Freedom Incorporated Read online

  “I live over there,” she said once they’d left the lethargic bustle of tired workers who were scrounging for something quick but not necessarily nutritious they could nuke in a microwave. “On Boundary Street.” It was the northernmost tip of New South Wales, the street dividing Tweed Heads from Coolangatta in southern Queensland. They technically formed a single city – the councils merged in the summer of ’35 – but neither side had been willing to lose their name, nor their identity, so Boundary Street still held some significance for the local population.

  Dan pressed his lips together, annoyed with the humidity after spending only a few minutes in the heavy atmosphere. It always made him feel sticky and irritable. “All right, let’s go.” They strolled through the centre of town, not looking all that different from any number of love-struck couples that were on an evening walk.

  A gaggle of seagulls squawked overhead just as Dan caught a whiff of ocean breeze. It revived him, bringing an unusual sense of calm that he couldn’t explain. It had a similar effect on Jen. She walked with more spring in her stride and stood with a confident posture.

  “Tell me the second you see anything unusual,” Dan ordered when they turned onto her street and began climbing the hill. “Which one’s your apartment? Can you see it from here?”

  “It’s on the other side of the street. You’re in Queensland now.” Jen motioned with a jerk of her chin. “Can you see that two-story townhouse? The blue one with the old brick retaining wall?”

  “Bagged?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  Dan slowed their pace to a crawl, holding Jen back with a light touch to her forearm.Then he made pretenceof doing up his shoelace, giving himself a decent opportunity to scrutinise the street. He scanned for anything and everything: the rustle of leaves in the nature strip, the puff of a cigarette from a man smoking on his balcony, anything that could spell danger and possible death by a glass pellet. “Is there another way in?”

  “There could be, if you’re willing to climb. We could circle around the back and shimmy up an embankment.” She’d done it once before but it hadn’t been easy.At the time, creeping in the back had seemed the best way not to disturb her friends. It hadn’t worked, but that was beside the point.

  “I’m not sure yet.” Dan lapsed into survival mode: sceptical of everything, believing only what his eyes could confirm. It’s possible the Raven’s already inside, waiting for us.It wasn’t a pleasant thought and he didn’t want to burden Jen with the possibility that her friend Samantha might already be a smouldering mound of decaying flesh. He kept going, urging her to keep up. Years of training boiled to the surface, activating triggers in his mind that generated automatic but potentially lethal responses. If an enemy appeared, Dan wouldn’t need to calculate distances, angles, ranges and rates of fire – he’d know them already. He also knew the likely survival rates for the gamut of available options, and he would act accordingly if someone ambushed them. Of course, it would do him little good if a hail of gunfire cut him down before he could mount an effective response. But his heightened senses were searching for danger.

  They went past the apartment. At least Jen had the sense to keep her mouth shut at such a critical point,Dan thought thankfully. His surveillance continued unabated and he was preparing to announce the area clear, for the moment anyway. He knew the Raven could make an entrance at any time. “Keep going. Lead me around the back.”

  She steered him to the right and they squeezed single file through a tiny alley. It sliced between two three-story buildings, which Dan presumed had a magnificent view of ocean sunrises.

  “Through there,” Jen whispered, pointing into the shrub-cultivated gloom. “It’s the seventh on the left.”

  Dan nodded, the movement lost in the dark. He saw what she meant by a ‘climb’. The embankment was easily 12 feet high and practically vertical. He edged toward the blue-bagged apartment with his eyes, now fully adjusted to the dark, darting from one likely sniper post to the next. He was displeased to note there were literally dozens of perfect nooks for the Raven to hole up in and wait for his target – Jen – to show her pretty face. Not if I have anything to do with it. He clenched his jaw, sending a ripple of tension through his neck. He held up a hand to indicate Jen should stop and pressed an urgent finger to his lips, demanding silence. Something’s wrong.He waited with his back pressed against the embankment while he scoured the trees and nearby houses for trouble. A huddle of rooflines sprawled to the ocean on his right and it presented the Raven with an endless parade of possibilities to perch and observe his prey.

  Jen inwardly squirmed, her filthy toes numb despite the warmth of the subtropics. Prickly blades of grass dug into her bare feet, which the sandy soil had made gritty.

  “Okay, let’s go.” Dan stalked forward until they were directly under Jen’s apartment. Once, a long time ago, it had been a large townhouse.Butsince its construction, developers had subdivided the townhouse into three apartments.Jen pointed to the top balcony and whispered, “I live up there.”

  Dan ran a hand across the sheer embankment, relieved to find ample cracks that would suffice as finger- and toe-holds. Surveying the neighbourhood with one last piercing gaze, he abandoned the shrubs’ scant cover and started scaling the wall, surprised by how easy it was. Moments later they were crouching below a window of the ground floor apartment. Dan peered inside, somewhat suspicious that the occupants hadn’t drawn their curtains. Maybe they just enjoy gazing at the ocean.He hoped so. Or maybe the Raven killed them.That was a less pleasant possibility. He was relieved a moment later to see the tenants in the throes of a passionate kiss, the husband pressing his wife against an imitation-alabaster wall while a curious hand worked under her skirt. Someone had obviously renovated the décor in the forties.

  Jen pulled him away before she’d have to start thinking of him as a Peeping Tom and motioned toward the downpipe. Dan took the lead, hoping the rustedmetal pipe and dingy loops that held it in place would be enough to support his considerable weight. A tired groan of old metal screeched into the night but the pipe held and Dan soon stepped onto the balcony of the top floor. Jen nimbly sprung next to him a moment later.

  He drew his Colt and carefully swept it across everything he could see and hear. A dog was barking in the distance and he could hear the far off roar of breakers at the heads. But there was nothing unusual from within Jen’s apartment. The lights were on and that was a good sign. And, is that a keyboard?He thought he could hear the muted cadence of a proficient – no, exceptional – typist.

  Jen heard it too and she inaudibly mouthed, “It’s okay, that’s Cookie.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Dan whispered in reply, feeling a prickle on the back of his neck. Something’svery, very wrong.He was faithful enough to trust this particular instinct.It had never let him down in the past.

  “Well, I’m going in.” Jen reached for the balcony door but Dan slapped a restraining hand on her wrist, willing her to be patient and allow him to finish his reconnaissance.

  With a twist and a jerk she was free and she burst into her apartment, thoroughly startling Cookie and Samantha.

  The typing stopped, replaced instead by a dumbfounded look on Cookie’s face. Samantha just stared. And Jen had to admit she looked a sight, dressed in a tight skirt, oversized flannelette shirt, and scuffing dirt on the carpet with her bare feet.

  Samantha was first to recover from the shock. “Jen! Where the hell have you been? I was worried you-”

  Dan entered. He held his Colt up, searching for hostile targets inside the apartment. When nothing jumped out he lowered his guard but wasn’t yet ready to holster his weapon. Not just yet.

  “Oh.” Samantha’s eyes popped wide, a streak of fear cutting into her normally jubilant voice.

  “Has anything unusual happened here today?” Jen got to the point, not realising the extent to which her gun-wielding companion was spooking her friends.

  “Apart from you disappearing? No. Why? W
hat’s happened? Who’s this?”

  Dan stormed about the apartment, uninvited, searching. He returned empty-handed after securing the chain on the front door. Then he closed and locked the balcony door too.

  Jen slumped onto the couch next to her friend, thoroughly exhausted. And for once, they had snared Cookie’s undivided attention. “I got into some trouble today.” Jen felt tears welling within as she embarked upon her explanation and she fought, and won, an inner battle to keep them under control. “A bounty hunter from UniForce is tracking me.” Then she waved at Dan and added, “This is Dan Sutherland, he helped me escape.”

  “What!” Samantha’s curiosity and fear morphed into fury, which she couldn’t adequately direct toward anybody in the room. “Start at the beginning and don’t leave anything out.”

  Jen spent the better part of ten minutes filling them in, though she deliberately neglected to mention that Dan was also a bounty hunter. She thought it would be best to leave some things unsaid. Meanwhile, Dan squinted out their balcony window, peering into the darkness.

  She finished with a trite, “So there you have it. That’s why I was late.” Then slapped a hand to her forehead and said, “I’m sorry, my manners took a dive. Dan, this is Samantha.”

  She waved in admiration. “Hi.”

  He nodded his greeting and asked, “Can I call you Sam?”

  “Not if you want me to answer.”

  “And that’s David.”

  Cookie got off his Posturific chair – in itself an amazing event as far as Samantha and Jen were concerned – and offered a handshake.

  Maybe I misjudged Dan,Jen thought, astonished by how warmly her friends were welcoming him. She grudgingly admitted that she was a harsh judge of character. He could’ve just turned me in.The tension of the moment, combined with her initial mistrust, had painted him in poor light and she made the resolution to reassess what she saw.

  “It’s David Coucke, but everybody calls me Cookie. How you doin’ man?” Cookie smiled enigmatically.

  “Good. And you?”

  “Couldn’t be better.” Cooke’s smile spread to the rest of his face. He spun back to Jen and said, “We’re just about there.”

  “Huh?” The implications of that sentence took a moment to sink in. “You mean into UniForce?”

  Cookie nodded, practically orgasmic from lack of sleep and his caffeine-induced euphoria. “I’m through all but their final defence, and I think I’ll have that down tonight.” His better judgement may have considered it unsafe to speak so frankly in front of a stranger, but that didn’t stop his tumble of words. “By midnight we’ll have access to all their files, and maybe we can have a crack at bringing Echelon to its knees.”

  Jen inwardly winced, wishing Cookie hadn’t mentioned it in front of Dan. He was, after all, a bounty hunter and he technically still worked for UniForce. I should have warned them, put them on their guard.But it was too late now. She silently kicked herself for the oversight.

  Dan’s spine stiffened. “Are you saying you’ve hacked the UniForce network?”

  An uneasy silence blanketed the room when Cookie realised his blunder. He stammered something indecipherable and looked guiltily at the floor.

  Jen came to his rescue. “That depends. What would you do if we had?”

  Dan sprouted a smile of his own. “Are you kidding? I’d love to get my hands on that sort of information.”

  Cookie turned back to his monitor, clearly unwilling to leave the computer unattended for long periods despite his outward confidence in his prop. Dan watched over his shoulder, understanding precious little of the information displayed fleetingly on the screen.

  “We’ve been working at this for a while,” Cookie said, flexing his fingers and cracking several knuckles before resuming the hack.

  Samantha leaned over and hit him on the shoulder. “I told you – I can’t stand it when you do that.”

  “Sorry honey, I forgot.” Cookie wasn’t allowed to crack his knuckles; it had the same effect on Samantha’s back teeth as nails scraping down a blackboard.

  Samantha and Cookie, Jen was relieved to note, were too distracted to ask many probing questions about Dan. She could barely trust him herself, and he’d saved her life. She hated to imagine her friends’ reaction if they discovered he worked for UniForce.

  Dan’s mind raced with the possibilities. Proof. That’s what I need. He chewed his lip. Proof they’re selling my lists to the Raven.He knew he needed something solid, something UniForce couldn’t easily brush aside as coincidence.And if what Cookie said was true, Dan believed he had a chance to get it.

  So the three turned to four, and they huddled around the terminal with Cookie taking centre stage. But their familiar bantering and good-natured jokes were gone, victims of the addition to their ranks.

  And only Jen was inwardly panicking – panicking about their bounty-hunter companion and what he intended to do.

  Chapter 4

  Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

  Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

  Thursday, September 16, 2066

  21:12 Coolangatta, Australia

  At least the chill of night and a cool ocean breeze had mitigated the humidity. The Raven even enjoyed the air wafting across his face, tingling every nerve beneath the surface. He didn’t like Australian assignments. Too weird.America was his homeland and he was proud to call himself American. The Australian’s he’d met were too guarded, too raucous, or else too trashy. He admittedthat the places he’d visited tended to attract social refuse and that if he went to the corresponding places in the States he’d find the same, but deep down he preferred to think the United States of America was superior.

  He sighed, getting tired. Should I roost?He’d need to rest soon or he’d risk damaging the delicate nerve tissue that interfaced with his computer. The doctors had warned him about that – extreme fatigue was just as deadly as a bullet. Not yet.His fellow humans fascinated him and he watched these particular ones with a psychotic intensity of interest. The moon was rising and he turned to frown at it. The Raven wouldhavepreferred pitch black, all the better to stalk someone. Silver streams of light filtered through the salt-laden atmosphere and draped brightly across the cluster of houses. That will make it harder,he thought impassively.

  Dan posed another problem. The Raven’s animalistic senses warned him to be cautious. Taking Jen alone would have been preferable. Her two friends wouldn’t cause a problem. Only Dan.Three untrained individuals were easy prey, but a highly motivated bounty hunter was something else entirely. Not that he was scared. He puffed out his chest with his swelling self-esteem. The Raven doesn’t get scared.And that was true, for the most part. The last time he remembered fear was prior to blacking out in hospital, immediately before the doctors had crafted him into a cyborg. Before my becoming.He thought of it as his birth, he hadn’t truly been alive before the operation. A thin smile stretched his dry lips and he felt his lower lip tear, a combination of dehydration, the salt in the atmosphere, and the parching wind. The iron tang of blood trickled onto his tastebuds and he quietly spat on the ground. That was something else he had to treat carefully.Cutting it a little fine, aren’t we? He’d made the calculations and he trusted his self-generated program with his life, quite literally. He still had three hours before irreversible damage would occur. After that, dehydration would cause the stressed nerve tissue surrounding his computer to break down, reducing him to a pile of twitching limbs. The Raven had seen it happen once, to a colleague. He’d miscalculated the time neededto re-hydrate and suffered permanent brain injury.

  One more hour.Something told him the following hour would bring his chance – his only chance.

  And what of Sutherland?Curiosity stimulated him into doing a preliminary database search on his competitor.
And afrown replaced his earlier smile. Nothing returned from his initial fetch command. His eyes lost focus when he turned his attention inward and engrossed himself in the easily defined world of zeros and ones. A high-speed burst transmitter, which could beam three terabytes per second at maximum capacity, provided his link to the outside world. But, as a drawback, it only worked over short distances so he needed to be close to a tower.He was just thankful that a town as wretched as Tweed Heads had its own station. Statistically Australia was the country he in which he was most likely to find himself rudely disconnected. This place is worse than Mozambique,he thought with a sneer. He could still send and receive information while out of burst-transmitter range, but the data trickled in at a poky five gigabytesper second – horrendously slow for the Raven’s powerful computer-brain combination.

  He fed his consciousness along the link, ensuring it was stable before committing his mind to the wireless connection. Stable? Check.So he roamed into a world that no true human had ever fully experienced. His brain extended and enhanced the operation of his embedded computer; they operated jointly at the speed of thought. He usually needed to visit only one repository for all his information requirements: PortaNet’s meticulously maintained central chipping database. But today it didn’t yield the information he needed. Personal details, height, weight, credit history… The Raven smirked until the fresh taste of blood in his mouth reminded him to stop. Dan had an interesting credit history, information he could use just as effectively as his Redback-PX7 if the opportunity arose. He downloaded Dan’s file and stored it locally, perturbed that he still hadn’t dislodged the information he really wanted. What’s he been doing for the past two decades? Who is he?He needed an answer for them both.