Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) Page 12

  “Not good enough,” Masozi retorted sharply, turning his own words against him.

  Benton chuckled and Jericho sighed softly after casting a reprimanding look at the now-jiggling mass of humanity lying in the bed. “Due to your current bargaining position, that’s simply not the case,” he said as he popped open the salad dish and leaned his face down toward it as he inhaled deeply of its aroma. “You’re a wanted fugitive, and I’d imagine that by now your case file has been uploaded to the Planetary Investigators.”

  “Why?” Masozi asked, her curiosity overriding her desire to present a strong appearance. Chief Afolabi’s press conference had made no mention of a planet-wide fugitive alert, and she pointed at one of screens over Benton’s bed—a screen which had a real-time readout of classified law enforcement updates for New Lincoln on one side, and the entire planet on the other. “There’s nothing on the official wires to indicate a planetary effort is underway.”

  Benton chuckled again and this time Jericho smirked almost piteously. “Don’t tell me you believe everything you see on the newsfeeds…or that everything actually gets put on the newsfeeds?” he chided. “A certain degree of naiveté can actually be healthy, but you can’t actually believe in Universal Transparency, can you?”

  Universal Transparency had been the Second Right afforded the people of her world, and indeed, the entire sector. “If I don’t believe in Universal Transparency, why should I believe in the Timent Electorum?” she challenged.

  Jericho chuckled softly. “Because you’ve got supporting evidence for one, and a lack thereof for another, all within a few meters of each other—and you,” he said with a pointed look before taking a fork and spearing it through the center of the salad.

  She noticed the smell of her favorite salad dressing as he lifted the first bite to his lips, and she reached across Benton’s bed and snatched the third salad for herself.

  “My girl,” Benton said with a warm laugh as he reached into the parcel. He had finished his own portion of salad and dropped the empty box on the floor beside his bed before producing another trio of containers.

  It had been nearly fourteen hours since she had eaten, and Masozi was absolutely famished, so she ate in silence for several minutes while doing her best to savor what would very likely be the finest meal of her entire life. She only wished it could have come under different circumstances. The ingredients were all of the highest quality, and for a moment she understood how such a ridiculously expensive restaurant could remain in business through the high, and the low, economic times New Lincoln had endured. In truth, that salad had been a more pleasurable experience than at least half of her life’s various sexual encounters.

  “Fine, so there’s some evidence—most of which I can’t verify independent of you,” she said after devouring the salad and washing it down with a carbonated drink which she would have normally never considered touching.

  “A fair point,” Jericho conceded after downing his own bottle of the bitter, carbonated beverage. “But the truth is you’re beating around the box; you’ve seen first-hand the nature of what you’ve stumbled across. You don’t need either of us to tell you what that is.”

  Benton, who had taken a break from the meal after producing the second trio of food containers in order to peruse a few dozen data feeds, adjusted slightly in his bed before saying under his breath, “She’s back, everyone.”

  Just then, the same hover drone which had ‘rescued’ Masozi from her leap of faith swung into the room and declared, “Hey all, it’s me: Eve!”

  “Hey, baby!” Benton said buoyantly, but Masozi suspected it was something of an act—the same act she had seen countless ‘couples’ go through when reuniting.

  That particular connection made her shake her head in a mixture of awe and barely-concealed disgust. How low can a human being get? she thought in bewilderment. I can understand owning a pet, but a sexbot—without the body, no less?!

  “You’ve got visitors,” Eve said as though in surprise as she hovered over beside Benton’s bed, but Masozi recognized her voice as the same one which had come from the autocannon outside the container. So she very much doubted that Eve had been unaware of Benton’s ‘visitors’—especially since it had been Eve’s voice which had not-so-politely told Masozi to ‘make like a bad sector and frag’ at gunpoint.

  Seemingly from nowhere, a small, claw-like appendage attached to an articulate, metal tube lowered itself from the bottom of the hover drone’s bulbous, circular body and snatched up the empty salad box. Eve’s avatar on the front-mounted screen wagged a finger reproachfully at the huge man, “You are such a slob, Johnny Wladimir Benton!”

  “Eve,” Benton interrupted with a wild gesticulation of his hands as his speech patterns changed to something approaching normalcy, “I don’t have time for this right now. I’ve got seventeen simultaneous data dumps I’m managing; I’ve got to wipe every trace of these two cowboy’s—and girl’s,” he added belatedly, “rampage through the city, and I’ve got to do it all before I lose my hard lines at castoff in twenty minutes.”

  Eve’s virtual image put her hands on her hips and Masozi saw Jericho roll his eyes slightly. “Ohhhh, so not only do I have to pick up after you,” she said hotly, “but now I have to go back outside and disconnect the lines four hours earlier than scheduled?!”

  “That would be great, Eve,” Benton said agreeably as he deliberately returned his focus to the screens above him. “Shouldn’t take you longer than an hour to put all of it away—and don’t forget to depolarize the linkage this time. We were down for almost six hours last time,” he said chidingly before adding, “besides…you still owe me.”

  “Well…I never,” she fumed before spinning around and whirring out of the room amid a stream of decidedly angry-sounding bleeps and data static which emanated from her hover-drone’s speakers.

  “Sorry ‘bout that,” Benton apologized as his accent returned with a vengeance, “but she be a little…high-maintenance. She would’ve crashed and burned a long time ago without me, and I gotta…you know, gently remind her of that every now and then or she’s liable to get uppity—and that would be good for nobody, feel me?”

  Masozi boggled at the notion of Benton carrying on a ‘relationship’ with what amounted to little more than a sex toy program he had transplanted into the hover drone. The sheer ludicrousness of it strained her imagination, but as she looked around the decidedly abnormal environment which Benton had built for himself, she realized that Eve was likely the least disturbing thing about the man.

  “Look,” she said as Benton began to open up the next take-out box, and the overpowering smell of creamy, buttery pasta wafted into her nostrils as he did so, “I’m not convinced that going with the two of you is any safer option than marching back down to the precinct and pleading my case.”

  “That might actually work,” Jericho mused with a thoughtful nod.

  “Yeah,” Benton said, “’cept for this.” The massive bank of screens lining the far wall flared to life, and Masozi turned to see Agent Stiglitz’s image appear in several different perspectives, taken by what appeared to be public surveillance equipment. “I done tried to dig up some dirt on him, Jericho,” Benton said as though in apology, “but this bitch is tight, know what I’m sayin’? I didn’t even get no God-damned name after cross-checkin’ every, single, database on Virgin—and then some more besides! This mo-fo be a gen-u-ine ghost, dog.”

  “Please, Benton,” Jericho said with a hand raised in tempered irritation, “enough with the archeo-slang.”

  Benton rolled his pink eyes and sighed. “Judging by the EM field pouring off him, he’s augmented—a lot,” he said deliberately, his unique ‘accent’ disappearing to be replaced with an altogether unidentifiable, yet thoroughly bland, one. “I don’t know exactly how much we’re talking about, but this level is way beyond a local thug-for-hire’s means.”

  “More machine than man?” Jericho pressed as he gave hardly a glance at the scree
ns before opening up his own pasta and devouring it.

  “It’s possible,” Benton admitted, and Masozi examined the images carefully as she recalled meeting the man in Chief Afolabi’s office. “But regardless of how much gear he’s packing beneath the surface, the fact that there’s no record of him ever existing suggests…”

  The two shared a meaningful look and Jericho nodded before devouring another bite of the ridiculously tempting pasta. Masozi had been limiting her protein intake—the shrimp was actually more pure protein than she had allowed herself in a week—but she simply could not resist the certain-to-be delicious pasta.

  She hesitated briefly before turning and saying, “I have ‘a’ name for him.”

  The two men looked at her in surprise. “Really?” Benton asked with narrowed eyes in his prior, over-the-top accent. “And just how you be comin’ by this information, shorty?”

  “He was working with my Chief—Chief Investigator Afolabi,” she amended quickly. “I didn’t know it at the time, but in hindsight it seems so obvious…they were checking to see if I would pose a threat to their plans.”

  “Details,” Jericho said, putting his box of pasta down as his interest was clearly piqued, “what exactly did they say—the precise words?”

  She closed her eyes and tried to recall the conversation. When it came to remembering visual events, or even cataloguing information in her mind—information like account numbers, names, locations, and timelines—her brain was a finely-tuned machine. But recalling spoken conversations had always been a particular weakness of hers. “He said his name was Stiglitz, and he claimed to be from the IIU—the Interplan—“

  “Interplanetary Investigations Unit,” Jericho interrupted, “don’t clarify; just stay with the conversation.”

  “Right,” she said somewhat embarrassedly, having recalled only after he interrupted her that she had impatiently requested several witnesses do the same during her career’s many investigations. “Ok…he said he was with IIU, his name was Stiglitz, and that they were interested in offering me a post in the IIU if I would assist in their investigation.”

  “Go on,” Jericho pressed after a few seconds’ pause.

  The details were difficult for her to recall, so she closed her eyes again and began saying whatever came to mind. “They didn’t trust me, but I thought it was because they were holding something back and weren’t certain I would keep the information secure.” She bit her lip as the overpowering smell of Casa Mia pasta flowed through her nostrils and broke her concentration, then she remembered a look Afolabi and Stiglitz had shared and her eyes popped open. “They were surprised…or maybe not surprised…” she shook her head, as the word escaped her. “They were disappointed,” she finally managed to bite out, “when I objected to their characterizations of the Timent Electorum and its role in our society.”

  Jericho nodded slowly as the hint of a smirk danced around his lips. “Can you remember anything else?” he asked after a few moments of silence.

  In fact, Masozi had remembered something important. “They said they doubted the insignia you…” the word caught in her throat as she stole a glance at Jericho, who merely looked at her impassively—which did nothing to assuage her mounting trepidation. “They suggested that the T.E. insignia you left at the mayor’s office was not genuine.”

  Jericho’s brow rose briefly before he snorted under his breath. “It’s called a Mark of Adjustment,” he said offhandedly, “not an ‘insignia’.” He turned to Benton, who appeared to be paying their conversation little mind, “Are you certain it was authentic?”

  Benton nodded dismissively, “No chance it was a fake, boss man. That Mark was legit as can be.”

  Masozi’s brow scrunched up as she took the last box of pasta from the table and began to dig into its contents, which were a kind of ravioli half-covered in a butter-cream sauce she had only ever seen on gourmet cooking vids and half-covered in a more conventional tomato-based sauce. “What are you talking about? How could a ‘Mark’ be faked?”

  Jericho and Benton shared a look—a look that was disturbingly similar to the one which Afolabi and Stiglitz had shared the night before, and she felt herself chilled to the bone at the similarity. “About three years ago,” Jericho began with a short sigh, “an Adjustment was made on a magister named Dukane out on the Skylark colony. Everything was done within established protocols, and the Adjustment was verified according to the two century old system we’ve used since the first Adjustment.”

  Masozi recalled the case, since it had been caused a media frenzy surrounding on the discovery of disturbing evidence at the crime scene. The case itself had involved Magister Dukane secretly holding a significant share of stock in a corporation which had been losing market share to a competitor’s firm, a firm which had been founded by a pair of men named Seeton and Crain. Dukane had manipulated the timing and sequence of events by having Seeton sequestered during the unveiling of their latest model drive units. Crain had failed spectacularly in the ensuing press conference, and public confidence in his and Seeton’s company vanished overnight.

  Obviously, Dukane’s company had profited massively from their competitor’s downfall, so it had come as no surprise when the T.E. revealed they had been behind the death of the corrupt magister. None of the material facts of the case had been disputed in the aftermath.

  “The problem wasn’t with the Adjustment itself, but with the Mark,” Jericho explained as the bank of screens lining the wall switched over to show data pertinent to that case. Masozi doubted she could have called that much information up with a day’s time, and Benton appeared to have done so in a matter of minutes. She could finally comprehend just why individuals like him were so dangerous to society: with supposedly secure information at his fingertips, he would be ahead of even the people who were sent to pursue him.

  “It was a forgery,” Benton agreed as he expanded the view of the item itself—an apparently exact copy of the one Masozi had seen on Cantwell’s desk. “But not just any forgery,” he added with a hint of appreciation in his voice, “this one was made using the exact blueprints and specs of the real thing, right down to sourcing materials from the same supplier as the originals.”

  “But I thought,” Masozi said with a furrowed brow, “that the Marks were merely a way to present the evidence justifying an…Adjustment?” she said, lingering on the last word after she said it. It was such a cold, calculating term for what amounted to little more than a publicly sanctioned assassination.

  Jericho nodded. “That is one of their purposes,” he allowed, “but they’re also the way an Adjuster officially receives the contract in the first place.”

  Before Masozi could question any further, a blue light began to strobe beneath the hemisphere of monitors hanging above Benton’s bed.

  “Casting off in two minutes,” Benton reported between bites of his pasta, and Masozi decided to finally indulge her curiosity and take a bite of the meal.

  If the salad had been better than sex, then the pasta might have been better than solving a case. She tried to pace herself, but before too many minutes had passed she had finished the entire box—and immediately regretted her gluttony as she felt her stomach protest at its overfilled state.

  Jericho stood from his chair and moved to the side of Benton’s bed opposite Masozi. “You’ve got more questions, but you have to prove something before I can give you the answers,” he said as he held out a data pad.

  She accepted the pad warily, acutely aware that she was becoming swept up in the events but finding herself nearly overwhelmed by the fantastic situation. She glanced at the pad and saw a series of opinion articles, homemade video clips, and dozens of other amateur media pieces. She could see no rhyme or reason behind any of it, but she was intrigued all the same.

  “You find the message buried in that content,” he said with a tilt of his head toward the pad, “and I can answer your next round of questions. But you’d better get started since you’ve only go
t nineteen days.” Jericho then turned and made his way to the door which led down to the lower two ‘floors’ of the cubical container.

  “Why should I do any of this?” she demanded tersely as she waved the pad to indicate the entire room. She truly despised people thinking they understood her—especially people who had literally known her for less than a day!—and she found her temper flaring at his continued dismissal of her choice in the matter. “Even if you are who you say you are, you’ve all but admitted to committing multiple murders—and, regardless of what my superiors might have said today, I am an Investigator whose primary caseload consists of murder investigations.” She took a step toward Jericho as he stopped at the threshold of the door and looked at her over his shoulder. “When I work a case, I never fail to make the collar,” she said icily.

  Jericho snickered softly. “Investigator,” he said evenly as he turned away and took a step through the door, “I promise you that if, after breaking the code on that pad, you still want to march me down to the nearest station and book me…I’ll give you the chance to do just that. But until then, I suggest you get to work.”

  With that, he disappeared through the door and left Masozi standing there with impotent fury coursing through every fiber of her being.

  She heard Benton chuckling and she whirled to face him. “What is so funny?” she demanded hotly.

  The mound of blubber and skin which comprised his torso was wracked with a series of rippling perturbations which somehow managed to make him appear even more disgusting. “He used the ‘grilled cheese sandwich’ line on you, didn’t he?” he said with more than a hint of sympathy before sighing.

  Masozi was taken aback by his inference and it must have showed on her face, because Benton nodded shortly before returning his attention to the array of screens above his bed.