Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (32 page)

Every step she had taken, and everything she had seen since
leaving New Lincoln, had been carefully engineered by Jericho—including her
discovery of the fake nuclear weapon aboard the
Tyson
. The only real
deception on his part had been the scene in the tavern, and if he was any judge
of her deductive reasoning skills then she had already realized her unwitting
complicity in his scheme. And now, for the first time since he had met her, he
couldn’t confidently predict her reaction.

“Not a grilled cheese sandwich any more,” he muttered as he
staggered out of the detainment facility. Once outside the medical technician
worked on Jericho’s stump while he waited for Eve to arrive. When the
Tyson
finally appeared on the horizon, he rolled his neck gingerly as he stepped out
to meet it, “I am
definitely
getting too old for this shit.”

Chapter XXVII: Operation: You
Lose

Masozi had finally realized Jericho’s plan, but try as she
might, she found herself unable to muster more than indignation at being
played. The clues had all been there but she had been unable to piece them
together until just then, so she considered it her own fault that she had been
manipulated.

“This was Jericho’s plan, wasn’t it, Eve?” Masozi asked with
little uncertainty in her voice. “He wanted me to come here by myself.”

“Hold on a sec, honey,” Eve replied before disappearing for
a moment. When she re-appeared she sighed, “Looks like it, babe; I’ve got a
hidden audio file here with your name on it and a high priority level attached
and it just appeared in the suit’s database. Have a listen.”

Jericho’s voice came over the speakers, “Investigator, I’m sorry
about how all of this had to go. I want you to understand that none of what you
saw, or thought you saw, was intended to insult you,” he explained heavily,
with a hint of regret in his voice that Masozi was far from believing as
genuine. “You don’t believe me, and that’s fine,” he continued and though the
statement wasn’t much of a stretch, Masozi felt her anger rise at his
presumption, “but I only did what I did in order to ensure you could accomplish
the mission if you choose to do so.”

“You bastard,” she spat bitterly.
What am I, a bullet to
be chambered, aimed, and fired?
she
thought with
silent fury.

“You can still back out now,” he explained, and her helmet’s
three-dimensional display of the coliseum zoomed in on her position before
illuminating a path which led away from the building, “but after what you’ve
seen, I sincerely hope you’ll follow through with this. Too many sacrifices
have been made so that these people can be stopped—and I have reason to believe
that Governor Keno is just the beginning.” He paused briefly before continuing,
“It’s entirely possible that I’ve already been added to the list of lives these
people have claimed. However, understand that I manipulated you specifically so
that the risk would be as low as possible not only to you, but to the civilians
of Abaca. If we had gone in together, Stiglitz and his team would have almost
certainly stopped us…but now that I’ve drawn him out of position you have one
chance to strike back at the people who would destroy more than just our two
lives. You need to tell Eve your choice, Investigator, and you need to do it
quickly—our window is already closing.”

Masozi considered his words for several seconds before
shaking her head. “I can’t back out now,” she muttered. At her core, Masozi had
grown up wanting nothing but to serve the people of Virgin’s society and she
had applied herself fully to that endeavor with as much effort as she could
muster. While the Timent Electorum agency—if it could be called an ‘agency’—was
a different calling from that of an Investigator, in the end they both
attempted to serve the nameless, faceless masses of humanity who could not
stand up to injustice for themselves.

“You sure about that, babe?”
Eve
pressed warily. “I’ve got a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ file here, and once I open one of
them the other will automatically delete.”

Masozi took a deep breath before nodding. These people had
been responsible for the bombing at her apartment—she had known most of the
people who had died in that explosion. Oddly enough, she gave little regard for
the fact that they had tried to have her killed in that same explosion; the
thought of them slaughtering innocent people just to get to her was enough to
push her over the edge.

“Let’s do this, Eve,” she growled, promising herself that there
would be a reckoning with Jericho.
If I survive
, she reminded herself,
remembering Jericho’s suggested sixty percent capture probability for her
chosen course of action.

“You got it, babe,” Eve said hungrily, “here’s the second
part.”

“I promise that you’ll get a chance at whatever retribution
you think I deserve,” Jericho said evenly, “but for now you need to move
through the access tunnels adjoining the Governor’s private dressing room.
There will be guards outside in light body armor who your suit would let you
easily overpower, but you need to avoid them. Eve has a set of protocols Benton
developed that will buy you a window to enter the dressing room and wait for
the intermission. When that comes and the Governor enters the room,” his voice
turned serious, “you’ll only have forty seconds to
Adjust
her before the alarms go up and you’re trapped. Expect the Governor to be
heavily augmented—even your
suit will
likely only even
the odds in a hand-to-hand fight. Good hunting, Investigator,” he said heavily,
“with luck, we’ll be seeing each other soon.”

“That’s it, babe,” Eve said, “looks like there’s six minutes
until the concert kicks off so we’ve got less than an hour to get in position.”
Eve’s avatar then clapped her hands emphatically before rubbing them together
in apparent anticipation, “Let’s see what these last protocols give us…”

A new route appeared on Masozi’s display, and she set off to
follow it. Eve was silent while Masozi wound her way through the service
tunnels beneath the coliseum, and even with several meters of concrete between
herself and the concert above, the suit’s audio pickups registered the
beginning of the concert easily.

“Too much bass,” Masozi muttered as she made her way to a
sealed door. “Can you deal with this, Eve?” she asked as she looked for an
obvious method to open the door.

“Sure can, sweet thing,” Eve replied, as though distracted
by something. “Just put your right hand near the locking mechanism for a few
seconds.”

Masozi did as she was instructed, and the lights covering
the locking mechanism began to flicker in a seemingly random pattern. After a
few seconds, the lights all turned green and the door swung easily open.

“Good work,” Masozi said unthinkingly.
She’s just a
computer program
, Masozi reminded herself,
it’s
her
job
to do things like this
.

“No problem, babe,” Eve replied, still clearly distracted by
something before adding, “
some
of this suit’s
subroutines are getting a little confusing. Sorry about the lack of witty
banter.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Masozi replied dryly after stepping
into the corridor and hearing the door close behind her.

“Was that sarcasm?” Eve asked suspiciously as she cast an
accusing glare in Masozi’s ‘direction.’

“Of course not,” Masozi said exaggeratedly, causing Eve to
burst into laughter.

“You’re a lot of fun, Investigator,” she said with a shake
of her head, “I think we just might be kindred spirits after all.”

“Stay on task, Eve,” Masozi grumbled, feeling the corner of
her mouth turn up in a lopsided grin in spite of
herself
.

They reached the final junction indicated on the map and
Masozi stopped before peering around the corner. There was a pair of guards
standing outside door about a hundred feet down the intersecting corridor, and
Masozi leaned back around the corner just as Eve declared triumphantly,
“Finally got it; all our systems are online, girlfriend. Calculating our rated
hand-to-hand combat output now and…” she trailed off before grinning, crouching
down and yelling victoriously at the top of her virtual lungs, “IT’S OVER NINE
THOUSAND!”

“What does that mean?” Masozi asked in bewilderment,
thankful to still have functional hearing after Eve’s unexpected outburst.

“Put simply,” Eve replied matter-of-factly as she resumed
her upright stance, “your average civilian’s got a combat output rating of a
hundred. A talented amateur wrestler, kickboxer, or other single-discipline
hand-to-hand fighter would be somewhere between three and eight hundred. And a
lifelong killer with the right gear and three dozen scalps on his belt, or a
hall-of-fame professional mixed martial artist, would be somewhere between two
and three thousand depending on their size, strength, speed, etc
..”

Masozi had taken part in more than her share of amateur
athletics, including some wrestling, before discovering a love of kickboxing as
a young girl that persisted all the way until she became an Investigator. But
she simply hadn’t had time to train in a few years, so she guessed she would
have been on the lower end, near four hundred. “Where did you get that metric?”
she asked, her curiosity—once again—getting the better of her.

“It’s something an Imperial military officer worked up,” Eve
replied. “Benton discovered it while digging through some old archives he…umm…found?”
she finished meekly before giving a short, nervous laugh. “Yeah…probably
shouldn’t have said that. Anyway, the point is that those guys—even if they’re
full-on badasses—won’t give us any trouble we can’t handle on the way out. You
ready for your window?” she asked unexpectedly. “It looks like we’ll get a
chance in about two minutes.”

“Works for me,” Masozi said, anxiety beginning to build in
the pit of her stomach, “I’m ready when you are.”

“Great,” Eve said, “first thing we need to do is make like a
spider and crawl on the ceiling until we’re right over the door. After we’re
there, I’ll distract the guards and you’re going to need to drop in front of
the door so I can crack open the lock. I should be able to open it up before
they return to their posts, but it’s going to be tight as a virg—”

“I got it,” Masozi interrupted harshly as she placed her
hand on a nearby concrete wall and tested to see if the gloves were once again
supernaturally sticky, and found that they were. She crawled up the wall until
transferring to the ceiling, acutely aware of just how unnatural the position
was, and began to slowly move her way over to the door.

“Be sure not to block the light,” Eve cautioned, “the suit’s
stealth systems are impressive, but even they have limits.”

“Right,” Masozi said, skirting one of the industrial light
banks more widely than she had originally intended, and after nearly two
minutes she was in position. “Ready, Eve,” she muttered, risking a glance down
at the two guards who stood silent sentinel to either side of the door.

“Gotcha, babe,” Eve replied.
“Diversion in
three…two…one…now.”

There was a sound from a nearby corridor as a pair of voices
echoed through the tunnel-like passages. They sounded very nearly drunk and
they quickly came closer, causing the guards to give each other a neutral look
before one of them silently set off for the source of the commotion with his
weapon shouldered.

“I’m telling you,” a man’s voice echoed through the
corridor, “I pressed the button for the restroom—I can’t help it if this stupid
place’s equipment’s faulty!”

“You just wanted to get me alone in a dark tunnel,” a
woman’s slightly slurred voice retorted knowingly. “You’re not that smart,
Dennis.”

They rounded the corner—fondling each other in manners which
were better left to private locales—and Masozi saw guard who had moved to
intercept them train his rifle on them before snapping, “Hands in the air,
Citizens!”

The two quickly retracted their wayward hands and the man’s
eyes went wide with fear while the woman appeared more surprised than anything.
“We got lost, officer,” the man blurted in self-defense as his hands reached
for the ceiling. His voice squeaked so badly it was as though he had yet to
breach puberty. “We were just trying to find the restrooms—I swear!”

Just then another pair of voices came from the corridor
opposite the one where the guard had pinned the two to the wall at rifle-point.
The guard still standing watch by the door quickly shouldered his weapon and
made his way to intercept the newcomers, who appeared to have gotten themselves
similarly lost.

“Now, babe,” Eve said as soon as the second guard had taken
half a dozen steps.

Masozi dropped to the floor and made surprisingly little
noise as she did so, landing in a crouch before springing up and placing her
right gauntlet next to the door’s locking mechanism.

The second guard was just pinning his small group of
interlopers to the wall when the door popped open. Masozi wasted no time
entering the room before closing the door behind her as quickly, and quietly,
as possible.

“Well done,” Eve congratulated. “Now we just have to wait
for the Governor to show up and we can get down to business.”

“Drive this thing faster, Eve,” Jericho snapped through
gritted teeth as the medic worked to suture the major blood vessels in his left
arm.

“I’m
sorry,
Jericho,” she replied
tersely, “but when you split my program in two pieces this part lost more than
half of my processing power. You
did
tell me to send my better half with
Masozi,” she reminded him pointedly, “I can’t load balance the draws on the
engines, anti-grav systems, and flight controls any more efficiently than
this.”

“What’s our ETA?” he growled, knowing that Eve was
performing far better than she had any right to do…which begged a question he
would need to get answered at a later date as to just what exactly she was. It
was clear by now that she was no simple sexbot program, or even a high-quality
emotional companion product.

The painkillers the medics had given him were already
wearing off, and he knew that if he took too many more then his mental
faculties would be too severely compromised to be of any help when they arrived
at Abaca. So he gritted his teeth and went through a series of long-practiced
mental exercises—the same ones he had used to prepare for Stiglitz’s
torture—even though he knew that with so much pain already at the forefront of
his thoughts it would be difficult to achieve any measure of relief.