Outlawry , livre ebook

Andrews UK - Scott Tierney

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21 pages

English

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"If any civilization strives to be prosperous and remain civilized then crime must always lead to punishment - and today the punishment is crime..."In a near-future where the punishment for any crime is Outlawry - where the outlaw is cast out from the protection of the state and left to fend for themselves - a Lawman goes on the hunt for a prized and valuable outlaw. Yet as the night unfolds, the fine line between Lawman and Outlaw soon begins to blur.

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Science fiction

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	18 août 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789822571
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Outlawry
Scott Tierney

Outlawry
First published in 2020 by
Acorn Books
www.acornbooks.co.uk
Acorn Books is an imprint of
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2020 Scott Tierney
The right of Scott Tierney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Outlawry
Client name:
David Julian Price
Occupation:
Investor
Address:
Apartment 129, Manor House, Tenth District, New Vegas (penthouse apartment situated on top floor of complex – floor plan attached)
Immediate family:
Wife (Eleanor, 54), two children (Peter, 26, and Silvia, 19; neither child currently residing at client’s residence)
Start date of client’s Outlawry:
12/8/2054
End date:
12/11/2054
Reason for Outlawry:
Tax evasion and financial fraud
Status of Outlawry:
Pending, due to begin at midnight tonight
Wealth value of client:
Approximated at over $50million
Notes for assigned Lawman:
Client’s criminal details currently suppressed from public knowledge, and personal protection supplied in the form of armed guards – unfortunately, both services have been provided via one of our competitors.
Client has refused our initial offer of support, along with numerous approaches thereafter. As stated above, they have opted to work with a rival firm – we would like to convince the client to decide otherwise.
Tyler, you have permission to move ahead on our behalf with a more personal resolution to this matter…

New Vegas is unfittingly cold for this time of year, the glass tubes of so many neon lights dulled by internal moisture. A cruel rain bleeds from the night, bouncing off the bonnet of my black saloon and cascading down the windscreen like diamonds.
I’m parked by the curb, engine running, the heater purring at maximum; a tall take-out coffee, half empty, rests on the passenger seat. With time to kill I take the opportunity for a second gloss of the client’s file, scanning each page for any further information I can use to bolster my forthcoming pitch . As any good salesman will tell you, the more you know about a client the more you can squeeze outta them. As this particular client, this David Price, has seemingly refused the protection of our venerable firm, my superiors have left it up to me to sway said client into reconsidering our generous proposal. If he again refuses…well, Mr. Price will discover that our firm is not only in the business of client conservation . As the maidenhead of our logo denotes, while the left hand carries the scales of justice, the right hand bears the sword.
And in my time I have been known to swing the broadest sword in the business…
I sip my coffee while the rain continues to pelt the wing mirrors. The dashboard clock reads ten to midnight.
In a few short minutes my client, David Price, will be classified as an Outlaw .
To all those outside of the know (which I assume includes yourself, good listener) let me explain the full consequences behind this somewhat inconvenient classification…
Being an outlaw used to imply, romantically speaking, that you were a criminal, a bandit, a gun-toting bank-robbing whip-cracking son-of-a-gun who galloped through town in a cloud of cordite before taking potshots at the sheriff and his deputies just for kicks. To be an outlaw meant that you were forever in the gunsights of law enforcement – were you unlucky or foolish enough to be apprehended you could fully expect the ire of said law to be brought against you, whether it arrived in the form of a fine, a jail sentence, or, in those halcyon days of the gunslinger, a good ol’ fashioned hanging.
But I like to think that our present society of 2054 has evolved beyond those rather primal days of the wild west – death by rope and a stint behind bars went the same way as steam engines and gold prospectors. Capital punishment, however the method, was considered both cruel and archaic by the early 21 st century; confining a man to a cell was an act which the state rightly abolished sometime thereafter, for by that point the prisons were too cramped to be effective anyway, with our own nation housing a drove of inmates larger than some countries’ entire populations. With overcrowding rife it became clear that the situation could not endure – the financial burden on the state of keeping these prisons operational was too great, and the deterrent of a jail sentence, however lengthy, had clearly proven ineffectual. So in the late twenty-twenties a radical new tact of punishment was implemented: Outlawry . In case you slept through your history classes, a simplified overview of modern-day criminal procedure is thus…and please pay attention, as there will be a test afterwards.
When you broke a law in the days before outlawry, the state and its clenched iron fist would hand out your punishment itself. I remember those times well, for I was what they used to call a ‘cop’. Us cops were granted the authority to implement the power of the state so as to preserve order, ‘Protect and Serve’ being our mantra – yet in reality we were as impotent as pawns trying to protect an already toppled king, for the citizens we were obligated to oversee soon realised that they held all the power over our corrupted and ineffectual institution. There were riots not long after this realisation, and as a consequence of public outcry us cops were de-funded and consigned to irrelevancy. That was a black day…a black, lawless day…
But I digress, for nowadays times have changed – and for the better.
Outlawry works like this: For a set period of time, in accordance with the severity of your crime, you are cast out from under the sanctuary of the state’s wing. You are cut adrift, ostracised, booted from the tribe and left in the wilderness to fend for yourself.

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