No
, the shadow-form roared.
You are wrong. I am Morris Weems! I-
No you're not
, Anderson said.
You're a bad recording of a copy of the ghost of a dead man trapped forever in the belly of the beast that killed him. And thanks to you, the evil little mothers in those eggs are going to spread out across the city and make more poor dumb bastard recordings just like you. Then, when they have their own template, they're going to start feeding on souls to make even more monsters like them. And when they and their offspring have sucked the Big Meg dry, they'll go on to the rest of the world. They'll feed on the whole human race, and it will be all your fault. You wanted to punish sin? You wanted to sit in judgement?
She let the words hang in the air, hoping she had played her hand right. She spoke again, spitting the words at the shadow-form with venom.
Judge yourself.
No!
The shadow-form screamed. Its hands warping into angry claws, it lashed out at the wall before it, burrowing deep inside it and crushing one of the eggs. She heard another scream, louder, a deep rumbling bass tone to the shadow-form's shrill falsetto. Around her, the tentacles writhed and the walls shook as the entity reacted in rage and pain. She took a step back, watching as the shadow-form gouged great chunks out of the wall. The tentacles whipped towards it, coiled around it, tried to restrain it, but the shadow-form broke free. It ripped the tentacles loose from their moorings and resumed its attack on the wall, tearing chunks of shadow-substance free as both it and the entity around it screamed again and again. She felt the entire mass of the entity convulse, great wet fissures appearing in the walls. The creature was at war with itself. It was tearing itself apart. More tentacles lashed out to grab hold of the body of the shadow-form and rip it to pieces with a final anguished shriek, but it was too late. The damage was done. She felt the entity diminish around her. It was dying.
In fear and terror, it returned to the only haven it had left.
"I don't believe it," Whitby said. Looking down the stairwell, he saw no sign of movement. A minute ago, dozens of crazies had been charging up the stairwell, intent on killing them, only for every one of them to collapse without warning. Gingerly, he bent forward to check the pulse of one of the collapsed bodies. "They're unconscious. What the hell happened?"
"It's over," he heard a woman's voice behind him.
It was Anderson. Whitby saw that she had emerged from her trance seemingly little the worse for wear.
"Anderson?" He rushed over to her. "Grud, for a moment there I thought the entity had you." He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the collapsed crowd behind him. "I'm guessing you're responsible for this? How the hell did you do it?"
"It was nothing much." She shrugged and smiled. "You remember I said the entity fed on souls? Let's just say I found a way to give him indigestion."
TWENTY-ONE
THE SMALLEST THING
"That should about hold it until we can get you to a med-bay." Two painkilling injections and an emergency course of viral healers later, the Med-Judge fixed a magnabind dressing over her left eye. "We should be able to save the sight in your eye, but I'm still worried about that head trauma."
"First chance I get, med-bay's where I'm headed to, doc," she said. "Before that, I've got some things I need to get done."
"If you say so," the Med-Judge shrugged. "I want to be clear, though, it's against medical advice."
"Whatever you say, doc," she smiled. "I promise that if I drop dead I'll have nobody to blame but myself."
She was sitting on a stretcher in the ground floor foyer. An hour had passed since she had emerged from inside the entity's mind, and now the entire Sector House was swarming with a dozen different brands of reinforcement Judges sent by Justice Department to re-establish order in the wake of the crisis. In the last hour, in-between receiving medical attention and saying her goodbyes to Symonds and most of the surviving Judges from the stairwell, she had been questioned and de-briefed by half-a-dozen different interested parties. Psi Division, Tek Division, SJS, the MegCentral Regional Commander: everybody wanted to hear her version of what had happened. No doubt in the next few days she would be called upon to tell the story to a dozen different commanders in a dozen different places, to have the entire incident chewed over and analysed while her own actions were put under a microscope. She expected as much. No matter how bad a crisis was, the paperwork she had to go through when it was over was always worse.
"Sinners, we are all sinners. We must be judged..." she heard a man's voice muttering quietly nearby, repeating the same phrases like a mantra. "Sinners, we are all sinners. We must be judged..."
Anderson saw a Judge in a straitjacket being wheeled through the lobby on a stretcher. It was Hass. The SJS man was now a psych-case. As he passed, Hass didn't even notice her. His eyes stared blankly into space, drool dripping from his mouth as he quietly repeated the same words over and over again.
"They're taking him to the psycho-cubes for observation," the Med-Judge said. "Whatever happened to him, it seems to have left lasting mental scars."
"Psychic possession can do that to you," Anderson said. She shrugged. "Give him some time and he should be okay. Although you may want to make sure you keep him away from matches for the time being."
"Hey, Anderson," she heard a voice call, and saw Whitby jogging towards her as the Med-Judge moved on to treat another patient. "I thought I'd missed you. I just wanted to say goodbye." He looked with concern at the bandage across her face. "How's the eye?"
"It's fine," she said. "Although I'm sure I'll have to put up with people telling me I look like a pirate for the next few weeks."
"Yeah," Whitby said. "I think if you had a robo-parrot and a peg leg to go with that eye-patch, your costume might look better."
"A Street Judge making jokes?" she smiled. "Now I've heard everything. You might want to be careful - before you know it you'll be smiling on duty and giving Street Division a bad name."
"I'll take the chance," he smiled back. "I guess you'll be leaving us soon?"
"That's right." From across the foyer she saw a pair of Psi-Judges walking towards her, one of them carrying a heavy metal box. "I've got some unfinished business to attend to, then it's back to Omar House for yet more de-briefings. You know how it is."
"I know," Whitby nodded. "I guess I'm likely to be doing more of the same myself." He paused, then began awkwardly again. "Before you go though, I just wanted to say-"
"We said it already," she decided to spare him any further embarrassment. Smiling was one thing, but expecting a Street Judge to easily express his emotions more than once a day was like asking for a miracle. "Back when we were about to take on the mob of crazies. 'Just in case.' You remember?"
"I remember. Though that was before you beat the entity and saved my life."
"I seem to remember you saved mine, too," she told him. "Twice. We're even."
Standing up from the stretcher, she nodded towards the approaching Psi-Judges.
"Anyway, I've got to go. Like I say, unfinished business. See you around." She began to walk away, then turned. "Oh, and Whitby? Remember when we were in Billy Friedkin Block and you were wondering whether you measured up as a Judge? I hope you'll forgive me, but I overheard it. It's the curse of the telepath - sometimes you pick up stray thoughts without even trying. I've seen you work, and you can take it from a 'legend', you measure up just fine."
"Basement sub-level three," Psi-Judge Carsons looked at the floor number stencilled on the wall of the stairwell and turned her attention to the palm-sized comp-terminal in her hand. "According to the Sector House specs, the evidence vault should be this way."
Anderson opened the stairwell door and stepped into the corridor with the two Psi-Judges beside her. They walked towards the imposing steel door of the evidence vault at the other end of the corridor, their footsteps echoing across the floor.
"Teks say all systems are back online," Carsons said, producing an override card from inside her utility belt and swiping it through the lock. The door slid open. "Looks like we're in business."
They stepped through the door, the lights automatically flashing on overhead as they did so. Anderson saw row after row of metal shelves filled with plasteen crates.
"They must have been packing everything up, getting ready for the move," Psi-Judge Sirk said. Spotting a clear space on a nearby table, he deposited the metal box he was carrying on top of it. "Grud, but that thing's heavy."
"It should be," Carsons said. "It's layered with psi-brick."
"All right," Anderson said. "It doesn't look like there's any particular order to these crates, so we'll have to do this the hard way and check them all until we find the one we're looking for. Carsons, you have the details?"
"Check." Carsons raised her palm-sized again and looked at the screen. "We're looking for property recovered following the arrest of one Jard Erwin Kelso for Receiving Stolen Property. Grud, according to this, the stuff was seized fifteen years ago. If nobody claimed it, it should have all been sold off a long time ago."
"It's here," Anderson said. "I can feel it."
"How does something like that even end up in a Sector House to begin with?" Sirk said as they began to search through the crates. "From the reports I heard back at HQ, I understand it's some kind of other-dimensional predator."
"That's right," Anderson said. "When I was in its mind, I caught glimpses of its past. Enough to piece at least some of the story together. Hundreds of thousands of years ago someone captured it."
"Someone?" Carsons said. "You mean like aliens?"
"I think so. Whoever they were, they captured it in its larval stage and put it in a prison. I don't know whether they meant to study it, put it in a zoo, or keep it as a pet. Whatever their plans were, something went wrong. There was a malfunction and the ship carrying the entity exploded. Still inside its prison, it was cast adrift in space until it fell to Earth."
"Like a meteor you mean?" Carsons shivered. "I always said nothing good ever came from space."
"That still doesn't explain how it ended up in the Sector House," Sirk said.
"It must have been buried by the impact." The look in Anderson's eyes was distant. "Eventually, somebody dug it up by accident and thought it was valuable. Who knows how many hands it must have passed through over the centuries, or how many collectors had it in their possession, never once realising what it really was. And all that time, the entity waited, raging against the walls of its prison. It waited for the right set of circumstances, for the tangents to come together that would allow it to be free. Jard Kelso. Brophy. Morris Weems. Even then, once it had absorbed its first soul - Weems - and was hungry for more, it found itself frustrated. There was no one around for it to kill, to make it grow stronger. It was hidden away here inside the evidence vault, probably until the packing for the impeding change of Sector House caused it to be moved a little bit closer to the holding-cubes. Close enough for it to start killing in earnest."
"I've found it!" Carsons said excitedly.
Stepping alongside her as Carsons pulled open the crate, Anderson saw a tray of gemstones, each in individual evidence bags. Among the glittering stones, she saw it: a blood-red ruby, no bigger than her thumbnail. There was no mistaking it. Even from here, she could feel the entity's cold malevolence radiating to her from inside.
"That's it?" Carsons seemed disappointed as Anderson picked up the ruby. "A small thing like that caused all this damage? I thought you said this entity was bigger than the Sector House."
"It was," Anderson said. "It
is
. It's from another dimension - it doesn't follow the same physical laws that we do. Once I turned the Uriel-Weems part of it against itself, the entity retreated back inside the gemstone. Over the years this ruby has become more than just a prison. It's a haven, a refuge. More than that, it's an anchor that keeps it in our dimension - where its prey is. That's why it didn't want to see the Sector House destroyed."
She put the ruby in the metal box and watched as Sirk closed and locked it.
"All right," she said. "Take it back to Psi Division and tell them it's an Omega Level Threat. Have them put it in the psi-proof vaults below Psi-lab and tell them to throw away the key. That way, hopefully, it will never have the chance to harm anyone again.
"What about you?" Sirk asked as he hefted the weight of the box and turned to make his way from the evidence vault alongside Carsons.
"I'll be along," she told them.
They left her, their footsteps echoing up the corridor. She was exhausted, not just by her exertions over the last day and night, but by the experience of having the entity's memories play through her mind again. It had existed only to feed on human souls, annihilating them. Although she was sure such moral questions would be lost to it, it occurred to her that the entity was as close to a creature of pure evil as anything she had ever met. A small thing, Carsons had called it - and she was right. Anderson realised that there was no irony in the fact that such a seemingly insignificant thing had caused so much devastation, and had even come close to wiping out the entire human race. It was the way of the universe. Their lives were lines and tangents; fragile threads that intersected while around them other forces moved unseen in the darkness to shape their existence. Forces that mankind called gods, fate, destiny, good luck, bad luck and a dozen other names besides. No matter the name though, it was all the same. The forces moved about their work regardless, unravelling the skein of one human life thread here, cutting another one there. Heedless and uncaring, the dance of the cosmos continued as human lives floundered and were broken by the smallest things.
Sometimes, it was the small things that made the difference between life and death.