Judge Dredd

happening? They’re dying out there. A hundred and eight Judges in forty-eight hours. What the hell is going on?”

Dredd shook his head. “You think I’m part of this?”

“I don’t know who or what you are anymore. I don’t know anything.”

“I would never hurt you, Hershey.”

Hershey studied him a long moment, glanced at Fergie, then backed off across the room. Without lowering her weapon, she reached in her jacket and and tossed a viewie to Dredd.

“Tell me about this. Make me believe in you again—the way I did when I defended you. I did, Dredd. I honestly did, I-I couldn’t imagine you doing anything that was against the Law. I couldn’t, and then I found this.”

Dredd let out a breath. He took the viewie without looking at it. “The man beside me in this picture is my— brother. His name is Rico. He was the best Judge on the street. The smartest, the most dedicated. Then something happened to him, to his mind. He went insane, Hershey. He said the Judges should rule, not serve. He said that was our destiny in life, our place in history.

“He finally became more dangerous than any of the criminals he’d put away. A lot of men died trying to stop him. I had to judge him…”

“That was the one,” Hershey said quietly.

“Yes. That was the one.”

“And you’re telling me he’s doing all this? All this killing?”

“Not by himself. He’s working with Griffin.”

“Griffin?” Hershey slowly lowered her weapon. All the strength seemed to drain from her body. “Oh, my God. It fits, doesn’t it?” She looked at Dredd. “We’ve got to let the Council know. They’ve got to stop him before he—”

“It’s too late for that. There isn’t any Council. Rico murdered them all an hour ago. Griffin set it up. Griffin was there.”

Hershey sat down. She laid her weapon on the floor. Dredd watched her. She was staring past him, looking at nothing at all. Fergie glanced at Dredd, then quietly left the room.

“I shouldn’t have even thought you had anything to do with this,” Hershey said. “I didn’t know. All I could think about was the Tribunal, what happened there. I should have known when I found out you’d been drugged. I thought it was Fargo, that he didn’t want you to try to stop him from taking the Long Walk for you…”

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.