Free Sweet Justice by Neil Gaiman

was enough to snap her out of the state she was in. She snapped down her respirator, and kicked the sugar out of Armour’s hand.
    ‘Judge Armour! Use your respirator!’
    He reached up a trembling arm and fumbled it down.
    ‘I don’t know what come over me,’ his voice echoed in her helmet.
    ‘This stuff isn’t sugar,’ said Hershey. ‘We’ve known that all along. But I think we’re about to find out where it came from...’
    And then the thing came over the hill.
    Seen at that size the resemblance to a spider was decreased. It had seven legs, and dragged a hairy, bulbous body between them. A network of tiny eyes circled its body; at the front were mandibles, behind it a stream of white crystals was trickling down.
    It was enormous.
    Armour sighted his Lawgiver. She put out an arm. ‘No, don’t shoot.’
    ‘Huh?’
    ‘It’s intelligent. I recognise the life-form. A Sakishira. It’s non-aggressive... I saw some seven years ago, when I went extragalactic. This one is sick.
    ‘Armour, put out a call to Justice Central, or whatever you people call it here. Tell them we need an alien handler. And a truck to move the thing. And an alien medic, if you’ve got such a thing in Brit territories – otherwise call Mega-City One and ask them to send Sturgeon over. He’s the best we’ve got.’
    Armour began to put in the calls. Hershey walked over to the spider-creature. Her Allspeak was rusty – it had never been good – but she managed. ‘You-ill-make-better-thing-come.’ The alien shuddered, and lay down.
    Hershey walked over to where Clute was lying.
    ‘There used to be an insect called the bee. Almost extinct these days. Not enough plants around. Bees made a synthetic sugar in their bodies called honey. Food for their young. When you saw this alien come in on the shuttle point, trickling sugar, you thought it was something like that. That right, creep?’
    The man nodded. Sugar crystals were sticking to his sweat-soaked forehead.
    ‘So you kidnapped the thing, and dragged her down here, and locked her up. Must have taken a lot of work. But you thought you’d made your fortune.
    ‘There must be twenty million creds worth of sugar down here, eh, creep? You thought you were printing your own money.’
    ‘You’re smart, Judge, for a–’
    ‘Shut up, creep. But you were wrong. This stuff isn’t food. It isn’t sugar. It’s eggs. That’s how these things breed. They lay this stuff, animals eat it, and it transforms the cellular structure of the animals into little duplicates of Big Momma over there.
    ‘You’ve been sugar dealing, kidnapping an intelligent being and killing people, creep. You want to know what the sentence for that is?’
    Clute didn’t respond. His face seemed waxen, papery. Something pulsed rhythmically in his cheek. The skin broke, and tiny black legs clawed at the air.
    ‘How’s our prisoner?’ called Armour.
    Hershey shrugged. ‘He’s gone to pieces,’ she said. ‘Must have been sampling his own merchandise.’
    Then the clean-up squad arrived, and it was all over.
     
    EPILOGUE
     
    Chief Judge Silver sent for her as soon as she arrived back in Mega-City One.
    ‘You did all right,’ he told her. ‘The International Justice Council were pleased. So was Chief Judge Jones: if their man had shot the Sakishira it could have provoked an intergalactic incident. And we’ve an antidote to the sugar for anyone we can get it to in time. No point in having them turn into little spiders in the Iso-Cubes.
    ‘So what did you think of Brit-Cit?’
    Hershey was expressionless. ‘I’m pleased to be home, sir.’
    ‘Yes, I hear they do things differently over there. Still, they get the job done. That will be all, Hershey.’
    She left.
    Silver looked down at the paper on his desk. It was a request, from the Brit-Cit Chief Judge, that Judge Hershey be assigned to the Brit-Cit Judge force for a six-month tour of duty, while they sent a Brit-Cit Judge to Mega-City One. ‘ To foster