Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (19 page)

Masozi sat there in silence for several minutes, and was
surprisingly unable to get her heart rate under control. She had even begun to
sweat profusely and her lungs were filled with a vague, prickly sensation with
each breath she drew.

Then a woman wearing a white lab coat drew back the curtain
and entered the booth. Her skin was nearly as dark as Masozi’s own and, though
she had to be nearly fifty years old, she was incredibly attractive.

“Mrs. Jefferson,” the woman said in a beautifully staccato,
south-eastern accent, “my name is Afia, and I am a doctor here at the Aegis
Spaceport. When did you first notice your symptoms?”

“I…” Masozi began, wondering if she should lie. But she
quickly concluded that doing so would prove pointless, so she took a short
breath and continued, “I was exiting the bio-scanners when a wave of vertigo
came over me.”

Doctor Afia took out a small scanning device and flashed it
briefly in either of Masozi’s eyes before swiping it along the palms of
Masozi’s hands and checking the readings on a readout built into the bracer
covering her left forearm. “It would appear that you have contracted a case of
Timmaylian Flu,” she said after tapping on the screen for several seconds, and
Masozi was almost smitten with how beautifully the woman spoke. She had rarely
met anyone who so perfectly retained the accent of their birthplace after
moving to New Lincoln—and until her trip aboard the
Esmerelda Empática
she had never gone further than a hundred kilometers from that city. “Normally
I would advise a course of antiviral therapy to combat the potential long-term
neurological damage this disease might cause, but that would preclude you from
continuing on to your destination.”

Masozi felt her stomach churn at the doctor’s prognosis.
Then she remembered that Jericho had unexpectedly touched her on the skin of
her neck, and she almost reached up to touch where his cool, dry hands had
brushed against her skin before catching herself as she wondered if this had
been part of his plan all along.

She folded her hands in her lap and took a few calming
breaths before asking, “What should I do, Doctor?”

“You will accompany me,” Doctor Afia replied in her
melodious voice as she stood. “We have a quarantine area where we can observe
you for the next four hours, after which time you will no longer be infectious.
If your symptoms have not worsened dangerously during that interval, you will
be permitted to continue on to your destination with a supply of medication to
manage your symptoms.”

The doctor opened the curtain and Masozi stood on her
surprisingly shaky legs before following the other woman. Doctor Afia led her
through several doorways and dimly-lit, soundproof corridors until they came to
the end of one such corridor and she opened the door—a door which had a sign
reading ‘Medical Quarantine’ above, and on, it.

“Please make
yourself
comfortable,”
the doctor instructed, and Masozi entered the room. After she had done so, the
doctor closed the door and Masozi heard the unmistakable buzz of mag-locks
engaging.

“Feeling under the weather?” she heard Jericho ask from the
far side of the room, and she turned in surprise to see that he was lying on
one of the cots.

“You…” she fumed as her tightly-wound emotions came crashing
down in a flood. Her fingernails bit deeply into her palms before she forced
her hands open and pointed an accusing finger at him, “You should have warned
me!”

Jericho made a ‘calm down’ gesture with his hands and gave a
meaningful look toward the corner of the room. “I’m sorry, darling; I can
explain everything.”

“Explain!?” she blurted, unable to control herself. “You
gave me this…this…disease—and don’t call me ‘darling’!”

Jericho stood and made his way to her, all the while keeping
his steely, blue-grey eyes fixed on hers. “Darling, I had a meeting in the
Financial District this morning to go over some last-minute transaction details
with my new clients. One of them looked unwell, but I didn’t think to check if
I had contracted any kind of flu from him,” he said with a meaningful look as
he placed his hands firmly on her upper arms and squeezed. “This was the only
way I could get the contract…do you understand?”

Masozi actually did think she understood, but it didn’t make
her any less upset with him. “You could have told me about your…meeting,” she
said coldly. “I might have been prepared for the possibility if you had.”

“Duly noted,” Jericho said as his eyes softened and he gave
her a nod. “Now, why don’t you lie down—“

Just then the lights flickered off before returning at a
slightly decreased luminosity and Jericho quickly made his way to the door.
“What do you think that was?” Masozi asked, feeling a sense of mounting dread.

“That was our signal,” he replied as he opened the door,
which swung freely on its hinges despite previously having been mag-locked in
place. “Come on,” he gestured after setting one foot out of the room.

Masozi then realized that the whole sequence of events had
been carefully engineered to get them past the most stringent security
checkpoints. She felt like a fool for not having understood it and while she
would have liked to blame her physical and psychological stress for her failure
to grasp Jericho’s plan, she knew she needed to recognize the cues more
quickly. She had just never been good at
reading people, and it seemed that once again it was a weakness that had been
exploited. She vowed to work on shoring
up that particular shortcoming.

She followed Jericho out into the hallway, where he
proceeded for several paces until ducking off into an adjoining corridor. There
were doors every few meters in the short hallway, and he stopped at the fourth
one on the left. They waited there for several seconds until the door’s locking
bolts clicked open, after which Jericho opened the door and proceeded through
it with Masozi close on his heels.

They made their way down a set of metal stairs, and emerged
in a maintenance corridor of some kind with electrical relays every few meters,
dozens of high-pressure pipes of varying diameters running alongside each
other, and even the occasional storage room door.

“We won’t have long,” Jericho said tensely, “Benton wouldn’t
have opened the quarantine door unless we’d been compromised. Someone was
waiting for us here in the Spaceport and we’ve got to slip through whatever net
they’ve got in place quickly.”

“Understood,” she wheezed, her breaths now causing
significant pain as her bronchi felt like they were on fire.

“I
am
sorry about the Timmaylian Flu,” Jericho said
as he reached down and took hold of her wrist. While his hand had felt cool and
dry before, it was now hot and moist, and only then did she notice that he was
sweating profusely. “But I couldn’t risk you giving away the game.”

“You’re going…to need…to trust me…sooner or later,” she
growled as she fought to keep her breaths shallow so as not to aggravate the
burning in her lungs. Her legs were increasingly unsteady, and she found
herself grateful for his steading hand on her wrist—which was soon joined by
his other hand as it gripped her elbow.

“There’s more truth in that than you know,” he agreed grimly
as he helped her along, their combined pace significantly slowed compared to
the when they had left the Medical Quarantine room. “The Flu shouldn’t have hit
you this hard, though…I should have chosen a less virulent pathogen. Again, you
have my apology.”

Before she could compose a reply, they reached the end of
the maintenance tunnel and Jericho looked up at the security camera which was
fixed on the door.

“What is it?” she asked after they had waited for nearly a
minute.

“We can’t just barge out onto the tarmac,” he replied
hoarsely and she noticed that he, too, appeared to have been affected by the
Timmaylian Flu to the point where his breathing had become labored. “We need to
wait for an opening, but when that opening comes you have to do everything you
can to get to the nearest vehicle—it doesn’t matter if it’s a personal
conveyance, a luggage carrier, or even a refueling truck—do you understand?”

Masozi nodded, feeling her vision narrow as she did so.

“Come on, Benton,” Jericho growled under his breath as he
cast an impatient look up at the camera, which remained fixed in its same
position.

“Maybe we…should…head back,” Masozi wheezed as her ears
began to pound in time with the beating of her heart.

“There’s no going back,” he said shortly. Then his eye
seemed to catch something to do with the camera, and she looked up to see the
small, red light indicating it was active had begun to blink. That blinking was
rapid, but clearly deliberate, and after a few seconds Jericho held up two
fingers to his brow in acknowledgment. “Actually…maybe there is,” he corrected
as he placed an arm around Masozi’s waist and slung her near arm over his neck.
“It’s not very far to the secondary route; you just need to keep conscious. Can
you do that?”

Masozi’s eyes had become heavy, but she shook her head
vigorously as she fought off the urge to close them. “I…think so,” she replied
weakly as she fought to keep her feet moving in the direction Jericho was
carrying her.

“Good,” he replied as the came to a doorway, which was already
ajar but had not been so when they had previously passed it, “just keep your
feet moving and we’ll be out of here in a few minutes.”

Her senses seemed to sharpen after a few minutes of walking
down the metal stairway beyond the doorway when the ambient temperature dropped
well below the freezing point of water. She looked around and saw that they had
emerging into a chamber with a vast, interconnected series of catwalks
suspended above a series of storage tanks. They were apparently within the storage
facility for the Spaceport’s fuel supply—a high-security area if there ever was
one.

If the wrong interests were allowed access to that
chamber—where she and Jericho were apparently the only people present—the
destruction they could wreak would be nearly unprecedented in Virgin’s history.

“Just a little further, Investigator,” Jericho said harshly,
and she realized that her physical effort had begun to diminish as her focus
had drifted.

She did as he suggested, but then he stopped cold in his
tracks and she looked up in alarm to see a handful of blue-clad men wearing
identical tactical visors—visors which highly-trained paramilitary outfits
employed during tactical deployments—and one of the men stepped forward while
the others kept their weapons trained on Jericho and Masozi.

“Looks like I finally caught you, Jericho,” the man said
with deep satisfaction evident in his voice and a triumphant smirk on his lips.

Jericho tightened his grip around Masozi’s waist, and she
did her best to focus on the new man’s features but she was unable to do so. Her vision had become so blurry she could
barely make out the blue outline of the man’s uniform. She was so sleepy she
could just…

Masozi sat bolt upright and looked around for the blue-clad
men with the tactical visors. She saw nothing but a small, scarcely-illuminated
room and quickly realized she was sitting up in a soft, remarkably comfortable
bed.

She looked down and felt her torso, realizing that her
clothing had been replaced with a soft, plush robe which seemed to caress her
fingers as she ran them across its luxurious fibers. She then realized she was
naked beneath that robe—which meant someone had disrobed her without gaining
consent to do so.

Oddly enough, that was the least of her worries. As she took
stock of her situation, she saw that there were several intravenous tubes
running into her arm. Those tubes were connected to a wrist-mounted medical
device of some kind—a device which she quickly realized was rumored to no
longer exist on this side of the wormhole.

When the wormhole had collapsed, the entire standing
infrastructure of the Sector had collapsed with it. Industry and interstellar
commerce had ground to a halt due to the inability to import or export material
wealth through the wormhole, and that included precious components and
maintenance equipment for the Phase Drives which allowed for faster-than-light
travel between nearby stars.

Not surprisingly, several other types of highly-valuable
technological assets had been snapped up by those with the means to acquire
them, including Automated Uniform Treatment of Organic Diseases Operated by
Computer—or AUTODOC’s—which became worth a measurable portion of their weight
in antimatter overnight when the wealthiest members of the Sector sought to
acquire such technology exclusively for themselves.

The device on her wrist, while not a complete Auto-Doc
apparatus itself, was most definitely a component of an Auto-Doc system…which
meant that whoever now held her captive was not only wealthy in the extreme,
but had also deemed her life to be valuable enough that doing so warranted
expending some fraction of the Auto-Doc’s limited resources.

Careful not to damage the incalculably valuable device attached
to her wrist, Masozi swung her legs slowly over the edge of the incredibly soft
bed and her feet touched a soft patch of rug beside the bed. That rug’s many
threads seemed to tickle the soles of her feet, and find their ways in between
her toes with such a tactilely stimulating effect that she simply flexed and
extended her toes for several moments while taking in the experience.

She indulged herself until the pleasurable shivers which the
action sent running up and down her spine had subsided, and she stood to her
feet. Looking around the room she saw no windows, nor did she see any apparent
com-links or access panels of any kind.

“A gilded cage,” she muttered, remembering the phrase from a
piece of ancient literature she had read as a child. Masozi then made her way
to the door and, just before she had reached it, the door slid open
automatically and revealed a well-lit corridor which extended to the left and
right.

She stepped out into the corridor and, since the corridor
appeared identical in either direction, she decided to go left—then she
remembered she was wearing nothing but the robe and decided to see if there was
any clothing available in the room.

Masozi found a well-appointed closet which was filled with
clothing that appeared to be better-fitted to her body than most of the
clothing she had worn in New Lincoln. The wide range of styles present in that
closet—ranging from simple bodygloves of varyingly revealing designs, to
complicated, frilly, exotic silk dresses which she had thought went out of
style when the wormhole had collapsed—each of which certainly cost more than an
entire year of her Investigator’s salary.

She ended up settling on a padded bodyglove which didn’t
leave her feeling overly exposed, accompanied by a short vest and knee-high
boots which laced up all the way from the toes to the cuff, and were
surprisingly comfortable.

The bodyglove, surprisingly, slid over the wrist-mounted
Auto-Doc device quite easily and after checking herself in a full-length
mirror—noting as she did so how the blue-tinged bodyglove seemed to smooth out
the thick, muscular appearance of her physique in a surprisingly flattering
manner—she made her way to the corridor.

The corridor was lined with several doors which appeared
identical to the one she had passed through upon entering the corridor, but she
did not open any of them to confirm that they contained a similar arrangement
of furniture.

The walls were painted in a soft, white tone while every
piece of trim was a light blue color. Also a distinct shade of blue was an
emblem she recognized almost immediately after seeing emblazoned on the floor
of the corridor.

It was a blue planet, modeled after the image of what many
believed to be Ancient Earth, and there were dozens of human hands clasped with
each other beneath that blue-white orb. The image suggested that the joined
hands were holding the entire world up, and it was one of the recognizable
images in the entire Sector.

“Hadden Enterprises,” she breathed, as everything she had
witnessed after awakening came snapping into focus. Hadden Enterprises was one
of the most powerful non-regulated entities in the Sector, having built the
majority of its wealth by providing reasonably cost-efficient Phase Drive
repairs, or outright replacements.

The various governments of the Sector had attempted to, one
might say, ‘persuade’ Hadden Enterprises to share their knowledge of Phase
Drive technology for the public good. But H.E. had never once acquiesced to
such strong-arm tactics.

In fact, one such system, named ‘Rationem,’ once attempted
to seize all of Hadden Enterprise’s assets in order to coerce the corporation’s
compliance in the matter. Hadden had, quite famously, paid a series of
exorbitant bribes to the government officials in positions of authority over
the employees of Hadden Enterprises which had been imprisoned, which saw the
vast majority of those prisoners released.

After securing the release of over ninety percent of those
employees—with the other ten percent remaining in government custody until their
natural deaths several decades later—Hadden Enterprises had sent out an
official statement which had since become legendary. It had said in no
uncertain terms that Hadden Enterprises would no longer supply the Rationem
system with any of its goods or services. Additionally, any entity which was
suspected—not proven, but merely suspected—of re-selling H.E.’s property or
services on to Rationem without H.E.’s expressed consent would find
themselves
similarly cut off from Hadden’s services.

Unsurprisingly, the Rationem system was dealt a major
economic blow by H.E.’s decision but even a century later Hadden Enterprises
had refused every overture on Rationem’s behalf to repeal that decision. As a
result, Rationem had plummeted from its position as one of the strongest
Systems in the Sector to one of the weakest. Every major corporation that
conducted business with Hadden Enterprises—which was, essentially,
every
corporation—had to request permission from H.E. to do business with Rationem or
risk losing their own working relationship with the monolithic corporation, and
generally those requests were denied.

Rationem had therefore become something of a cautionary tale
for the Sector’s citizenry, as well as something of a talking point for those
who believed that government should expand its role to include direct oversight
of the megacorporation’s activities. One such proponent of this notion was
Governor Crissa Keno, and she was only one among dozens. Even the Virgin System’s President, Han-Ramil
Blanco, offered frequent vocal support to the growing sentiment that entities
like Hadden needed to be controlled in spite of several Primary Rights which,
according to the corporate lawyers, guaranteed them their autonomy much like
the First Right guaranteed the Timent Electorum’s actions’ legality.

Frankly, Masozi tended to agree with the notion that
entities like Hadden Enterprises were essentially unaccounted for in the
Sector’s two centuries old codex of laws. It had been convincingly argued that
H.E., and similar entities, had taken advantage of loopholes in the system in
order to vastly increase their own individual power—power which was essentially
unchecked. It appeared that this would continue to be the case for as long as
the corporations’ lawyers were able to fend off the unending lawsuits brought
against them which invoked anti-trust, equal access, and myriad other
fundamental laws on which the Sector had been built.

Masozi tore her eyes from the emblem of the blue planet and
looked down the corridor to see what looked to be a lift tube at the end. She
made her way to it and the door opened just before she was able to press the
activation panel.

Inside was a man who appeared to be in his late twenties or
early thirties, wearing a two-piece uniform with the same color scheme as the
corridor. “Investigator Masozi,” he said crisply with a professional nod, “your
presence is requested in the Observation Lounge. Please,” he invited, stepping
aside and gesturing for her to enter the tube.

She did as he suggested, noting with surprise that the man’s
features were sharp, angular, and wholly unlike those of anyone she had ever
met of Virgin origin. He gave her outfit a brief, appraising look before
closing the door with a swipe of his hand across the activation panel. “The
Director will approve,” he said neutrally, and Masozi was genuinely uncertain
if the remark had been of a sexual nature or something altogether less
unprofessional.

Judging by the man’s stoic and composed demeanor as the lift
accelerated upward, she concluded it was more likely to be the latter.

When the door opened, Masozi’s breath was taken away at the
sight before her. She was inside a massive, flattened-dome-shaped chamber that
had to measure at least a hundred meters across and stretched thirty meters
high at the peak. The entire dome was transparent, and she looked out to see
the familiar rings of Chambliss—the Virgin System’s largest gas giant—framing
the incredible sight of Chambliss itself.

The gas giant was mostly brown in coloration, but several
bright, red storms violently churned the planet’s surface gases with
wind-speeds that would destroy any unprotected, man-made objects in just a few seconds.
As if the wind-speed wasn’t bad enough, the electrical discharges taking place
within the three dozen documented storms would overpower even the most advanced
shielding in seconds.

As she stepped out onto the observation deck, she realized
that the entire facility in which she was housed had been built into one of the
smaller moons which orbited Chambliss. A few of those moons—whose names she
could not recall—orbited at a slightly different angle from Chambliss’ rings,
and this appeared to be one of them.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” the man who had invited her into the
lift said after nearly a minute of Masozi’s silent gaping at the awe-inspiring
sight. “The station is currently at its northern zenith relative to the
ring-plane—this is the best view we’ll get for the next two months until we
pass to the southern zenith.”

Masozi marveled at the sight before her, boggling at the
moon’s odd orbital plane. She suspected
it was a more or less natural state for the moon, but if any human entity in
the Chimera Sector was capable of reorienting the orbital path of a moon, it
was Hadden Enterprises. The very possibility
that Hadden Enterprises had done something of that magnitude on purpose was a
sobering thing to consider, and Masozi suspected that particular consequence
was far from coincidental.

“Please, the Director is waiting,” the young man gestured
toward a nearby staircase, which led up to a platform in the center of the
chamber, before proceeding to climb those stairs himself.

As Masozi followed him up the stairs, she saw that there
were literally hundreds—perhaps thousands—of people in the Observation Deck.
They wore variations on the same uniform her escort was wearing, and they
appeared to be working out problems on data pads, socializing, eating, or just
relaxing.

But the most surprising aspect of the Observation Deck’s
denizens was that only half of them appeared to be human! There were aliens of
every kind with which Masozi was familiar present and several species she had
never even glimpsed in a xenobiology text, let alone seen up close. Those
aliens appeared to be working hand-in-hand with their human counterparts, and
Masozi was utterly speechless at the sight of it. It all seemed so natural, and
yet she had heard nothing but propaganda about how only a select few aliens
could be ‘incorporated’ into society to live alongside humans.

She marveled at the sheer scope and complexity of the
engineering required to hollow out the small moon—which was clearly what had
been done. Several rocky outcroppings—artifacts of the moon’s original
composition, which quite possibly were still directly connected to the moon’s
rocky body—jutted out artistically between the perfectly machined plates of
metal and ceramic which made up the rest of the massive chamber’s man-made
features.

The shape of the Observation Deck’s ‘floor’ was actually
more like a short, broad, pyramid. And as she ascended the stairs behind her
escort, she quickly concluded that the ‘Director’ was awaiting her at the top.

When they reached the topmost platform of the pyramidal
structure, there was a red velvet rope-line which her escort unfastened at one
end and gestured for her to pass through. “The Director will see you,” he said
with a professional nod, and she passed through the rope line as she took stock
of the platform beyond.