Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) Read online

  “Everything seems to be in order, Mrs. Washington,” the Customs Officer said before handing the ident card back to Masozi, “welcome to Aegis.”

  “Thank you,” she replied perfunctorily, feeling a wave of relief wash over her at not being recognized by the automated facial recognition systems scattered throughout the port. As she walked past the border security checkpoint and emerged on the coastal frontage road, she felt a newfound respect for Benton and his information-manipulating skills.

  He had supplied her with two thousand credits, which was nearly as much as her starting Investigator’s monthly salary had been in New Lincoln. She knew she would need to conserve those funds, though, since Aegis was the second-most expensive city on Virgin.

  Only the System Capitol of Onding’s Watch was a more expensive place to live. The Capitol had been named after Commander Leonardo Onding in memory of his last stand when, with the support of his two thousand brave soldiers, he had held the then-central spaceport city of Black Harbor against wave after wave of criminal elements bent on securing the world’s only access point for themselves.

  In the face of overwhelming odds and having run out of options, Commander Onding overloaded a docked starship’s drive core and incinerated the entire spaceport, taking the criminals with it. His heroic act had given the populace of the planet sufficient time to gain some measure of control over their individual communities which prevented a takeover from the criminal forces.

  Aegis had been born shortly thereafter. Originally little more than the western oceanic transfer point between the two great continents of Virgin, it was quickly repurposed into a spaceport. Slowly but surely, the city had grown into a major hub of interstellar activity and it was in no small part due to Aegis’ development that the eventual System Capitol had been founded on Virgin—directly over the rubble of the old Black Harbor spaceport.

  Conveyances bustled this way and that on the busy frontage road, and Masozi knew that if she was to complete her assigned task she would need to secure passage in one of them. A few moments after hailing such a vehicle, one pulled to a stop before her and she stepped inside.

  “Where to?” the driver asked.

  She considered the query briefly. She knew that if she acted immediately, there was a chance that whatever authorities she alerted to Benton’s and Jericho’s presence at the harbor would be able to act in time to arrest them—or at least to make the attempt. But that would require that she proceed with all haste to the nearest Planetary law enforcement agency, and that meant the Virgin Port Authority located just a few kilometers away.

  She let out a short, bitter sigh and said, “Across town: the financial district.”

  “Thank you for your time,” Masozi said for the sixth time that day as she collected the data pad from the Public Accountant’s desk, which had been affixed with said Accountant’s notarial seal of approval.

  “Of course,” the Accountant replied after Masozi had transferred the correct number of credits from the chit Benton had supplied. It was fairly unusual for a person to use a physical chit since most people’s accounts were directly linked to their idents. But she had explained it away as some sort of a glitch in the system—one she had supposedly been assured would be corrected before the day’s end—which necessitated the use of the old-style chit.

  That falsehood had drawn more than one look of incredulity from the various public notaries. But with each telling of the lie, Masozi felt somehow more comfortable with it and, in the process, more proficient at its delivery. It had gotten to the point that this latest official had barely given her a second glance, and that thought disturbed her more than she had imagined it would.

  After leaving the Accountant’s office, Masozi checked the list which Benton had generated for her and stored on a data pad prior to her disembarking the Esmerelda Empática. She knew from her own work as an Investigator that to constantly be accessing the same query—such as a repeated one for ‘notaries public’ or similar variations—would make tracking her far too easy for anyone inclined to do so.

  She crossed off the most recent Accountant’s name from the list and moved on to a seventh name, checking her chronometer as she did so. It was nearing the end of business hours, so she selected a nearby paralegal whose offices were just a block away.

  Masozi made her way down the sidewalk toward the corner, and when she arrived there waited patiently with the other pedestrians who wished to cross the intersection. When the signal changed to indicate they should proceed, she did so and was halfway across the intersection before stopping cold at an image which flashed up on a nearby advertisement panel.

  It was a digitally-rendered image of her face! Below was a caption which read: Terrorist killed in explosion at Aegis abandoned warehouse—details to follow.

  The image of her face—which had worn a decidedly unappealing expression somewhere between a snarl and a grimace—was replaced with a large fire burning out of control somewhere in an industrial center.

  “It’s a good likeness but trust me, honey,” she heard an elderly woman’s sarcastic voice say in a certain tone, “I’m deader than you are.” Masozi looked down at the woman and blinked several times, her mind still reeling from the image for reasons she could not quite understand. “But that could change if you don’t two-step off the road,” the elderly woman chided as she walked past her, and Masozi did as she suggested.

  It took her several minutes of walking before she realized that the newsflash must have been Benton’s way of ‘clearing a path’ for her through the city’s scanners.

  After all, there would be no reason to scan for a dead person.

  Chapter XIV: A Side Mission

  Jericho raised his arms as the security guard outside the establishment scanned him. The guard waved an expensive-looking device across his body, and Jericho knew that it would find every single one of the literally hundreds of weapons he had been tempted to bring with him to the meeting.

  “You’re clean,” the guard said gruffly through its surgically-implanted vocalizer, and Jericho took a moment to examine the guard’s features more closely. It was an alien whose species was called ‘Klk’whrr’s—or, by those who wished to antagonize the six foot tall insectoid creatures, ‘Click Whores.’

  Their external carapaces were capable of resisting all but the most powerful slug-throwers, and an un-augmented person could forget about trying to puncture it with anything less than a monomolecular blade. They had large, blue-green, multi-faceted eyes and a quartet of antennae protruding from the tops of their heads which served as both auditory and olfactory organs.

  “You’re looking good, Jesse,” Jericho said blithely as he made his way past the guard.

  “That’s ‘Mr. Holland’ to you,” the giant insect said amid a chorus of clicks and clacks from its multiple mandibles as they struck against each other in agitation. The Klk’whrr had been subjugated so many years before the wormhole had collapsed that they had functionally been rendered into little better than slaves.

  The Sector government had been working to abolish slavery in every form, but unfortunately things did not change overnight. Jericho still held hope that, before he had breathed his last, aliens like the Klk’whrr—and even the Poppers—might achieve rights in accordance to their contributions to society.

  Jericho opened the inner door leading into the establishment and his senses were immediately assaulted by a riotous cacophony of sound, light, smell, touch, and—improbably—taste.

  It was one of several such locales, and while they were legal under Virgin’s law, that didn’t make them any less offensive to Jericho. Not far from the door was a trio of aliens—two of which looked vaguely like slugs, while the third was decidedly avian and half the size of an adult human—engaged in some sort of unspeakable act with a human couple. The writhing, moaning mass of flesh was obviously in unified ecstasy.

  Jericho averted his eyes and moved into the throbbing, almost blindingly-bright room and saw hundreds o
f people crammed into the small club. He scanned the room until his eyes fell on the person who had summoned him to the seedy club. He made his way across the dance floor, which seemed to writhe and pulsate with the mixture of humans and aliens who were indulging their base instincts while being ‘bathed’ in the sensory-overloading environment.

  In just the fifteen steps it took him to cross the dance floor, Jericho identified at least seven distinct flavors enter his mouth—only one of which had been even remotely pleasant—and at least twice as many overpowering smells.

  Just before he reached his destination, a club employee—a nearly naked young man who had every reason to be proud of his physical endowments—offered him a small, necklace-shaped device which Jericho refused. He knew that the device had plugs for his nose and ears, and small goggles for his eyes, and that it was meant to provide a means to focus on the particular senses one wished to indulge while in the club. But Jericho, even if he had enjoyed such indulgence—which he did not—was there on business.

  The boyish-looking man shrugged and snaked his way through the crowd before Jericho sat at the lone, empty stool among dozens which were clustered around tiny, circular tables. The man seated opposite that stool was short, slight of stature, and almost completely bald. His name was Eugene Roderick Obunda—and he was the closest thing that Jericho had to a boss.

  “Good of you to make it,” Obunda said neutrally, looking over the tops of his horn-rimmed glasses. “After your ship docked at the harbor and you didn’t show, I was worried you’d hit a snag.”

  Jericho suppressed a snicker, knowing he needed to stay professional throughout the meeting. Obunda may have appeared small, but he had undergone extensive genetic modifications and possessed one of the sharpest minds in the Sector. Jericho could certainly handle him in a straight-up fight, but men like Jericho and Obunda tended to deny potential adversaries advantageous positions by using the most powerful lump of tissue in the human body: the brain. “I need three Adjustments verified,” Jericho said as he produced a trio of data crystals.

  Obunda raised an eyebrow in surprise and, though he appraised the other man’s expression longer than he should have, Jericho was still unable to determine if that surprise was genuine. “I knew about the mayor,” Obunda said slowly, his voice barely loud enough to be heard over the violent, overpowering music. But Jericho had long since learned to read lips, so he missed nothing of what was said, “And that bit with Angelo was impressive, if perplexing.”

  “Adjuster’s prerogative,” Jericho replied neutrally, knowing that there was no way for Obunda to actually know which Adjustments he had made. “The case was neck-deep in political hot buttons; I didn’t think the public would benefit from an immediate exposure of his crimes.”

  “The truth always comes out, Jericho,” Obunda chided. “Your charity will be your undoing.”

  Jericho slid the data crystals across the table and Obunda accessed them via portable scanner one by one, stopping at the last entry with a look of confusion on his face as he shook his head as he showed Jericho that he had, indeed, verified the Adjustments as being authentic. When he had finished, he returned the crystals to Jericho and the two sat in silence for several minutes.

  “You have something for me?” Jericho pressed after the silence had lingered a bit too long for his liking.

  “When were you going to tell me about the woman?” Obunda asked mildly as his eyes swept the club like a hawk surveying a field.

  Jericho had suspected that the subject of Masozi would come up, but he was unwilling to discuss her in any way with Obunda—even if he was, technically, Jericho’s superior. The T.E. had no dedicated hierarchy in the traditional sense, but after an Adjuster acquired enough RL—Redeemed Lives, a metric which showed how many lifetimes of productivity an Adjuster had ‘saved’ or ‘redeemed’ via his or her actions—he inherited several bureaucratic responsibilities. Those responsibilities included verifying that Adjustments had been properly carried out and, if they had not, the senior Adjuster was to dispose of the junior Adjuster—personally.

  Of course, there were several perks that came with the territory as well…and Jericho was fast approaching the threshold which still separated himself and Obunda.

  “What I do with my pants down is none of your business, Obunda,” Jericho said evenly, hoping to discourage further comment on the matter.

  Obunda let loose a harsh, barking laughter which was somehow audible even over the din of the club’s absurd soundscape. “You don’t know what you’re missing, old man,” he said before taking a sip of his drink. “I’ve always got time for a potential convert and would happily show you a thing or two if you’d like…who knows, you might even enjoy it?”

  “Pass,” Jericho said levelly, fighting to keep the irritation from his voice. “You have something for me so let’s stop wasting each other’s time.”

  “As you wish,” Obunda sighed before sliding a data crystal across the table. “This one’s time-sensitive, and the former Adjuster’s preparations look solid. All you have to do is show up, wait for an opening, and make the Adjustment. It’ll be the easiest fifteen hundred RL you’ve ever accrued.”

  Jericho withdrew a data pad and slid the crystal into the reading slot. Data began to flood the screen and he scanned its contents before asking, “What happened to the former Adjuster?”

  Obunda gently swirled his drink. “Her paperwork for a previous Adjustment came up…lacking,” he said casually. “The window for this one is closing and, as the senior Infectus-level Adjuster here on Virgin, the burden of executing the contract falls to you. You make this Adjustment,” he gestured to the data pad, “and you’ll pass the tribunal to get access to Tyrannis contracts before year’s end without breaking a sweat.”

  Obunda’s description of the expected risk was conservative to the point of being ludicrous. The target was a recently-retired Planetary Defense Force officer holding the rank of Lieutenant General, and his name was Pemberton. Apparently he had been the Virgin Automated Defense Commander assigned to deploy several orbital-and ground-based defensive assets in the unlikely event of an invasion.

  The System’s President, Han-Ramil Blanco, had issued an executive order for a drone strike against a rural community comprised of nearly four thousand that had set up on the frontier of Virgin’s eastern continent. That community was later revealed to have harbored several dozen key members of a Sector-wide terrorist organization, and much of the funding for establishing the rural community had come from supposedly untraceable, off-world sources. In general, the public had accepted the attack as necessary—but the strike had not been approved by the Planetary Senate.

  On the day of the drone strike, Pemberton had been charged with defending the people of Virgin by deploying his automated defense assets in defense of the planet against unlawful attacks—which, having failed to gain Senatorial support prior to taking place, the drone strike was categorically unlawful—but he had failed to do so. The result was three thousand two hundred confirmed deaths when the assault drones vaporized the vast majority of the community’s infrastructure with methodical, repeated strafing attacks.

  Some speculated that PDF General Pemberton had sympathized with the rationale for the drone strike, and had therefore essentially granted President Blanco permission to slaughter the very people who Pemberton had sworn to protect by accepting the post he had essentially abandoned.

  But none of that explained how Pemberton’s Adjustment fell under the Infectus branch of the Timent Electorum’s mandate. Brutally suppressing civilians was an act of tyranny, and therefore Jericho should have never been permitted to see such an Adjustment—let alone carry one out.

  “I don’t see it,” he said, removing the data crystal and sliding it across the table. “This doesn’t fall within the range of my authority.”

  “Read the last entry,” Obunda said all-too-patiently.

  Jericho eyed the other man for several moments before doing as he had suggested.
After re-reading it and believing he understood the nature of the Adjustment, he opened the attached files and confirmed their apparent authenticity. “I can’t possibly verify all of this in two days,” Jericho said coldly, despising the way that Obunda had managed to gain the upper hand but working hard to keep that disappointment from his affect, “do you affirm that these are as they say?”

  “I do so affirm that the findings there are genuine,” Obunda said laconically. “But General Pemberton’s admission of negligence is well-documented in the public record; all you’ll need to do is have one of your,” his lips twisted into a cruel smirk as he said, “talented operators confirm the financial transfer to make the Adjustment legal.”

  Jericho knew that it was an intentional slight which his ‘superior’ Adjuster was making. Jericho was absolutely terrible with data links and other technological devices. Even as a child they had made little sense to him, but over his life he had learned to incorporate them enough that his techno-aversion was far from debilitating.

  So by employing ‘operators’ like Benton, Shu, and the apparently late Baxter, he had managed to overcome that particular limitation. But Obunda required no such assistance.

  Obunda had dabbled in tech crime since he was a youth, and had managed several Adjustments via remote from the comfort of whatever place it was he called ‘home’—including that of three Senators in one night, who had conspired to manipulate the Sector’s currency value by shifting massive amounts of labor from one pool to another over a period of five years. He had stopped them during the first year of their plan, and had therefore accrued near the theoretical maximum number of RL possible once the extent of their crime had been confirmed.

  Naturally, the prevention of a crime against the body politic was worth more than simply punishing an official who managed to complete such a crime. So, the more ‘lives’ which would be proven to have been directly saved by an Adjuster’s actions, the higher the percentage of the affected population’s lifetime productivity quotient that Adjuster was awarded for acting in defense of the voters’ interests.