The Covert Academy Read Online Free

off the wrapping and wolfed it back.
    ‘Ohhh...’ he let out a satisfied moan. This was a rare luxury. He'd have to trade a month's worth of rat carcasses for this at the market.
    Joshua sat back on his haunches as he let the sweet feeling of real high quality meat, cheese, lettuce and bread wash through him. The General stared up at him from the bottom of the dumpster.
    An eye twitched.
    ‘Holy sh- !’ Joshua jumped out of his skin and backed up into the side of the dumpster.
    ‘Come on get a grip man... what the...?’ Joshua crept back up to the General and looked back into the twitching eye. It was definitely made of the same type of brownish material as the drones, but it looked more... organic. Alive.
    ‘That’s got to be the find of the goddam century,’ Joshua said with a smile creeping over his face. ‘A General’s iPC! I bet you’d fetch a nice price.’
    In one swift motion, he whipped out a nasty looking blade. It was a well-balanced hunting knife with heavy signs of repair from use on city game over the years. Not very useful against metal enemies unless you got close enough to stick it into their internal wiring. A theory Joshua could do without putting to the test.
     
    He flipped the knife around in his hand and stuck it in the General’s hybrid eye like an oversized scalpel.
    The eye fizzed and sputtered as though it were still alive, the last organ of the General’s body clinging desperately to life. Gently prying it out of the socket, Joshua could see the trail of wires and electrodes in place of where the optic nerve should be for a normal eye.
    They wouldn’t budge. Joshua stopped and weighed his options. He could cut the wires, but without knowing exactly how it interfaced with his patient’s brain, he might lose valuable data.
    As he made to dig deeper with his knife into the socket, a slight twitch in his ear from the smallest of distant sound waves caused him to look up. Clomp , clomp , clomp . Confederates. But then, softer still, was: Hmmm , hm , hmmm .
    Confederates with drones.
     
    They had to be looking for the General. Not him. Joshua meant nothing to them, just another faceless urchin dirtying their streets. He pictured being questioned by a Confederate patrol. They could get any answer they wanted out of him eventually, but they’d be happy with none of them. He didn’t know who this General was, or what they would want with his corpse. The General certainly wasn’t going to get up to any funny business in the state he was in, with half his head smashed in.
    Then it clicked. Literally. In Joshua’s hand, the metal eye clicked as it rotated to look directly into Joshua’s face. It had scanned him.
    Self-powered... not any ordinary iPC then , he thought. But who was controlling it now that the General was dead ?
    Under normal circumstances, when the user died so did the power for their intra-Personal Computer, or iPC for short. A self-powered one would be worth a small fortune if he could sell it to the right person. All the food that money would buy was worth risking capture by the Confederacy. Joshua licked his lips at the thought of a life without searching through dumpsters for food.
    He glanced over his shoulder and saw the shadow of a guard crawling over the far wall, inching closer. A pale red light washed over the alley corner. He was out of time. Trying not to damage the fragile eye, he sliced the wires tethering it to the General’s skull with his knife, yanked it out, and pocketed it.
    ‘Halt!’
    Joshua turned to count five Confederate soldiers and two drones hovering above them. He ran.
     
    The perch on the fire escape was as good a start as any to try to throw his pursuers off. Joshua sprinted the short distance down the alley and launched himself up to the lowest rung of the raised ladder, twisting around in the same motion to get a better idea of the Confederates’ movements. He saw three of the humans immediately break into a run to follow his path. The