Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (28 page)

“Those ‘childish notions’,” she said, her eyes flicking to
the clock and confirming that the time had, indeed, elapsed and the call would
have been automatically made to the nearest law enforcement responders, “are
the very ones which created your reason for existing,
Adjuster
.” The
title tasted like ash as it passed her lips, and she stood from the table slowly.
Jericho made to do likewise—with murder in her eyes as he did so. It was a look
with which she had become all-too-familiar during her career as an
Investigator.

“I see that I was wrong about you, Investigator…and that’s a
rarity for me. But you should have run while I was in the head,” Jericho said
coldly. “How far do you think you can get now that I know you’ll try to stop me
from accomplishing my mission? You’ve just become an obstacle—and I’ve made a
career out of removing those from my line of fire long before it’s time to pull
the trigger.”

“You’re wrong about that last bit,” she quipped, knowing
with certainty that she had already committed herself to what had to be done. “That’s
why I’m going to walk right out of here,” she replied confidently, “and you’re
not going to do a thing to stop me.”

Jericho’s lips twisted in a dark, bemused smirk, “And what
makes you think that?”

“Because if you don’t,” she said, meeting his piercing look
with one of her own just as the doors to the tavern opened and a quad of armed,
and armored, law enforcement officers entered the tavern and set their sights
on the two of them, “no one will make the Adjustment while you’re locked away
in the nearest detention facility.”

She began to back slowly away from him, and she saw the
cold-blooded assassin’s eyes flick back and forth between her and the
approaching police officers. “Clever girl,” he said with the barest hint of
approval as he straightened his posture, “but not as clever as you think; when
I get out I’m going to find you, Investigator. And when I do I promise we’ll
discuss this…betrayal at some length.”

The way he said those words made her blood run cold, but she
had already backed far enough away from the table that the quad of
fully-armored officers interdicted themselves between Jericho and herself.
“Jericho Bronson,” one of them said in a heavily-distorted voice through his
suit’s external speaker while the other three trained their weapons on Jericho,
“we have an outstanding warrant for your arrest. Come quietly and we won’t use
deadly force.”

Jericho tensed, causing the other guards to do likewise as a
trio of targeting lasers appeared on his chest, where they remained unwavering.
But then he relaxed and nodded as he placed his wrists together and held them
before himself, “I won’t resist.”

After they had placed him in restraints, two of the officers
frog-marched him out of the tavern under the supervision of the one Masozi
assumed was their commander. She was slightly surprised that they had mentioned
an outstanding warrant for his arrest, but Masozi guessed that a man in his
line of work made several enemies—enemies with longer-than-average memories.

The cold look he gave her before exiting the structure gave
her the chills, and the fourth officer approached and said, “You were the one
who sent the call?”

Masozi nodded. “I didn’t know there was a warrant out for
him,” she admitted truthfully, “I just saw what I thought was a concealed weapon…and
he was giving me the creeps.”

“You did the right thing, ma’am,” the officer said, and
Masozi thought that the officer’s voice sounded vaguely feminine through the
distortion. “We’ll just need you to come down for a statement so you can claim
the reward.”

“Reward?” she repeated blankly. “How much of a reward was
there?”

“It’s substantial, ma’am,” the officer replied. “But we can
discuss the particulars at the station.”

Masozi shook her head, knowing her rights afforded her the
ability to refuse since she had not participated in any wrong-doing. “I don’t
need a reward; I’m just glad to get someone like him off the streets.”

“Ma’am?” the officer pressed. “You’re saying you’d like to
waive the reward? It’s a life-changing amount of money, especially here on
Philippa.”

Masozi shook her head again. “I’d just consider it my civic
duty,” she replied, knowing it was truer than she could explain given the
circumstances.

The officer regarded her silently for several seconds before
shrugging, “If you’re willing to affirm that you waive your right to the reward
then you’re free to go.”

Masozi nodded quickly. “Of course; I hereby waive my right
to whatever reward had been issued for Jericho Bronson’s capture.” She knew
that was the proper verbiage, since she had accepted a handful of similar
statements during her time as an Investigator.

“Your statement has been recorded, Citizen,” the officer
said before nodding curtly, “have a pleasant day, ma’am.”

“You too,” Masozi replied unthinkingly as the officer turned
and left the tavern. As soon as the officer had left, Masozi sank down onto the
cushioned seat of the booth she had just been sharing with Jericho.

Her knees were quivering and her hands trembled while she
drank down the last of her mug’s contents. After several minutes, she had
gathered her wits enough that she stood from the table. In what seemed to be an
impossible turn of events, she had managed to neutralize the threat of the
nuclear device and also put Jericho behind bars. She wasn’t particularly happy about the
latter, but his insistence that no amount of collateral damage was too much had
put her over the top. She had read the
Goat file, and she had seen with her own two eyes just how badly Governor Keno had
abused the people who depended on her leadership to provide for them. She knew what needed to be done…and she knew
she was fast running out of time to do it.

She pulled her hat over her head and, after sealing the
attached mask to her face, Masozi closed her overcoat around her body and
exited the tavern before beginning the long hike back to the
Tyson
. Her entire adult life had been spent
attempting to restore balance, create order, and deliver justice. But by the Timent Electorum’s ‘Redeemed Lives’
metric, her entire decade-long career would only yield five hundred such units
of redemption, or justice, or balance, or whatever a person chose to call
them. And now, with Governor Keno’s
out-and-out atrocities committed against her own people in plain view, Masozi
knew she could accomplish something on the order of a thousand times that much
impact on the Virgin System’s populace by removing Keno from the equation permanently.

The Governor’s corruption had been allowed to fester for far
too long, and millions of lives had been unduly disrupted as a result. The scales of justice had been manipulated
against the people who depended on them for protection.

The time had come to make an Adjustment.

Masozi came to the edge of the crater where they had hidden
the
Neil deGrasse Tyson
and peered over the edge, relieved to find the
craft apparently undisturbed. She was surprised to see that its color, which
had originally been a glossy black, was now almost indistinguishable from that
of the surrounding, moss-covered rock.

She would have set up in a blind and observed the vessel for
a prolonged period, but time was against her. If Jericho had been right, even
if she hopped onto the hoverbike and made a max-speed burn for the Capitol City
Abaca, it would take no less than nine hours to reach it. That left just over a
day to implement whatever plan Jericho had set up—and she only hoped that she
would be able to decipher his plan in time to execute it.

So she made her way to the bottom of the crater where the
craft rested, and swiped her hand across the area of the hull which she thought
was the door. There was a hiss of air as the door opened before lowering itself
to the ground to form the boarding ramp.

Once inside the craft, Masozi checked to ensure that the
duffel bag was still in the closet, and it was. She carefully withdrew the bag
from the closet and opened it, revealing the same, heavy device she had seen
inside the concealed compartment which was disguised as a bench.

She took the bomb out of the duffel and gently laid it down
on the floor of the cabin, her heart racing as she did so. She then turned and
carefully opened the concealed compartment, and when it was open she placed the
bomb inside the honeycombed interior of the hidden box.

Masozi then closed the box and emptied the rest of the
duffel’s contents onto the floor of the craft. There was a pair of ID’s, one
for Jericho and one for Masozi, and she snorted derisively to see that their
false identities suggested the two of them were married. “You wish, you old
bastard,” she muttered as she took the pieces she would need and stowed them in
her overcoat’s inner pockets.

There was also a pair of pistols inside, and after a brief
hesitation, she took one and secured it to her bodyglove’s hip beneath the
overcoat. She could always abandon it as she neared the Capitol City, but
Philippa was known as a ‘wild frontier’ to the residents of Virgin; she would
rather have the gun and not need it than have the reverse be the case.

There was also some clothing inside the duffel bag, and
Masozi saw that hers was a two-piece outfit which would go neatly over her
bodyglove. So she removed the other articles she had worn since disembarking
the
Zhuge Liang
and placed the new pieces—a vest and a fairly tight,
knee-length skirt—over her bodyglove. There were a handful of credit chits
inside the vest, and they totaled nearly ten thousand credits in all—half a
month’s salary for an Investigator of Masozi’s experience and accomplishments.

The final item was a vehicle access key, and she picked it
up to examine it. There were two buttons, one of which clearly was meant to
activate the bike’s motivators while the other had the picture of a closed lock
on it. She had ridden as a passenger on several hoverbikes, and had even
operated one a former fling had owned. She had left him in the dust a few weeks
into the relationship because he seemed to care more about his bike than he did
about anything—or anyone—else, including her.

She pressed the second button and heard a low thrum outside,
and Masozi exited the craft via the ramp to find a hoverbike—remarkably similar
to, but clearly different from the same one Jericho had picked her up on in New
Lincoln—had been lowered from a concealed compartment along the craft’s
fuselage.

Masozi took a deep breath and activated the ramp’s
retraction sequence, causing the cabin door of the
Tyson
to fold back up
into the closed position. Masozi then threw her leg over the seat of the bike
and pressed the activation button of the key.

She was rewarded by a low-pitched thrum which vibrated her
thighs and groin just enough that she was aware of it, and she waited for the
bike’s warm-up cycle to conclude before carefully maneuvering it away from the
Neil
deGrasse Tyson
.

Once she was clear of the spacecraft, she twisted the manual
throttle and was rewarded by a measure of acceleration she had not entirely
expected as her head was snapped back. Her hands reflexively gripped the
handlebars, and she felt certain if she had been less athletic that she would
have failed to keep her hold of the vehicle’s handles.

She managed to keep hold of the handlebars as the bike
roared up and over the edge of the crater before leveling itself out and
rocketing across the relatively flat terrain at speeds which would have seen
her arrested within seconds if she had reached them inside New Lincoln’s
confines.

Masozi had memorized the basic topographical layout of
Philippa, so she set the most direct course she could for the Capitol City
before opening the throttle of the hoverbike up and feeling the impressive
power of the vehicle beneath her hurtle toward her destination at roughly four
hundred kilometers an hour. The faster she went, the higher the hoverbike
climbed; when she reached the vehicle’s maximum speed she had achieved an
altitude of nearly a hundred feet above the cratered moon’s surface.

She knew that she needed to do everything in her power to
stop Governor Keno—and not place any innocent civilians’ lives in danger when
she did.

After nearly nine hours of near-continuous riding—during
which time she only ever saw two other vehicles on the bike’s radar-like
display, neither of which came close enough for her to see visually—Masozi
pulled up at the edge of a truly massive crater. It was so large that, had she
not known it was there, she might not have seen it until she was well within
and Philippa’s horizon had been replaced by the crater’s edge in the far-off
distance.

The sun had still not come up, but Masozi knew that a
‘sunrise’ would not happen for at least another week while Philippa orbited
around Pacifica, and even when it did it would be unlike any sunrise she had
experienced on Virgin. That knowledge somehow made the lights of Abaca even
more striking.

While the Sense District where Tera St. Murray had operated
her brothel was wreathed in neon light, Abaca was filled with what seemed to be
massive searchlights. The industrial-strength beams stabbed upward and wandered
the deep, dark sky in seemingly random patterns, and there must have been
dozens of the most powerful ones whose beams disappeared into the black void of
Virgin’s space.

The city itself was a dull, yellow-white glow from her
position at the edge of the giant crater, and she took the pistol which had
been fastened to her hip. Despite her inclination to keep it for protection,
she knew it presented too great of a risk. She tossed it to the ground,
grateful she had not needed to use it, and sped off toward the city.

Carrying a concealed, unlicensed weapon in a major city was
an offense punishable by automatic imprisonment—and if that happened, Masozi
‘the terrorist’ would be discovered and she would almost certainly be handed
over to whatever power had pulled Stiglitz’s and Afolabi’s strings. She had all
but deduced that power was none other than Governor Keno…and possibly even more
powerful figures within the Virgin System’s government.

That same entity had stolen Masozi’s life from her and with
the accumulated evidence it wasn’t hard to conclude who the person wielding
that power was.

“I’m coming for you, Crissa,” she growled as she gunned the
throttle. She knew that the Governor wasn’t the sole author of the crime which
had seen Masozi nearly assassinated…but Governor Keno was most definitely
involved and, according to evidence which Masozi had personally vetted,
Philippa’s Governor had already wiped out tens of thousands – perhaps hundreds
of thousands—of lives under her cruel, utterly self-centered regime.

As Masozi slewed the hoverbike into a paid parking slot
outside the building Jericho’s keycard had indicated. Masozi wished she could
have taken the keycard, but she hadn’t thought of a way to do so that wouldn’t
have aroused his suspicion. She just had to trust that she could gain entry to
the apartment without it.

After receiving her receipt and change for a twenty three hour
parking pass—the standard ‘day’ cycle in Virgin, which had been adopted since a
moon colony like Philippa had too long of a rotational cycle to use in any
meaningful way for daily scheduling—and Masozi pulled the hoverbike into the
assigned slot before making her way to the lift system.

The keycard had indicated that the room was on the twelfth
floor of the complex’s ‘A’ building, so she made her way to the centralized
lift boarding area and found herself facing a security checkpoint.

The guard manning the checkpoint looked at her impassively,
and Masozi screwed up her courage as she approached the checkpoint—which was
surprisingly equipped with a simple weapon’s detector, making her thankful that
she had abandoned the pistol at the crater’s edge.

“Step through,” the guard instructed, and she did so. She
was relieved when the alarms didn’t go off, but the guard waved her over to his
desk while he opened up a link display built into the desk itself. She
approached the desk and the guard said, “You’re not recognized by the system.
Do you have a visitor’s pass?”

“No,” she replied too quickly, realizing that she had
all-but admitted she didn’t have any proper business there. She made a show of
fumbling around in her vest for the ID cards which had been in the duffel and
then produced the primary piece to the guard. “My…husband,” she said with a
pointed hesitation before making brief eye contact with the guard, “isn’t here
yet and I wanted to surprise him.”

The guard’s eyes narrowed as he ran the card through the
scanner, but he visibly relaxed before handing her the keycard. “Welcome, Mrs.
Davis,” he said before gesturing to one of the lifts, “
lift
number five will take you to your level. If you’d like, I can send up the
superintendent with you; it doesn’t look like your room’s been accessed in…two
years?” he said, his eyebrows rising as he did so.

“My husband travels extensively,” she lied, “so we don’t get
to see each other very often. When I heard he was planning on coming to Abaca,
I thought I’d stop in and surprise him.”

The guard nodded knowingly. “You should have a great view of
the festival from your apartment,” he said before briefly glancing up and down
her body with barely-concealed lust, “and your husband’s a very lucky man.”

Suppressing the urge to roll her eyes, Masozi instead
flashed a smile and placed her ID back in the vest before saying, “Thank you.”

“Any time,” the guard said, and after turning for the lift
Masozi could almost feel his slimy eyeballs all over her back-side. But it was
a small price to pay for having successfully navigated the checkpoint.

She stepped inside the lift he had indicated and it slowly
rose to the twelfth floor—which was apparently the top floor of the entire
structure—and she made her way to the unit designated on Jericho’s keycard.

Masozi then had a startling thought: if that keycard had
been on his person when he was arrested, it would be entirely possible that the
local law enforcement agencies would soon be alerted to that fact.

That meant she needed to conclude her business inside the
apartment as quickly as possible—which, in turn, meant that not having the
keycard would likely pose a problem.

Masozi approached the unit—number 1201—and examined it.
There was a standard, keycard slot built into the wall beside the door, and the
entire portal was otherwise featureless.

She tried to swipe her ID’s in front of the keycard reader,
but nothing happened after several such attempts. She looked up and down the
hallway—even considering a humiliating attempt at ‘persuading’ the guard at the
checkpoint to help her in some way—and her options began to limit themselves as
she silently ran through them.

The building didn’t appear to have any cameras in her part
of the hall, but she knew that cameras could be easily hidden from the naked
eye. It was possible that same, slimy guard was ogling her at that very moment.
The thought spurred her mind into overdrive, and she had just resigned herself
to the disgusting task of convincing that guard to help her when a speaker
beside the door—apparently concealed within the keycard reader—crackled to
life.

“Come on in,” she heard a voice say, and it sounded
suspiciously like Wladimir Benton’s. The door then swung gently open, and
Masozi gave serious consideration to fleeing right then and there.

But she steeled herself, knowing that if she had just been
trapped then it was inevitable that they would subdue—or kill—her if she tried
to flee. The walls were solid concrete, and there was no exit other than the
lift.

So she stepped inside the unlit apartment and reached around
for a light switch, but found none.

“Light?” she said meekly, just before the door closed behind
her and the entire room was plunged into darkness.

“Come on in,” Benton’s voice said again and Masozi felt her
hackles rise at the possibility of being murdered in that apartment, never to
be seen again. She had once worked a case where a body had remained in situ for
nearly three years before being discovered—and that discovery had been prompted
by the occupant having gone delinquent on her property tax bill for that same
period.

Masozi moved into the room slowly, her hands sweeping
blindly from side to side as she did so. She felt the short hallway end, and
she was just about to follow the rightward wall to see where it went when the
lights activated and she saw a pair of armored silhouettes near the far wall.