Psykogeddon (20 page)

"Now hang on-" Malish began, but the Lady Tamara overrode him.

"No, no, Joseph," she said. "You hang on. I happen to like my life, Joseph. I like the clothes and the hangers-on and the credits - I'm rather shallow in that respect, I suppose.

"Certain things are... necessary to that life, and some are disposable. Some of them I get to decide whether or not to keep."

"But you can't just leave me out of the picture," Malish said. "You can't just... oh. You're not talking about the other. Leaving me out of the picture is the thing you're talking about."

Lady Tamara smiled coldly. "Precisely, Joseph. Whatever I decide about the other, you are at the moment a complication I simply don't need... and I'm certainly not going to let you spoil things with my Fluffy - I mean, Lord Whelpington.

"So this is the deal. If you'll bother to check your credit-account, you'll find that this week I deposited... well, let's just say that so far as you're concerned, compared with what you're used to, it's quite a substantial sum."

"Now listen here," Malish snapped. "If this is your idea of trying to buy me off..."

The lady Tamara waved an airy hand. "Nothing of the sort," she said. "Keep it, spend it, give it to the poor or pour it down your neck in the form of that low-quality synthahol you and your kind drink - I couldn't care less. I spend more on shoes, quite frankly.

"The important thing, Joseph, is that the cred-records say I paid it."

She regarded him with cold impassiveness. "If you make any kind of fuss," she continued, "if it even
seems
to me that you're going to make any kind of fuss, then, well, I'm going to have to show those records to my Fluffy - I beg your pardon, Lord Whelpington - and confess everything." She smiled. "And do you know what I'm going to tell him?"

Malish shrugged sullenly, sensing immanent defeat. "What are you going to tell him?"

"I'm going to say that some months back, when you drove me home to Shangri La from a certain charity event in Sector Twelve, you assaulted me. You were quite... violent and brutal about it, told me you would kill me if I said a word. I was terrified and confused, not quite in my right mind, so I kept it from my Fluffy - my Lord Whelpington. We were going through a bad patch in any case, and I was afraid that this would be the end.

"I thought I could put it behind me, but then you developed a twisted obsession with me. You began stalking me, sending me little notes and presents - I can produce all the evidence I need, if I need to. I tried to pay you off, but you still refused to leave me alone. So in the end I was forced to go to my Fluffy and tell him everything."

"You bitch!" Malish roared, leaping to his feet with sufficient force to send his rustically-designed chair skidding back across the faux-parquet flooring. "You think you can get away with something like that? Well you probably can, with your position, and your money, and your connections - but I'll tell you this for nothing. I'm gonna fight. I might go down, but I'm gonna go down fighting and making a stink all the way!"

He stood there, breathing heavily, grating at the Lady Tamara.

The Lady Tamara, for her part, regarded him with a sense of complete equanimity.

"I take it that's your final word on the subject?" she said.

"Yeah," said Malish. "That's my final word."

"Very well then."

The Lady Tamara Whelpington-Smythe snatched up an unused fish knife - the fish course having not by this point arrived - and flung herself over the table, her face a snarling rictus of pure animal bloodlust and rage. She grabbed Malish's face with one clawed hand and then wrenched downwards - leaving deep, blood-spraying gouges rather than mere scratches, and bursting one of his eyes.

Then, as Malish hitched in breath to shriek in agony, before he could even bring his hands up to his ruined face, the Lady Tamara plunged the fish knife into his remaining eye, to bury it deep inside the brain.

Malish spasmed and jerked, then sighed and collapsed bonelessly.

If the altercation between Malish and the Lady Tamara Whelpington-Smythe had caused some degree of consternation among the other patrons and the waiters of the bistro, these last events had provoked absolute and unbelieving shock.

The Lady Tamara sat calmly back down again and took a genteel sip of her drink. "Nothing to worry about," she said, with perfect calm. "This isn't real. It's just a copy. So it doesn't count."

Those who had never been in the Mega-City Kook Kubes tended to think of them as a bedlam horror show out of a slasher holo-vid. The place from which the psycho escapes before terrorising a hab-block populated entirely by, uncommonly enough, well-built girls between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one who don't wear many clothes. Or alternatively, in a few cases, the place where a number of well-built girls, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, find themselves locked in for the night during a power cut.

Crumbling plaster walls that might once have been white, but any white that remains is merely to set off the smears of blood and excrement. Rusting iron cages containing the ragged and shadowy forms of gibbering, whooping maniacs. Brutal lard-assed orderlies, who, if anything, are worse than the inmates - who they spend their time butt-drokking in the cells, in the ablutions and pretty much everywhere else. Wild-eyed doctors, who if anything are worse than the orderlies, creeping around the corridors and looking for anyone at all to use their ECT-machines on.

This, at least, was the common conception of conditions inside the Mega-City Psyko-Block, and the Justice Department encouraged it, possibly because, if people knew what the inside of the Kook Kubes was actually like, and if you survived the Judicial process long enough to get there in the first place, citizens would be flipping out at the drop of a tinfoil-lined hat.

The plain fact was that, while space and building resources might be limited in the Mega-City, advanced construction and molecular-refab techniques meant that when something was actually built, it was easier to make it perfectly suited to its purpose.

The Psyko-Block was not there, ostensibly at least, to punish the criminally insane. It was there to contain them, even treat them. The very definition of "criminally insane" is a fundamental inability to grasp the criminality of one's actions, or that they deserve punishment. So, simply throwing the criminally insane into a living stommhole is completely counter-productive.

The entrance hall of the Psyko-Block was bright and airy, the bright and airy space elegantly supported by slim colonnades of refab-marble. Actual genetically-fortified foliage rustled, faint and calm, in the soft cool breeze that stirred the lightly scented and conditioned air. There was the faint tinkle of wind-chimes. It was coming from the ambient sound-system, it seemed, rather than from actual chimes, so as to precisely gauge their calming effect.

Drago San looked around with barely-concealed delight.

"Do you know, Dredd," he said, "I believe I could learn to like this place."

"Yeah, well, wait until they start taking your personality apart to see what makes it tick," said Dredd. "I'm told it makes a Precinct-house interrogation look like a walk through the Arboretum of Assisted Euthanasia."

"Oh, really?" said Drago San, apparently unconcerned. "Well, fortunately for all of us, I've got quite enough personality to go around."

Waiting for them at the reception desk, which appeared to have been carved from a single lump of porphyry, were a pair of women wearing nurses' costumes. Although "wearing" was almost entirely the wrong term.

The word "costume", on the other hand was entirely spot on.

"My word," said Efil Drago San. "Things just keep getting better and better, don't they? Tell me, Dredd, did the
Carry On Interminably
series of holo-vids ever make it on to the Mega-City DataNet? How about
Confessions of a Thermodynamic Coolant-exchange Systems Repairer?"

"I'm Nurse Pebbles," said one of the girls, who had a strapping, Scandinavian look about her.

"And I'm Nurse Bambam," said the other, who appeared to be a mix of Indonesian and Korean descent.

"Delighted to make your acquaintance," said Efil Drago San. "I do so enjoy a happy end - urk!"

Dredd, who had had enough, gave the cuffs connecting them a yank to shut him up.

"Sorry for the, uh, you know, look," said Nurse Pebbles. "We were pulling duty on the Grade II Aphasics Ward - and you have to project an extreme and basic image for them to even recognise you as medical personnel."

"We've been detailed to take you up to Dr Roberts," said Nurse Bambam, "for initial consultation and evaluation." She glanced at the Tactical Arms guards. "Would you like to leave your men here? We have a number of... highly effective security measures in place."

There was not a wall, floor or ceiling in the Psyko-Block, to Dredd's knowledge, that was not packed with those security measures, from technically non-lethal restraining-field emitters to decidedly lethal cyborgs permanently charging in alcoves behind slam-shutters. There was almost no conceivable circumstance with which these measures, designed as they were to contain criminal psychotics in their thousands, could not cope.

On the other hand, as he knew to his cost, when dealing with someone like Drago San it was better not to take any chances.

"Drago San stays under guard until we have him secured," he said.

"As you wish," said Nurse Bambam. "If you'd like to come this way?"

Doctor Robert Roberts, Dredd recalled, had been notable enough to make the Justice Department Internal Bulletins, years before, when he had been a Cadet training for Psi-Division. He'd scored off the scale for passive psionic talents - empathy, Rhine-card reading, psychometric reading, remote viewing - while evidencing no active talents whatsoever.

The reason for this, it had transpired, was that Cadet Robert Roberts was possessed of absolutely no
psi
talent at all - not even the vestigial breath possessed by the vast majority of norms on the planet. He had produced the effect by way of a massive amplification of the mundane skills that in usual cases supplemented psi talent: the reading of faces, the extrapolation of data that the mind was aware of only subconsciously, and so forth.

All of which was interesting and notable, but of about as much actual use to Psi-Division as a one-legged man in the hundred yards dash. Cadet Roberts was shunted into Med-tech Training, where psycho-profiling showed that he was perfectly suited to that brand of psychiatric medicine concerned with the criminally insane. It was a path that had led to a rapid rise through the hierarchy of the Tech-Divisions, culminating in him being appointed Surgeon in Chief in charge of the Mega-City Psyko-Block.

It was Doctor Roberts, in fact, who had introduced the innovations to the Psyko-Block environment over recent years. Innovations which might have jibed a little with Judges of the old school - the school that held that perps should drokking well get what was coming to them, whether they were in actual fact responsible for their actions or not, but there was no doubt that they seemed to work. A serious problem had not come out of the Psyko-Block in years. It had become a place, effectively, where you could leave a problematic case and forget about it.

That was going to change, Dredd thought, as the elevator carried him and Drago San, together with their Tactical Arms guard, to the offices of Doctor Roberts.

The elevator itself was little more than a null-grav platform in a shaft, used for the transport of administrative staff rather than inmates, so there was no need for an actual cage. Access hatches to the various levels of cells and wards zipped by at speed. It was still some time, however, before the platform came to a stop in a large and somewhat cavernous chamber.

A geodesic superstructure of what appeared to be brass supported a dome of LCD panels, currently showing the lava-swirls of an abstract fractal pattern in different shades of green. In the centre of the chamber, the segmented, polyceramic cones of a galvanistic transformer flared and Jacobs-laddered with plasma-fire.

Standing before him, bathed in this shifting light, was a man. Recognisable as Doctor Robert Roberts from the Justice Department files - if rather more pale and twitchy than those files suggested, to quite some degree.

He wore a spotless surgical laboratory coat, offset by jet black polymer gloves and sunglasses with circular lenses, to the sides of which had been clipped microfilament lights. An ophthalmoscope was strapped to his head, which at some point he had shaved completely bald.

The somewhat menacing effect was only slightly spoilt by the speculum sticking out of his pocket and the stethoscope dangling from his neck. Then again, it might depend on what he ever decided to do with them.

Nurse Pebbles and Nurse Bambam now crossed the chamber to join the doctor, taking up positions that seemed to fire danger signals in Dredd's mind, despite the fact that they appeared to be nothing more than somewhat affectedly posing. It would only be later that he learnt why this was...

Dredd had never sat down and actually watched an entertainment holo-vid in his life, but there are some things one picks up by simple osmosis. The little tableau presented by Doctor Robert Roberts and the pair of nurses was straight out of an action-adventure spy show, where the Villain stands rather camply, flanked by his Cool Chick Assassins - only here and now there was a sense that those concerned had bought into it totally and were trying to do it for real.