Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (17 page)

Jericho reflexively raised his left arm and activated the
needle-launcher, resulting in a hiss of gas bursting from the tubular device.
The tiny missile sailed toward its target, adjusting its course slightly to
bend its arc mid-air and lodge itself into the exposed neck of the guardsman.
The guard barely reacted to the attack before going rigid and collapsing to the
floor of his viewing nest.

Jericho lost nearly half a stride while neutralizing the
guardsman, which meant he would remain in the autocannons’ overlapping fields
of fire for an extra quarter of a second—a potentially deadly increase in time.

His feet churned beneath his body as he silently counted
down the seconds before coming around the corner of the barn and seeing a
relatively exposed patch of ground between himself and the safe house. The
autocannons—which were concealed within a pair of ancient, rusted farm
vehicles—were still down, but Jericho knew that if they managed to acquire him
before he left their fields of fire he would never even know they had killed
him.

But he had left all doubt back with his high-powered cannon
two hours before. His feet pumped up and down like the pistons of a
finely-tuned machine, devouring the dry ground between himself and his quarry
as he saw—with more than a twinge of relief—that the third guard he needed to
pass by did not appear to be looking in his direction.

He was halfway across the open patch of ground when his
silent countdown reach three seconds remaining before the autocannons came
online. His legs were heavier than he had expected, and his lungs burned so
badly they felt ready to burst in his chest, but he knew he could make the safe
house before missing a step.

With two seconds left, he realized he would remain in the
autocannons’ overlapping fields of fire for nearly two seconds. He briefly
chastised himself for overthinking the approach, but Jericho had no place for
guilt or remorse anywhere in his being.

With one second left he tripped over an unseen rock and
concluded that there was
an eighty
percent likelihood
that the chip of granite had just cost him his life. He managed to keep his
feet beneath him, but his stumbling gait cost him nearly another second.

But Jericho refused to die defeated, so he pressed on and
actually heard the clicking of the nearest autocannon as it cycled through its
restart sequence. Though he pressed on toward the safe house, he felt confident
that those clicks would be the last sounds he ever heard.

Time seemed to slow as each painful, laborious step brought
him closer to the tiny alcove built into the house which he had chosen as his
insertion point. He knew that neither autocannon would see him if he made it to
the alcove, but even if he managed to do so he had only a few seconds before
the detection grid would come online—and the window appeared to be closed.

In what Jericho would later realize was the first moment of
clarity he had ever truly experienced, he made the final handful of steps
toward the alcove before rolling to a stop against the concrete foundation of
the house.

He lay there for just a moment before springing to his feet
and leaping as high in the air as he could while attempting to grab the narrow
lip of the window’s sill. Thankfully, his fingertips gained purchase on the
first try and he was able to haul himself up to the small portal.

Jericho risked a glance inside the window and saw that it
led into an empty, unlit toilet. He reached down to his belt and drew the
tanto, which he then used to pry the top-hinged window open. Though it was
locked, he managed to break that lock with the tanto as his silent countdown
continued. He had just three seconds before the detection field came online and
sent up an automatic alarm when it detected him hanging from the outside of the
house.

With the window swung open, he hauled himself up and felt
his left arm give slightly as he did so. But he had to focus on the task at
hand or he would fail to gain entry to the house, so he ignored the pain in his
arm and used sheer, brute, strength to haul himself into the lavatory as the
window swung closed behind him.

Jericho collapsed to the floor and cradled his arm against
his chest briefly before realizing that it had broken once again, likely
aggravating the injury he originally sustained entering the window of Angelo’s
flat in New Lincoln.

“I should have just knocked,” he muttered subvocally. That
he had re-broken the arm was actually something of a surprise, since most long
bones were more or less structurally sound after a couple weeks of healing
time. But he knew he was far from a young man, and was actually grateful that
his increasingly fragile body had withstood as much punishment as he had put it
through recently.

After collecting himself, he removed the needle-launcher
from his left and unslung the short, pistol-gripped shotgun from its holster
across his back and attached it to the front of the bandolier so he could draw
it more quickly. But he needed to remain undetected, or else he could kiss any
chance of escape goodbye—and he had no intention of dying during this
particular Adjustment—so he would need to depend largely on Sasaki’s tanto and
the tranquilizers he had brought for the mission.

Jericho listened at the lavatory’s door and heard nothing,
and then he tested the door’s handle and found it unlocked. He swung it open
and it was thankfully quiet as it opened wide enough for him to pass through.
He was in a short hallway which had a stairwell leading up to the second floor
at the far end, and appeared to adjoin both a kitchen and a parlor.

He padded softly toward the parlor-side of the hall and kept
his remaining needle-launcher aimed at the kitchen until verifying it was
empty, after which he turned his focus toward the parlor. The first of the
three guards was sitting in a chair beside a traditional fireplace, and he
appeared to be reading some sort of e-zine on a data pad.

The light of the room would create no shadows, and the
curtains on the windows would prevent anyone not intently looking inside from
seeing him, so Jericho carefully moved behind the man before tapping him on the
shoulder.

The guard looked up blankly before Jericho unleashed a
crushing overhand right which easily broke the man’s nose, knocking him out
cold. Jericho had only the one needle-launcher syringe remaining, and he wanted
to keep it in reserve for one of the other two remaining guards inside the
house. But he withdrew one of his tranquilizer syringes from the small satchel
and injected the man in his left brachial vein, ensuring the drugs circulated
throughout his system quickly enough to prevent him from regaining
consciousness.

Jericho then proceeded to the staircase, knowing that
although he was a highly-trained operative, all of it had been just a little
too easy. The overlapping fields of the autocannons; the relatively open lanes
of approach provided by the guards posted outside; and a less-than-alert
guardsman inside the safe house itself were all major red flags which further convinced
him that not everything he saw was what it appeared.

But he also knew that it was only a matter of time before
the tranquilized guard outside would be discovered, and when that happened the
compound would become a death trap.

So he softly padded up the stairs, the pain in his left arm
growing with each passing moment. He needed to secure the target and get some
answers soon, or his only option would be killing General Pemberton before
getting those answers.

He had suspected the only way to enter the safe house would
be after a localized electro-magnetic pulse, and that had proven correct just a
few minutes earlier. Jericho had therefore left his enhanced vision gear with
the cannon, and was forced to rely on his own senses rather than high-tech
gear—which
was
how he preferred to operate anyway.

Jericho made it to the landing and saw a glimpse of movement
from a nearby open door. Ducking back down into the staircase, he saw a woman
emerge from the room. She was wearing all-black, loose-fitting clothing and had
medium-length, blond hair. Her physique was less a soldier’s and more akin to a
ballet dancer’s, and she seemed unaware of his presence as she moved down the
second floor’s hallway toward the door at the far end.

Jericho moved quickly up onto the second floor’s landing and
followed her down the hallway for several steps before she turned abruptly and
caught sight of him.

Her face twisted in alarm, but before she could scream he
snapped a short, tight uppercut into her chin and her eyes rolled back into her
head as she collapsed. Jericho deftly caught her slumping body before she fell
to the floor and gently lowered her to the carpeted floor.

While scanning the hallway and its five adjoining doors, he
produced another tranquilizer-filled syringe and injected her in the jugular
vein. He gave her the full dose since all it would do was keep her
incapacitated for another handful of hours, and then carried her limp body to
the room she had left a few seconds earlier.

If he was to get answers then Jericho would probably require
some quiet time with Pemberton, so the less evidence he left of his presence
the better his chances were to get that time.

Just as he set her down on the bed, Jericho heard a door
open at the end of the second floor’s hallway. He quickly made his way back to
the doorway and heard a man’s voice say, “Sasha? Are you coming?”

The man’s footfalls approached the room Jericho was in, and
Jericho took up a position behind the door and cocked his needle-launcher in
preparation.

“Sasha…
don’t
make me come in there
after you,” he said playfully, and Jericho’s jaw clenched in a mixture of
anticipation and disappointment as the man neared the doorway. Any trained
professional would have never made the mistake of continuing to give away his
position…unless—

Jericho ducked down just as that thought occurred to him and
was spared decapitation as a blade sliced cleanly through the wall behind him.
The blade passed easily through the heavy, wooden door and Jericho rolled
across the doorway to get a bead on his surprisingly adept adversary.

After seeing the man’s weapon slice so effortlessly through
the wall and door, Jericho knew it had a monomolecular edge and that it would
slice through his armor as though it wasn’t even there. Even blocking with
Sasaki’s tanto would provide little more than a fractional chance of deflecting
a single attack before it would be torn apart by the amazing weapon. He had one
shot to put a tranquilizer in the man’s body, and as his foe came into view he
fired the needle-launcher at the man’s chest.

The drug-laden missile struck home on the right side of the
man’s chest, and Jericho saw that he was huge—easily two meters tall and a
hundred twenty kilos of knotted musculature.

The tranquilizer’s electric jolt hit the man with enough
force to put a half-ton bovine down, but amazingly he managed to keep his feet
beneath him as he staggered backward. Jericho launched himself at the
powerfully-built man, knowing that if his adversary could endure the electrical
surge then the tranquilizer that followed would likely prove to be even less
effective.

Just as the electrical surge dissipated, Jericho slammed
into the man’s body and managed to get inside the guard of his weapon as he did
so. Jericho drove the other man through the hip-high bannister which framed the
staircase, and the two men’s combined bulk reduced the wooden bannister to
splinters as they crashed into the stairs below.

The larger man actually managed to twist his body during the
brief fall and force Jericho to absorb as much of the impact as he did. The
wind was nearly knocked from Jericho’s lungs when he felt a pair of sharp,
cracking pains in his flank. He had suffered broken ribs before, and he knew
the sensation for what it was.

The brutally powerful man brought his meter-long blade
around in a one-handed grip and drove its tip toward Jericho’s neck. It was all
Jericho could do to keep the man’s single arm at bay using both of his own, and
he silently cursed his aging body’s fragility and swore to have a complete
physical if he survived the Adjustment—an outcome which was proving to be
increasingly questionable.

The larger man—whose movements seemed jerky and
uncoordinated while still retaining incredible, brute, strength—drove his knee
into Jericho’s hip causing his leg to explode in pain. The powerful man
followed up with a pair of crushing knees to Jericho’s abdomen, and whatever
wind the fall had failed to take from him vanished after the second, punishing,
knee to his gut.

Knowing that he was outmatched—and nearly out of time, as
the monomolecular sword’s tip came perilously close to his throat—Jericho
arched his body upward with everything he could muster and drove his hips into
his foe’s torso. The tip of the sword wavered briefly, and Jericho adjusted his
grip before twisting and forcing the blade into the wooden staircase.

The weapon drove into the wood steps all the way to its
box-shaped hilt, and a brief look of surprise came over the other man’s face as
he moved to recover—but he was unable to do so before Jericho bared his teeth
and savagely clamped them onto the man’s neck below his left ear. Jericho was
rewarded with a powerful spray of blood to flood around—and inside—his mouth.

Knowing he had just exposed himself to the same tranquilizer
which had incapacitated three of the guards—and possessing no enhancements
which would help his system fight that drug’s effects, unlike his current
adversary—Jericho released the man’s wrist and reached to his belt for Sasaki’s
tanto while spitting as much of the metallic-tasting connective tissue from his
mouth as he could.

The larger man thrashed violently and managed to buck
Jericho off, sending him tumbling down the stairs. Jericho recovered his posture
just before landing at the base of the stairs, and even then he was barely able
to avoid the deadly, sweeping arc of the man’s monomolecular blade. The weapon
sliced silently through the space which Jericho had barely managed to evacuate
as he backpedaled down the hallway, moving inexorably toward the same lavatory
through which he had entered the house.