Vienna Dredd

Vienna Dredd or Vienna Pasternak is a fictional character from the Judge Dredd comic strip, first appearing in prog 116 of the British comic 2000 AD in 1979.

Vienna is Judge Dredd's niece, the daughter of his corrupt brother Rico, and was orphaned when Dredd was forced to kill her father. She loved her uncle enormously, but was unaware of her father's fate until in 2101 she was kidnapped by the electronics genius Harry Carmen. Carmen had held a grudge against Dredd after he had incarcerated him for six years for a computer fraud, and he chose to seek his revenge through the child.

Dredd managed to rescue Vienna, but not before Carmen revealed that the Judge had killed her father. Vienna forgave him, but Dredd, to ensure her future safety, vowed to see her less often in the future and asked her guardian, Mrs. Pasternak, to ensure that the girl would forget him rather than risk the heartbreak of her hearing about his death on the streets of Mega-City One, or be taken hostage again. She did not appear in the comic again for 23 years.

After growing up in Brit-Cit, Vienna re-entered Dredd's life as an adult in 2124 (prog 1300). The following year she was abducted by a Brit-Cit Satanist cabal in order to bring Dredd out; guilty over the whole affair, he took her back to Mega-City One so he could help her better. She has been abducted and endangered a number of times since then due to being Dredd's niece, much to his distress.

It has been shown that Vienna is the only thing in the world Dredd cares about besides the law. As the daughter of his clone-brother, genetically speaking she could have been Dredd's daughter, and he has lately had to come to terms with his quasi-paternal instinct. When she was caught in the Total War bombing of Sector 2, Dredd acted to save her first instead of being impartial. He attempted to resign from the force at the end of this debacle but Chief Judge Hershey pointed out that it does him good to be human once in a while.

Soon afterwards, Vienna fell out with Dredd and was seduced by an East Meg assassin who planned to use her against her uncle. Dredd managed to save her and in the process she demonstrated that she had inherited her father's fighting talent, ruthlessly dispatching a soldier guarding her while handcuffed.

Vienna and Dredd are back on good terms though Dredd remains fairly distant (though he does visit her at Christmas).

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