Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (40 page)

Thankfully his work suit protected him from the incredibly
cold material. Jericho activated his wrist link and called up the list of
components which Eve had indicated, and sighted one of the numbered racks
nearby so he crawled to it and examined the housing.

He carefully took a miniature multi-tool from his belt and
grumbled, “I hate these blasted things.” He flipped through its built-in
options until coming to the proper, pentagonal screwdriver head he would need
to open the rack. Once he had undone the screws, he carefully pulled the panel
away and saw a nearly indecipherable mess of cables, wires, plugs, chips, and
myriad other devices the purposes of which he couldn’t even begin to guess.

Jericho quickly sighted the first component—a cubical device
connected to the primary housing via two large, X-shaped clamps. He checked the
procedure for removing those clamps on his link’s screen, and very carefully
followed the instructions while being careful not to touch anything else inside
the apparatus.

The six-inch cube tilted forward after its clamps had been
released, and Jericho took it from the housing and stuffed it into the duffel
bag. He then moved down to another large housing shaped like a squat, vertical
cylinder, finding the second device’s markings listed on the link’s readout.

There were six items in all that he needed to retrieve, and
he actually managed to remove the first five without any real difficulty. The
process required twenty two minutes to complete, but when he came to the last
item he looked down at his link to confirm what it was, as well as how to
remove it.

He noted with a small measure of surprise that there was a
new addendum to the instructions on removing the cache, and he quickly realized
those instructions explained how to access any potentially hidden messages
inside the cache which Benton may have left.

“I wish you were with me, Eve,” he muttered as he opened the
panel to reveal Eve’s tertiary cache housing. This was easily the largest
component of the six, and Jericho knew it would weigh at least a hundred kilos.
It was spherical with a narrow gap along its equatorial line, and was suspended
within the housing via vertical supports connected at its poles.

Jericho accessed the small program attached to the addendum
file in his wrist link and withdrew a thin, fiber-optic hard line from the
wrist link’s housing. He then threaded that line through the chorus of wires
near the southern support rod. There was a small diagnostic plug located there,
and the wrist link’s hard line was thankfully compatible with it, so he
inserted the line and executed the program.

The wrist link’s display flickered and switched off
unexpectedly, causing Jericho’s stomach to twist into knots. “Come on,” he
growled, gently tapping the link to no effect. “Stupid thing,” he muttered as
he felt the deck begin to vibrate ever so slightly beneath his feet, “I don’t
have time for this.”

He waited for thirty five seconds before deciding that the
link would require a hard reboot, and made to unfasten it from his wrist when
the display sprung back to life and Benton’s voice came over his earpiece, “I’m
gonna go ‘head and assume this is Jericho, my
elder-brother-from-another-mother. If it
ain’t
that geezer-ass
has-been,” he quipped, “then I’ma go ahead and assume it’s Masozi, in which
case: sup girl, how you been? If I’m
still
wrong then y’all are about to
get fuckin’ popsicled, feel me?”

The door to the chamber slammed shut with a clang, and
Jericho saw the pipes feeding the super-cooled gas into the room increase their
output at least tenfold.

“Now, if you
is
who you s’posed to be,” Benton’s
voice continued, “
y’all
know that annoyin’-ass shit
Jericho likes to spit to newbies? I’ll make it simple for ya,” he said, and the
wrist link’s screen switched to a virtual keyboard, “just pipe in that fogey’s
favorite fuckin’ food and we’ll be good.”

Jericho knew that with so much super-cooled gas flooding
into the room he had only a few minutes before even his suit would fail to
protect him. He was already chilled far below the normal human range, and was
afraid hypothermia would set in soon.

He punched in the three word phrase as he fought to keep his
finger steady and his teeth from chattering. When he had finished he pressed
the input icon and the gas ceased streaming into the room.

“My dawg,” Benton’s voice returned. “A’ight, so I ain’t got
time to personalize this shit; this is either Jericho or Masozi so since you’re
hearin’ this I’m already iced and Eve’s fallin’ into the atmosphere. Since
you’re here in the tertiary cache, you’re tryin’ to stop that from
happening…unfortunately, ain’t nothin’ can be done to keep this bitch from an
epic burn.”

Jericho saw the clamps disengage from the tertiary cache
module and he quickly took hold of it before placing it inside the duffel bag
and closing the double zippers.

“Of course,” Benton continued after a few seconds of
silence, “y’all know I be too much man to let somethin’ like that kill my
girl—let alone Virgin. I wrote a pretty simple program that I never got ‘round
to testin’ because, well, it’s risky. I only give it a seventy percent chance
to succeed completely, but we be lookin’ at a ninety seven percent chance the
virus will neutralize all but one of these platforms. Still, that’s better than
anything else I can think of by a light year so here’s what you’ve gotta do.”

The wrist link’s screen flipped through a sequence of
images, and Jericho realized it was showing him the same room where Eve’s
‘progenitor program’ had fried the Imperial operatives.

“This console here,” Benton’s voice said as a big, red
circle was virtually drawn around one of the seemingly identical consoles, “
be
the one you’ll need. Just get there, upload my virus, and
keep them fingers crossed. I’m afraid we can’t do nothin’ about it if the
program don’t
work; we’ll only have about ten seconds before
the other platforms receive the virus-modified instructions to their fire
control systems. E.E.V. Five,” Benton continued, and an orbital perspective
showing the six E.E.V
.’s relative positions
appeared
with one of them flashing yellow, “is my best guess to reject the commands; I
haven’t been able to get much work done on it due to some kinda damage to its
comm. transmitters, feel me? Now if this be Jericho, I wanna hear it loud and
proud, bro.”

Jericho knew all too well what the other man had wanted him
to say since the first job they had worked together, but he had steadfastly
refused to do so. It seemed the big guy would get his wish in the end, however,
since Jericho suspected the voice inputs of his link would now require him to
say those exact words. Sighing shortly, Jericho muttered under his breath,
“You’re the man, Benton.”

“Louder, bitch!” Benton’s recording snapped, apparently
having accessed Jericho’s earpiece and its audio pickup to check the volume of
the desired phrase.

Jericho snickered as he took a breath and repeated, in a hard,
significantly louder voice, “You’re the man, Benton!”

“That’s what I thought,” Benton’s recorded voice quipped
smugly. “Have a good life, y’all; and be sure to keep my baby safe, ok?
There’s
more of me in her than most bigs ever give their
shorties. Peace out, bitches!”

The wrist link reverted to its former readout and Jericho
crawled back toward the hatch, relieved to find it had already been unlocked.
He exited the computer core and began to crawl through the tunnel. He was
halfway down the tunnel when his earpiece crackled to life.

“…richo, are you there?” he heard Eve’s voice ask with
obvious worry.

“I’m here, Eve,” he replied, “
where
are you?”

“The
Tyson
’s holding position on the far side of the
E.E.V.,” she said quickly. “Did you get my components?”

“Every last one,” Jericho said as he came to the end of the
tunnel and paused before exiting. “How many visitors do we have?”

“I’ve adjusted the
Tyson
’s sensors and am able to
read at least eight new life-signs inside the station,” she replied. “I have a
couple of moves I can make to deal with them, but even if they go off perfectly
that will still leave three of them for you—and they’re all armed. You should
get to the nearest airlock immediately.”

“I have to get to that chamber you showed me in the record,”
Jericho said with a shake of his head.
“The place where
you—no, where your progenitor,” he corrected, “killed the Imperial
technicians.”

“So Benton did leave us a message?” she asked hopefully.

“He did,” Jericho agreed, “and all I have to do is get to
one of those consoles, upload a virus, and we’ll have done everything we can.
Can you make a secure connection with the
Zhuge Liang
?”

“Lemme check, babe,” she replied curtly before the audio
feed went dead, and Jericho waited for half a minute until her voice returned,
“yep; I’ve got a point-to-point right now but we’ll lose line of sight in
thirty seconds.”

“Download the message from Benton in my wrist link and send
it to them immediately,” Jericho said quickly. “It shows a priority target
among the six
E.E.V.’s
; Benton thinks there’s about a
good chance that it will fire its crust-busters as soon as I upload the virus.”

“Downloading,” she replied promptly before adding, “file’s
downloaded. I’m firing it over to the
Kongming
.”

Jericho was surprised to hear Eve refer to the
Zhuge
Liang
by its human-given nickname, but he couldn’t waste time asking her
about her word choice. “Send it as many times as you can to make sure they get
the entire message,” he added, “and when you’re done with that give me a breakdown
on where these new friends of ours are.”

“You got it, sugar,” she said. Several seconds passed and
she said, “The entire message was sent seven times, and the operative graphic
was transmitted eighty nine times; there’s a ninety nine point nine-to-the-seventeenth-decimal
probability they got the whole thing. I’m downloading my latest updates on the
hostile’s locations now, but you have to understand my sensors are pretty weak
on this thing and we’re well within the platform’s jamming field—“

“That’s fine, Eve,” Jericho cut her off, “just send me what
you’ve got.”

“Right, sorry about that, babe,” she said apologetically,
“your link should be populated now. But if you’re ready to go, give me twenty
seconds to clear out as many of them as I can.”

“How are you going to do that?” he asked warily.

He heard her giggle before she replied knowingly, “I’ve got
a few tricks up my skirt.”

“Ok…go ahead and make your moves,” he said after considering
the matter. Without body armor, there was little chance of Jericho surviving a
shootout with eight of them. He could take one or two before the others even
knew what was happening, but after that it would just be a game of
marksmanship. And while Jericho was an expert marksman, he knew it would
essentially be a game of dice.

“You got it,” she said hungrily. Just then a short,
multi-armed maintenance bot went scurrying past the mouth of Jericho’s access
tube using mag-treads to skim along the floor of the corridor. “Scutters,
march
!” she cried as though she was a general directing her
troops from a hilltop.

Not long after that, Jericho saw flashes of light signaling
weapons fire and heard a few unfamiliar reports as the lights of the E.E.V.’s
corridor dimmed and then went out altogether.

“Eve?” Jericho asked with mounting trepidation.

“Hang on, babe,” she replied with a grunt, “almost got ‘em.”

There was another series of flashes, this one much more
rapid and sustained, and then the lights in the corridor returned to their
previous luminosity.

“You can come out now,” she declared, her voice heavily
laden with static once again. “You should have a clear path to the Control
Nexus now; I’m reading three life signs inside and from the look of things out
here, they’ve already gotten control of the E.E.V.’s warhead launch protocols.”

“How long do we have?” he asked as he set off at a mag-boot
hindered jog. As he rounded the first corner, he came to a human corpse with a
maintenance bot dragging it through the zero gravity
corridor
.
Jericho allowed the bot to pass before asking, “How did those little
maintenance bots kill them?”

Eve giggled. “I reprogrammed their target recognition
databases so they’d think the humans were sections of depolarized power
conduit,” she replied innocently. “It’s amazing how little current a human body
can withstand if the potential is right.”

Jericho came to another junction and followed the indicated
path. “Remind me never to cross you,” he grumbled.

“Smart man,” Eve quipped as Jericho came to the final
doorway.

For the rest of
this novella, come over and join the
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Afterword:
First I would like to thank you for reading this book! I

understand that there is a lot of chaff to sort through on the indie e-book scene, and I genuinely appreciate that you took the time to finish this particular offering!

Second I would like to thank Mr. Christopher G. Nuttall for giving me the opportunity to write in this shared universe of his, and I sincerely hope I was able to present a story which was interesting and engaging, but at the very least, was a little bit of fun.

I have a planned trilogy set for this particular story, and I’ll begin writing book two sometime later this year. This particular novel

took me about twenty five days to get into rough draft form, which is really good for anyone not named Chris Nuttall (seriously…he’s a beast when it comes to word production!). I imagine the second

novel would be produced on a similar timeline as soon as I finish up a few other projects and get back around to it.

I thought about writing up a big essay on defense against tyranny, but I think I might have just done that with the previous ~124k words…

So I’ll spare you the sermonizing—this time—and instead say that I hope you head over to our
Facebook page
and check out the novella. I’m

hoping to produce a few more short stories/novellas to put up there, and if this story appeals to fans of the IC universe, I suppose I could work up another storyline or two…*wink*

Again, I seriously appreciate your taking the time to read this book!

~Caleb