Read Online Psykogeddon by Dave Stone - Free Book Online

Continental Europe, however, turned much of the British Isles into a wasteland, ruled over by a collection of criminal warlords constantly competing for territory and advantage in the chaos of what was, effectively, a civil war.
    The more far-sighted of these warlords knew that this state of affairs could not last without a wholesale slide into barbarism, but years of divisive politics had left nothing around which the various factions might cohere.
    When the law-enforcement agencies of the USA took command of the remains of their country and established the Justice System, the British warlords took it as a godsend - or, indeed, as a Grudsend.
    Knowing a good thing when they saw it, the warlords came together in what became known as the Conclave, redeployed their various soldiers and assassins and enforcers along Justice Department lines, dressed them up as Judges and applied for as much US funding as they could grab.
    It might have seemed odd that the American Mega-Cities, who had troubles enough of their own, would have had anything to spare for any other country. The plain fact was, though, that the idea of the Law had taken the US citizens by storm and in the heady rush of implementing it, they were drokking-well going to spread it around.
    The Brit-Cit Justice Department began life as nothing more than a front, the purpose of which was to garner massive doses of relief aid, wipe out all opposition and establish a de facto government by direct force, with the meanest sons of bastiches ending up sitting on the top.
    It would be wrong to say that the system was corrupt, because that would be assuming that it had been honest enough in the first place, and that corrupting it would make any actual difference.
    All of which was to say that Brit-Cit was one of the few city-states on Earth that maintained ties and trading links with Puerto Lumina, and allowed it to exist in the first place. Indeed, if one could scrape together the cash, it was possible to use those trade routes to escape.
    Efil Drago San had scraped that cash together, making his escape over a pile of bodies numbering in the thousands.
    On his arrival in Brit-Cit, by way of a British Off-Planet Services shuttle which, ostensibly, had crashed with no survivors, Drago San had melted into the underworld that existed on account of Brit-Cit Judges looking studiously the other way.
    He had then risen through the ranks with such single-minded ferocity as to put the atrocities of the Civil War to shame... to emerge, in a matter of half a decade, as one of the Overlords who not-so-secretly ran Brit-Cit and its Justice Department from behind the scenes.
    For years Efil Drago San had run a number of rackets in Brit-Cit, from drugs, to certain highly specialised avenues of prostitution, to organised murder, with effective immunity. These happy days had come to an end, however, for two main reasons - the first reason being the basic fact that form and function, in this world, are inextricably linked.
    Over the years, quite simply, amongst the usual hordes of thugs and bullies, the ersatz Brit-Cit Justice Department had begun to attract those who truly did believe in the Law, people who genuinely wanted to be of service.
    People who were naïve enough that the question of whom they were actually serving never occurred to them... or bright enough to know the game was rigged, but that it was the only game in town.
    The former, of course, were in for a rude awakening, and lasted in direct proportion to how much noise they subsequently made about it. The latter settled in for the long haul, did their jobs as best as they were able and never lost an opportunity to throw a spanner in the overlords' collective works.
    The net result was that the overlords woke up one day to find that the Brit-Cit Justice Department that they thought was in their pockets suddenly seemed to be devoting most of its time to actually solving crimes and keeping order. And for some unaccountable reason, they