Free Psykogeddon by Dave Stone Page A

including punitive measures requiring the use of ultimately lethal force."
    "Let me get this straight," said Dredd. "I get past you by giving up every right whatsoever, and anything that might happen to me is my fault rather than yours?"
    "That's about the size of it, sunshine," said the automated voice. "Please state name and business for the purposes of voice-verification."
    "Judge Dredd," said Dredd. "Justice Department business. I'm here to see some creep by the name of Barnstable Wheems."
    The tentacle whipped back into the wall as if had been physically stung.
    "Too rich for my hydraulic fluid," said the voice. "Go in and see who you like. No polycarbonate sheathing off my endoskeletal armature."
     
    Having never actually met a lawyer in his life, Dredd was unsure quite what to expect from Barnstable Wheems. In the end he found merely a pudgy, stuffy man in a suit.
    This would have been no problem, so far as Barnstable Wheems was concerned, had the suit been of the three-piece Saville Row variety, the sort one might have imagined a stuffy, pudgy English barrister from back in the early twentieth century wearing. The sort of perfectly-tailored suit cut to transform mere pudginess into an imposing look.
    Instead, the suit was trying to look like those sharp and shark-like suits that had been worn by US lawyers in the glory days of litigation, the twenty-first century.
    Barnstable Wheems looked completely wrong in it, as if he were playing an inept and childish game of dress-up.
    As a man, Wheems was balding, sweaty and more than somewhat twitchy - no doubt as a reaction to being in a job the pressure of which he was patently and innately not up to. Or possibly it was just a guilty conscience - it couldn't be easy being one of the last vestiges of a life-form the world regarded as the lowest possible order of slime, and would only breathe easy when such excrescences were finally extinct.
    "Let me see if I can understand you correctly," Wheems said, squirming uneasily in Dredd's gaze after the Judge had put matters to him. "You're mounting a trial and you require legal assistance.
    "What makes you think that I have the... relevant skills in prosecuting what is, after all, despite the scale and heinous nature of his crimes, nothing more than a common criminal? Where did you get my name? How did you come to decide upon me?"
    On Wheems's desk, Dredd noticed, was a little polyceramic plaque.
    "You don't have to be mad to work here," it read. "You have to be the sort of rabid and oleaginous jackal who'd sell their crippled old Grandma for the chemical-content value of her body while she's still alive!"
    "You still misunderstand," said Dredd. "We don't need a creep like you for the prosecution. We can handle the prosecution on our own.
    "Brit-Cit has demanded a reversion to the old forms of trial. Drago San supplied us with your name. You're gonna be acting in his defence."
     
    In the Halls of Justice Med-Division, techs were working their way through the daily crop of bodies killed by Judges in the execution, as it were, of their duties.
    Even with the winnowing processes that excluded all the cut-and-dried deaths and had the vast majority of these bodies packed directly off to Resyk, the numbers were still sufficient enough that the work had something of the quality of an assembly-line.
    Given that the items on the conveyor belts were being disassembled rather than assembled, of course.
    A med-tech checked the preliminary scans on the current body going past. On this level of triage he was just a Grade One, barely a step up from casual labour.
    "Latent-psionic type, the scan says," he said unconcernedly. "Level too low to ever give him more than nightmares one night in three, usually, but just the sorta guy who tends to flip out this time of year when the atmo-systems start playing up. Run around, act up, get pulled down and stomped flat, you know?"
    "Yeah," another tech agreed. "Bag him as standard suicide-by-Judge and...