Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) Read online

  A flashing red circle appeared on one of the external video feeds and Jericho expanded the window while setting the targeted individual to track mode in the pad’s software. As she moved from one camera’s zone of sight to another, the feed morphed using a digitally-rendered, three-dimensional ‘panning’ effect which made it seem as though there was actually just one camera and it was following her.

  The hair on her head had been cropped so closely to her skull that Investigator Masozi would have appeared bald were it not for the fact that her face and neck were covered with a sheen of sweat while her head glistened the way that only short, wet hair did. She was wearing exercise clothing, so it did not require much deductive reasoning to determine she had just completed a workout—a fairly intense one, judging by her stiff gait—and was heading home for some sleep. The sun would be up in less than an hour so Jericho knew he needed to act quickly.

  But, as was so often the case, he also knew what would come next was not entirely within his control.

  Masozi took the seven flights of stairs up to her tiny, one room studio flat rather than ride the elevator. This was atypical for her, but she still felt she needed time to process the night’s events. Besides, if there was one thing Masozi hated, it was the idea that she was predictable.

  Thoughts of joining the Interplanetary Investigative Unit danced in her head, and if she was honest with herself it was like a dream come true. She had never heard of anyone ascending to the IIU so quickly in their career and while Masozi knew there were precious few Investigators of her ability, she also knew she was no scion of the field. It was that fact—and only that fact—which had nurtured the seed of doubt which had taken root in her mind after seeing her Chief tamper with a crime scene and later attempt to explain the action.

  His stated reasoning had been sound enough, and Agent Stiglitz quite clearly was with the IIU—or, at the very least, some other high-level agency with similar, System-wide jurisdiction.

  But Masozi just could not shake the notion as she arrived at her flat’s door that there was something wrong with all of it. She decided she would sleep on it, since four hours of continuous exercise at the gym had done little to ease her troubled mind.

  She was, thankfully, one of the few people whose unit’s ceiling was high enough for her to stand within. At five feet, ten inches tall, she could even wear her general purpose shoes in the six feet of space her unit afforded without bumping her head into the ceiling. It was a significant upgrade over her first ten years in the NLIU, which had seen her living in a studio with barely four feet of ‘headroom,’ if such a term could actually be applied to the tiny dimension.

  She closed the door behind herself and touched a nearby pad on the wall, causing the lights to turn on, some of her favorite music to play, and the standing shower unit to run through its pre-activation routines.

  Masozi stripped out of her gym suit and tossed her sweat-soaked clothing into the hamper before making her way to the shower. Running water was expensive, so a hot, relaxing shower was a luxury she could only truly afford twice a week without eating into her food budget.

  She let the water cascade over her body as she tried to imagine the warm droplets of water washing away the troubles of the previous night. But no matter how long she stood there, or how hard she scrubbed, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she had somehow already become party to something reprehensible.

  There was a chime from the window of her apartment, indicating she had a delivery waiting outside. Masozi stopped and tried to recall whether she had ordered anything, but then she remembered that her cousins had taken a trip off-world recently. It was the only reason she could imagine for receiving a delivery, so she turned off the water and wrapped a towel around her body as she passed her hand over the window—which was actually a part of the shower stall—and caused it to turn transparent.

  Outside was an Okavango delivery drone, which was itself a common sight on her world. Okavango had revolutionized several aspects of urban retail not long after the wormhole had collapsed, when Virgin had been violently cut off from the rest of the Imperium—which many believed was a diving blessing.

  There was a short, gruesome series of local conflict known two centuries later as the Forge Wars, and out of those wars had sprung the Sector Government of Chimera. While there were nowhere near enough worlds in the Chimera Cluster—as it was properly known in the Imperial records—to classify the group as a Sector in its own right, its surviving inhabitants had realized they did not possess sufficient wealth to mount a meaningful expedition to return to Imperial space. The realization that they were utterly cut off, unless and until the Imperium decided to re-establish a wormhole somewhere within the Cluster, had caused some to despair in the years and decades that followed the collapse of the wormhole. But most of Chimera’s citizens had embraced their newfound freedom from the yoke of Imperial taxes, the all-seeing eyes of the Imperial Aristocracy, and the uncontested might of the Imperial Navy. The Virgin System, and the rest of the newly-founded Sector, had almost certainly benefited from the wormhole’s collapse two centuries earlier.

  She opened the window and the drone moved fractionally closer before its screen activated, revealing an incredibly odd sight: a red-haired, hyper-voluptuous woman wearing little more than a pair of strings—which thankfully covered her digital nipples—and a ridiculously short, red, skirt with white polka dots.

  “Hi, beautiful,” the image said with a wink, and Masozi furrowed her brow in confusion. She wondered if this was some sort of a gag…or maybe she was on one of those hidden camera shows? “It looks like you’ve got a secret admirer,” the overtly sexualized image said with a giggle, “and I can see why with such beautiful skin…and that incredible definition…I’m so jealous,” the drone said with a perfectly practiced pout.

  “I’m sorry…can I help you?” Masozi asked, becoming increasingly annoyed with not only the ridiculous scene but also her reaction to it. I must look like such a fool, she thought bitterly.

  “Of course, sweetie,” the drone said as she gave a thumbs-up sign, causing parts of her body to jiggle in ways that likely defied gravity, “you give me a palm scan and I’ll give you a surprise!”

  Masozi considered the matter, then reluctantly did as the drone suggested by grasping the scanning aperture and squeezing it like she had done hundreds of times before.

  The image on the screen shuddered and the speakers let out a loud—unmistakably erotic—moan, causing Masozi to withdraw her hand in surprise. The woman’s image returned, except her virtual hair was a mess and her virtual makeup had been smeared all over her virtual face. “Mmmm,” she—no, it, purred, “was that as good for you as it was for me?”

  Masozi rolled her eyes, becoming increasingly certain that she was on a gag show of some kind and she let out an obligatory laugh as the delivery drone’s cargo compartment slid open, revealing a box measuring approximately one inch by three inches by six inches. She took the box from the compartment and her mood turned slightly more serious as she turned it over and found no markings of any kind.

  But that’s illegal, she thought to herself. She, and every other citizen of Virgin, knew that all parcels in transit were required to bear physical tags demonstrating their points of origin, intended routes, and other itinerant information for legal and security purposes.

  “See you around, sugar,” the image on the drone’s screen said before blowing a virtual kiss and disappearing as the drone gently drifted down and out of sight.

  Masozi closed the window and examined the box more closely. It was completely unremarkable and, after a long moment of contemplation, she opened it to peruse its contents.

  What she saw took the breath from her lungs: it was an insignia of the Timent Electorum! Rather, it was a decal which was made in the image of the insignia, and she picked it up to examine it more closely. The reverse side was like any cheap decal, with a peel-away adhesive pad which had two words written on it:

  Pic
k up.

  She nearly dropped the box when it began to vibrate in her hands. After a moment she realized it had not been the box which had vibrated, but something that was inside the box.

  Beneath where the decal had been was a pair of objects: one was a cheap, civilian-class earpiece communication device, and the other was a similarly cheap link pad. The earpiece had been vibrating, and there was an icon on the screen of the link pad which showed an unread message had been received by it.

  Masozi thought very hard about her next actions and decided that regardless of what she meant to do in the future, her best option was to do answer the call.

  She placed the earpiece in her left ear and activated it after taking a deep breath. “Hello?” she said.

  Silence was her only reply for several seconds, and just when she was about to deactivate the device a man’s deep, tense voice spoke, “Investigator, I’m glad you took my advice. Activate the pad and open the message’s attached file—do so quickly since we don’t have much time.”

  “Who is this?” she asked warily, knowing she needed to get as much information as possible while she had this person on the line.

  “You have forty six seconds before I will have taken a very real risk and accomplished nothing but a short conversation with a very fresh—very stupid—corpse, Investigator,” the voice replied harshly. “If I wanted you dead you would already be so—thirty eight, thirty seven, thirty six—”

  She had to admit that he had a point, so she reluctantly opened the file contained in the link’s lone message and the screen showed dozens of security camera feeds. The feeds cycled quickly through until stopped on what appeared to be a maintenance room somewhere in her residential building.

  “Good,” the man’s voice said as he ceased his countdown, “what do you see?”

  Masozi looked intently at the image and, at first, saw nothing. Then she saw that one of the panels appeared to have been tampered with, and her throat tightened when she realized it was the control panel for her quadrant of the building.

  The image shifted around quickly in a strange, pseudo-realistic panning shot until it came to rest on a man’s motionless body which was propped up against the wall. She gasped when she recognized the man as one of her building’s maintenance staff—she had even taken a somewhat regrettable tumble with him a year earlier when she’d had too much to drink after a high-profile case’s successful conclusion.

  “Tom,” she breathed, trying to fathom why someone would kill a superintendent of a relatively poor building like hers.

  “I have reason to believe that your quadrant of the building is about to be destroyed,” the man said, as though he was speaking about the evening’s weather forecast. “You have only one hope if you want to survive.”

  “Who are you?” she demanded as suspicions swirled in her head.

  “You know who I am, Investigator,” the man said gravely, and her eyes widened as she concluded she was speaking with Mayor Cantwell’s assassin, “now jump.”

  “Jump?!” she blurted.

  “Yes, Investigator,” he said far-too-calmly. “If you don’t want to die in twelve seconds, I suggest you jump out the window—the sooner you jump, the higher your chance of survival. Eight seconds; you should be able to smell the gases by now.”

  Now that he mentioned it, she did smell something that seemed like methane. Her building used it for quick heating of water, like for her shower, and apparently it had somehow been plumbed into the air cycling system.

  Having only a few seconds, she performed some quick math and felt her heart stop. The evidence did, in fact, seem to suggest that there was enough gas flooding her room—and possibly adjacent rooms as well—to kill her and everyone in her part of the building.

  She swung open the window and, after hesitating for a moment, leapt from the window and braced herself. As she fell she became absolutely certain that her lapse in judgment would amount to little more than a footnote in the next shift’s incident log at the NLIU unit assigned to her zone of New Lincoln.

  But then two things happened. There was a massive ‘whump’ of hot air behind her which briefly deafened her and splayed her arms and legs out to either side violently as she fell, face-down, toward the ground. The wind whipped around her naked body as the ground approached far-too-rapidly, and she closed her eyes in preparation for the end of her life.

  Then she landed and felt the wind knocked from her lungs, causing her to gasp in agony as she struggled to regain her breath. But Masozi realized after a second that only her torso had ‘landed,’ and when she opened her eyes she looked down to see that she had been ‘caught’ by an Okavango DOT Net delivery drone—the same drone which had delivered the package to her room!

  “Sweetie…we have got to talk about your diet,” the drone’s ultra-feminine voice said as the drone struggled to adjust its overloaded trajectory, but it somehow managed to keep them from crashing into the street below as it began to gently gain altitude.

  The fact that she was naked could not have been further from her mind as Masozi looked back up to see a thick, black cloud of smoke belching out of her apartment unit—as well as the adjacent six windows on her floor. The walls separating their units had been made of a cheap, lightweight, soundproof material which would have been shredded by the explosion. Thankfully, the other quadrants of the building would likely have been unaffected by the event, since even cheap concrete would have likely contained the blast.

  She would have mourned her neighbors, but she had more important things on her mind. “Where are you taking me?” she demanded.

  “Keep your clothes on, honey,” the drone quipped before giggling uncontrollably. “Get it? ‘Keep your clothes on’?! I crack myself up…”

  “I’m not amused,” Masozi shouted as they slewed across the intersection at Seventeenth and King.

  “Trust me, babe; this has nothing to do with your amusement,” the drone said in a surprisingly serious tone. “Just hang on and we’ll put you down someplace safe.”

  Masozi only then noticed that two of the drone’s four lift units appeared to be off-line, and she quickly concluded that it shouldn’t have been able to stay airborne with her as a payload—much less perform a climb, however gradual that climb might be. The only thing she knew with absolute certainty was that this was not an ordinary delivery drone.

  A few minutes later, Masozi was struck by just how few people looked up and saw her astride the errant Okavango delivery device. She only saw two such people do so during her relatively quick trip across the district: one had been drunk and gave the sight rather less thought than it deserved, and the other had been a child who had innocently waved at her after realizing that a person was riding one of the innumerable, unmanned drones flying forty feet above the street.

  She even soared over three sets of patrolling peace officers, none of which noticed her or the malfunctioning delivery drone with only two functioning lift units.

  “Here we go, sweet cheeks,” the drone purred as they slewed into a blind alley in a particularly seedy part of the district. “As always, be sure to leave your feedback if you enjoyed our service,” the drone said as ‘she’ set Masozi down low enough that she could jump off the makeshift platform of the drone’s back, “and if you didn’t, we’d suggest you keep that opinion to yourself! Gratuities are greatly appreciated, of course,” the drone continued as Masozi got to her feet, and it turned to display its utterly ridiculous, mostly-naked, avatar displayed on the screen. The figure was now sucking suggestively on a digital lollipop between utterances, further reinforcing Masozi’s belief that it was nothing but a frustrated person’s digitized wet dream, “So if you’ve got any spare indium or tantalum wedged between the cushions, dig it out and drop it in the tip jar!”

  “What are you talking about?” Masozi asked in utter bewilderment, feeling more than a little vulnerable in such a dangerous part of town without a weapon—let alone without any clothes.

  “Forget it, hun,
” the drone said with an exaggerated eye-roll as she made a whoosh gesture over her virtual pigtails with her free hand, “inside joke. See ya; wouldn’t wanna be ya!”

  The drone then rose into the air, causing Masozi to yell, “Where are you going?” She quickly realized how stupid she must have sounded, but she was not in the habit of wandering into the seedy corners of New Lincoln in her birthday suit so she forgave herself the ill-considered query.

  “People to see, things to do,” the drone’s avatar replied with a wink before adopting a thoughtful look as it continued to rise and adding, “strike that…reverse it. Toodles!”

  The drone then made good on its word and sped off in an atypical direction for a delivery drone, which Masozi realized was probably to be expected considering the strange machine’s obviously unique programming.

  Then she heard a low-pitched whirring from the blind end of the alley, and she turned to see a two person hover-bike’s illuminators activate. The conveyance slowly moved toward her and she held her hand up to shade her eyes as she moved to the side in case the vehicles operator decided to gun it and try to run her down.

  But the operator did no such thing, and slowly pulled up beside her until she could see that he was wearing a helmet which concealed his facial features. It was obviously a man, given his physique and posture, and his visor flipped up to reveal a pair of grey-blue eyes beneath short, flat-topped salt-and-pepper hair. He had a strong, square jaw and looked to be in his late forties or early fifties.

  The man tilted his head toward the back of the bike, “Put it on.”

  She looked and saw a helmet identical to the one the rider was wearing, and stuffed inside the helmet was what looked to be a form-fitting bodyglove. It wasn’t as good as real clothing, but it was comparable to a far-too-revealing workout suit. So she did as he suggested and climbed into the garment as the mysterious man’s eyes were fixed on the mouth of the alley.