Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (2 page)

The pistol bucked hard in his hand as the window shattered
into a shower of countless pieces, and the wind began to whip violently through
the office carrying the heavy, greasy smells of industry into the previously
sterile chamber. Jericho dropped the spent weapon to the floor and took a
steadying breath.

“Ten seconds, Jericho,” Benton reported as the sealed door
began to glow near the locking mechanism as they began to burn their way
through the portal. The security guards outside were apparently just ahead of
schedule, and would breach the room in no more than five seconds.

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.

“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 arrival 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 through 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.