his helmet, the familiar voice of Justice Central's dispatch control issued another critical advisory, the ninth one since the sun had set on Sector 88. "Item. Nark tip-off indicates possible wrecker action planned for junction 846, Braga Skedway and trans-sector underzoom. Senior Judges respond."

  Dredd tapped his throat mic and set off toward his Lawmaster, the bulky motorcycle parked in the lee of a pat-wagon. "Control, Dredd responding. Feed the intel to my bike computer. I'm on my way."

  The Lawmaster's broad tyres bit into the road surface and launched the bike on to the highway, into the flashing streams of four hundred mile-per-hour traffic.

  The only good thing about the skid district was that coming down here made you appreciate your own neighbourhood a hell of a lot more. Unless you were unlucky enough to be living in a rad-pit in one of the bombed-out sectors, it wasn't an exaggeration to say that there was little in Mega-City One to compare to the 88 Skids in terms of squalor and general noxiousness. It was almost as if the city proper had disgorged this part of itself and divorced it from the rest of the metropolis, shying away from this horrible piece of effluent, its back alleys and drinking pits. Wess had never seen a uniform in the skids, not a Judge, not a medic, nothing. He assumed that the government had probably decided to let sleeping dogs lie and just allow the area to slowly choke itself
to death in its own filth; but like a colony of cancer cells, the no-go zone kept alive by eating itself, festering there in the shadows cast by fractionating towers and manufactory domes. Perhaps one day the Judges would drop a warhead on the place and torch it clean once and for all.

  Wess emerged from the sewers and took the over-pipes route from Fissile Fuels Inc to the broad blockhouse of RubbaBaby BuggiBumper Baby Foods, then down the inert electricity pylons to street level. This was the floor of Mega-City One, the concrete plate of City Bottom that had been laid over the radioactive ruins of dead conurbations like New York, Washington, Boston and Philadelphia. The smell of the skids never failed to make him retch; it was like a ritual he went through every time he arrived here. Smyth snaked his way through the cardboard shantytown at the foot of the Braga road junction and into the skid proper. He'd been careful about his pod last night, not ready to risk driving it out of the area while there was a chance he was being looked for. Sure, he ran the risk of finding his vehicle gutted, but for the most part the locals in this part of the skids knew and liked him. Wess kept the hobos and the street people sweet by dropping off packs of GrotPot and InstaFuud every now and then. It was easy to be generous to folks who considered a single hot meal like a fortune in diamonds. Wess enjoyed playing the big man and laying a little on the derelicts, especially when Jayni was around. She told him that it made him seem sensitive, and while Wess wasn't exactly sure what she meant by that, anything that made her like him better couldn't be bad.

  He rounded the corner and spied the oblate lump hidden underneath a camu-net, shaded from the dim lights of the rushing highway overhead. A smile crossed Wess's thin lips. The net was SovBlok army surplus from the Apocalypse War, a mimetic camouflage sheet that mimicked the urban environment around it. Wess kept it rolled up in the trunk of his podcar for times just like these. He checked the street and then approached. After the disastrous game of shuggy against Bob Toes and that alien guy he partnered with, Wess had finally topped out with a cold, hard five grand in creds owing - and naturally, he didn't have the money with him. Truth be told, Smyth hadn't ever had that kind of cash, but he'd been hoping that Toes would be a walkover. All that sweet dough was going to go straight up the line, to Cortez's loan sharks. Wess had owed them for quite a while now, and they'd already taken one of his kidneys as a "holding payment". His fingers strayed to the crude surgical scar on his belly. They had threatened to take an eyeball next time, although privately Wess was more afraid Cortez's ripperdocs would go for a testicle.

  What had made things worse was finding out that Bob Toes had set him up; Toes actually worked for Cortez, and now because Smyth had tried to get a little leverage on his debt, he was five thousand deeper in the hole for his cleverness. Bob's alien pal had tried to peel the clothes off him and that was when Wess has run, hiding the car and footslogging it. Now, he'd get the pod back and drive out nice and careful in the light of morning, right under Toes's nose, so to speak. He figured that the pod might be worth a couple of hundred and he knew a guy in Sector 87 who owed him a favour. Some cash - any cash - might just keep the goons off him until he could come up with a scheme.

  Old Foley gave him a crack-toothed grin as he reached the car. The tramp threw him a shaky salute. "Kept an eye on 'er for ya. Just like ya wanted, Smythy."

  Wess gave him a wan smile in return and flipped a pack of SoyBoy Crunchies into the hobo's hands. "Thanks, pal. You're an ace."

  Foley nodded and tucked the packet in his pocket, which was odd, because normally the old geezer attacked food like it was going out of fashion. Wess suddenly became aware of the fact that a snowdrift of used snack cartons surrounded Foley's nearby cardboard hovel. Smyth looked him in the eyes and read the duplicity of the tramp like ten-foot tall neon letters. "Who fed you, Foley?" Ice formed in the pit of Wess's stomach.

  The tramp turned away and wobbled toward his hide. Behind Smyth, the camu-net changed shape as the podcar's gull wing door creaked open. A man, a very large man, one so big that it was difficult to imagine how he'd fitted his bulk inside the car, emerged from Wess's parked vehicle. Smyth darted an accusing, betrayed look at the tramp, but Foley was gone. He sighed. It wasn't as if he wouldn't have done the same thing if the roles were reversed.

  "Uh," Wess managed. "Hey, uh, Flex." Other people were coming out of the shadows now, and among them were Toes and his alien guy.

  Flex was like the contents of a meat locker stuffed into a tan suit; a face like a red fist on a body made from planes of muscle. He rolled his head around, and it made cracking sounds. "Little seats make me uncomfortable," Flex said, speaking to nobody in particular. "I get stiff."

  Toes made a tsk noise and it was then that Wess knew he wouldn't escape without shedding blood.

  "Got something for me?" Flex turned his gaze on Smyth. For such a large and threatening man, he had warm, cornflower blue eyes that utterly belied his character.

  Wess just blinked. There was little point in denying it.

  "No?" Flex asked, and Bob's alien buddy chugged with amusement. "Ah. The Eye, he's been lenient with you, Smythy. Because he likes you. We all do." Another crack of the neck. "But last night you misbehaved. Sets a bad example."

  Wess suddenly found his voice. "I... I'll get some creds."

  "Yeah, you will," Flex nodded his assent. A red blur flashed across Wess's vision and then the world spun around him, pain igniting in storms across his skull, the black asphalt flipping up to pin him against it. "By tomorrow."

  They all came in and took a turn. Wess kept waiting to be knocked unconscious, but, as ever, he wasn't that lucky.

  NO HIGHWAY

  The city blurred past in a stream of neon and shadow, the endless urban sprawl reduced to a smear of sound and colour along the ferrocrete expanse of the megway.

  Dredd rode the Lawmaster like the machine was an extension of himself, a union of law-man and law-machine prowling the ten-lane road like a sentinel. He could have put the bike on auto, simply snapped out the destination he wanted to the Lawmaster's central processor and let the computer handle the ride - there were some Judges who did it that way, taking the easy option - but Dredd preferred the feel of control in his own hands, sensing the texture of the road through the handlebars and the thrumming vibrations of the Notron V8 engine between his knees. The split-second difference between automatic and manual control could save a life when you were hurtling along at hundreds of kilometres per hour.

  Of course, it was impossible for any human, even one as well trained as a Mega-City Judge, to know the layout of the entire city by heart. Human taxi drivers and truckers were very much in the minority in MC-1, the complex matrix of megways, underzooms, skeds and slips enough to drive an organic mind mad with their insane patterns. No vehicle could be considered roadworthy in the Big Meg unless it had a functioning automap - otherwise the unwitting driver might make the mother of all wrong turns, ending up in one of the NoGo Slum Zones or worse, a rad-pit left over from the war.

  A discreet indicator in the corner of Dredd's view blinked, showing him the upcoming turn-off on to Braga Skedway, and he gunned the motor, deftly slipping out of the lee of a Big Mo mobile service station and across two lanes of sparse, late evening traffic. There was no rush hour in the city, because there were hardly any commuters with jobs to rush to; the closest equivalent was the pick-up and drop-off jams that took place in the mornings and afternoons when citizens living in mopads docked with fuel bowsers or mobile utility rovers. In a city where having a three-room habitat was an achievement, there were millions of people who chose to live in mobile homes that never made port, circling the arterial highways in endless loops.

  The itinerant populace of MC-1's city-in-a-city had their own infrastructure, with schools and shops and libraries, the static landscape of the "rooties" forever flashing past them. In a lot of ways, the mobiles - as Justice Department parlance labelled them - were a subculture of their own, with the attendant pros and cons that encompassed. Mobbie juves had th
eir own gangs just like the teenagers in the citiblocks, and their parents had the same problems as their permanent neighbours, just at 650 KPH. And where there were people, there was crime. Snatchers, who used anti-grav snares to steal cars off the road, thrill-seekers in overcharged dragsters, mobi-bank robbers, even high-end perps like Cortez, rolling around Sector 88 in a casino the size of a cargo blimp. But wreckers were among the worst.

  In ancient times, there were criminals who would set up fake lighthouses on treacherous stretches of coastline, enticing unwitting helmsmen to pilot ships into rocky shoals. The beached vessels would be swarmed, the crews killed, the cargo looted - and by the time the authorities had arrived, the booty would be gone and the locals would claim innocence. On Mega-City One's freeways the same crime had been reborn in the ashes of the Apocalypse War, when parts of the metropolis were still lawless and ungoverned. Unprotected stretches of highway became prime choke points for wreckers, causing traffic accidents and halting hundreds of vehicles, killing and robbing whoever was caught in their traps. As time passed, the smarter wrecker gangs prevailed, some of them building fake tollbooths or staging roadblocks in huge sting operations. These were no gentleman highwaymen; they were murderers, opportunist thieves and rapists.

  Perversely, Sector 88 had a very low incidence of wrecker activity, something Dredd attributed largely to Ruben Cortez's fondness for the mobile life. Cortez had grown up as a mobbie punk and wrecking was something that the rooties did. There was a little of the law of the sea among mobile folk, a gypsy code about not picking on your own - although in Dredd's experience it was as elastic as any other variation on "honour among thieves". Cortez didn't like wreckers, especially if he wasn't getting a cut of their haul, and it was highly likely that the source of the snitch about tonight's crime had come on The Eye's orders. The thought brought a grim sneer to Dredd's face.