Neal Barrett - Judge Dredd

She caught Dredd’s expression, stood, and reached out and touched his hand. “You didn’t even know that, did you? What they’d done. Oh, Dredd!”

“It’s all right,” he told her. “You didn’t have any way to know what the son of a bitch was doing. No one did.”

“That’s why the DNA convicted you. You and Rico are the same. Brothers. Did Fargo know? Was he… ?”

“He was a part of it. They all knew. Everyone on the Council.”

Dredd turned away. “It’s not exactly like Rico and I are brothers. Not like real brothers, normal brothers, Hershey. We’re the same. Clones. We’re inhuman. Defective. He just broke down first.”

“No, oh, no, that’s not true at all, Dredd! You’re not the same!”

Dredd wouldn’t face her. “You said it, Hershey. Remember? That I had no feelings, no emotions? Now you know why. I’m not programmed to feel. Like Rico.”

“They didn’t do that to you,” she said softly. “You did, Dredd. You did it to yourself. You hurt. You hurt because you had to condemn your brother. You told yourself you would never let that happen to you again. You would never care for anyone, never let anyone get close. If you shut it all out, they couldn’t touch you.

“Don’t you see? They made you do it, but you did it to yourself.”

Dredd faced her. He felt confused, mixed up inside. He understood what she was saying, but her words didn’t seem to apply to him. They didn’t and they did. It was like she was talking about someone else, someone like him.

Fergie poked his head into the room. “Sorry, guys. I messed around with that terminal, but I’m afraid it’s torn up pretty bad. Hey, I fixed your microwave, though. Listen, is this a bad time?”

He looked at Hershey, then at Dredd. “The computer’s back up to the idiot stage. That’s the best I can do for right now. I’ve got enough working to go in and look around. I tried to find this Janus business. There’s nothing. Nowhere.”

Hershey looked puzzled. “Janus?”

“That’s the code word for the project that brought Rico and me to life. I’m not surprised Ferguson can’t find it. It would be buried under so many security barriers…”

Dredd stopped. “If Griffin’s got Janus back on-line now, it’s going to be using a lot of power. That thing’s bigger than a toaster.”

Fergie shook his head. “Tried that. No new energy allocations for anything that big. Even under an alias. Of course, that moron machine I patched together, I wouldn’t trust it to count apples.”

“No, they wouldn’t risk putting something like that on the net, would they?” Hershey said. “But it’s still got to use power, so they’d… They’d have to steal it, wouldn’t they? From everything they could get their hands on.”

Hershey turned to Fergie. “Check the sectors for recent black-outs. Any sudden power surges. Can you do that?”

Fergie looked pained. “I can handle anything you can dream up, Judge. Okay, atomic disintegration, I can’t handle that. This mortally-wounded machine of yours, though… Hey, I can try, I don’t know.”

“Try,” Dredd said.

“Right, right, I’m doing it.”

“Wait a minute…” Hershey bit her lip and frowned. “The day of that fracas in Red Quad? I had to write up everything that happened, because those groons blew up my Lawmaster. I called up all the data in that area within the time parameters—temperature, bio-air samples, pollen count, for God’s sake. I remember there was a significant power surge about thirty blocks wide. A big one. It didn’t mean a thing to me at the time.”

Fergie whistled under his breath. “Something like that’d shut down the power grid in the whole sector. We ought to be able to pin down a lot more than you get on a first-level data report.”

“What do you mean?” Dredd said.

“I mean it’s like you shoot up with battery acid, right? I wouldn’t do anything like that, that’s stupid, you’d be flat-ass dead, but I know some droogs who would—”

“Ferguson!”

“Yeah, right. Okay. What I’m saying is, it doesn’t just burn up everything in your body it touches, it leaves a trail. Nerve endings all crudded up, stuff like that. If you didn’t know where the trouble started, you could pick up the trail about anywhere and trace it right back. To the point of origin, I mean.”

Hershey looked at the ceiling. “You had to go through all that to get to the point?”

Fergie looked hurt. “Well, yeah.”

“He’s right, though,” Dredd said. “Wherever all that power went, we can follow it. We can find it!”

“Maybe,” Fergie said. “I don’t know, man…”

“You said you can do anything. So do it.”

Fergie looked at him. He had a good comeback but decided to keep it to himself. Dredd didn’t have a real good sense of humor. If Fergie had learned anything at all, he’d learned that.

“I’ll get the easy stuff first,” Fergie said. He tapped the keys, frowned, looked at the screen. “Let’s hope this thing’s still got the brain cells to—yeah, all right!

“That’s your basic power record for the date in question everywhere close to Red Quad. Those little peaks are minor over-loads. This one, the big daddy, is the power surge you’re talking about, Judge. Now, let’s see where it came from, okay?”

Fergie’s fingers ran lightly over the keys. Hershey and Dredd stood over his shoulders.

“Okay, it’s coming up now, breaking down the power load to—huh?”

Dredd squeezed his arm. “What the hell’s that?”

“I don’t know what it is. Sorry. What I meant to say was…” He leaned in and squinted at the screen. Grid buildings rose up from the ground, shimmered for an instant, then vanished out of sight. Others popped up to take their place. Geometric mountain ranges blinked up and down, the beat of the city’s heart.

“I told you this computer’s glitched out,” Fergie said. “What it’s doing is taking us the long way around. It’s tracing back that sector of the city for, what? A hundred, maybe two hundred years. About a year every half a second.”

“Fascinating,” Dredd said. “When do we get to now?”

“There’s nothing I can do. It’ll run itself down and we’ll get to the source of our power drain.”

“It’s coming,” Hershey said. “That’s almost Red Quad today.”

“Couple of seconds… Okay, we’re home. Block War day.” Fergie nodded at the screen. Intricate capillaries of energy webbed the sector, merging at one central point, a glowing amber ball.

“It’s underground,” Dredd said. “No big surprise.”

“Way underground,” Fergie added. “Nothing goes that deep, man. Nothing I ever heard of.”

“Wait. What’s that? That thing right there.” Dredd jabbed a finger at the screen.

“After-image,” Fergie said. “I could clean it up if everything was working right.”

“No. No you couldn’t,” Hershey said. “It’s there, where it’s supposed to be. See that profile? That’s the Liberty Lady. What’s left of her. The city relocated it, what, seventy-five years ago?”

Fergie slapped a fist into his palm. “I’ve seen her. They built one of those death traps across from Heavenly Haven. Built it right around that Lady of yours, swallowed it up again.”

Hershey looked at Dredd. “They built the Janus Project directly beneath it. Under the Liberty Lady.”

“Yeah,” Dredd said. “Where else?”

The crisp smell of ozone was in the air. Griffin could almost feel the energy, the awesome surge of raw power that throbbed beneath his feet. That much power was frightening to imagine. New life, the pulse of Creation itself…