Freedom Incorporated (25 page)

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 rust
ed
metal
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
’s
very, very
wrong.
He was faithful enough to trust this
particular instinct
.
I
t 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? What’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
i
t 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 admit
ted
that 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
would
have
preferred
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
need
ed
to
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?
C
uriosity stimulated him into doing a preliminary database
search on his competitor.
And
a
frown 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
.
H
e 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
giga
bytes
per 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
in
to 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.