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  But Jericho could not commit to taking the man down since he still had the gene-modified woman to contend with, so he backpedaled slightly toward the lamp as the powerful Sasaki sprang back into action and leapt toward him with her knife poised to deliver a killing blow.

  Having less time than was required to sight in on his target, Jericho swing the frying pan blindly behind himself and felt a satisfying clang as it struck the antique, iron—high voltage—lamp which he had carefully placed in its new position prior to Angelo’s entry into the flat.

  Sasaki’s eyes shifted to focus on the falling lamp and she twisted in mid-air as she pushed off the aquarium’s base and drove her body toward the antique, wood-framed chair as she abandoned her previous attack on Jericho.

  But her companion apparently failed to recognize the danger in time as he charged toward Jericho with murder in his eyes. The instant the iron lamp’s bulb struck the concrete floor—a floor which was now covered in aquarium water—there was an audible buzz and accompanying flash of light which saw Matsumoto’s body seize as electricity coursed through his nerve endings. A fraction of a second after that crippling jolt of electricity robbed him of his senses, the safety breakers cut power to the entire flat and the room went dark.

  The brief interruption was enough to send the hulking man crashing face-first to the floor. Before Matsumoto could recompose himself, Jericho reversed his grip on the kitchen knife and unceremoniously plunged it into the base of his skull while re-acquiring a line of sight on Sasaki, using his infrared goggles in the now-darkened apartment.

  By the time he sighted in on the chair she had used as insulation against the electrical surge, the hard-bodied woman was nowhere to be seen. But Mr. Angelo had fled to his bedroom and apparently locked the door, evidenced by the telltale clicks of several mag-locks engaging in sequence.

  A flash of movement was all he registered before reflexively leaning out of the way of a tiny missile. Having trained continuously for two decades in preparation for similar situations, he reacted by seeking the missile’s point of origin rather than following the path of the tiny object. It was only by following this conditioning that he managed to react in time to the second missile by moving the frying pan—and his body—in such a way as to deflect it harmlessly away with the flat, iron piece of cookware. The pain he felt in his broken forearm was extraordinary, but it thankfully did not prevent him from defending himself against the poisonous darts.

  When the missile whizzed past his head he caught a glimpse of the tiny, dart-like device and knew that he would be receiving no further fire of that type. He finally sighted in on Sasaki when moved out of the kitchen and back into the parlor.

  “You should have stayed in there; I might have left you alive,” he said through briefly gritted teeth. “But those darts are delivered via forearm implants which are limited to one per limb. So you’re out of ammo and I outweigh you by forty kilos of muscle and bone…it’s only a matter of time.”

  She smirked as she looked pointedly at his left arm and spun the straight-bladed knife over in his hands as though it was light as a feather. “We shall see,” she said in a deceptively mild tone before launching herself at him, her tanto-style knife lashing out in a series of almost impossibly quick attacks. He parried each one, even while favoring his wounded arm, but after a dozen such thrusts and parries he knew that she was better with a blade than he was—a lot better.

  He dropped the frying pan so as to increase his own agility, and saw a contemptuous sneer spread across her features. She increased the speed and variation of her attacks in an attempt to draw him out of position, and he found himself constantly giving ground as he sought to minimize her angles to his lesser-protected left side.

  Her blade sliced cleanly across his left triceps as he failed to move the extra half inch necessary to avoid the attack altogether, and a short exchange later she also managed to open a gash on his right thigh.

  “Too slow, old man,” she hissed as she never broke the tempo of her deadly ballet. He knew that she would win a war of attrition, so he decided to take a risk.

  He drew his own knife back as he put every bit of power he had into a long, sweeping slash aimed at her neck. His kitchen knife arced through the air as he extended his body as far as he could in an attempt to reach his nimble adversary.

  She saw the attack too early for his blow to land on the exposed flesh of her neck, and she gently swayed backward as his blade whistled through the air where her throat had been an instant before—actually severing a handful of her hairs before they, too, could evade the attack.

  Seizing on the opening, the athletic woman pirouetted so fast he almost didn’t see it and plunged her tanto into where every human anatomy textbook ever written on the subject said the human heart was located.

  He looked down at the blade protruding from his chest and actually felt a wave of relief as a bright, red bloom began to ooze out of the perfectly-placed wound. Sasaki had already taken several steps back and was admiring her handiwork, while Jericho slumped to his knees. All he could think about was how fast she was, and that he had sorely underestimated her from the outset of the engagement.

  “Tsk tsk tsk…poor, old man,” she said with a self-satisfied snicker as more bright, red fluid poured out of his chest onto the floor in what would have been an ever-widening red blossom in the water-covered floor of the apartment. “Thankfully for you, you will lose consciousness in less than a minute and death will follow shortly thereafter.”

  He took a deep, ragged-sounding breath, “Do you have…a smoke?”

  She cocked an eyebrow before throwing her head back and laughing. “No smokes here, fogey,” she said with a shake of her head, “but I’ve got a few chemstix if that’s how you’d like to go out.”

  He drew another deep, laborious breath before spitting a wad of bloody phlegm onto the floor, where it landed with a wet splat. “Please…” he wheezed.

  She reached into her faux leather jacket and flicked a tiny, plastic case through the air in a swift, fluid gesture and it landed in front of him. “Knock yourself out,” she quipped.

  His head lolled around for a moment as he attempted to grab the sachet of chemicals, but he missed with his first attempt to do so and shook his head as he looked down at the knife protruding from his chest. He reached up deliberately to grab the blade, and saw the woman tense.

  “Wouldn’t do that, fogey,” she warned in a playful tone, “you pull that out and you lose whatever time you might have left.”

  He snorted derisively. “Taken down by a woman,” he muttered as he gripped the tanto’s hilt and pulled it from his chest, letting it slip from his fingers and fall to the floor with a clatter as a small spray of thick, red fluid burst from his chest. The pain was thoroughly unpleasant, but it was nothing he had not felt before.

  “Stupid,” Sasaki shook her head with mock disappointment without taking her eyes from him.

  Jericho looked up at her through his goggles and chuckled for a moment.

  “What’s so funny?” she demanded, as though his laughter was an affront of some kind.

  He laughed for a few seconds more. “You gave up your edge,” he said with a piteous shake of his head as the last of the fluid dripped out of the admittedly painful wound in his chest. He stood slowly to his feet and felt a kind of brutal, savage, animalistic satisfaction as her eyes widened in fear. “With the knife you could have taken me…but you let me have it.”

  Before Sasaki could even locate a new weapon, Jericho launched himself at her and attempted to wrap his long, powerful arms around her small, hard body. She danced to the side as she made a play to slip past him and recollect the knife, but he dissuaded her attempt by reaching out with his left arm.

  Had she been neurologically augmented, she probably would have remembered that his left arm was broken and therefore less likely to stop her. But for all her genetic modifications, she still had a completely average brain.

  Before she could real
ize her gaffe, he had closed off the route to the parlor and left her only one path of escape: the kitchen and its still-open window.

  She turned and ran as fast as she could toward that exit, and Jericho followed. With just a half dozen steps they were in the kitchen where she leapt for the window in a desperate attempt to escape, probably in the hope of clinging to and shimmying across a ledge rather than plummeting to her death.

  But Jericho also left his feet, with his right hand outstretched as it reached for her slick, black boot. His fingers barely managed to touch her ankle, but that was all he needed to do. He swatted her leg to the side as hard as he could while she was in the air, and managed to redirect enough of her body’s momentum into the window’s jamb where her hip slammed into the molded concrete and stopped her forward momentum.

  Before she could recover and pull herself through the window, Jericho lunged again and grabbed her other ankle with his good hand. She lashed out with her stiletto-heeled free foot and drove the sharp point of the impractical footwear toward his eye.

  Jericho had expected an attack of that kind, and managed to move his head out of the way. The sharp heel still dug into his shoulder but he managed to maintain his grip on her foot as he brought his wounded, left arm to bear by grabbing her free foot before she could line up another potentially deadly attack.

  His left arm failed him after he had gripped her ankle with his left hand, and she managed to wrench her leg free and stomp toward his face with her free foot once again.

  Jericho didn’t have time to block or dodge the incoming attack, so he did the next best thing: he pulled her trapped leg with everything he could muster from his right arm and, luckily, managed to break her grip on the window sill.

  Her deadly footwear slid past his head after he had managed to pull her groin against his upper chest. But the little bitch was crafty; even before he had managed to attempt controlling her posture, she freed her trapped leg, snaked her legs around his head and right shoulder, and locked them behind his neck with a figure four triangle choke.

  She reached down to the back of his head with both hands and drove her crotch into his face while forcing his chin toward his own chest. He knew that he only had a few seconds before her enhanced strength cut off the blood flow to his head and rendered him unconscious.

  Using his longer-than-average arms, he grabbed her by the hair, stood up as tall as he could and suplexed her—head-first—into the nearby stove-top.

  The powerful attack somehow failed to render her unconscious, but it did break her posture enough that he was able to reposition his shoulder and create the requisite space for continued blood flow to his brain. Like the trained professional she clearly was, Sasaki released the choke-hold and attempted to isolate Jericho’s right arm between her iron-hard thighs while grasping his right palms in her hands and pulling it straight between her small, firm breasts.

  To say he was surprised by her raw strength would have been an understatement, but he still managed to react quickly enough to grasp his right wrist with his free hand. Pain rioted up his broken arm, but he managed to ignore it as he effectively neutralized her unnatural strength by maintaining a grip on his right wrist. He lifted her into the air and prepared her for another head-first slam—this one intended to introduce her black-haired head to the nearby concrete countertop.

  She released her arm-lock just before he had brought her to the apex of his posture and she stomped down on his chest with her right foot, driving her stiletto heel into his thick, hard pectoralis major muscle. But the footwear, dangerous enough as an improvised weapon, was unable to break through his ribcage to pierce his vital organs.

  And when her heel dug into his chest, Jericho knew the fight was finished.

  She was too light, and the quarters were too close for her to use her superior speed and power-to-weight ratio against him. In one, smooth motion, Jericho wrenched her foot free from his chest and drove her body toward the floor. As she struck the tiled floor, he kneed her in the midsection with his left leg hard enough to audibly break several ribs.

  A gasp escaped her lips, but Jericho knew this particular foe was more dangerous than she appeared. So he drove a hellacious, overhand right down across her jaw, snapping her head to the side with enough force to potentially kill a normal person of her physique outright. Sasaki’s eyes rolled around as she staggered into the concrete counter. Her hands flailed about for an improvised weapon—an eventuality Jericho had already taken into consideration, having previously removed all such utensils from the cupboards prior to his target’s entry to the flat.

  Jericho reached out with his good hand, grabbed her by the hair, and slammed her face-first into the concrete countertop once—twice—three times before her body finally went limp.

  He added another pair of bone-shattering introductions of her previously exquisite features to the kitchen’s prep area before letting her limp body crumple to the water-soaked floor.

  She coughed spasmodically and blood poured from her mouth as Jericho knelt beside her. Using a well-practiced combat maneuver, he snaked his arms through her own and behind her back, grasped his hands behind her torso, and broke her back midway up her chest to permanently immobilize her before propping her up against the lower tier of cabinets.

  “Who sent you?” he growled between ragged, panting breaths. Deep down, Jericho knew the universe was telling him that he was getting too old for this shit, but he was too stubborn to listen.

  The woman attempted to respond, and all that came out of her mouth was a muffled croak accompanied by a gurgling stream of blood.

  “I need a name, soldier,” he said sharply as he gently lifted her chin with his left hand and saw the rank tattoo of a Southern Bloc’s Rikugun Taii—roughly translated to ‘Captain.’ “You’re already dead, Captain Sasaki, but I’ll spare you an unnecessary hour of suffering if you tell me who sent you.”

  She fixed her eyes on him and, for a moment, he thought she would make her final act one of defiance—a gesture he would not have found altogether less than admirable—but instead she nodded stiffly as she worked to swallow a mouthful of blood before spitting a pair of teeth onto the floor.

  “You fight well,” she grudged slowly, and her words were forced and deliberate as she struggled to enunciate with a horribly broken jaw, “especially for a…normal.”

  “The name, Captain?” Jericho said evenly. If she had any more tricks up her sleeve than what he had seen, she would have used them already. The conflict was already over; all that remained was to get whatever he could from her before leaving her broken corpse on the kitchen floor.

  “How?” she challenged as she looked at the wound in his chest. “How…did you not…die?”

  He looked down at the still-painful, but far from life-threatening hole in his chest, and smirked. “It’s a congenital condition called situs inversus viscerum,” he explained. “It flipped all of my organs around, and put my heart on the other side of my chest. I discovered I had this rare inversion of internal anatomical structure twenty years ago…then I had a few minor alterations made for situations precisely like this one. The name, Captain,” he pressed again after answering her question.

  She seemed to consider refusing, but finally relented, “Boris Kardashev, Interior advisor to…Philippa’s Governor Keno.” She winced in obvious pain as she worked her way through the words.

  Though it was difficult to be certain due to the tremendous trauma she had suffered, Jericho saw none of the telltale behavioral or physiological signs that she was lying. “Thank you, Captain Sasaki,” he said levelly as he opened a nearby cupboard containing a set of steak knives.

  “Let me do it…our way,” she said after fixing him with a hard look.

  He considered the request and nodded, since he had nothing to lose by doing so. Baxter had already cut off Angelo’s flat from the building’s security systems, along with all access to outside communications. In effect, Jericho’s target had locked himself in the perfect
cage—a cage which Jericho had already checked for weapons and found devoid of them.

  Jericho placed her hands on her lap and reached up to the zipper on her neck, and unzipped her skin-tight, armored bodyglove down past her belly button to expose her milky-white skin. He noted that her rib cage was horribly deformed from his earlier knee strike as he laid her belly bare, then he reached up and took one of the steak knives in his hand.

  He had never actually killed a person using this particular technique and, while he couldn’t trust her not to turn the weapon against him, he allowed her to grasp the weapon in her own hands while he kept a firm grip on her wrists. She drove the knife into her belly on the left side of her abdomen, and to her credit she winced but did not cry out. In a single, quick motion she drew the blade through her belly and Jericho saw a spray of blood gurgle out of her abdomen when she successfully severed the abdominal aorta.

  The light in Captain Sasaki’s eyes faded after just a few seconds, and then they closed forever as her body slumped in a scene with which Jericho had become far too familiar. After he was satisfied she was truly dead, Jericho deliberately placed her hands on the hilt of the knife to give her remains some measure of repose befitting a warrior of her abilities. He then stood and made his way to the parlor to retrieve Captain Sasaki’s tanto before proceeding his target’s bedroom door, knowing that the heavy lifting of this particular Adjustment was already done.

  He tapped out the security override sequence Baxter had relayed to him into the door’s access console and the mag-locks disengaged, causing the door to swing open into the bedroom.

  Mr. Janus Angelo, the head of the New Lincoln branch of the Environmental Protection Bureau, was cowering in the corner of his room in a puddle of his own fluids when Jericho stepped through.