Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (8 page)

“See you around, sugar,” the image on the drone’s screen
said before blowing a virtual kiss and disappearing as the drone gently drifted
down and out of sight.

Masozi closed the window and examined the box more closely.
It was completely unremarkable and, after a long moment of contemplation, she
opened it to peruse its contents.

What she saw took the breath from her lungs: it was an
insignia of the Timent Electorum! Rather, it was a decal which was made in the
image of the insignia, and she picked it up to examine it more closely. The
reverse side was like any cheap decal, with a peel-away adhesive pad which had
two words written on it:

Pick up
.

She nearly dropped the box when it began to vibrate in her
hands. After a moment she realized it had not been the box which had vibrated,
but something that was
inside
the box.

Beneath where the decal had been was a pair of objects: one
was a cheap, civilian-class earpiece communication device, and the other was a
similarly cheap link pad. The earpiece had been vibrating, and there was an
icon on the screen of the link pad which showed an unread message had been
received by it.

Masozi thought very hard about her next actions and decided
that regardless of what she meant to do in the future, her best option was to
do answer the call.

She placed the earpiece in her left ear and activated it after
taking a deep breath. “Hello?” she said.

Silence was her only reply for several seconds, and just
when she was about to deactivate the device a man’s deep, tense voice spoke,
“Investigator, I’m glad you took my advice. Activate the pad and open the message’s
attached file—do so quickly since we don’t have much time.”

“Who is this?” she asked warily, knowing she needed to get
as much information as possible while she had this person on the line.

“You have forty six seconds before I will have taken a very real
risk and accomplished nothing but a short conversation with a very fresh—very
stupid—corpse, Investigator,” the voice replied harshly. “If
I
wanted
you dead you would already be so—thirty eight, thirty seven,
thirty
six—”

She had to admit that he had a point, so she reluctantly
opened the file contained in the link’s lone message and the screen showed
dozens of security camera feeds. The feeds cycled quickly through until stopped
on what appeared to be a maintenance room somewhere in her residential building.

“Good,” the man’s voice said as he ceased his countdown,
“what do you see?”

Masozi looked intently at the image and, at first, saw
nothing. Then she saw that one of the panels appeared to have been tampered
with, and her throat tightened when she realized it was the control panel for
her quadrant of the building.

The image shifted around quickly in a strange,
pseudo-realistic panning shot until it came to rest on a man’s motionless body
which was propped up against the wall. She gasped when she recognized the man
as one of her building’s maintenance staff—she had even taken a somewhat
regrettable tumble with him a year earlier when she’d had too much to drink
after a high-profile case’s successful conclusion.

“Tom,” she breathed, trying to fathom why someone would kill
a superintendent of a relatively poor building like hers.

“I have reason to believe that your quadrant of the building
is about to be destroyed,” the man said, as though he was speaking about the
evening’s weather forecast. “You have only one hope if you want to survive.”

“Who are you?” she demanded as suspicions swirled in her
head.

“You know who I am, Investigator,” the man said gravely, and
her eyes widened as she concluded she was speaking with Mayor Cantwell’s
assassin, “now jump.”

“Jump?!” she blurted.

“Yes, Investigator,” he said far-too-calmly. “If you don’t
want to die in twelve seconds, I suggest you jump out the window—the sooner you
jump, the higher your chance of survival. Eight seconds; you should be able to
smell the gases by now.”

Now that he mentioned it, she did smell something that
seemed like methane. Her building used it for quick heating of water, like for
her shower, and apparently it had somehow been plumbed into the air cycling
system.

Having only a few seconds, she performed some quick math and
felt her heart stop. The evidence did, in fact, seem to suggest that there was
enough gas flooding her room—and possibly adjacent rooms as well—to kill her
and everyone in her part of the building.

She swung open the window and, after hesitating for a
moment, leapt from the window and braced herself. As she fell she became
absolutely certain that her lapse in judgment would amount to little more than
a footnote in the next shift’s incident log at the NLIU unit assigned to her
zone of New Lincoln.

But then two things happened. There was a massive ‘whump’ of
hot air behind her which briefly deafened her and splayed her arms and legs out
to either side violently as she fell, face-down, toward the ground. The wind
whipped around her naked body as the ground approached far-too-rapidly, and she
closed her eyes in preparation for the end of her life.

Then she landed and felt the wind knocked from her lungs,
causing her to gasp in agony as she struggled to regain her breath. But Masozi
realized after a second that only her torso had ‘landed,’ and when she opened
her eyes she looked down to see that she had been ‘caught’ by an Okavango DOT
Net delivery drone—the same drone which had delivered the package to her room!

“Sweetie…we have
got
to talk about your diet,” the
drone’s ultra-feminine voice said as the drone struggled to adjust its
overloaded trajectory, but it somehow managed to keep them from crashing into
the street below as it began to gently gain altitude.

The fact that she was naked could not have been further from
her mind as Masozi looked back up to see a thick, black cloud of smoke belching
out of her apartment unit—as well as the adjacent six windows on her floor. The
walls separating their units had been made of a cheap, lightweight, soundproof
material which would have been shredded by the explosion. Thankfully, the other
quadrants of the building would likely have been unaffected by the event, since
even cheap concrete would have likely contained the blast.

She would have mourned her neighbors, but she had more
important things on her mind. “Where are you taking me?” she demanded.

“Keep your clothes on, honey,” the drone quipped before
giggling uncontrollably. “Get it? ‘Keep your clothes on’?! I crack myself up…”

“I’m not amused,” Masozi shouted as they slewed across the
intersection at Seventeenth and King.

“Trust me, babe; this has nothing to do with your
amusement,” the drone said in a surprisingly serious tone. “Just hang on and
we’ll put you down someplace safe.”

Masozi only then noticed that two of the drone’s four lift
units appeared to be off-line, and she quickly concluded that it shouldn’t have
been able to stay airborne with her as a payload—much less perform a climb,
however gradual that climb might be. The only thing she knew with absolute
certainty was that this was not an ordinary delivery drone.

A few minutes later, Masozi was struck by just how few
people looked up and saw her astride the errant Okavango delivery device. She
only saw two such people do so during her relatively quick trip across the
district: one had been drunk and gave the sight rather less thought than it
deserved, and the other had been a child who had innocently waved at her after
realizing that a person was riding one of the innumerable, unmanned drones
flying forty feet above the street.

She even soared over three sets of patrolling peace
officers, none of which noticed her or the malfunctioning delivery drone with
only two functioning lift units.

“Here we go, sweet cheeks,” the drone purred as they slewed
into a blind alley in a particularly seedy part of the district. “As always, be
sure to leave your feedback if you enjoyed our service,” the drone said as
‘she’ set Masozi down low enough that she could jump off the makeshift platform
of the drone’s back, “and if you didn’t, we’d suggest you keep that opinion to
yourself! Gratuities are greatly appreciated, of course,” the drone continued
as Masozi got to her feet, and it turned to display its utterly ridiculous,
mostly-naked, avatar displayed on the screen. The figure was now sucking
suggestively on a digital lollipop between utterances, further reinforcing
Masozi’s belief that it was nothing but a frustrated person’s digitized wet
dream, “So if you’ve got any spare indium or tantalum wedged between the
cushions, dig it out and drop it in the tip jar!”

“What are you talking about?” Masozi asked in utter
bewilderment, feeling more than a little vulnerable in such a dangerous part of
town without a weapon—let alone without any clothes.

“Forget it, hun,” the drone said with an exaggerated
eye-roll as she made a
whoosh
gesture over her virtual pigtails with her
free hand, “inside joke. See ya; wouldn’t wanna be ya!”

The drone then rose into the air, causing Masozi to yell,
“Where are you going?” She quickly realized how stupid she must have sounded,
but she was not in the habit of wandering into the seedy corners of New Lincoln
in her birthday suit so she forgave herself the ill-considered query.

“People to see, things to do,” the drone’s avatar replied
with a wink before adopting a thoughtful look as it continued to rise and
adding, “strike that…reverse it.
Toodles!”

The drone then made good on its word and sped off in an
atypical direction for a delivery drone, which Masozi realized was probably to
be expected considering the strange machine’s obviously unique programming.

Then she heard a low-pitched whirring from the blind end of
the alley, and she turned to see a two person hover-bike’s illuminators
activate. The conveyance slowly moved toward her and she held her hand up to
shade her eyes as she moved to the side in case the vehicles operator decided
to gun it and try to run her down.

But the operator did no such thing, and slowly pulled up
beside her until she could see that he was wearing a helmet which concealed his
facial features. It was obviously a man, given his physique and posture, and
his visor flipped up to reveal a pair of grey-blue eyes beneath short,
flat-topped salt-and-pepper hair. He had a strong, square jaw and looked to be
in his late forties or early fifties.

The man tilted his head toward the back of the bike, “Put it
on.”

She looked and saw a helmet identical to the one the rider
was wearing, and stuffed inside the helmet was what looked to be a form-fitting
bodyglove. It wasn’t as good as real clothing, but it was comparable to a
far-too-revealing workout suit. So she did as he suggested and climbed into the
garment as the mysterious man’s eyes were fixed on the mouth of the alley.

“Who are you?” Masozi asked after donning the singlet. Her
confidence was measurably improved now that her every inch wasn’t exposed to
the night air—and whatever else might be lurking in the shadows.

“I’ll answer that, and as many of your other questions I
can, but right now you need to get on the bike and wear the helmet,” he said
shortly. “They were tracking Eve visually and if we linger too long they’ll
lock onto us with one of their stealth drones. A friend has a safe house in
town but we have to leave—now!”

If not for the events of the previous twelve hours, she
would have never accepted his offer. But Masozi was smart enough to know that
she had gotten caught up in something much bigger than a simple murder
investigation, and it seemed this man knew more about it than anyone else she
had spoken to—except perhaps Agent Stiglitz and Chief Afolabi.

But for some reason, she trusted this man more than she
trusted them…and that realization shook her to the very core. “How can I trust
you?” she asked after the silence had grown intolerable and she failed to
arrive at a conclusion.

“You’re going to get on the bike, so let’s just get it over
with,” he snapped.

“I am?” she challenged stiffly.
Who is this man to think
he can predict what I will do?
she
thought,
clenching her jaw tightly.

The man nodded. “Human psychology is about as mysterious to
me as a grilled cheese sandwich, Investigator; your curiosity has gotten the
better of you
and
you’re smart enough to know you’ve got no choice but
to get on if you want to live,” he said before his helmet’s visor slid back
down into place and concealed his features. He then added, speaking through the
helmet’s built-in speakers, “So do us both a favor?”

She very much disliked his insinuation that he had somehow
‘solved’ her in just a few seconds, but Masozi knew he was right. Her
curiosity—which had formed the foundation of Masozi’s entire life’s
path—demanded that she follow the deadly mystery she had inadvertently stumbled
into, so she put the helmet on and swung her leg over the seat of the bike before
gripping the bars to either side of her butt for stability.

“Who are you?” she asked via their helmet-to-helmet com-link
as the bike’s
motivators
whirred to full power.

“My name’s Jericho,” he replied, “and in a few hours I’ll be
the only person in this city who doesn’t want you dead.”

He gunned the throttle and the whiplash nearly knocked her
from the bike, but she recovered in time to clamp her thighs down on the seat
as she leaned forward to counteract their acceleration.

The hover-bike carried them out onto the road, and they set
off at the maximum speed limit toward the city center as the first rays of the
sun began to creep over the horizon.

They cruised through the streets of New Lincoln for half an
hour until they had crossed town and found themselves at the city’s seaport.
Masozi had taken that time to compose herself, and she had managed to get her
mind wrapped around the sequence of events which had led her to her current
situation.

The bike came to a near one of the city’s many piers and her
helmet’s built-in com-link activated with a short burst of static, “Inside your
left hip pocket is an ident chip and a handful of credit chits.”

She had already discovered those items in her bodyglove’s
pocket on the trip across town, so she replied, “Whose are they?”

“Yours,” he replied tersely as he gestured to a massive,
ocean-going cargo ship at the end of the nearest pier, prompting her to
dismount the bike. “Your name is Helena Pendergast; you’re a harbormaster’s
agent who’s about to conduct a series of spot inspections on a handful of
random cargo containers,” he explained. “Once aboard you should make your way
to container EIV-1138 down in the hold. Wait for me inside.”

She removed her helmet and took another look at the ship.
Its name was the
Esmerelda Empática
, and while it was nearly half a
kilometer long, it had clearly seen better days. Its gunwales were marked by
long, meter-wide streaks of rust which ran from the deck to the waterline, and
its freeboard plates had clearly been patched dozens of times with no apparent
consideration given to the vessel’s aesthetics.

“Won’t they assign someone to keep tabs on me?” she asked
guardedly. What he was suggesting violated at least a dozen felony-class
statutes and, if a capricious judge decided to throw the book at her, she could
be facing up to forty years in a penal colony if caught.

The rider shook his head. “The captain is expecting you.
He’ll make you present your papers before making a few…choice observations. But
afterward he’ll give you the time and latitude you need to get where you’re
going without being followed.”

Masozi took another glance at the ship and knew that
whatever lines she might cross in the future these next few would likely be
only the beginning. “I could turn you in,” she said boldly, wishing to avoid
unnecessary wordplay.

The man’s visor flipped up and she saw a bemused look on his
face. “You could,” he agreed evenly, “and the truth is that I’ve already made
my most valuable resources—among them my own life—vulnerable to such a gesture
on your part. In fact,” he said almost playfully as he leaned across the
antique-style handlebars, “after what I’ve just told you, I suspect that
my
apprehension would be of secondary value to your superiors compared to the
apprehension of the man waiting for you on that ship.”

She shook her head and felt her jaw tighten, “Why would you
tell me that?”

He fixed her with a piercing gaze, and for a moment his
blue-grey eyes almost distracted her from the matter at hand. There was
something penetrating about his eyes, and whatever it was sent shivers down her
spine. “Because, as I already told you,” he said after the silence had grown
deafening, “we
both
know you need to follow this thing at least a little
while longer before making a decision. Oh, and one more thing,” he added as he
flipped a small box from his pocket, which she easily caught, “tell Benton to
take a look at that—and that I’ll bring dinner if he can give me a breakdown by
sunset.”

With that, he re-powered the bike’s motivators and lowered
his visor before speeding down the dockside street. He disappeared from sight
just a few seconds later as he turned back toward the city’s center, and Masozi
was left with a choice that she was forced to admit was no choice at all.

During the course of the ride across town, she had run
several possible scenarios through her head—and each of them had left her with
nothing but more doubts than she had held just a few hours earlier.

Much as it pained her to believe it, there were two logical
conclusions given the available data. The first was that ‘Jericho’—if that was
even his true name—had engineered each and every event of the previous
night—including the Mayor’s assassination and subsequent explosion in the
apartment complex—in order to gain her complicity, if not her outright trust.
But to her analytical mind, that possibility seemed too elaborate. The cold
truth was that while such a scenario would serve her ego and vanity by
suggesting there was something special about her, she knew that was far from
likely.

That left the second possibility: that either one, or both,
of Chief Afolabi and Agent Stiglitz had arranged for the explosion in her
apartment building. That scenario left her feeling the most vulnerable by far…and
the most betrayed, but by whom she still could not determine.

Masozi had dedicated her entire life to the service of her
fellow citizens, and believed with every fiber of her being that the Great
Collapse—the negative term given to the wormhole’s sudden and inexplicable
failure by those inhabitants of the Sector who regarded the event as a
harbinger of the end times—had been the greatest thing to ever happen to her
world. Her sentiment was the norm for a citizen of the Chimera Sector, and the
populace had collectively adopted the term ‘Great Collapse’ in order to embrace
the idea of change within their newfound society.

In fact, not only had her planet—one of three so-called
‘Core Worlds’ in the Chimera Sector’s Union of Worlds government—had been re-named
‘Virgin’ shortly after the wormhole had collapsed, but it had also established
a new calendar beginning with the failure of that conduit, which had once been
considered of the utmost importance to their way of life.

The name ‘Virgin’ had celebrated their independence from
what many believed to be a tyranny of unfathomable proportions which had been
perpetuated by the aristocratic nobility which maintained absolute control over
every level of the Imperium.

In the immediate aftermath of the Great Collapse, a
revolution unlike any in recent history had taken place which saw the vast
majority of the Imperial Nobility overthrown. Those nepotistic bodies had been
replaced with free elections, along with a newly-crafted Bill of Rights, which
would ensure that the errors of the past did not repeat themselves on Virgin or
the other worlds of the Chimera Sector.

That Bill of Rights—in which the Timent Electorum was given
absolute, immutable primacy—was meant to act as a guardian of civil liberties
against corrupt, tyrannical, or treasonous officials no matter how they came to
power. The cold, harsh reality was that every death which had been attributed
to the T.E.’s actions had boosted community confidence in the government to
truly unprecedented levels, and that faith in their unified cause had led the
citizens of Chimera Sector to not only survive, but to thrive, despite their
technological shortcomings.

And now, in the face of what appeared to be an
interplanetary conspiracy aimed to obfuscate the truth of the T.E.’s actions—to
say nothing of the fact that those same conspirators may have attempted to
murder Masozi simply for trying to do her job—she was unable to ratify any
course of action that did
not
involve doing as Jericho had suggested and
boarding the oceanic freighter.

“I am
not
predictable,” she growled as she made her
way to one of the personnel boarding ramps, where an armored guard stood vigil
on the other side. Masozi took a deep breath as she flashed her false documents
after setting foot on the gangway, “Agent Helena Pendergast; I’m here to
conduct an inspection of this vessel by order of the harbormaster.”

The guard narrowed his eyes as he appraised her documents.
“There’s nothing in the book,” he said stiffly after he had given her identification
a lengthy appraisal, “request denied.”

“I have seven other vessels to check before lunch,” she
snapped irritably, sliding easily into the role of an irritated
bureaucrat—mostly because it was one with which she was intimately familiar,
after spending so many years as a Junior Investigator. She gave a pointed look
at his name badge, “Merchantman T.J. Jackson; should I remember your name in my
report, or are you going to let me on so I can conduct my inspection sometime
before the primary burns out?”

He gave her an impassive look as his hands lowered to his
hips—on which a pair of high-powered pistols rested. “You can remember whatever
you want,
ma’am
,” he said in a tone just above a growl, “but if you
cross this threshold without authorization I’ll turn you into scraper chum.”

The Merchantman’s response had not been altogether
unexpected, but Masozi knew that if she was to gain access to the vessel on
guile alone she couldn’t be seen to back down from the rough display. She held
his gaze as she leaned over the edge of the ramp to look at the water below.

‘Scrapers,’ as he had called them, were a whole family of
marine wildlife which lived near busy maritime ports such as this one. They
were more or less a kind of stingray, except somewhere on their evolutionary
path they had incorporated iron alloys into the teeth and bones of their
immensely powerful jaws. As such they were capable of tearing anything short of
industrial grade materials apart, given enough time and determination.

“Was that your best threat, Merchantman?” she asked
irritably with an emphatic roll of her eyes.

“Not a threat, ma’am,” he replied with a fractional shake of
his large, square, head, “a guarantee.”

“You should probably get your captain on the line,” she
suggested with narrowed eyes, “if you have any desire to retain your job—let
alone your freedom.”

Jackson tensed and, for a moment, Masozi thought he would
make a preemptive move of some kind but a hatch behind him swung open with a
clang as it struck the nearby bulkhead. Through the hatch stepped a tall, thin
man who was at least seventy years old. He had a full, white beard and a pair
of cumbersome, external hearing devices mounted where his ears should have
been.

“What’s all this fuss about?” he demanded sharply as he moved
toward the gangway.

“Sorry, Captain,” Merchantman Jackson said without taking
his eyes from Masozi, “but the inspector here doesn’t have an appointment.”

“Oh?” the captain asked gruffly as he snatched the data pad
Jackson had checked earlier from the Merchantman’s belt. He scanned it for
several seconds before giving Masozi a hard look and demanding, “What’s your
name?”

“Hel—
“ she
began, but was spoken
over by the guard.

“ID says ‘Helena Pendergast’,” Jackson said smartly. “But
I’ve been to every port this side of the Leviathan Sea, and I’ve never heard of
her,” he said as his right hand went to the grip of his pistol.

The captain narrowed his eyes, and Masozi had the sudden
fear that she had fallen into some kind of elaborate trap which would see her body
consumed by the scrapers lingering a few feet beneath the surface of the frigid
water below.

“Ah, yes,” the captain exclaimed, causing both Jackson and
Masozi to jump enough to bring a look of irritation to both of their faces.
“Perkins—that would be, Harbormaster Westerbeke,” he added knowingly, “just
sent over a missive saying we could move the inspection up from this evening if
we were prepared. I approved the change in schedule but failed to update the
ship-wides.”

Jackson’s look of irritation intensified, but he relaxed as
he turned to the captain pointedly. “If I’m supposed to be in charge of
security here, sir, I need to be apprised of any such changes in a timely
manner,” he bit out.

“Quite so, quite so,” the captain agreed before gesturing
for Masozi to board. “Welcome to the
Esmerelda Empática
, Inspector,” he
said in an overt display of cordiality. “Sooner begun, sooner done.”

Masozi eyed Jackson, who had apparently already deemed her
beneath his notice as his eyes scanned the nearby docks methodically, and took
her first step onto the
Esmerelda Empática.

“I must apologize for my Chief of Security,” the captain
said after they were out of earshot and had begun to descend a series of
stairwells, “but I fear we can never be too careful when it comes to matters of
privacy. I pay him well to give would-be harassers a good stonewalling, and
he’s yet to fail me in that capacity.”

“He certainly makes an impression,” Masozi agreed, more than
slightly surprised at how the ship’s captain navigated the series of twists,
turns, stairs, and lowlying obstructions like they were not even there as they
moved toward the stern of the ship. He moved like a man half his age and, given
his obviously questionable connections, she doubted the source of his spryness was
a natural one.

“Indeed,” the captain agreed as they came to a large,
reinforced set of hydraulically-powered doors. “You could have gotten down here
via the ladders, but then you might fall and break something—and I’d hate to
try explaining that to our mutual friend,” he said with a wink. He slapped the
activator button beside the doors and they began to slide slowly open as the
large, metal shafts retracted into their respective cylinders. “Third port
stack, second from the top,” he gestured to the right side of the cargo hold.

She nodded by way of acknowledgment and made her way into
the cargo bay, but after just a few steps she got the distinct feeling
something was wrong. Masozi turned to see the captain’s eyes firmly locked onto
her butt, and she felt a pang of relieved irritation at discovering the source
of her unease.

He clucked his tongue wistfully as he tore his gaze from her
far-too exposed physique—which was essentially shrink-wrapped in the blue-black
bodyglove. “No matter how many years I live…it never gets old,” he sighed
before turning and making his way back to the stairwells. His chuckles echoed
through the hold until they grew so weak that the thrum of the various pieces
of machinery aboard the ship drowned them out.