Red Shadows (23 page)

"Yes. I understand." The words seemed to force their way up from between Weller's lips as though the perp's every question demanded an answer.

"Good. Tell me, do you know Psi-Judge Anderson?"

"Yes. I know her." He gritted his teeth, trying to hold the words inside, but it was no good. He was slave to every nuance in the killer's words. Weller was horrified to realise that his own brain was acting against him by responding to the perp's instructions in a direct and non-evasive manner. He was no genie in a bottle, craftily interpreting his master's orders to his own advantage. No, the perp had told him to answer truthfully. That was precisely what Weller did, helpless to offer anything but the complete, unvarnished truth. "I'm working a case with her: your case. We're investigating the murders you committed."

"Really?" the perp said. He seemed delighted. "That's perfect. Her knowing you just makes everything so much better."

Falling deep in thought, the perp fell silent for a moment. In that silence, Weller tried to find a way out of his predicament. He was still wearing his daystick and bootknife and his Lawgiver lay on the ground by his feet. But no matter how hard he tried to make his hands reach for his weapons, they would not obey him. Desperately, his mind ran through his options as he attempted to find a loophole in the perp's instructions. He could not run. He could not attack the perp. He could not lie to him and try to trick him. An idea occurred to him. He could still speak, and his Lawmaster was only a few metres away...

"Lawmaster!" Weller shouted suddenly, trying to get the command out before the perp could stop him. "Emergency protocol zero-"

"Shhhh." Putting his fingers to his lips, the perp hushed him softly and the words died on Weller's tongue. For a moment the perp smiled quietly again, and then he continued. "Your Lawmasters computer can follow your instructions, then? What were you going to tell it to do?"

"Return to base," Weller said. "When the lawmaster showed up at the Sector House without me, it would automatically trigger a Code Ninety-Nine Red."

"Code ninety-nine Red? What's that mean?"

"Judge down," Weller told him. "When a Code ninety-nine alert is issued, every Judge in the area drops what they're doing and responds to the call."

"Clever," the perp said. "Of course, they would have gotten here too late anyway." He paused again. "Still, I think it's better if we get rid of the lawmaster. What's the furthest part of the city from here?"

"MegSouth," Weller said. "By the South Wall."

"Tell your lawmaster to go there." The perp raised an admonishing finger. "Nothing else, you understand. Just tell it to go to the South Wall right away."

"Lawmaster!" Weller called out the command. "Engage autopilot. Destination: South Wall. Go now."

Its engine suddenly purring to life, the lawmaster began to move off down the skedway. With it, Weller realised his last chance for salvation was gone.

"Good," the perp said, taking a knife from inside his coat. "Now, open the tunic of your uniform."

Unable to resist, Weller released the hidden catch at the shoulder of his tunic and pulled down the zipper. Then, easing aside the heavy weight of the tunic with its concealed plasteen-armoured plates, he exposed his chest.

"There's something I want you to do for me, Judge," the perp said. Stepping closer to him, he turned to point with the blade of the knife down the opposite direction of the skedway to the one the lawmaster had taken. "Well, two things really. In exactly one minute's time, I want you to start walking north along the skedway. I want you to keep going until you are dead. But first, there's something else."

As the perp turned back to him, Weller felt a sharp and agonising pain just below his sternum as the perp stabbed him with the knife and twisted the blade.

"I want you to remember something for me, Judge." As Weller's body bent forward in shock and pain, he felt the perp move closer to whisper in his ear. "A single word, I want you to say it to yourself over and over so you'll remember it past your death. It's the place where I'll be waiting for your partner, the Psi-Judge, when she tries to come and find me, the word that will lead her right to me."

He heard the killer whisper a single word. Even through the agony coursing through his body, it seemed to Weller that the perp had picked a strange word to ask him to remember. It was a word unlikely to lead anyone anywhere. A word that in Mega-City One was so common as to be almost meaningless.

Of all the words in the world, why did his killer want him to remember the word "block"?

SIXTEEN

FALLEN EAGLE

"At first I thought we thought it was a dump job," the Judge said. The name on her badge read "Loudon". "Then we saw the blood trail and traced it back along the skedway to Trinity Heights, three klicks away. It's an old rad-pit left over from the Apocalypse War. Looks like he walked the whole way here from there after the killer stabbed him. Grud knows how he did it though, after he'd lost so much blood."

"He always was a tough one," the Judge next to her said. His name was Dietz. His voice had a mournful tone. "Hard as nails. I worked with him on a few cases. Always the first through any door, and he wouldn't take any shit from perps. He was a real Judge. The kind you want at your back when things go drokk-shaped. This city will miss him."

They were standing on the hard shoulder of a skedway with Anderson, looking down on the body of a fallen Judge. It was Weller. He lay on his side with one of his arms curled beneath him, the tunic of his uniform open and the eagle insignia on his shoulder trailing in the dirt covering the rockcrete surface of the road. He had a wound in the middle of his chest, while a trail of blood ran past his body and south along the skedway. Following the end of the incident at Sissy Spacek, Anderson had asked Control to put her through to Weller so that they could compare notes on their investigation, only to be told that he had gone off-com and could not be reached. More than two hours later, the mystery of the Street Judge's whereabouts had finally been resolved.

"Who found him?" she asked.

"I did," Loudon answered. "I was on patrol when I spotted something on the hard shoulder, drove over to investigate, and found him lying here, dead. It was too late to put out a Code Ninety-Nine Red for him, so I called Control requesting a Tek-team. They said they'd contact you as well, seeing as you were both working a case together."

"What about that?" Dietz asked. "You think his death is connected? Like maybe he caught up with the perp you're after and the bastard got the drop on him."

"Could be," Anderson agreed. She looked down at Weller's body. The two of them had never exactly seen eye-to-eye on their investigation, yet she was as sad to see him lying there as the two other Judges were. Hard case or not, Weller was a Judge. He was one of their own. After twenty years of service to the citizens of the Big Meg, his only reward had been a cold and ignoble death.

"Guess there's only one way we're going to find out what happened," Anderson sighed. She knelt beside the body, pulling off one of her gloves. "I'll have to scan him."

He feels every movement of the knife as the killer twists the blade in his chest. Smiling, the killer is whispering to him. A word. Something he wants him to remember. Something the killer wants to stay with him past his death. Something the killer says will draw the Psi-Judge to him...

"Block?" Loudon asked, while both she and Dietz looked at her in confusion. "That's the word the killer wanted Weller to remember? The word he said would lead you right to him?"

"Yeah, that's it," Anderson replied, as she stood gazing down at Weller's body in the aftermath of the psi-scan.

"But it doesn't mean anything." There was a look of frustration on Loudon's face. "There must be thousands of blocks in this city. How are you supposed to know which one he meant? Are you sure you didn't make some kind of mistake?"

"About the word, you mean?" Anderson shook her head. "No, I'm sure it's right. It came through loud and clear. Every step he took after he was stabbed, Weller was repeating the word to himself over and over, trying to remember it. I'm sure the word is 'block'. I just don't known what it means."

"Have you thought maybe it doesn't actually mean anything?" Dietz said. "Maybe the killer is just trying to pull your chain, send you on a wild goose chase."

"I won't say it's not a possibility," Anderson said. "All the same, my instincts tell me that isn't what's going on here. The perp was willing to kill a Judge to make sure I got his message. You've got to admit, that's one hell of a way of making your point."

"All right, I'll call it in then." Grimacing, Loudon's hand went to her helmet to activate her comm-link. "I'll ask Control to forward the details to MAC for analysis. From the blood trail, we know that Weller was probably stabbed somewhere in Trinity Heights. Maybe MAC can put the whole thing together and come up with something." The grimace became more pronounced. "I wouldn't hold your breath though."

"Believe me, I won't be." She paused for a moment to take a last look at the body before her, and then turned her eyes to the two Judges. "In the meantime, I figure there's nothing more to be done here. Loudon, as the first Judge on the scene, the body is your responsibility until the Tek-team gets here. Dietz, you're with me."

"Where are we going?" the male Judge asked her.

"Trinity Heights." We know that's where the killer stabbed Weller. It could be he's still around there somewhere. Either way, we have more chance of picking up his tracks there than we do here."

Grud, Anderson thought afterwards, but that was a bad way to go. Poor Weller.

She was speeding down the skedway on her Lawmaster en route to Trinity Heights, with Dietz riding beside her. The skedway was all but deserted. After midnight the traffic in this part of the sector would usually be light, even if they weren't headed for a rad-pit. But while the sensation of the wind blowing through her hair and the power of the lawmaster beneath her would normally have brought with her a sense of freedom, Anderson's mood was melancholy as she replayed the results of her most recent psi-scan in her mind.

She had been economical with the truth earlier, telling the two Street Judges the bare facts of Judge Weller's death without dwelling overlong on the details. There had seemed little point in burdening them further. It was bad enough that a Judge had died, without relaying every moment of his final agonies to others. Weller had walked for three kilometres, pain coursing through his body, his uniform slick with his own blood.

Along the way, as the blood loss took its toll, he had stumbled and fallen dozens of times, each fall bringing with it new agonies. In the end, he had been reduced to crawling on his belly, compelled to keep moving by the killer's instructions. "I want you to keep going until you are dead," the killer had told him, the words given the power of holy writ by his psi-talent. Powerless to disobey him, Weller had followed his orders to the letter, experiencing further agonies because of it. She couldn't have told the other Judges that. It would only have made Dietz and Loudon angry and more eager to hunt down the killer. With one Judge dead already, Anderson knew that now was the time to keep a cool head. Not least because, for all she knew, she and Dietz might well be about to ride into a trap.

Ahead, the surface of the skedway had become more uneven, the streetlights either side of it diminishing in number as they approached Trinity Heights. Soon, they had passed the last of the working streetlights and Anderson had to boost the power of her lawmasters headlamp to see where she was going. The helmet Dietz wore as a Street Judge was equipped with an infrared vision filter allowing him to see in total darkness, but following her lead he boosted his headlamps as well. Anderson had never worn a helmet; few Psi-Judges did. It was not simply a matter of comfort. Somehow, having to cope with the restricting confines of wearing a helmet seemed to interfere with her psychic powers, lessening her sensitivity. As they entered Trinity Heights proper, it occurred to Anderson that sometimes being able to lessen her powers a little might not be a bad thing.

Twenty years had passed since the people of Trinity Heights had died in the nuclear fire, but from the psychic impressions she could feel in the ruins around her it might as well have been yesterday. The entire landscape felt raw with echoes of pain and terror. Erecting her psychic defences as she tried to keep the combined emotions of the neighbourhood's long dead residents at bay, Anderson found herself wondering how many had died on that single brutal day in Trinity Heights. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? And how many millions more had died when Mega City One had retaliated against the attack?

Anderson had been part of the hand-picked squad of Judges that had seized control of an enemy missile silo to launch that retaliation. Granted she had not pushed the button herself, and in the madness of war the retaliation had seem justified, but she had blood on her hands, all the same. She had come to Trinity Heights to bring to justice a man who had brutally murdered six people - eight, counting Judge Weller and the unfortunate Lenny Kaspasian, but what about her? Whatever her reasons at the time, regardless of the fact that the enemy had attacked first and without warning, she had played a part in the deaths of millions. Who would bring her to justice?

"Control to Anderson." Her lawmaster radio squawked to life, intruding on her disturbing thoughts. She found the intrusion more than welcome.

"Anderson receiving, Control. Over."

"Just heard back from Tek Division regarding the investigation you ordered into the records of a company called HelixCorp. The Teks think they may have found something suspicious. It was well hidden in the files, but all your perp's victims had a parent who took part in some kind of medical trial for HelixCorp forty-one years ago. According to company records, the trial was for a new cancer vaccine that never made it past the testing stage. Like I say, it looks pretty suspicious, especially now that seven people whose parents took part in the trial have suddenly died in the last fourty-eight hours."