Freedom Incorporated (34 page)

Today he favoured the
blade.

The bloodier
the better.
He needed to compensate for his
earlier fear and lashing out at the hapless – but deserving – sheep
always made him feel better.

He implored
his mystic protector for an omen.
A
favourable omen.
He’d never received an
unfavourable omen, but he’d once waited over
a month
before abandoning hope that
his vision would ever come
.
H
e was
starting to cramp and he wanted the task done. Yet the Raven would
never dare renounce his faith by acting without a blessing from the
spirits. He’d learned that lesson the hard way.

Just then, a
faint tingle started to develop at his temples and he grinned in
wicked anticipation of the release that was soon to come.
About time too…

*

Paul Savage
was muttering the speech repeatedly under his breath, practicing
the various nuances he could project with his voice. He wasn’t as
stupid as Jackie believed; he knew his forte was appeasing the
shareholders. Inwardly he shrugged, it was a job and he was close
to retirement. Why should he exert himself when all he had to do
was serve his time?
His heart palpitated
when he remembered
that he might end up in
a wheelchair before he could enjoy his retirement, but there was a
time and a place to contemplate everything and this wasn’t an
appropriate moment.

Already his
mind was wandering and soon he was gazing out his window at the San
Francisco skyline, the speech held limply between thumb and
forefinger.
So many
people.
He was tired and looking at the city
always made him acutely aware of his age. It was somehow
appropriate that he spent his last moments reflecting upon his
achievements in life. He didn’t hear the ventilation grate open
above his desk and his degraded hearing couldn’t detect the squeak
of leather boots as the rogue bounty hunter lowered himself to the
ground.

His eyelids
opened for the last time and the problems plaguing his inner ear
were solved when an icy blade severed his head from his shoulders.
The slash was quick and brutal and it was all over before his aging
nervous system could send pain signals to his brain for processing.
He had just enough time to open his mouth in
surprise
,
though he
didn’t understand why he couldn’t draw breath and he had no vocal
cords to speak. By the time his head clunked to the carpet and came
to rest facedown on the plush woollen fibres, the life in his eyes
was gone. His body jerked vertically for two extra seconds before
dropping like a sack of potatoes. It twitched on the ground as his
heart kept pumping, sending diminishing jets of thick blood
squirting across the room. A spray of red on the windows was
already oozing to the floor and soaking through the carpet into the
underlay. Paul’s skin peeled away from the fatal wound and a
cross-section of his spine was a lesson in anatomy for whoever
discovered the body. His head – amazingly – escaped most of the
gore. I
t
resembled
a frightened child, cowering in the corner.

And so Paul
Savage met his death the same way he’d bluffed through life –
without really knowing it was there. The saddest part was, despite
his age, there were many things he would’ve done differently if
he’d known the 16
^th
of September 2066 marked his
death.

*

The Raven
kicked the corpse in the ribs, swearing at it for marring him with
blood. He’d forgotten that neck wounds bled explosively. He’d
failed to store that titbit of information in his cyborg brain and
paid the price for trusting his human faculties to remember.
Now I recall – this is why I use
toxin.
He therefore dedicated several fields
in his crystal-core to preserve the memory and avoid a mess in
future.

Nano-technology made memory cheap and the Raven had more than
a trillion terabytes available. The ignorant twits at Global
Integrated Systems had said he’d never fill it in a
lifetime.
But they say the same thing
every few years, don’t they? And every few years they prove
themselves wrong.
They hadn’t factored how
much memory total human integration would require. Every six atoms
in the Raven’s crystal-core defined a decimal memory cell. The
designers thought it would be more logical to store the data in
base-ten rather than base-two for smoother assimilation into a
human brain. The Raven would have preferred twice as much memory,
three times, or infinite. Yet regardless of his desires, he had a
fixed amount and had to manage his memory just like everyone else.
He’d deleted the sickle-equals-blood memory because he thought it
was something his human mind would never forget.

He flicked his hand to
shake off the worst of the gore and wiped his face on a fistful of
tissues borrowed from a box on his target’s desk. After five
minutes of preening, the remaining blood was beginning to dry and
crack.

Without blood
in its capillaries, the corpse’s skin looked blue.
How much blood can fit in one
person?
he wondered. That was another detail
he hadn’t stored in crystal-core.

He wiped his
sickle on the back of Paul Savage’s suit and slid it into
the
sheath at his belt.
Next, he loosed his harvester, the instrument he needed to extract
his victims’ vertebrae
.
It
looked similar to a can opener. He used
it to slice through Paul’s clothing and was surprised to see a
festival of tattoos marching across his shrivelling skin. They
wouldn’t have looked out of place
in
a gangster’s bar and he wondered whether his
target had once been a hippie, or a bikie, or a hippie-bikie. It
tickled him with amusement while he plunged the harvester into a
carefully selected patch of skin and dug for the appropriate groove
in Paul’s spine. With a wrench of the handle he felt spinal disks
tearing and bone grind against bone. Then the vertebrae slipped
through the incision, impaled by the Raven’s harvester.

A quick scan confirmed
he’d extracted the correct spinal segment and he dropped it into an
opaque plastic container. He slipped it into a special pocket he’d
sewn into his coat and secured it with a Velcro tab.

He scanned the
murder scene with a calm finality before exiting the target’s
office and heading for the bathroom. He needed a mirror to wash the
encrusted blood from his face.
Amen
, the Raven thought solemnly. He
always intoned it after an assignment as thanks to his spiritual
protector. It couldn’t hurt to stay in the good graces of the
spirits.
Who knows? Maybe that will speed
things up in future.

With a
composed aplomb, he strode past several security
agents
and
stepped
calmly into a portal before retrieving the appropriate number from
PortaNet’s database and coding
his
destination
.

After a pop and a gush of
air, he was on a different level of the same building. He marched
to the collection counter and slapped his plastic container in
front of the clerk, stating simply, “Apprehension from the
Raven.”

She was
familiar with the Raven. All the clerks were. She knew he only ever
returned a plastic box containing certain parts of his targets’
anatomy. Once, he’d handed her the festering testicles of an
unchipped man, along with some heart tissue that’d burst from the
victim’s nanotoxin-infected chest. The Raven
had
invited her to perform a DNA test
to prove it was the correct man and serenely walked from the room
to await payment. Three collection clerks staffed the counter and
they all abhorred the Raven. They talked about him in their
staffroom and sometimes had a kitty running on who’d be unlucky
enough to get him next. Today it was Rena Scanlon’s turn and she
suppressed a smile because she’d bet on her own ill luck. The pool
had been growing too.
Three hundred and
five Credits if I’m not mistaken. Not a bad bonus for a day’s
work.

“
Okay,
Mr
Raven.” Rena’s delight
at her windfall quickly evaporated when she turned her attention to
the dark green container he’d planted before her. “Who’ve you
brought in today.”

“
A special
assignment,” he replied, his voice deep and husky. He spoke the way
Rena expected such a ruthless killer to speak. “Something from the
bounty co-ordinator.”

“
Okay,” she
said again. She accepted it on face value, though she’d met Michele
Roche and doubted she had the intellect to requisition the Raven
for a special assignment. She scanned the box and turned deathly
pale when the chip’s owner appeared on her screen. Her heart
pounded behind her eyes and her vision began to fade until she
remembered to keep breathing. A naturally sceptical woman, she
scanned a second and then a third time, denying the
evidence.
How’s that
possible?
A bleak expression clouded her
face when she recognised what the wet blotches on the Raven’s black
clothes actually were: blood.

“
One million
Credits I believe,” the Raven said, waiting for her to key the
details into the database and initiate the transfer to his
chip-linked account.

“
Is that a
threat?” It was the only explanation Rena could understand, that
somehow this was an act of extortion. She wasn’t about to let this
thug intimidate her, not while there were two security guards in
the room. The Raven had a gruesome record, true, but they
were
trained
security personnel. It was their
job
to protect her. She felt safe
sitting behind her counter.

He cocked his head to one
side, unsure why she wasn’t processing the transaction as usual.
“No.”

Rena, an experienced
clerk, knew when to capitulate to her superiors. She didn’t have
the authority to handle the situation herself. “You said this was a
special assignment. That it was from the bounty
co-ordinator?”

“
Affirmative.”

Something’s
going down.
Rena pushed back from the
counter and reached for the phone, holding up an index finger. “One
minute, sir.” She dialled Roche’s internal extension and waited
with a nervous tick in her left eye.

“
Michele Roche
speaking.”

She even
sounded brainless.
Either she’s the
dumbest scrubber in America or she’s pretending to be stupid as
cover for a takeover.
Rena had never heard
of anyone masterminding a takeover like this, but she supposed it
was possible. “Yes this is Rena Scanlon at collections, we’ve got
an issue here that needs your attention, ma’am.”

“
What is it?”
She sounded
irritable
.

“
There’s a top
level hunter here who says he’s collecting for a special assignment
you sent him.”

“
I didn’t do
that,” she said, reluctant to move from her office.

“
Ma’am you’d
better come and take a look for yourself,” Rena said, remaining
understandably firm.

She sighed into the
phone. “Fine, I’ll be there in five.”

Rena replaced
the receiver and smiled sweetly at the Raven. “The bounty
co-ordinator will be here personally to deal with the results of
your special assignment.” She wished he’d take the container off
the counter, she knew there was a spinal segment inside and it
irked her. It was even more tormenting to know it had come from
their CEO.
I wonder whether he’s still
alive. Can someone live without part of their spine?

Michele, still reeking of
cigarette smoke, portaled into the room and tried unsuccessfully to
shield her fear upon discovering the Raven was the problem. Her
thoughts turned immediately to the exclusive lists she’d double
sold and she wondered whether he was there to complain. “What is
it?”

Rena motioned with her
hands, inviting Michele to inspect the catch-of-the-day.

Michele had a distorted
hourglass figure – smallish breasts but a whopping arse to make up
the difference. She unerringly wore tight black skirts that made
the bulge even more pronounced and high heels that caused her to
walk bent at the waist. So when she wore a white shirt the
combination made her look penguin-like, especially since she had to
waddle because of the restrictions imposed by the skirt. She had
blue eyes, pride at being an Irish descendent, and a wild streak
running through her otherwise empty head. Yes, Michele thoroughly
deserved the nickname the clerks sniggered behind her back: the
Retarded Penguin.

She gasped when she read
the details on Rena’s monitor and turned ghostly pale at the words
‘unauthorised apprehension’ flashing in red. “Who told you to do
this?”

The Raven’s patience was
quickly fading. “You did.”

“
No I didn’t,”
she retorted, stunned.

“
I have your
e-mail,” he said, willing to forward it for their inspection. He’d
done the work and now intended to collect the promised one million
Credits.