Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (9 page)

“Act like you’ve gotten some,” Masozi sniped under her
breath as she turned back to the cargo hold and made her way to the indicated
stack of containers. They were mostly cubical, and measured anywhere from three
meters on a side to ten meters, and the one she was to enter was of the latter
variety. Every container in the hold seemed to be covered in graffiti, but she
was certain she had identified the correct one.

She got to the base of the stack and circled it completely,
until concluding there was no apparent way to reach the perilously narrow ledge
formed by the protruding edge of the container below the one she meant to
enter.

But that was no real obstacle, as Masozi had long trained in
gymnastics, kickboxing, and even some urban obstacle coursework which had earned
her a handful of medals in her teens. Since reaching adulthood, she had
maintained her body with at least thirty hours of exercise each week, and it
was essentially the only thing she did when not working a case. The physical
activity always helped her clear her mind and focus on particularly troublesome
problems, so she knew she could scale the forty feet of irregular, metal
surfaces without too much difficulty.

She wrapped her fingers around a half-inch diameter pipe
running vertically along on the side of the lowest container, and tested the
grip her bodyglove’s attached ‘footwear’ provided. She was surprised to find it
behaved essentially as her own amateur rock-climbing gear had done when she had
competed locally in her youth, so she gave a few test steps before scampering
up the six meters of pipe on her way to the ledge some ten meters above where
the pipe made a ninety degree turn.

Masozi shimmied across the pipe for a few feet before
setting her feet beneath her and looking for a handhold above. There was a pair
of box-shaped, metal slots which apparently acted as guides for the locking
mechanisms some of the shipyards employed for transferring the heavy,
cumbersome containers. Without so much as a second thought, she launched
herself upward and reached out for the boxes, grabbing one neatly in each hand
and hauling herself up to a resting position with her feet perched on a series
of regular corrugations not far below the boxes.

She stopped and stretched her legs for a few seconds,
feeling a cramp threaten to seize control of her calf. After a brief rest, the
cramp dissipated and she sighted her next potential anchor point: another pipe,
this one slightly smaller in diameter than the first one, and she gave a
critical look to the brackets holding it to the surface of the container. From
the size of them, the brackets should have been able to hold her weight easily
but there was significant corrosion present on several of them. Still, she
decided to trust they would hold, and she leapt up to grab the pipe at the
furthest edge of her leap’s grip range.

The pipe held at first, but as she was adjusting her grip to
shimmy along the pipe to a nearby half-ladder welded to the surface below her
target ledge, the brackets to her left gave out and the pipe snapped on the far
end.

She risked a look at the ground as she tried to find
something to grab in order to break the potentially lethal fall, but thankfully
the broken end of pipe did not fall more than a few inches. Masozi looked over
to the damaged end and saw that the pipe was actually a conduit, and several
thick electrical wires ran inside it. Those wires, judging by the size of them,
would easily hold her weight.

Taking several deep, calming breaths, she carefully shimmied
over to the ladder and hauled herself up to the second rung. It was a small
matter to scale the ladder to the narrow ledge above, and when she had done so
she took another series of deep, cleansing breaths as she peered over the edge
and realized that there was little doubt she would have been crippled or killed
had she fallen when the pipe broke.

She placed her hand against the door, which still had a
government-mandated clamp locking the door in place. That clamp showed the date
it had been applied, as well as the itinerary of the container in question.

“Finally, some answers,” she muttered as she leaned in to
get a better look at the surprisingly grimy-looking clamp in order to read the
container’s destination. The clamp quite clearly read that container was bound
for Aegis Port City which, for all intents and purposes, was Virgin’s beating
heart. It appeared that the container was scheduled to be offloaded in Aegis in
three weeks’ time, which meant that the
Esmerelda Empática
would need to
leave sometime in the next few days in order to meet that appointment. Aegis
was on the other side of the Leviathan Sea, and the journey took no less than
seventeen days for a liner of the
Esmerelda
’s design. But the weather
had already turned for the season, and a few extra days would be required to
ensure a punctual arrival.

Masozi, feeling rather less vulnerable for the first time in
twelve hours since she was finally armed with some measure of useful
information, made a fist and rapped her knuckles against the door panel.
Silence was her only reply for several minutes, so she knocked again. But
again, she received no indication that there was anyone—or anything—inside the
container.

Then there was the whirr of what sounded like an autocannon
spinning up, and she turned in more than a little bit of alarm to see a
military-grade weapon pop out of concealment and train itself on her.

“Whatever it is we don’t want any,” a woman’s voice said
sharply, her voice seeming to originate from the weapon itself. “Go sell it
somewhere else, bake shop.”

“Bake shop?” Masozi repeated, uncertain if she should feel
insulted.

The ‘gun’ sighed, and Masozi thought she recognized the
voice when it said, “You know the list, babe: sweet cheeks, sugar buns, honey
pie, baby cakes, butter face,
etc.
ad nauseam. Let’s just cut to the chase and
throw the whole bake shop at you in one go,” the woman said cheerfully. “Saves
everyone time, no?”

The autocannon suddenly spun up, and a red light began to
flash on its side—a light which indicated the weapon’s safeties had been
disengaged.

“Now, like I said, wannabe-pastry-chef,” the woman said, her
voice turning serious, “make like a bad sector and frag!”

Just as Masozi was contemplating a leap to the nearby stack
of containers in the hope of escaping the autocannon’s firing arc, the weapon’s
safety light returned to yellow and the weapon cycled down.

“Eve, will you please stop harassin’ the woman?” a man’s
strangely accented voice came over the same speaker the ‘gun’ had spoken
through. “My apologies,” he said after what sounded like a huff from the woman,
“but I expected you to knock, Investigator.”

“I
did
knock,” Masozi said irritably. A second later
there was a soft, clanging sound from the floor below, and she looked to see
the very ladder she had climbed the final leg of her ascent with had extended
and now reached the floor. She suppressed a growl at having made such a
dangerous, unnecessary, ascent.

“It’s all good, girl,” the man chuckled in a rich, baritone
voice. “Please, step into my parlor—I’d ask you to take off yo’ shoes but it
doesn’t look like that’ll be a problem.”

The panel before her deformed slightly, and a narrow section
of metal recessed and slid to the side. It was almost large enough for her to
enter without turning sideways, but she did so anyway and saw the interior of
the cuboidal container was poorly illuminated.

“Sorry about that,” the man’s voice came over a nearby
speaker as the hidden door closed behind her, “I’ll get the lights.”

A string of soft, bluish panels on the floor and ceiling
began to glow until the interior was lit well enough that Masozi could see her
way. The lighted panels each formed a large arrow, and without needing to be
urged she followed the arrows deeper within the container.

After climbing a set of staircases, she came to a closed
door. It was difficult to tell with such poor visibility, but it seemed the
interior of the container was as Spartan as one might expect. There were
several crates of differing sizes stacked neatly inside the container, and she
thought she felt a not-insignificant amount of heat being generated on what she
came to think of as the ‘second floor’ of the container as she passed the
locked door to that level.

“Mind your step,” the man’s voice came from a speaker near
the third, final floor’s door before it slid slowly open, “I didn’t have time
to tidy up.”

She took a careful step into the room and an odd odor wafted
into her nostrils. It wasn’t unpleasant as such, but it was unfamiliar and it
put her even more on her guard.

“My apologies, girl,” the man’s baritone voice said, but
this time it was coming from inside the room and not through a speaker, “I
forget myself. Let me get the normal lights.”

The room was filed with a fluorescent, white, light which
grew in its intensity until Masozi had to shield her eyes so they could adjust.
When they had done so, she lowered her hand and took a look at the chamber

It was something like twenty feet on a side, and had only a
few pieces which might be considered ‘furniture’ by any reasonable person.
There was a pair of cots against the far wall, as well as what looked like a
work bench on the right wall.

The left wall was covered, from floor to ceiling, with
dormant display screens. Masozi counted one hundred thirty six individual displays,
but they were far from the most remarkable thing in the room.

At the chamber’s center, there was a large, contoured
bed-like piece of furniture. It had several tanks attached to the ‘headboard,’
as well as numerous wires and tubes piping their way up and into a
hemispherical array of displays suspended directly above the bed.

And lying on that bed was what had to be the largest human
being Masozi had ever laid eyes on.

His skin was sickly pale, and fully exposed for
all the
world to see. He had to weigh well over half a ton,
although he was likely no taller than Masozi. His body was swollen so badly he
barely resembled a human being, with rolls upon rolls of blubbery tissue
spreading across the contoured bed.

“Come on in, girl,” he beckoned with an inviting gesture as
his pink-irised eyes never left the array of screens above him. “I’d get up,
but…you know,” he said with a chuckle that saw the mass of flesh that was his
body jiggle
as though with a life of its own.

“Who are you?” Masozi asked as she took a few steps forward.
It became increasingly clear to her that much of the bed’s clearly complicated
technology was designed to prolong the man’s life, as each of his limbs had a
handful of tubes—and even some wires—running into access ports built into his
skin. “Oh,” she said when she remembered the item Jericho had given her,
“Je…that is, our friend, wanted me to give this to you.”

“It’s a’ight; he actually
is
named Jericho, and I
be
Wladimir,” he said, his voice taking on the former, odd
accent with which Masozi was completely unfamiliar. He accepted the small
parcel from her in his thick, surprisingly smooth-skinned fingers, and began to
open it before tilting his many-chinned head toward the wall. “’Fraid I got
somethin’ to show you, babe.”

The wall comprised of a hundred thirty six individual
display screens lit up in unison, and a series of images began to populate the
screens individually. She moved closer so she could examine them and felt her
stomach tighten at what she saw.

Agent Hugo Stiglitz, wearing his agency’s all-black, armored
bodyglove, entered her apartment building through a service entrance after he
appeared to successfully override the building’s security protocols. That was
less than surprising, given the fact that he was an independent agent of the
Interplanetary Investigative Unit.

He’s
supposedly
an IIU Agent
, she reminded
herself,
for all I know
, he’s
the terrorist
.

The video replayed itself in a continuous loop, so she looked
at another one and saw Agent Stiglitz kill Tom—the maintenance man who had been
pathetically bad in bed—with a sequence of far-too-quick maneuvers that
apparently saw the man’s neck broken while the Agent seemed to hardly break his
stride.

Yet another monitor showed Stiglitz tampering with the
building’s gas feeds, and somehow redirecting some of the gas into the air
cycling system.

Still another monitor showed a newsfeed with a video clip
showing the explosion at her apartment building. The clip had apparently been
recorded via the neighboring building’s continuously operating security
cameras.

All of the timestamps looked correct to her, and with each
new screen she felt her choler rise.

Then the images disappeared, only to be replaced by a live
news feed which spread across the entire bank of monitors, turning them into
one, massive, display like the marquees on Main Street.

She failed to suppress a gasp as she saw her latest
photo—taken just a few weeks earlier at her annual after-dark-ambulation permit’s
renewal—with the caption:
Disgruntled NLIU Investigator wanted for
questioning in connection to recent string of murders, as well as morning
bombing of residential complex with 39 confirmed fatalities.
Considered
Armed and Dangerous.

Before she could wrap her brain around what she was
seeing—or even begin to doubt the veracity of the images she was being
shown—the screen morphed to show Chief Investigator Afolabi standing at the
NLIU official press podium.

“Let me assure the residents of our fair city,” Afolabi said
as he gesticulated emphatically, “that we are doing everything in our power to
apprehend this dangerous fugitive. Investigator Masozi had a troubled record at
the NLIU, and had recently been suspended pending an inquest for professional misconduct.
It is my deepest regret that she was able to take out her frustrations on the
very people who depended on her for protection. She has betrayed our trust,” he
said darkly, “and I intend to bring her to justice for that betrayal by any
means necessary.”