Freedom Incorporated (17 page)

“
If you don’t
want to end this day full of nanotoxin, I recommend you portal out
of here
. Both of you. R
ight now,” Dan said, warning the bewildered onlookers. Doctor
and patient both looked ready to wet their pants but they were
alert enough to nod understanding. Dan doubted they would take his
advice; they were more likely to wait for Elustra security.
Poor things.
If the Raven
set his mind on entering the medical centre,
there
was
little
Elustra security
could
do to stop him. And, perversely, the Raven could kill them
legally. The old
notion
of obstruction
-
of
-
justice had
evolved. If the Raven chose to, he could slaughter any innocent
bystander hindering the legitimate apprehension of a sanctioned
target. Dan found the idea disturbing.
Bureaucrats,
he thought in
disgust.
They have no idea what their laws
have done.

He swung his
legs into the shaft and
tested a
rung to make sure
the
ladder
could support his weight. Jen was
already ten metres down and he hurried to catch up. Soon it was
pitch-black. After five metres the sparse light from the doctor’s
surgery wasn’t enough to see the rungs; he had to feel for them
with his hands. Unconsciously he prised his eyes wide, but he may
as well have had them shut for all the good
it did
.

He could hear Jen below,
though he couldn’t tell how far she was. “Are you okay?”

“
Fucking
terrific,” she said irritably. “What kind of stupid question is
that?”

He ignored the acidic
sting of her words and replied calmly. “There should be an exit
panel on every floor. And some kind of grate or vent between
floors.”

“
Yeah? What
other useless information are you going to share with me today?”
She was understandably pissed, and Dan was the only person at whom
she could lash out.
Fair enough
too
, she thought,
he was the one who nearly knocked me
senseless
.

She was sorely
testing Dan’s patience but he bit his lower lip
instead of replying in anger
. “Just
run your fingers along the side and feel for the seam.”

Silence.

“
You’re joking
now, right?” She gripped each rung with a strength that could only
come from fear. “If you want to find the damn thing take your own
hand off the ladder.”

“
All right.
But when I find it you’ll have to climb back up.”

She calmed down a little.
“Okay.”

Dan ran his
fingers down the metal, listening to the squeegee-on-glass sound it
made. The shaft was frosty and smooth. Elustra hadn’t designed
their environmental system with the comfort of their maintenance
personnel in mind. His flesh was already starting to numb, it felt
like he was in a freezer. The sun’s warmth never reached the
sterile belly of the superstructure, despite the warmth of the
mid-
S
eptember day
outside.
If only we could turn on the
lights
, Dan thought. The darkness amplified
his discomfort at the cold. He risked looking up and, when he
leaned away from the ladder, his adjusting eyes could just make out
the slant of light from the medical centre.

There were
voices above now, and they didn’t belong to the doctor or his
patient. He froze, listen
ing
intently
.
Security? Maybe the Raven backed away.
He held no illusions that he’d broken off the chase, only that
he’d chosen a different angle of attack.
Maybe he’s not as
trigger-happy
as
I thought.

W
ith the last of the meagre ambient
light, Dan watched a security officer poke his head into the shaft.
Without vision-enhancing goggles, he doubted the man could
penetrate the blackness. But that sort of specialist equipment
wasn’t standard issue and it would probably take several minutes to
fetch.

“
You there!”
His commanding voice echoed through the shaft. “Come back up here,
right now!”

Not
likely.
He hoped Jen had the sense to stay
quiet as he lowered himself by another rung. He estimated they were
three floors below the medical centre and wondered how he’d missed
the intervening access points.
Maybe the
dark is screwing with my sense of distance.

The fact that
he had no idea how
far below Jennifer
was
gave him cause for concern. He
fretted that, with any downward step, he might
crush her fingers.
And that would be
fatal.
The nanotoxin-laced shards embedded
in the soles of his boots would kill her even if she managed to
hold onto the ladder. H
e
froze, looked down, and whispered,
“Jennifer?”

“
What?” She
whispered back, perhaps seven metres below.

“
Nothing. I
just wanted to know how far you’d gone.” He descended another rung
just as the security officer above vanished.

There it
is
. The seam in the metal was unmistakable.
“Wait there, I found an exit.” He was still whispering to protect
his intentions from the prying ears above.

Gripping the
ladder with all his strength, he swung his left hand back and
punched the panel, popping it out with a clang of metal against
metal. The light pouring from the hole was blinding and he
shielded
his
eyes.
He’d burst into the weights room of an Elustra gymnasium, much to
the astonishment of the three burly men pumping away at the
dumbbells.

Displaying his
gymnastic prowess, Dan vaulted into the room
and
reached back to offer Jen a
steadying hand. This time she accepted with an expression Dan
decided to interpret as gratitude, but was more likely her relief
at exiting the gloomy shaft.

“
Where to
now?”

Dan led the way. “The car
park. Below.” He started toward the door.

“
Hey.” The
biggest of the three musclebound weightlifters blocked the exit.
“You care to explain what you’re doing in my gym?”

“
We’re
leaving.” Dan didn’t have time to waste on the spandex-clad weight
instructor. “So if you’ll just step aside we’ll be on our
way.”

Spandex arched
an eyebrow and peered menacingly at Jen. “Nobody’s allowed in the
maintenance shafts, only maintenance personnel.” He clearly
believed it was his duty to enforce the rules. “And nobody’s
s’posed to come out of ‘em either. You’ll have to wait for
security.” He folded his arms and his chiselled features twisted
into a bravado smirk. His two students took their
cue
and lowered their
weights, filing behind their leader with sweat-streaked
scowls.

“
We don’t have
time to wait for security.” Dan reached into Jen’s jeans and drew
his Colt. “Stand aside.”

They
hesitated.

“
Please?” Dan
undid the safety catch. He knew he’d never fire, but his bluff,
combined with his apparent unpredictability, was enough to
discourage the weightlifters from trying anything stupid. They were
clearly stronger than Dan, but they were also musclebound. Dan
could shoot all three of them before they could reach
him.

The weightlifters wisely
backed down and Dan slipped past, keeping his muzzle trained on
Spandex and Jen safely behind him until they were at a prudent
distance. They hurried past change rooms, saunas, and many
torturous-looking exercise machines before arriving back at the
public walkways. They were on floor 37, which had fewer attractions
and was therefore less crowded.

But
that
didn’t make Dan feel
comfortable.

“
I thought you
gave
me
the gun,”
Jen said, a quaver of nervousness in her voice.

“
So I did.”
Dan flicked the safety catch to cover the red dot, reversed the
pistol, and thrust it back into her hand. “Come on. Walk quickly
but don’t run – that’ll attract too much attention.”

So they
walked, briskly.
It went against Dan’s
natural inclination, but he knew slipping away unseen would be
better than shooting his way out. They reached the main escalator
belt and heading down. Elustra had arranged the mall so that it
never took patrons long to get where they wanted to go, but only if
they used the portals. The escalators were free, so Elustra
discouraged their use by building them inconveniently out of the
way. That, however, worked to Dan’s advantage – there were fewer
people about.

The mall’s main escalator
belt was also one of the few areas Elustra had dispensed with their
design philosophy of keeping every fourth floor solid. By leaning
over the rails, it was possible to see all the way to the top and
all the way to the bottom. Elustra had compensated for this
apparent lack of safety by installing liquid-glue guns around the
rim of every floor. If the sensors detected someone falling, the
guns would fire tentacles of warm glue and snare the individual
before he or she damaged the plastic garden at the bottom. The glue
guns had spoiled several would-be suicides and, after the incidents
had reached the media, nobody had tried to suicide in that way
since – removing the glue took five days in a hospital solvent
bath.

It took agonising
minutes. They made their descent in tense silence. It felt like it
would last forever; every time Jen glanced over the rail, the
ground looked no closer. Dan was just beginning to hope they’d slip
away unnoticed when his plans shattered around him – they were
taking the turn on the fifth floor when the Raven spotted them from
fifteen floors above.

The Raven’s analytical
mind calculated the risks and decided to seize the opportunity. He
lined Jennifer Cameron’s head up in his Redback’s sights, whispered
a silent prayer to his omen, depressed the trigger, and was
gratified to feel the potent recoil in his palms.

Dan felt the
pellet whiz mere centimetres past his ear
.
He knew what it was; he didn’t need
to hear the Redback’s cough to be sure. Silenced, it barely made
more than a puff – not something he expected to hear from a
distance.

“
What was
that?” Jen heard it too.

“
Death’s
mistress.” Dan pointed at the black-clad man above them.
Bah! Man? No – beast!
“He’s the one that’ll kill you unless you do exactly what I
say.”

Jen’s eyes went wide. A
shrill feeling that wasn’t quite fear and wasn’t quite panic
infused her. She shifted uneasily, realising she’d totally lost
control of the situation – not that she’d had much to start with.
She squinted at the distant figure just when another volley of
shots whizzed through the air. Then she mimicked Dan and ducked
beneath the rail, though the Perspex panelling seemed like scant
protection.

“
Come on.” Dan
abandoned his plan for stealth and bounded down the escalator,
taking two steps at a time. Jen laboured to keep up as they skipped
down one, two, and then three stories. Her heart pounded in her
chest and her teeth and bronchiales ached the way they always did
when she overexerted herself.

They finally reached the
only level of the mall dedicated archaic transportation – the car
park. Dan veered wildly to one side, skirting the line of vehicles.
With society no longer dependant upon vehicles for transportation,
only a few motor companies had survived the paradigm shift. Cars
were luxury items to entertain the rich. Spoiled sons and daughters
used them to drag in surreptitious locations on stormy nights.
Consequently, the cars parked in Elustra’s spacious lot were mostly
luxury or sports vehicles. Scrap dealers had long since stripped
the older models of everything recyclable and dumped the remainder
in landfills – junkyards on Mars were brimming with spare parts
because PortaNet made transporting scrap so easy.

Dan examined
each in turn, looking for a car he could use. A ’23 model Toyota
Celica MT looked promising. Unfortunately, modern cars were
expensive and most owners opted to fit them with microchip
disablers. Only drivers from a predetermined list could start the
engine. The Celica MT was one of the first models to run on methane
gas.
Except,
Dan
noticed,
this one has a soybean-oil
conversion kit.
But as far as the productive
lifecycle of a car was concerned, the MT was an old model, so he
doubted anybody would’ve bothered installing a disabler.

He retracted
his elbow, feeling safe within his thick
coat,
and smashed the driver’s window.
He quickly disengaged the central locking and said, “Get
in.”

Jen stumbled to obey,
brushing the glass pebbles from her seat before sliding in and
slamming the door.

Dan came prepared. He
reached into one of his many inside pockets and fumbled for a small
black-handled device known amongst thieves as a kick-start. It was
barely larger than a thick pen but it emitted a strong electrical
field at undulating frequencies and wavelengths. It could bypass
the ignition system to start a car; the trick was finding the
correct frequency. He waited impatiently with eyes fixed on the
escalator, wondering how long before the Raven came streaking into
view.