The Forge: Fire and Ice

JUSTICE IN THE ’POOL Jonathan Edwards

Once it had been a beautiful metropolis. A zero-carbon city of the angels, if only for the rich. Schoolchildren had been taught how the city hosted, ‘The First Ever Air Olympics’. But it had been a very long time since the Olympics had been held, and schools were part of history now. Firstly, the rest of the population had eaten at the city’s edges. And the domes could only keep out so much foul air and dirty water. Man had attacked nature for hundreds of years, and the prize was disease, despair and filth. The pristine municipality had slowly been transformed into a squalid rats’ nest. Life expectancy had halved, but in this fetid hell, nobody complained.

Perhaps because of the downgrading in society, or possibly because of it, the population surged even higher. The push-button wars with other countries had given way to individual battles for space. As huge community towers blocked out the sun, funding and power were cut for the elderly and vulnerable. The government channel showed prisoners laughing about it. That led to punishment, which led to jail riots, which led to staff walking out for almost a year in a pay dispute. The prisoners didn’t get a meal during that time. All they found when they went back in was death.

With no space or money, justice had to evolve to cope with the spiralling crime levels. The new Case Handlers and Judges originally sounded like bureaucrats and lawyers. But the days of paperwork had given way to something grimy, chilling and fatal. Even in the air-starved, vermin-infested city, with legions of families sleeping in stairways and old cars, when people said they had nightmares, it was always of the Handlers and Judges.

Crib never had those nightmares, because he lived them.

Handlers Hutton and Tresling put their blackened boots against the windshield of their vehicle. They sat back and sucked the multi-coloured noodles out of the tin. They were meant to be green, but after fourteen hours on shift, anything warm worked.

Outside, people scuttled away from the Handlers’ machine. Some crossed themselves, all hugged themselves or their children, as if they could feel the cold from inside.

A red light flashed on the driving console, and Tresling hit it unnecessarily hard. The windscreen filled with a visual.

‘Murder one…’ said an aged man from the screen.

‘Go!’ shouted Hutton, and they were already moving before they even knew where they were going.

The cragged face carried on, ‘At Highland Boulevard Block 9. All squads within three blocks to attend urgently!’

Another Handler’s voice, unseen but probably on patrol like them, incredulously asked, ‘All squads within three blocks for a single murder one?!’

The old man looked angry. ‘Just do it!’

Tresling smiled at Hutton. Who the hell had been clicked?

‘Visual online, update as per.’ The old man’s face was replaced with several images from the location of the murder. All citizens were required to be implanted with tracking devices, and one image mapped scared people starbursting to save themselves.

The Handlers heard a crunch as they hit something, or probably someone. They laughed. The department had The Brain putting their speed as a priority way before their lives, let alone a pedestrian.

They looked at the screen. Usually, the area would have been almost blocked out with tracking signals. But now there was only one. It wasn’t the deceased. And whoever it was, they weren’t moving.

Hutton checked his icer. The icer was originally designed to record evidence, something which it did with its audio, visual, scanner and black box. But it also froze. It could freeze a fingerprint, a DNA sample, a suspect… Tresling had iced one suspect as he chased him over rooftops. The guy had been turning blue before he jumped for the other side. He fell 84 storeys. Splintered into a billion pieces.

Hutton told him in the old days the cops used to shout, ‘Freeze!’ to suspects. Tresling said Hutton was full of it, but Hutton kept saying it. He said back then it meant to ‘keep still’, as opposed to the current meaning: ‘Have a class 4 icer hit you with enough LDS to get your own body to use its energy to turn you into a giant popsicle, that will be kept in storage until the case gets processed’.

Neither of the Handlers had ever had someone intentionally wait at the scene for them before. They checked their icers again.

The reading said he was Crib L. Jones-7. He’d gotten in trouble as a juvenile, protesting at the zoo. He’d worn a T-shirt saying, ‘This is not a Zoo!’ and had been agitating people. According to him, a room with moving visuals of elephants, hippos, and the like (the ones that existed just a hundred years before) was not a zoo. There had been a cat and a white rat as well, but someone had stolen the first and eaten the latter, leaving just the room and the visuals. Crib got half-rations, curfew and limitation.

It was the other entry that was more interesting. Violent disorder. Three thousand had died after a queue riot. Hutton struggled to remember the case. He called it up.

Ah, it was from a good twenty years before. After fourteen investigations, an automatic appeal and finally, reviewing the video and tracking footage, it had shown Crib wasn’t involved. Of course, due process had to be followed. That’s why the Handlers had frozen Crib at the scene. And when, eighteen years later, the justice system had considered the case, Crib was immediately scheduled for de-icing. And the Handlers, the ‘Ice Squad’ as they were often called in the media, had Crib thawed out by the very next year. No harm done, on to the next case please!

They arrived at the shell of flats, squirted something up their noses to numb the smell, and headed into the building. Both Hutton and Tresling fired up their icers.

The murder had happened in Families Room B8-32. Every room they passed differed only in size. They were all multi-purpose (the mess and stains told you that), and overcrowded. Yet the absence of a public health warning meant this was a better part of the city.

As they came to B8-32, Hutton and Tresling nodded to each other and held their icers ready.

Tresling went in first. There was a pile of rags covered in a bloody mulch in the corner: the victim. Crib was towards the other corner, kneeling and facing him.

Hutton bounded in.

‘Freeze!’

Tresling winced.

Crib didn’t even look at them. ‘I’m guilty. I accept sentencing.’

‘Woah! Let’s do this by the book! Who’s the victim? How did you do it? And why?’

Even an old hand like Hutton had sweat running down his back when a suspect confessed before they’d gotten evidence. Confessing meant the Judges would be notified. Even the Handlers had nightmares about them. Most of them were picked from Handlers who had lost it. Every Handler swore they’d get out before they went like that. The plan was always to get some proof before any confession, so they could freeze them and leave them for the Judges when that happened.

Crib looked at the floor.

Tresling pointed his icer at Crib’s head. ‘Start talking! You want another twenty years in the freezer?’

Crib didn’t move. ‘I said I confess. Call in the Judges!’

Was this guy nuts? ‘You want the Judges, you tell us something. Victim. Name. Now.’

Hutton was poking about in the blood and guts with his icer. ‘The old man was jacked up on this case, I’m going to ask him for a remote DNA ident.’ Tresling nodded and continued trying to get some answers.

He walked up to Crib. His face was tinged blue. It had odd creases from where he’d been frozen. Tresling didn’t know if Crib’s vacant stare was because of his mental state, or whether his facial muscles had never properly recovered after being iced. ‘Tell me everything now and I’ll ice you before the Judges come.’

‘I’m not going back into the cold. I can’t take it. I confess.’

‘Do you actually know anything about this murder, citizen? Because you are making me pretty damned angry!’

A panel on Hutton’s armcomm went green and he walked over to his partner. He glared at Crib. ‘Look, if you’re so keen to admit it, fill us in on the details. The Judges won’t accept an unreliable confession.’

Crib began to laugh hard. ‘Yeah, sticklers for rules those Judges.’ Tresling punched Crib hard, but cursed himself because it was time they didn’t have.

‘Talk!’ screamed Hutton.

‘I think the perp has already admitted it, don’t you?’ The voice was from what passed for a doorway. The Judge was short, with short red hair, and a torn red suit. He was also about three feet wide and carried a PB-8 flameunit. He stepped into the room and grinned.

‘We don’t have a reliable confession, Sir.’

The Judge walked up to Tresling and spat on the floor. Then he turned to Crib. ‘The feed showed you admitting it, perp!’

‘I am guilty, I accept sentencing.’ It was Crib’s first acknowledgement of the Judge’s presence.

The Judge smiled and clicked a button on his flameunit. ‘You Handlers can leave.’

Hutton was a bastard, but he knew he’d be in for an icing or worse if he let a Judge burn this guy for an uncorroborated confession. He rested his icer against his shoulder. ‘You know the law, Sir. I have to ice this suspect and scene for a murder one.’

The Judge just smiled. There had been talk about Judges just burning people without full confessions. Even for fun. This one looked crazy, but then they all did. The Judges meted out punishment, but never seemed to suffer any.

He pointed his flameunit in Crib’s direction. ‘Found at the scene. A sign of guilt, some might say. That’s corroboration.’

Tresling tried to support his partner. ‘Wouldn’t a guilty man try to flee the scene?’

The Judge sneered. ‘You a psychologist?’ Then he turned to Crib. ‘Tell me why you killed them?’

Crib just stared. That seemed to upset the Judge.

‘We’ve asked him several times,’ said Hutton. ‘He’s been a cube before, and I think he can’t face it again. He’d prefer to be burnt than another twenty in the freezer.’

‘Hmm!’ The Judge smiled. ‘Then maybe his confession isn’t reliable, and I should just leave you legal experts and psychologists to it.’ Then he broke into a full smile of red teeth and put his flameunit against Crib’s head.

Tresling pulled the Judge from behind, and they both went to the floor. Hutton iced on full blast, Crib screaming as he contorted in pain.

The Judge jumped to his feet and pumped out a stream of fire that engulfed Hutton. Hutton screeched and his flaming form fell on top of Crib. Crib’s right leg wasn’t fully iced, and it began chemically burning as the rest of him was in the process of freezing.

Tresling aimed his icer straight for the Judge, who sidestepped, kicked Tresling and stood over him with the flameunit. It was only as he pulled the trigger that he realised the weapon was cold. It had gotten iced by Tresling’s last shot. His face showed the fear as the flameunit exploded in an orange ball, killing the Judge and Tresling in less than a second.

Crib was literally frozen stiff now, but his leg was on fire. Tresling’s dismembered arm and armcomm rested next to his frosted torso. A message came in saying the murder victim was the Chancellor. But Crib couldn’t see or hear, he could just sense the gelid paralysis and his leg crumbling into soft ash. Twenty minutes later, he was arrested for quadruple murder one. He made no reply to caution, ‘Reason: frozen.’

the end