Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (7 page)

“That may not be good enough,” Jericho warned.

Angelo nodded quickly and stood a bit too abruptly for
Jericho, who closed the distance between them with a single, long, stride and
pressed the flat of the blade against the man’s throat. Angelo looked
absolutely terrified as he audibly soiled himself, before pointing to the far
wall—a wall which Baxter’s investigations had proven housed a cleverly-designed
safe.

Jericho withdrew the blade from the man’s neck and took a
half step back, ready to act at the first sign of betrayal. The truth was
Jericho had come to Angelo’s flat with two purposes in mind. The first was to
make the Adjustment for the RL it would accrue to his record as an Adjuster,
and the second was to retrieve the contents within Angelo’s safe. Without the
information Angelo had it may have been impossible to proceed with his future
plans—and those plans were absolutely vital to the security of the planet, the
System, and even the entire Sector.

Angelo slowly made his way to the wall before pressing his
hands against seemingly random points on the wall. A soft, blue glow emanated
from eye level before him, and he placed his face near the mundane-looking
surface for several seconds before the panel in front of his face slid to the
side and revealed a long, shallow recess which ran parallel to the surface of
the wall.

Jericho, careful to keep himself in position to react to the
man’s potential treachery, stood at his shoulder and watched Angelo withdraw a
slender data crystal. It was a rare form of data storage which had fallen out
of favor due to its incompatibility with recent quick-scanning technology. But it was durable and, once
written,
its contents could not be overwritten or modified
in any way short of physical destruction.

Angelo turned and, in a somewhat surprising display of
resolve, said, “I will give you the passcode if you don’t make my crimes
public.”

Jericho hesitated. He suspected that Wladimir could crack
the encoding given enough time, but that would likely take weeks. There was,
however, nothing explicitly stating that an Adjuster was required to publicly
produce the evidence which condemned one of the Timent Electorum’s Adjustments…

Jericho nodded and held out his hand, “I can do that.”

Angelo nodded, pointing to the now-opened safe. “The mineral
bars are there; take them and do as you would with them.”

Jericho narrowed his eyes. It was explicitly forbidden for
an Adjuster to accept a material bribe in any form, and Angelo’s offer was
clearly such a bribe.

“You may dispose of them as you see fit,” the
soon-to-be-former Director said hastily, “but they will provide a motive for my
murder.”

Jericho considered it and—though doing so was solidly in the
dark grey zone of what was or wasn’t permissible—he nodded in agreement and
gestured for him to withdraw the small pouch of material.

When Angelo gave him the pouch, Jericho looked inside to see
a small series of tiny, geometrically perfect, hexagonal rods in a clear,
plastic case. Rare minerals were valuable, but these were likely untraceable
and had already been meticulously crafted so as to be incorporated quickly into
high-end electronic devices.

He neither knew, nor cared to know, what purpose Angelo may
have had for them since they were nothing but evidence in Jericho’s eyes. So he
took them out of their plastic case and crushed them one by one, destroying the
majority of their value in the process. When he was finished, the pouch was
worth little more than its weight in industrial grade diamond, which was almost
nothing—except in the hands of an examiner with equipment which could verify
where those minerals had come from, and when they had been mined. Jericho already knew the answer to both of
those questions, but until that moment he had lacked the actual evidence needed
to proceed with an Adjustment he had been working toward for decades.

Jericho placed the pouch in the same pocket which had held
his T.E. insignia and withdrew a small recording device, which he gave to
Angelo. “Make it quick,” he urged, and the other man nodded as he wiped the
tears from his face.

A few minutes later, after composing himself, Angelo
recorded a farewell letter to his grandchildren—whose names were Victoria and
Michael—before finishing and handing the device back to Jericho, who watched
the affair with more than casual interest. Jericho had never fathered children
and, though his duty required him to rob those children of their grandfather’s
presence, he knew that if he failed to carry out his charge he would be robbing
thousands of others of the lives they might have otherwise made for themselves
due to the corruption for which people like Angelo were responsible.

“Thank you…” he said, and Jericho knew the man’s resolve
would not hold for much longer, “the passcode is a simple alphanumeric composed
of my birthdate followed by my grandmother’s maiden name, scrambled by the
seventeen standard Virgin chronometers’ individual variances, measured to the
twentieth decimal, prior to their collective weekly reset.”

Jericho had no idea what any of that meant, but he had
recorded the entire scene via his goggles’ video pickup and had confidence that
Benton would know how to decipher it. “Are you ready?” he asked evenly.

Angelo took a deep, measured breath and nodded as he closed
his eyes. Jericho ended his life with a quick, precise, stab through the
brainstem that his mark never even heard coming.

Captain Sasaki’s knife, while not a monomolecular blade, did
the job better than any other implement Jericho had used in recent months and
Director Angelo’s body fell to the ground in a silent heap. In the moment that
he fell, Angelo looked for all the world like a puppet whose strings had been
cut—and it was an all-too familiar sight to the experienced assassin.

With his grizzly task complete, Jericho wiped the blade
clean and produced a neatly-folded collar-to-toes overcoat which, when
compressed, was no larger than his fist. He removed his goggles and hood before
tucking them into his coat’s large pockets.

After donning his new outfit, he exited the flat, made his
way to the emergency escape which Baxter had indeed unlocked for him, and used
it to disappear in the crowded streets of New Lincoln.

Not ten minutes after Jericho had left Angelo’s flat, an
Okavango DOT (which initials stood for ‘Delivered
On
Time,’ the company’s infamous and much-lampooned slogan) Net delivery
hover-drone appeared before him.

“Hi, handsome!
You have a delivery
from,” the drone purred in an overly sexual voice as the image of a
ridiculously sexualized schoolgirl ‘uniform’-wearing woman appeared on the
two-dimensional display built into the meter-wide drone’s front. The screen
flickered and the woman’s voice changed to that of Wladimir Benton, who
snapped, “
Bitch, you gotta learn to check yo’ damned mail!
”

Despite the crass language, Jericho was well-pleased to have
received the package so promptly. He would normally have ignored the drone
until it went away, but he had been expected such a package and even without
the overt greeting message he would have recognized this particular drone as a
very cleverly-designed fake of the global retail giant’s own delivery devices.

This particular drone was one of Wladimir ‘AJ’ Benton’s…one
might say ‘pets,’ and Jericho complied by providing the requested signature by
placing his hand into the cavity and gripping the contoured handle. Doing so
provided a physical impression of his handprint while also providing other
data, like body temperature, heart rate, oxygenation level in the blood, and
God only knew what else.

There was a loud, moaning sound from the drone’s speakers
and the woman’s image flickered briefly before she bent over, exposing far more
cleavage than Jericho believed to be biologically possible for a human woman to
possess. “Thanks for the squeeze, handsome,” she said with a wink after licking
her lips suggestively, “please…take anything you like.”

Rolling his eyes in irritation, Jericho waited for the
storage compartment to open and, when it did, he took a small briefcase from
the drone. There was one other item inside, but he knew it had not yet reached
its intended destination so he turned to continue down the sidewalk.

“Aww,” the drone pouted as the image of the woman folded her
arms theatrically, “just like a man…gets what he wants and leaves without so
much as a kind word.”

Jericho couldn’t help himself from chuckling as he turned
around and nodded. “Thank you, Eve,” he said with a tip of an imaginary cap. “Say
‘hello’ to the big guy for me.”

Eve’s image seemed ready to burst with joy as the pupils of
her eyes turned into little, pink, Cupid hearts before the screen was filled
with similar images.
“Will do, babe.
But seriously…we
have got to stop meeting like this; people are going to talk. I have a
reputation to consider!”

Jericho shook his head and made a ‘shoo’ gesture. “Get out
of here before I report being sexually harassed by a delivery drone,” he said
with a hollow grin.

“Mmm…baby,” she purred, her image leaning forward to expose
her beyond-ample cleavage, “if I was sexually harassing you—“

He held up a hand haltingly. “Another time, Eve,” he cut her
off before tapping the briefcase and wincing when he moved his still-broken
left arm in an inadvisable manner. “Work to do.”

She pouted again briefly before sighing as the drone began
to drift up into the designated altitude for such devices to operate above when
not making deliveries. “All work and no play…” she chided before turning around
and flipping up her skirt, exposing even more pink hearts on—and around—what
appeared to be Benton’s idea of a woman’s underwear. She winked, blew a kiss,
and then disappeared from the screen as the drone sped off until it was once
again out of sight.

Jericho made his way down the street until finding a small
café which was less than likely to have round-the-clock recorded surveillance.
He sat down, took out a few chits and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich before
opening the case and examining its contents.

Inside was the usual assortment of material necessary for a
Guardian Angel operation, including new identification, untraceable credit
chits of sufficient value to book passage off-world, and a link pad similar to
the one he had destroyed after executing the Cantwell Adjustment. He activated
the link and input his usual passkey, which was accepted, and found
himself
looking at multiple video feeds of a modest
apartment complex which made Mr. Angelo’s residential building look like a
getaway resort built for the Old Nobility.

The individual unit floor plans were no more than six feet
by twelve feet with ceilings of varying heights. The extra headroom required to
go from a four foot ceiling to a six foot one—which would have still been too
short for Jericho to stand to his full height—increased the cost of the unit by
fifty percent since the rental price was based almost entirely on displaced
volume.

It was one of the things Jericho had come to despise about the
old Imperium’s obsession with cramming as many people as possible into as small
of an area as possible, but he had made his peace with such incomprehensible
realities years earlier.

He scanned his way through the various feeds, most of which
appeared to have been hijacked directly from the building’s own internal
security system. But three of the feeds were marked with icons indicating they
were being delivered via off-grid, wireless bugs. The interesting thing was
that those three feeds had not been placed by Wladimir, as would have been
normal for a Guardian Angel operation—he had apparently discovered that their
next ‘target’ was already under covert surveillance.

AJ had apparently intercepted those feeds without making
anyone the wiser. He was, in all likelihood,
the
foremost hacker in the
Virgin System with only Jericho’s immediate ‘superior’ in the T.E. serving as a
competitor for the title. Benton had evaded capture for nearly two decades of
wreaking continuous mayhem, so at this point in his life Jericho put nothing
past the man. The mayhem Benton wrought was something which Jericho had come to
depend upon during his mid-life career choice as a T.E. Adjuster, and though he
had absolutely no idea how his top operator did what he did, he was grateful
they were on the same side—despite the other man’s unusual, and often outright
insulting, verbiage.

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.