Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (5 page)

“I’m just a voice, here to deliver the edict of the people
you’ve wronged, Angelo,” he said almost pleasantly as his eyes flicked between
Sasaki and Matsumoto.

Angelo went white as a sheet, but Sasaki took a bold step
forward while Matsumoto—who was tall and broad, but not an accomplished fighter
judging by his posture and lack of confident poise—held back.

“Body temperature within point six degrees of normal,”
Sasaki purred as she looked up and down Jericho’s body, and he realized she
must have had some sort of ocular implant—yet another variable that would make
things interesting. “A thermal suit but no accompanying electromagnetic
field…and your weapons are a kitchen knife and frying pan?” She shook her head
as an emphatic look of disappointment came over her face, “So repulsively
normal…I had expected something more of the T.E., old man.”

“Last chance,” Jericho warned calmly as he tightened his
grip on the makeshift weapons, “you can leave on your own two feet…or in a body
bag.”

Angelo was frozen in place, but Matsumoto had moved to flank
Sasaki and appeared to have strengthened his own resolve. “I’ve never killed
one of you,” the woman said as she cracked her neck, “I’m going to enj—“

Jericho didn’t wait for her to finish her bloated speech. He
swung the frying pan in his left hand into the glass aquarium and the glass
shattered on contact, its contents spilling out onto the concrete floor of the
flat. But before the first drop hit the floor, Sasaki had leapt the ten feet
between them and drew a short, straight blade from concealment.

Jericho realized almost too late that he didn’t have time to
execute his second planned move, so he brought his good arm up with the kitchen
knife aimed at her incoming wrist. She reacted more quickly than he had
expected and lashed out with her left leg, connecting with his upper chest and
driving him into the wall with the surprising force of her flying kick.

But he managed to score a hit of his own along her forearm,
and was sorely disappointed with the kitchen knife skittered off her seemingly
ordinary, skintight, fake leather jacket.

A gleam entered her eye as she adjusted her grip on the
knife and spun to drive it into his side. But Jericho had anticipated the
rather mundane attack, and managed to dive just inside the arc of her weapon as
he delivered a low kick to her nearest knee.

When his shin impacted against her leather-clad joint, he
was relieved to see her leg almost buckle from the force of the attack.
No
augments
, he silently celebrated as he brought the frying pan up into her
torso. But his arm failed to comply properly and rather than delivering a
crushing blow to her midriff, he barely managed to hang onto the makeshift
weapon and use his forward momentum to shove her across the room.

Thankfully, she weighed no more than she appeared she
should, so she slammed into the wall near the door just as her companion waded
into the fray. Matsumoto assumed a traditional, Southern Bloc martial arts
posture, and Jericho blocked his rapid—albeit formulaic and entirely
predictable—series of calculated punches and kicks.

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 ready 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 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 covered in
aquarium water—there was an audible buzz and accompanying flash of light which
saw Matsumoto’s body seize as electricity course through his nerves. A fraction
of a second after that crippling jolt of electricity, the safety breakers cut
power to the entire flat.

But 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 aimed at his chest. 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, doing so effectively 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 exposing
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 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 taken several steps back and was admiring
her handiwork, and 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 before
his knees. “Knock
yourself
out,” she quipped.

His head lolled around for a moment as he attempted to grab
the sachet of chemicals, but he deliberately 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 to grab the hilt of 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.

“Stupid,” Sasaki shook her head 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 and processed the fact that his left arm was broken and
therefore less than likely to stop her. But for all her genetic modifications,
she still had a completely average brain.

Before she could realize her gaffe, he had closed off the
path 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 and
she leapt for the window in a desperate attempt to escape, probably in the hope
of clinging to a ledge before 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 mid-air, and managed to
redirect enough of her body’s momentum into the window’s jamb. Her hip slammed into the molded concrete and
nearly stopped her forward momentum entirely as he gathered his feet and closed
the remaining distance between them.

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 nearly drove the sharp
point of the impractical footwear through his eye.

Jericho had expected an attack of that kind, and managed to
move his head out of the way. The sharp heel 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 managed to grip 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 good, right, arm and managed to break her
grip on the window sill.

Her deadly footwear slid past his head as he pulled her
groin against his upper chest. But she 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 back with a
figure four triangle choke.

She reached down to the back of his head with both hands and
she drove her crotch into his face while forcing his chin toward his own chest,
and 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.