Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) Page 2

  Jericho hesitated for one of the few times in his life. The principles at play in his ‘safe’ egress from the office had been explained and tested—then re-tested—so many times he felt confident he could do what he was about to attempt in his sleep. But, contrary to the opinions of some, he was human—and that meant that in spite of his meticulous preparations, he still harbored a sliver of doubt.

  “Man’s sake, Jericho,” Benton chided through a static-laden, crunching noise which Jericho took to be the chewing of junk food by his rotund operator, “the science is solid—solid, know what I’m sayin’!? Take yo’ leap, boy!”

  The sound of the locking bolts retracting from the vault-like door was enough to spur Jericho into motion. Running as fast as he could, he cleared the window and began to fall to the street below just as a volley of energy beams erupted into the space above his head as the security force narrowly missed their mark after breaching the Mayor’s heavy door.

  The rain-filled, night air whipped around his body as he fought to keep his feet pointed to the ground and his body reacted to the sensation of falling just as it had during his several test runs back at headquarters. No more than a quarter of the way to the ground, a series of sharp, repeating impacts could be felt as a the tiny cord he had attached to the beam at the window began to unwind through a series of meticulously, painstakingly designed loops which provided just under four gees of resistance at their peak.

  This was the only part of the operation Jericho had taken issue with. Killing the Mayor had almost been too easy; infiltrating his office had been marginally more difficult, but still eminently do-able. It was the leaping-out-the-window-and-ensuing-insanity which had bothered him.

  But his body hurtled toward the ground below in an ever-slowing descent, and before he knew it his feet met the pavement and despite his instinct to do otherwise—and due to literally thousands of practice sessions—he kept his legs straight and his feet slammed flat against the ground just as the cord attached to his harness finally broke near the fastener a hundred and thirty six feet above him.

  The sensation of landing on the slick, dark pavement was far from unpleasant—in fact, it was anything but remarkable save for the fact that it was utterly anticlimactic. The impact felt like nothing worse than jumping down from a height of three meters, and Jericho could not help but marvel at the simplicity of his escape mechanism as bits of the very cord which had safely lowered him to the ground fell to the pavement all around him.

  That cord—and the soles of his boots—had been meticulously crafted with a lattice-work of ablative, carbon nano-fibers which had absorbed the entire energy transfer of his fall. The devices had been relatively cheap to produce and, more importantly, had passed through the Mayor’s security scanners undetected. The boots, like the cord, were now worth little more than their weight in pencil shavings, but they had served their purpose beautifully.

  “Y’all still with me…or do we need a clean-up on aisle nine?” Benton asked into the silence as Jericho took a glance up the massive, towering building from which he had just leapt and marveled at the fact that he had actually survived.

  He exhaled a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding. “I read you, operator,” he replied after shaking the imagery of the potentially lethal fall from his mind as he reached up to remove the earpiece, “I’m going dark. You’ll get your payment within the hour; nice working with you again.”

  “Any time, boss-man—any time,” Benton replied with a boisterous chuckle. “Bro, I’m so psyched…I can’t believe that shit actually worked!”

  Despite his operator’s pre-jump confidence, Jericho had known he had been far from alone in his trepidation regarding the use of such primitive, crude technology. “Timent Electorum,” Jericho said wryly, invoking the name of his own branch of the government—a name which also served as a warning to corrupt officials everywhere in the Chimera Sector, where Virgin Prime was located.

  “True dat, bro; gotta fear them voters,” Benton agreed seriously before Jericho removed the earpiece and tossed it into a nearby drainage grate.

  His latest voter-endorsed Adjustment executed, Jericho made his way to a nearby hover conveyance—which he had contracted specifically for the occasion—and the vehicle disappeared into the sprawling cityscape while law enforcement vehicles sped toward New Lincoln’s seat of government in response to their city leader’s Adjustment—an act which some would think of as little more than an assassination, but which any true son or daughter of Virgin Prime would recognize for what it was:

  Justice.

  Chapter II: Protocol vs. Politics

  “Here are the building’s security logs, Investigator,” a subordinate officer named Riley said, proffering a data slate.

  “Thank you, Riley,” Investigator Masozi replied as she accepted the slate. The scene had been secured some twenty minutes earlier and the forensic analysts had only just arrived, but they had surprisingly not yet begun to examine the evidence in depth. Masozi had been first on the scene and had directed her people to gather the security logs, audio and video records of the building, and locked down the entire building. The assassination of a Mayor—especially of the third most populous city on the planet—was a rare occurrence, and she knew there would be hell to pay in the coming days.

  Mayor Cantwell had been extremely popular with the New Lincoln electorate, but recent allegations had arisen regarding possible corruption within the administration itself. Normally such allegations made during an election campaign would have been dismissed as routine mudslinging on the part of the challenger.

  And had it not been for the triangular insignia set before the Mayor’s lifeless body, Masozi would have been inclined to dismiss those rumblings just as she had done for every other political election her planet had endured since the wormhole collapse of two centuries earlier. But the presence of that insignia, and its prominent—some might say arrogant—display at the crime scene pointed to the Mayor’s death as being, essentially, a legally-sanctioned affair.

  “What about the video records?” Masozi asked as she flipped through the entry and exit records for the past three days. The data pad had built-in programs for cross-referencing all of the logged names with those of known, or even suspected, malcontents or disruptive elements. But the program concluded its background search without having turned up anything promising.

  Riley shook his head bitterly. “The whole building’s primary, secondary and tertiary storage systems were hit with a powerful, incredibly focused e-mag pulse; there’s barely an aberrant one scattered in all the remaining zeroes. The data retrieval team says there’s not much they can get; this was a professional job.”

  Masozi nodded solemnly as she considered the triangular insignia and shot an irritated look at the forensic analysts standing in the hall outside the office. “Are you going to get started sometime this millennia?” she snapped with a pointed look at the nearest forensics team member.

  The forensic examiner pointedly ignored her, which made her set her jaw. This was her investigation, and they were there under her direction; when she gave the order they were supposed to hop to it!

  But before she could vent her spleen at them the New Lincoln Chief Investigator, a man named Afolabi, appeared at the far end of the hallway and quickly locked his eyes with hers. He was a tall, imposing figure with skin nearly as dark as Masozi’s own, but his physical prime was far behind him and he sported at least an extra twenty, useless, kilos around the midsection.

  “Investigator,” he said as he approached, giving a curt nod to the forensics team leader. The head forensics examiner gave Masozi a brief look before turning his back and making small talk with his team members. “Can we have a word?”

  “Of course, sir,” she replied warily as he made his way into the Mayor’s office. It was highly irregular for the Chief Investigator to appear prior to the scene having been examined by the forensics team, and judging by that team’s reaction to the Afolabi’s arriv
al they had been under orders to delay their investigation until he had arrived.

  The two entered the Mayor’s office, and after giving an obligatory look at the Mayor’s corpse—and the wall behind it, which was covered in a gruesome layer of skull and brain fragments—Chief Afolabi turned to Masozi and said, “What have you determined thus far?”

  Masozi cocked her head slightly in confusion, since she had been unable to make any determinations due to the forensics team having failed to begin their own work to that point. “Well…aside from the obvious,” she said, gesturing to the Mayor’s head which ended just above the lower jaw before pointing to the discarded weapon on the floor just beside the desk, “we have something of a rarity.”

  “Oh?” he asked neutrally, and Masozi was reminded just how good this man was at politics. He had served at the highest levels of the New Lincoln peacekeeping forces for thirty years, working under three separate administrations after serving on the street for over a decade.

  “Yes, sir,” she replied as she turned deliberately and pointed at the triangular insignia on the desk before the Mayor. “This looks to be the work of Timent Electorum.”

  Afolabi’s eyes never left her own, and she furrowed her brow in confusion when he apparently refused to look at the desktop. “An interesting theory, Investigator,” he said evenly, “however, perhaps we should wait until the forensics team has had a chance to go over the scene before jumping to wild conclusions?”

  “Sir?” she asked incredulously. “I tried to have the forensics team get started but they were being rather less than cooperative. Besides, if this was a T.E. contract then it was legally sanctioned.”

  Afolabi fixed her with a cold, piercing look before sighing irritably. “Whatever gave you the notion that this cold-blooded murder was carried out by the Timent Electorum agency?”

  “Chief Investigator,” Masozi scoffed as she pointed to the insignia desk and raised her voice, “everyone learns to recognize a T.E. insignia in primary school!”

  Afolabi visibly flustered as he took a deliberate, ominous step toward her and lowered his voice, “I see no such insignia, Investigator Masozi. Perhaps you’re mistaken?”

  She opened her mouth to retort before realizing that the Chief Inspector’s presence wasn’t meant to facilitate her investigation—he meant to obstruct it! Masozi took a deep, cleansing breath before lowering her voice and saying, “Chief…I have a job to do here—“

  “I suggest you head back to the barn, Masozi,” Afolabi interrupted in a slightly raised voice as his features hardened. “You’ve done a great job here but I think this particular situation might require a slightly more…experienced hand.”

  “Chief!” she blurted unthinkingly. This was to be her career-defining moment, and while it was far from unprecedented for a Chief Investigator to usurp an assigned Investigator, such a transfer of responsibility required recusal on the part of the assigned Investigator—in this case that was her! “I am the lead Investigator assigned to this case, and I will not recuse myself unless I am physically unable to carry out my duties.”

  Chief Afolabi narrowed his eyes. “Think carefully about this, Investigator,” he warned. “Your family connections might not carry as much weight as you believe, should you follow through on this course of action.”

  Masozi clamped her teeth together at the mention of her familial ties. She had worked hard to distance herself from those members of her family who had ascended to System-wide political prominence, for reasons too numerous to recount. But her colleagues never let her forget her relatively distant connection to those people. It was, perhaps, the single greatest insult which could be leveled her way to suggest that she had not in fact earned each and every stripe she wore proudly over her breast.

  “I’ll help you out, Investigator,” Chief Afolabi continued after a few seconds of silence, “Internal Affairs has a few questions regarding your case-load these last few weeks. I’m ordering you to report to them so you can put that bit of nastiness behind you and get back to work as quickly as possible.”

  Masozi clenched her fist so tightly that she felt one of her stick-on nails pop off more than a little painfully. But she ignored the sensation as she realized that he had come prepared to force her off the crime scene. “This isn’t over, Chief,” she growled under her breath as she pushed past him toward the door.

  “Forgetting something, Investigator?” Afolabi asked with a pointed look down at her off-hand.

  She stopped and looked down to see she was still holding the data pad with the building’s security logs. She turned and held it out, her hand nearly trembling with anger. The Chief deliberately held her with his gaze for several seconds before reaching out and accepting the pad. “Escort the Investigator from the building,” he said with a glance at one of the uniformed officers in the hallway.

  “Yes, sir,” the man replied, and Masozi stormed out of the room and down the corridor, followed at a close remove by the uniformed man.

  She silently fumed for the entire ride down the elevator. The Mayor’s assassination had been assigned to her and it was beyond irregular for a superior to so crudely force an Investigator off the case. Her thoughts swirled into a maelstrom that nearly saw her scream in frustration before the elevator doors opened.

  Her ‘escort’ saw to it that she exited the building, and when that was done he went back to the building and left her alone. There was a pair of forensic examiners already at work on the pavement, picking up fragments of glass which had scattered from the base of the towering sky rise to the far side of the street.

  Deciding to take a risk, Masozi crossed the line of artificial light marking the boundary of the forensic team’s authority. “What have you found?” she asked, acting as though she had come down to check on their progress.

  The nearest examiner, a woman Masozi recognized whose name was Angelica, looked up briefly with her scanning monocle’s blue light flickering off as she did so. “We’ve got micro-fractures in the armored glass,” the examiner explained. “Not many people still use reinforced silicates; even in this building nearly all of the windows have been replaced with transparent alloys, but we’re seeing evidence of kinetic resonance in this material consistent with a shaped charge.”

  Masozi nodded slowly. “So the hitman knew the room.” It wasn’t exactly news to her given the rest of the evidence she had managed to observe in her little time with the scene. “Did any witnesses see where the assassin landed?”

  Angelica nodded. “Right there,” she replied, pointing to a fairly nondescript patch of sidewalk near the center of the glass fragments. The area where she pointed looked completely unremarkable even to her highly-trained eye, except for the marked presence of a few, hair-like pieces of material.

  Masozi cocked an eyebrow. “Are you saying he just…landed?”

  The examiner shrugged, “It looks that way, ma’am, with a little help from above. These cord fragments look like carbon nanotubes,” she explained, holding up an evidence bag with a pair of the small, hair-fine fibers inside, “but they’re barely better than industrial grade. He could have had these made at over a hundred different facilities in this System alone.”

  Masozi approached the patch of sidewalk and knelt down to look at it more closely. “Did you find anything unusual where he touched down?”

  Angelica bit her lip for a moment before taking a few steps closer and gesturing, “The spectro-scope picked up a high concentration of carbon tubules there. I’ve taken a sample but won’t be able to produce a more detailed analysis until I’ve run it through the lab—my guess is it’s the same material which made the cord, and that he used them as a shock absorber.”

  “Can I see it?” Masozi asked, glad to have finally found a thread to follow.

  The examiner nodded, removing the monocle with a series of taps to its fastening surface before handing it to the Investigator. Masozi attached the small scope over her right eye and activated it, allowing the device to cycle throug
h the various bands of non-visible light before stopping it at the spectrometric analysis setting and leaning close to the concrete surface to get a clearer image.

  Even though the rain had washed much of the microscopic evidence away, there was a distinct pair of boot-shaped silhouettes surrounded by a fine, roughly-circular cloud of carbon particles. The only truly remarkable aspect of the carbon was that it was pure carbon; there was essentially no other element present in that particular layer of nearly-invisible debris.

  “Thank you,” Masozi said, knowing she had risked too much already. She removed the monocle and returned it to Angelica, who accepted it and resumed her duties.

  The Investigators’ offices were not far from the main government building where the assassination had taken place, so she had simply ridden with a uniformed patrolman en route to what was supposed to be her biggest assignment yet. So she decided it best to walk back to the office, which might let her compose her thoughts as she considered the disturbing events of the evening.

  Chapter III: The Working Man

  Jericho had already switched conveyances six times over the course of nearly half an hour when his handheld link vibrated within his pocket. He had not expected any inbound communications, so he was more than slightly apprehensive as he entered his password to the data pad. The device also doubled as his sole connection to the vast information grid which pervaded every aspect of life in a city like New Lincoln—a grid which Jericho believed humanity could very well do without.

  The author of the message was familiar to him; it had been sent by his most recent operator, Wladimir Benton. Jericho had not yet transferred the agreed-upon sum of money to Benton’s account, but he still had half an hour remaining in their agreed upon window so he cautiously opened the message.