Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) Page 25

  Hero looked doubtful, “I don’t know, Lisa….”

  “I…apologize, Hero,” Klarpf said via his vocalizer as he splayed his pincer-esque appendages to either side. “I am unaccustomed to life on this ship.”

  “Klarpf was one of the deep-core miners on H.E. One,” Lisa explained after making eye contact with Masozi. “They didn’t have any doors down there, either.”

  “Really?” Masozi asked, uncertain if the prolonged dialogue would be beneficial or harmful to her chances for a safe exit from the scene but knowing she had little choice but to play along.

  Lisa nodded as her eyes began to mist. “I…” she began, but her voice caught and Hero placed his long arm around her narrow shoulders. Lisa took Hero’s hand in her own and shook her head, as though it would banish the rising surge of emotion she clearly felt after mentioning H.E. One. “I need to get back to the Comm. center,” she said hastily before meeting Hero’s gaze, “go easy on the big guy, ok?”

  Hero’s visage softened and he nodded. “Ok, Leese…I’ll let him off—this time,” he added with a warning look to Klarpf.

  Klarpf made another display of what Masozi took to be prostration. “Thank you, Crewman Hero.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Hero rolled his eyes before planting a short kiss on Lisa’s lips. “See you after shift?”

  “You bet,” she said as she wiped her eyes dry and gestured for Masozi to accompany her. Masozi would have preferred exit on her own, but she didn’t want to attract suspicion so she followed the diminutive woman to the lift. When they had both entered, Lisa said, “Deck two, right?”

  “Yes,” Masozi said in surprise, but Lisa gave her what looked to be a wholly genuine smile.

  “It’s part of my job to coordinate the berthing assignments for unranked personnel,” she explained before thrusting out her hand. “My name’s Lisa Steiner, Comm. Technician—among other things,” she added with a roll of her eyes.

  Masozi accepted her hand and nodded. “Masozi…a month ago I was an Investigator but the truth is I don’t know what I am now.”

  Lisa leaned in conspiratorially after their hands had separated and said, “You’re still an investigator, you just might not get to capitalize it any more.” The little woman sighed as she added, “We are what we are, Masozi-the-still-investigator. Nobody can take that from us, and we should all learn to be happy with what that is.”

  The door to the lift opened and Masozi saw that they were at Deck Two. She exited the lift and turned before awkwardly saying, “Thank you.”

  Steiner waved dismissively, “On a ship this small, everyone’s got to look out for each other—especially us girls.” She winked just before the lift closed, and Masozi made a bee-line for the cabin she had been assigned.

  Once inside she exhaled deeply, but was acutely aware that her quarters might have been bugged. So she turned off the lights and did her best to go to sleep.

  In spite of what she had discovered in the shuttle bay, that turned out to be a less-than-challenging task.

  Chapter XXI: Final Approach

  “I don’t like it, Jericho,” Captain Jeffrey Charles said darkly. “You’re putting too much faith in her.”

  Jericho shrugged, knowing that from a given perspective the Captain’s comment would seem reasonable. But he had put in too much work, made too many preparations, and set too many events in motion to back out over what he considered to be an acceptable risk. “When have I ever been wrong about this kind of thing?” he asked with cold certainty.

  The Zhuge Liang’s Captain snorted as he waggled a finger remonstratively, “That’s what everyone says until they’ve broken their cherry.”

  Jericho chuckled. “True enough,” he admitted. “But the Director had enough faith in this plan to put your ship and crew at my disposal for the foreseeable future…when has he ever been wrong about this kind of thing?”

  “When had he ever been wrong?” Captain Charles riposted pointedly. “With the old man gone, it’s anyone’s guess as to how things are going to turn out. The gears are already turning…and before long the Sector might be thrown into a full-blown civil war.”

  “That’s right,” Jericho said fiercely as he leaned forward in his chair, which was situated opposite the Captain’s, “the time for doubt is over. We have to see this thing through or thousands—maybe even millions—of people are going to be crushed by those gears.” He forced himself back into his chair and held the Captain’s blue-eyed gaze for several moments before continuing, “I’ve done too much…seen too much…I can’t—no, I won’t—believe that it was all for nothing!”

  Captain Charles set his jaw and the two engaged in a silent battle of wills until the Captain finally shook his head and sighed. “I already voiced my objections to this plan in the hours before the Director gave me my orders,” he said in bitter resignation before straightening in his chair. “For better or worse, you’re right: we are committed.” The Captain quirked a grin before adding, “At least you’ll get to see home one last time. I just pray to God your plan goes off like you hope it will.”

  Jericho relaxed in his own chair and released a pent-up breath. “You and me both, Jeff,” he said hollowly as he looked out the lone window in the Captain’s Office, “you and me both.”

  Charles hesitated before asking, “If you see her, will you give Valeria my regards?”

  Jericho snorted derisively, remember that his cousin had long held an unrequited affection for a woman they had both known while growing up. “I can do that,” he said as he stood from his chair and made for the door. He stopped after a few steps and, without turning, said, “But you’re wrong about one thing, Cousin.”

  “Oh?” Captain Charles said with a quirked brow.

  Jericho nodded solemnly as his eyes went back to the stars outside the Captain’s office. “The old man’s dead…but he’s not gone,” he said before tearing his eyes from the star field outside the window and locking gazes with the Zhuge Liang’s Captain, “men like him never are.”

  Mazosi struggled with the controls and the Neil deGrasse Tyson slewed hard to the left after she overcompensated for the initial bump against the colony’s atmosphere. She cursed under her breath at having to perform her very first atmospheric entry with such a valuable craft—especially when her own well-being depended on that performance!

  “You’re doing fine,” Jericho said patiently as the Tyson arced toward the moon colony of Philippa. “I’ll take over if you get in trouble; this ship doesn’t register on the world’s sensor net so the only obstacles you have to worry about are the atmosphere and the ground.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Masozi snapped as the Tyson gently lowered itself through the upper atmosphere. It was actually fairly simple to navigate the craft into an approach which didn’t create much in the way of heat—unlike the egg pod, which had used friction as its primary braking method. The Tyson had powerful engines which allowed her to essentially dictate the craft’s behavior completely independent of the moon’s gravity.

  “This atmosphere’s as thin as it gets while still being considered breathable,” Jericho reminded her for at least the fifth time during the trip after leaving the Zhuge Liang’s shuttle bay.

  Jericho had decided that after only one more day of intense training in the VR simulator—during which she only crashed twice in over two hundred separate missions—Masozi had proven her ability with the shuttle sufficiently to warrant moving forward with the next leg of his mission.

  Masozi couldn’t take her mind off the device hidden in the cabin behind them—a device which she was increasingly convinced was a thermonuclear warhead that had been lost during the infamous collapse of Virgin’s Southern Bloc some two decades earlier.

  Is he going to detonate that weapon here?! she wondered silently. Why? The Governor’s security detail can’t be that tight.

  “Concentrate, Investigator,” Jericho snapped, and Masozi’s attention snapped back into focus as she guided the craft through a
patch of upper atmosphere turbulence which had been indicated on her instruments. Her thoughts had only strayed for a moment, but that was all it had taken for her to stray to the outer boundary of their approach vector.

  After correcting their course, she realized her pulse had quickened and she was sweating. She knew some of that was due to the stressful act of piloting a genuine starship for the first time, and every muscle in her lower half had been flexed tightly for nearly five continuous minutes. But she also knew that part of her anxiety was the knowledge of the device in the cabin behind them.

  “Good,” Jericho said approvingly after she had brought the vessel back into the designated approach path. “This ship has stealth systems that only a handful of grids in the Sector could overcome, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be cautious.”

  “If you know so much about it,” Masozi said through gritted teeth, “why aren’t you flying it?”

  “Everyone needs practice,” he replied evenly before unfastening his harness and making his way into the cabin. “I’ve got to check on something; I’ll be just a minute.”

  She was tempted to ask what he meant to investigate, but Masozi thought better of it and instead focused on the task at hand. She knew that she could ill-afford a mishap, even though they were well within the atmosphere of the colony and only a few minutes from touchdown. She risked a glance over her shoulder into the cabin just in time to see Jericho close the hidden compartment, zip up a duffle bag which had been set beside it, and stow that bag in the craft’s tiny, locker-like closet. Before he turned back toward the cockpit, she returned her full attention to the task of flying.

  When he reached the cockpit and re-fastened his harness, Masozi asked tensely, “What was it?”

  “One of the capacitors was acting up,” he replied offhandedly. “But it was just a glitch in the readouts; nothing to worry about.”

  “That’s good,” Masozi said hollowly as they made their final approach, having gone beneath the colony’s primary detection grid. “How far is the nearest settlement?” she asked as the landing zone was highlighted.

  “Twenty three kilometers,” Jericho replied. “Philippa’s gravity isn’t much more than two thirds that of Virgin’s, so it might take some getting used to. Still, it will make the hike that much easier.”

  “What are the colony’s rules regarding weapons?” Masozi asked, hoping to segue into whether or not they would be carrying said weapons.

  “They’re tight,” Jericho replied bitterly as he began to transfer several of the Tyson’s controls to the craft’s computer, “so we won’t be armed during this first excursion—we’re just here to pick up some of the resources we’ll need later. Go ahead and let off the controls, Investigator; we’ll let the auto-landing program take over from here.”

  Genuinely relieved that she would not be attempting to land the incredibly expensive-looking craft, Masozi slowly relaxed her grip on the controls as the computer assumed command. Their trajectory evened out considerably from her own directed path, and after less than a minute the Neil deGrasse Tyson touched down inside a rocky crater lined with some sort of green, mossy plant.

  “Well done, Investigator,” Jericho said as he unfastened his harness once again and stood from the cramped quarters of the co-pilot’s chair. “We should get moving; we’ve only got two days to set this thing up. Our window will close after that and, following the VSDF’s attack on H.E. One, we likely won’t get another chance.”

  “I understand,” Masozi said as she followed Jericho to the cabin, where he opened the closet into which he had just stuffed the duffel. The truth was she had no idea why such a window existed, but she didn’t want to voice her ignorance.

  She was relieved when Jericho failed to retrieve the duffel from the closet, instead opting for a pair of wide-brimmed hats and long, thick overcoats before closing the closet. He handed one of each to her and she accepted before he explained, “Philippa’s thin atmosphere and weak magnetosphere make solar radiation more dangerous here than any other habitable location in the Virgin System. We have to protect ourselves at all times.”

  They donned the protective equipment, which included a goggled mask attached to the hat that sealed neatly around her neck just above the collarbones. The mask was remarkably easy to breathe through, and the goggles likewise did very little to alter visible light which made wearing them less inconvenient than it likely appeared.

  “Ready?” Jericho asked as he placed a hand on the glyph which would open the lone door into the craft’s cabin.

  “Yes,” she replied, still feeling a massive wave of relief wash over her at his decision to leave the as-yet unexplained device—which she suspected was a nuclear bomb.

  “The Tyson’s systems, including the door’s locking mechanism, are coded to our bio-patterns and no one else’s. If you we get separated and you need to launch, just swipe your hand across the door panel and it will open for you,” he explained before donning his own hat-and-mask, “anyone else’s attempt to access the vessel will result in the ship’s nuclear plant overloading, taking out the nearby settlement in the process.”

  Masozi’s heart skipped a beat at his mention that the vessel would explode, and her thoughts turned to the nuclear bomb stowed in the ship’s closet. If the ship’s power plant will take out the nearby settlement, she wondered with mounting concern, how much worse would it be if the hidden bomb’s power is added to it?

  Jericho secured the mask attached to his hat as though doing so required less than a thought, but Masozi had struggled for several attempts to get her own unit to fit properly. “Log the ship’s location on your link,” he reminded her, and she was actually grateful for the mask in that moment since it hid her red-faced embarrassment while she did so. There had been several, sleek, wrist-mounted data links in the Tyson and Jericho had given her one as soon as they had boarded the sleek craft. “If we run into any problems you need to be able to return here,” he said as he pressed the glyph, and the cabin depressurized gently as the ramp descended to the rocky ground below. “Let’s go.”

  Two hours later Masozi’s legs burned in a wholly unfamiliar way and her lungs felt simultaneously tight with effort and short of air.

  “Philippa barely has enough atmospheric pressure to support strenuous human activity,” Jericho explained. “There are several alien species that fare just fine here but humans aren’t one of them, so I suggest that you pace yourself, Investigator.”

  “How much further?” Masozi asked between long, empty-feeling breaths.

  “Not far,” Jericho said, gesturing ahead, “the large crater ahead houses around six thousand colonists. It’s the largest settlement on this side of the moon.”

  Masozi looked up for at least the hundredth time at the sky. Suspended high above them, looming impossibly large in the night sky, was the planet Pacifica. Its blue-green orb might have been mistaken for one like Virgin, if not for the distinct striations marking its many-layered appearance.

  Pacifica was the second largest gas giant in the Virgin System, behind only Chambliss, and of Pacifica’s seventeen moons three had been colonized at one time or another. But Philippa had proven to be the only moon capable of sustaining an atmosphere due to its position jut within Pacifica’s electromagnetic field. That field was barely strong enough to create an acceptable degree of protection from Virgin’s primary to qualify Philippa as a habitable world.

  Using technologies long-since forgotten—or possibly even lost to antiquity—the Imperium’s terraforming teams had extracted the requisite gases from Pacifica and transferred them to Pacifica at the earliest stages of the colony’s transformative process.

  No one knew how long it had taken to terraform Philippa to its current state, but the process had apparently been interrupted when the wormhole had collapsed. The engineers responsible for the moon’s completed transformation abandoned their efforts in favor of fleeing to their precious Imperium—an undertaking which no one could confirm had succeeded
or failed.

  Of course, ‘Philippa’ was only the moon’s original astronomical designation. Since the re-naming of most life-sustaining bodies had taken place some two centuries earlier, Philippa had been re-designated ‘South Virginia’ due to its outermost position in the Virgin system. But Masozi had learned both names for the tiny world during primary school and had always preferred ‘Philippa’ to ‘South Virginia,’ so that is how she thought of the rocky moon where she now tread.

  As they came to the edge of the crater—and it was a literal edge, much to Masozi’s surprise, rather than a gentle slope—she looked down and saw a tiny settlement nestled inside of a smaller crater within the larger crater which she now overlooked.

  “It’s amazing that life can flourish in places like this,” Jericho said with a note of something approaching admiration in his voice. He gestured out to the far side of the crater and said, “First we’ve got to skirt the main settlement and make for that smaller crater. Do you see it?”

  Masozi strained her eyes for a few seconds before seeing what she thought he meant. It was well-lit with what looked to be several large, neon signs around the perimeter. “What do you need to do there?” she asked.

  “Collect a final piece of the puzzle,” he replied, “once we’ve got it we can make the Adjustment.”

  Masozi wanted to object, to say that she didn’t want to be a party to any of this any longer, but her sense of caution won a short-lived battle with its counterpart, temerity, and they moved to find a less treacherous path into the crater.

  As they approached the far side of the crater, Jericho took a glance over his shoulder at Masozi. She was a truly impressive physical specimen, having never once requested a break from the arduous trek across the unfamiliar—at least, unfamiliar to her—terrain. But her physical attributes were among the least interesting aspects he had admired in the young woman since their meeting in New Lincoln.