Rico Dredd: The Titan Years Read online

  RICO DREDD: THE TITAN YEARS

  The Third Law - The Process of Elimination - For I Have Sinned

  Michael Carroll

  An Abaddon Books™ Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  [email protected]

  First published in 2019 by Abaddon Books™, Rebellion Intellectual Property Limited, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK.

  Creative Director and CEO: Jason Kingsley

  Chief Technical Officer: Chris Kingsley

  Head of Books and Comics Publishing: Ben Smith

  Editors: David Thomas Moore,

  Michael Rowley and Kate Coe

  Marketing and PR: Remy Njambi

  Design: Sam Gretton, Oz Osborne and Maz Smith

  Cover: Michael Carroll & Pye Parr

  Introduction copyright © 2019 Rebellion

  The Third Law copyright © 2014 Rebellion

  The Process of Elimination copyright © 2018 Rebellion

  For I Have Sinned copyright © 2019 Rebellion

  Rico Dredd created by Pat Mills and Mick McMahon.

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-160-2

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  RICO DREDD: THE TITAN YEARS

  THE THIRD

  LAW

  Michael Carroll

  Mega-City One

  2079 AD

  Prologue

  IT WAS AN accident, of course.

  Yes, I was extorting that citizen. And, yes, that was a crime. I admit that. I’ve never denied it. I knew what I was doing, and I knew it was technically wrong. Especially for a Judge.

  But what so many people have failed to understand is that there are degrees of wrongness. Killing a man without due cause is clearly wrong. Accidentally killing a man when you only intend to wound him is marginally wrong, but mostly just unfortunate.

  My brother Joe didn’t see it that way. To him, the world is divided into two groups: lawbreakers, and Joe Dredd.

  I tried to explain, of course, but Joe wouldn’t listen. All he saw was me drawing my Lawgiver on Virgil Livingstone. Without context, it looked like I was gunning down an unarmed citizen. But Livingstone wasn’t a citizen, not really. He’d given up that right the moment he chose to be a lawbreaker.

  And breaking the Law is a choice, no matter what any smug liberal do-gooders might tell you about “poor upbringing” and “broken homes.” That stomm doesn’t sit well with me. Never has.

  Some perps will argue, “Hey, I didn’t know that was against the Law!” but that’s not a valid excuse. Just as it’s our duty as Judges to make and enforce the Law, it’s the citizens’ duty to learn and understand it. The basic rule of life in Mega-City One is this: if you wouldn’t do it when a Judge was watching you, then don’t do it. That shouldn’t be a difficult concept to grasp, but apparently it is.

  A few days after we graduated, Judge Wagner was approached by a perp who wanted him to arrest her friend because he’d sold her a dud batch of crawbies. Wagner asked her, “You understand that crawbies are illegal, citizen?” and the woman said, “Yeah, real ones are, but these ones are fake. So are you going to arrest him or what?”

  I’ve seen it myself, too. During my final assessment as a rookie, Judge Kenner and I were on foot-patrol when an ordinary car pulled into a taxi-only bay right beside us. The driver jumped out, saw us, realised what he’d done, looked back at his car for a moment, then turned to us and said, “It’s all right—I am a taxi-driver. I’m undercover.”

  So sometimes the people need a reminder of who’s in charge. They need to be shown that the Judges are there to protect them from themselves, as well as from each other. In the average week in Mega-City One, four citizens die as a result of possessing a strong sense of curiosity, a fork and a power outlet.

  I believe that, in general, people are reasonably smart. But by Grud the dumb ones are so dumb they drag the whole damn human race down. This is why you’ll always find finger-marks on a wall next to the Wet Paint sign. It’s why the hinges on car doors are at the front: so that if the idiot driver chooses to open the door while hurtling along the freeway, the wind won’t rip the door off and take her arm with it. It’s why the food safety laws insist that banana skins and coconut shells must be printed with a warning notice that reads Don’t Eat This Part.

  My first week on the job I stopped a citizen from attempting to pry open the elevator doors on the fiftieth floor of the No-tell Motel. Poor drokker didn’t understand the concept of elevator shafts: he thought that there was an endless stream of elevator cars, one after the other, like train carriages, and all he had to do was open the doors and step in.

  That’s why the citizens need Judges.

  I graduated the Academy of Law with the highest cumulative score ever recorded. Joe was a little behind me. Not much, but it was clear which of us was the better Judge. In fact, that had been obvious pretty much from the start.

  October 2073, six years away from graduation, Judge-Tutor Semple called our class to assembly. Semple was a stern man. Never smiled, never gave praise, but by Grud we sure knew it when he was disappointed. There were thirty-one of us, then, down from forty the previous year. Semple lined us up and strode back and forth along the line, scowling down at us in silence.

  That’s all he did. Striding back and forth, glaring with his good eye, saying nothing. And then, maybe ten minutes in, Cadet Milo Lange sagged, turned around, and walked away.

  Semple seemed pleased with that. He said, “Hope the rest of you learned something here. Dismissed.”

  Cadet Gibson wouldn’t let it go. He said, “Sir? What did Lange do?”

  “Hell if I know,” Semple said. “Did something. Guilty conscience. He’ll be gone by morning.”

  Later, back in the mess hall, Gibson said, “That wasn’t right. Lange’s a good cadet. He’s never done anything wrong.”

  Joe said, “He must have; he cracked. Semple didn’t accuse anyone of anything, didn’t give Lange the evil eye any more than he did the rest of us. It was a fishing expedition, that’s all. He played the odds, figured that there was at least one of us has done something we shouldn’t have.”

  “It’s sick,” I said, and Gibson and Hunt agreed with me.

  Joe sat back in his chair and scratched at the fuzz on his chin. “No, it was a good move. Weed out the weak. I reckon we can expect a lot more stuff like that in the next few years. We’re down to thirty now, started with over a hundred. By the time we hit the streets in ’79 there’ll be maybe ten of us left.”

  Before I go on, I should make something clear that many people don’t seem to realise. The Academy of Law graduates a lot more Judges than that every year, of course. I mean, ten extra Judges hitting the streets each year isn’t going to make a lick of difference in a city of eight hundred million citizens, is it? There are multiple classes taking place all the time: our class was one of forty-six. As the numbers whittled down they’d sometimes merge two classes, but mostly the tutors tended to keep the classes separate. The actual number of graduating Judges in 2079 was around five hundred, I think.

  Anyway: Gibson said, “You and Rico’ll be safe, whatever happens. The two of you could piss on the Chief Judge’s boots and he’d give you a free pass.” Then he grinned. “Maybe that’s what they want, huh? Hound the rest of us out so that the only Judges on the streets will be Fargo’s sprogs. An ar
my of interchangeable clone Judges stomping around without minds of their own.”

  And then he added, “No offence.”

  I didn’t care—Gibson was always saying things like that, trying to get a rise out of Joe. My brother didn’t respond, but I could tell he wanted to. Even then, Joe was a Lawbook on legs. He knew the regs inside and out, and never once broke a rule. I knew the regs as well as he did, of course, but I understood the difference between blindly following the rules and understanding their intent.

  Judges don’t just dispense the Law, we make the Law. That’s why we have to be the best of the best. That’s why, I guess, Semple and the other tutors were right to have been so hard on us.

  Long before I graduated, I came to understand the need for Judges to be flexible. If we see two creeps beating the stomm out of each other on the street, protocol says we arrest both and sort it out later. So that’s the arresting Judge, a crew on a pick-up wagon—three Judges at least—to take them to the closest Sector House, another couple of Judges there to process the arrest. And then we find out that the creeps are brothers or something like that, and neither will press charges. Best we can do is fine them for disturbing the peace. Fifty creds each, if it’s their first offence. That’s anywhere upwards of six Judges involved, all for a measly hundred credits.

  But say the Judge on the scene breaks up the fight and instead of arresting them on the spot he demands to know why they’re fighting. He figures out it’s just a scuffle, no harm done. He gives them a warning—not anything official, just a scare—and sends them on their way. Now instead of five or more other Judges having their time wasted, we’ve got two scared citizens who’ll be keeping their heads down for a long time afterwards.

  That’s why my arrest numbers weren’t as high as Joe’s. That’s why the citizens on my regular patrol routes grew to respect me, not fear me. I’d pass them on foot or on the bike and they’d nod a greeting. A couple of months on the job and I had most of the local juve gangs in line. Half of Joe’s were in the cubes.

  Sure, the juves would get a bit wild from time to time—they were kids, it’s to be expected—but I’d wade in with the daystick and crack a few skulls. Let them know who’s boss.

  I guess that’s where the split between me and Joe really started.

  At the investigation, it was suggested an incident in the Cursed Earth when I was a cadet exposed me to radiation that, somehow, affected me. I’d broken my arm and fractured my skull. This was thrown into the mix as a possible explanation for why I “turned bad.”

  But I didn’t turn bad. Not then, not ever. “Bad” and “good” are not absolutes. They’re points of view.

  Even if I hadn’t fully recovered, that theory doesn’t make a lick of sense, no matter how thin you slice it. Joe was with me the whole time, only a few metres away. He was exposed to the same levels of radiation that I was. Anything that affected me would have had the same effect on him. After all, we’re physically identical.

  There were other theories raised at the investigation… My DNA was tainted. I’d been exposed to the wrong sort of propaganda. My constant top-of-the-class scores had gone to my head, made me believe that I could do no wrong, and—therefore—I’d developed the notion that anything I did was right.

  But the truth is a lot simpler that any of that. Joe concerned himself with maintaining the status quo, a case of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But I could see that it was broken. I saw the flaws in the Justice system, and I was smart enough to know how to make everything better.

  One

  THERE WAS THIS juve, Evan Quasarano. Seventeen years old, built like a tank and almost as smart. Quasarano was a rising star in a gang called the Beadles. They didn’t get up to anything too serious; at worst, they did a little flash-mobbing every couple of months, swarm through a store and pick the shelves clean.

  Some Judges follow the regs and will do whatever it takes to break up the gangs, but right from the start I knew that was the wrong call. Leave the gangs intact and let them police each other, but keep an eye on them—that’s the best approach. If they do become a problem, it’s a lot easier to corral a thirty-member gang than thirty individuals each with their own agendas, bolt-holes and alibis.

  Quasarano was inducted into the Beadles when he was fourteen. At that age, he was already close to two metres tall, though he was skinny then. A couple of the older kids started giving him a hard time—part of his initiation, I guess. Quasarano took a few punches, hit the ground, then got back up and really laid into the drokkers, just using his bare fists. One of them ended up in the infirmary with cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder.

  They admired that, and soon Quasarano became their foremost enforcer. He kept the younger kids in line, and he was the one they sent out to “negotiate” with the other gangs in territorial disputes.

  Like most of the juve gangs, once the kids reached eighteen they were nudged out, whether they wanted to leave or not. Around the time I came on the scene, Quasarano was fifth in line, and the four guys ahead of him were long past their eighteenth birthdays, but they didn’t want to go. I can understand that, from their point of view: they’d spent years building up their little power-base and there was no way they’d be happy to just hand it down to someone else.

  Quasarano didn’t do anything, but he made it clear to the others that they weren’t welcome any more. He began to ignoring the older kids’ instructions, started telling the younger kids how things would be run. The older guys didn’t like that, so one night they ambushed him coming out of a shuggy hall. Four against one.

  I got the call and arrived to see Quasarano pushing himself off the ground, covered in blood. The other four looked like they’d tried to take down a tank by running at it with their faces.

  “We were jumped,” Quasarano said. “This buncha guys... They came outta nowhere and...” He stopped when he realised it was me. “Aw, man. Rico, look... I was defending myself.”

  I climbed down off my Lawmaster and strode over to him, hauled him to his feet. “I warned you about fighting on my patch, Quasarano.”

  “Rico, come on, man.” He painted a bloody streak across the back of his hand with his mouth. “You know me. You know these guys. And you know the situation. They’re too old for the club.”

  I planted my hand on Quasarano’s jaw. “Hold still and shut up.” I turned his head left and right. “Doesn’t look like your nose is broken.”

  I stepped back and looked around at the other gang members. Three of them were unconscious; the fourth, a nasty little scuzzball called Paxton, was faking it. Compared to the others, there was barely a scratch on him. I’d seen that before, with street-fights; someone quickly realises that he’s out of his depth, so he hugs the dirt in the hope he’ll be able to slither away when it’s all over.

  Quasarano said, “Rico, I—”

  “You weren’t here. Go home. Now.”

  He hesitated for a second, then took off.

  I pulled out my radio. “Control, this is Dredd. Four to pick up, my location. Brawling, four years in the cubes.”

  From the ground, Paxton said, “Four years? No way!” He rolled onto his side, pushed himself up.

  I put away the radio. “Then it’s a good thing for you that I didn’t actually call it in. This is how it’s going to be around here, boy. You and your friends stay away from Quasarano and the rest of the gang. Understood? Your time is over. You’re done.”

  Paxton slunk over toward me. “Look, Judge... That guy doesn’t know stomm from stew. There’s no written rule about how old someone hasta be to be in the club. And it is a club, not a gang. We’re not—”

  He shut up, then, because a fist in the face will do that.

  I reached down, grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet again. “I asked you if you understood, Paxton. All I want is a yes or a no.”

  He squinted at me through bloodshot eyes. “I’m just sayin’...”

  It took two more punches and a solid kick t
o the ribs before Paxton came around to my way of thinking.

  The next day, I saw Paxton and his friends on the street. Not one of them gave me any sass. They kept their heads down as they passed me by. That’s part of what it means to be a Judge. We don’t just rule the people, we guide them. It’s better to steer the citizens away from trouble instead of just waiting for them to break the Law and then punishing them.

  Joe could never see that. A week after the incident with Quasarano and Paxton, Joe and I had some downtime, a half-hour between shifts where we both happened to be in the same Sector House at the same time. We were only four months out of the Academy, and already we had better arrest records than Judges twice our age.

  I spotted Joe in the mess hall. He was always easy to recognise, even from behind, because he was the only one sitting alone. The only one paging through the Lawbooks as he ate.

  Joe turned around to face me before I was even halfway across the room. To anyone else, that might suggest some sort of mysterious link between twins or something, but I knew Joe better than that. If he had to sit with his back to the door, he’d arrange it so that he could see a reflection in the window, or in the side of a napkin dispenser. I’m not saying he was paranoid, just cautious. There weren’t many people who could sneak up on Joseph Dredd.

  Joe nodded to me, then to the chair opposite. I put my tray down, and for a moment I watched him eat. Even when we were kids, he was an efficient eater. Food was fuel to him, that’s all. I don’t ever recall him having a favourite flavour, or doing something like eating the pseudopeas first to get them out of the way. He just ate. Methodically, without any interest other than topping up the body’s fuel and nutrients. He shovelled it in, chewed, swallowed, and stopped when the plate was empty, or when he was full. Those two things usually coincided, because Joe never put more food on his plate than he thought he’d be able to eat.