Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) (10 page)

Before Masozi could protest, the video feed shifted again.
It began showing the same footage as before when Agent Stiglitz murdered Tom,
the maintenance man, with little apparent effort.

But, to Masozi’s horror, Stiglitz’s image in the video had
been replaced with her own and she watched as ‘she’ murdered the maintenance
worker. The camera got a close-up of her face and even Masozi felt a chill run
down her spine at the cold, merciless look she saw in the false image’s eyes.

The feed flipped back to Afolabi at the podium, trying to
silence the cacophony of the press corps as they fought to get their questions
heard. “Let me make this as simple as possible,” the Chief of the NLIU said
with iron threaded through his voice. He gripped the edges of the podium and
swept the press with his steely gaze, “Investigator Masozi has shown to be
capable of anything—including sexual coercion, which is how we believe she was
able to gain access to the apartment building’s maintenance locker. She is to
be considered New Lincoln’s Public Enemy Number One: all armed units are
authorized to use deadly force when apprehending this fugitive. I’m going to
personally oversee this manhunt, so I’m afraid there will be no more time for
questions.”

With that, the feed went dark and Masozi felt her knees
begin to buckle. She steadied herself be leaning against the wall as a wave of
anxiety washed over her. A loud, crackling noise came from the middle of the
room and she looked dully toward the morbidly obese man lying on the bed.

“Looks to me like you’d best be settlin’ in for a little
cruise, Investigator,” he said in his maddeningly inconsistent accent and
dialect as he chewed loudly on something crunchy. He held up a plastic bag
filled with cheap, salted grain wafers called ‘Snap-itz,’ which she recognized
only from the perpetual adverts lining the city’s streets. “Snap-it?” he
offered cheerfully.

The pain in Jericho’s broken, left, arm had become nearly unbearable.
It was not that it would have physically prevented him from going about his
daily activities, but he knew that in order to execute his last New Lincoln
contract he would require a degree of composure that was problematic with a
broken arm.

But he had nearly run out of money after diverting the last
of the Cantwell fund to saving Investigator Masozi’s life—an investment which
Jericho dearly hoped would pay dividends, both in the near and not-so-near
futures.

A quick-knitting bone repair kit would have been easy to
purchase, and would only cost a fraction of the money he had saved from the
Cantwell contract. Spending that money to repair a wound—even a wound sustained
during the execution of a wholly separate contract—would have even been a defensible
expenditure if the issue was ever brought into the light.

But that was one of the many reasons Jericho kept his
contract funding far, far below the average T.E. estimate. It gave him greater
latitude for dispersing those funds, and on average his contracts cost only
thirty percent that of his fellow Adjusters. Too many Adjusters had fallen
victim to the trap of gathering more financial resources than a job required
and then pocketed the funds. While not exactly illegal, if deemed guilty of
this by his or her fellow Adjusters, it would make it essentially impossible to
receive the opportunity for future Adjustments.

“Hey there, handsome,” he heard a woman’s voice interrupt
his thoughts through the com-link built into his helmet. A small, familiar
image appeared at the edge of his helmet’s internal displays—displays which
monitored his hover-bike’s engine status, showed a three-dimensional overlay of
the cityscape and his location within it, and basically whatever else he
desired to call up. “I heard you have a booboo,” the image said as she laced
her fingers beneath her virtual chin and batted her eyes suggestively, “want me
to make it better?”

“I could use a bone-knitter, Eve,” he said shortly. He was
always discomforted by interacting with Benton’s carefully-constructed
‘companion,’ even though he knew he should view ‘her’ like he viewed any other
tool or device which could benefit him in the course of his duties.

“I might have something better…” she purred.

“Not now, Eve,” he snapped before taking a deep breath, “I
just need the knitter but I’m short on funds.”

“I could always ‘find’ one for you,” she said with a wink.
“It’d be our little secret.”

“No, Eve,” he replied through gritted teeth. He had, on
occasion, ‘acquired’ materials vital to his completion of a mission but he had
never forgiven himself for it. Once, he had been bleeding so profusely that he
had been forced to hold a pharmacist at gun-point to acquire the necessary
auto-suture kit and coagulants. He had never forgotten the look in the man’s eyes
as he pleaded on behalf of his three daughters’ futures, and he had promised
himself that he would never do that again.

“You’re no fun,” she pouted before sighing loudly, “I
suppose I could point you to a clinic I know of…”

“No,” he said sharply as he pulled the bike over to the side
of the road. He was finding it difficult to concentrate, and suspected that
diminished blood volume was playing a part in his mental status in addition to
the pain from his broken arm. “I can’t be logged into the system.”

Even covered her mouth with her dainty fingers and giggled
briefly. “No, no, silly,” she said playfully, “no
that
kind of clinic.
They don’t keep records where I’m sending you—at least, not for
humans
.”

He considered her offer and, in spite of his reservations,
nodded grudgingly. “Give me the coordinates.”

Eve’s image blew a kiss, causing a lip-shaped icon to leave
her fingers and move seamlessly over to his primary display. The disembodied
lips merged with the cityscape on a secondary display, and a path was then
clearly indicated on the virtual grid. While detouring to the indicated
destination would take him nearly an hour out of his way, he knew that he was
out of options. He still had time for his final contract even with the delay,
so he logged the path in his helmet’s data link.

“Thank you, Eve,” he said perfunctorily.

“Welcome, handsome,” she said with a wave. “Oh! I almost
forgot,” she said as she smacked her virtual forehead with her palm. “Big Daddy
Wladdy says…” she paused and took a cartoonishly deep breath. While she did,
her face distorted grotesquely until it was a large, flat-topped,
military-looking man’s with Benton’s voice which said, “
Don’t forget the
pasta, bro
!”

“Got it,” he said dryly as he gunned the bike’s motivators
and merged into the growing morning traffic.

Eve’s image shook its head vigorously, and the
military-looking man’s features quickly reformed into her usual face. “Good
hunting, gorgeous; just tell them I sent you!” she said in her usual, bubbly
manner before disappearing from the helmet’s display.

Much as the pixie-like program annoyed him, Jericho knew
that Benton was the best hacker in the system—and very probably beyond—and he
had apparently deemed Eve necessary to his continued operation. That meant
Jericho had learned to tolerate her…despite her programmed obnoxiousness.

Jericho stood before a rundown building on the far edge of
town—an area very near to the city limits, and one which had all the telltale
warning signs which most sane people obeyed by steering clear.

While he despised the notion of entering the premises—even
for the purpose of completing a mission—Jericho knew he had no choice in the
matter. His arm had swollen to half again its original
size,
and he feared that he might be bleeding internally. If he didn’t get it looked
at, and quickly, there was the very real danger of long-term damage to his
arm’s nerves.

So he knocked twice on the solid, sheet-metal door. A
low-cost security camera swung over to look at him as its telescopic lens
adjusted for a few seconds before apparently locking onto his image.

“Who you?” a garbled voice asked through an intercom built
into the doorjamb.
“We no trouble; license good.”

“I’m not an inspector,” Jericho said evenly as sweat began to
roll down his cheeks. The pain in his arm was getting difficult to ignore, and
he clenched his teeth as he fought to keep his voice steady as he said, “Eve
sent me.” It wasn’t as though he actually believed that ‘Eve’ was anything more
than a cleverly designed program which Benton used as a proxy to decrease his
odds of capture, but ‘she’ had told him to inform the building’s denizens that
she had directed him there.

There was silence for several seconds until the door’s crude
latch sprung open and the door swung slowly open.

Needing no further encouragement, Jericho stepped inside and
closed the door after he had done so, manually locking the latch as he did so.
It was bright inside, almost painfully so, but he had expected such given the
nature of the place.

A foul stench wafted into his nostrils and he moved further
into the building, knowing he had come to the right place after smelling the
putrid odor. The bright light was generated by synthetic indoor lights which
approximated a different band of light than Virgin’s primary put out, and that
light was feeding the seemingly endless, slick film of dark, grey, fungus which
covered every square millimeter of the building’s interior.

A short, fat creature waddled into view and Jericho nodded
his acknowledgment toward it, having expected to find precisely such a being.
The alien was not even vaguely humanoid, possessing six, half-meter long,
arachnid legs supporting a soft, meter long, egg-shaped, rubbery body which
seemed wildly at odds with the chitinous legs beneath.

Its species had no natural name of its own since they did
not communicate via sound. Instead, its kind bore an alphanumeric of
154-HR-658-T, which served to catalog its system of origin with which
Jericho—and likely the vast majority of humanity—was unfamiliar. Its species
was among the more recognizable nonhuman aliens in the Chimera Sector, since
their specialized biology was responsible for several organic alternatives to
materials which were traditionally produced mechanically.

In a uniquely human show of poor form coupled with dark
humor, people had taken to calling them ‘Poppers’ since, when exposed to
sources of heat which would generally be harmless to humans over short periods,
they would loudly explode. They were subterranean and therefore did not have a
set of traditional eyes, which was odd since even on their home world they had
foraged out of their subterranean dens to eat. Their source of food on that
distant world was the same fungus which now grew on the walls of the large, apparently
abandoned, building.

The creature’s front pair of legs turned upward as it reared
up slightly, exposing a crude vocalizing unit which allowed the creature to
‘speak’—albeit crudely. “Permits good; we have receipt for food,” it began in
protest, apparently still nervous of the possibility that Jericho was an
inspector of some kind. Poppers were notorious—some would say undeservedly
so—for digging up corpses and using them to feed their farmed fungus.

Like most aliens in the Imperium, the Poppers were significantly
less intelligent than humans—at least when using human-centric measures—but,
unlike the supposed majority of their fellow aliens, the Poppers were at least
intelligent enough to communicate meaningfully while generally abiding by human
laws.

“Eve sent me,” Jericho repeated. He had nothing against the
Poppers—and did his best to never repeat their unfortunately widespread ‘name’
outside the confines of his mind—but he was on a schedule. He held out his left
arm and peeled back the sleeve to reveal the swollen limb beneath.

The Popper moved forward and the trio of mandibles ringing
its triangular, toothless mouth clacked in anticipation. It moved to nearly
within reach and then
recoiled
a step or two before
reactivating its vocalizer, “Cracked endoskeleton…needs silk…Eve…we like Eve…we
trust Eve…smells like Hadden…Hadden good to us…”

To Jericho it sounded as though the creature was logically
working its way through his story, probably trying to justify the risk of
stepping closer to a human—even a wounded one. He did not begrudge the creature
its hesitance, and did his best to stand quietly while the alien came to a
conclusion.

The Popper’s mandibles peeled back and it ‘said,’ “You
break?”

Jericho’s brow furrowed. “Yes…it’s broken,” he said slowly, hoping
he had not wasted his time in coming to the creature’s putrid home.

“No,” the Popper said as it deliberately lifted a leg and
drew it through the film of fungus on the nearby wall, making a horrid,
screeching sound as it did so, “you break—or we break?”

Jericho finally understood what it meant. “I’ll do it,” he
said as he took out the late Captain Sasaki’s tanto—a weapon which he had
risked bringing with him through town, even though he had no license for it—and
sat down cross-legged on the cleanest patch of floor he could find.

The Popper moved forward and, as it did so, Jericho took a
breath and made a small incision with the razor-sharp tip of the blade. He knew
from experience that it would not hurt much initially, but it still surprised
him to see blood well up from the fresh cut without a commensurate degree of
pain. He cut a little deeper, and wider, for several seconds until the Popper
clacked its mandibles.

“Enough,” it said, and he set the tanto down on the floor
before using his free hand to clamp his brachial artery and slow the blood flow
to his now-opened arm.

The Popper moved forward and delicately inserted the
needle-sharp tips of its impressively steady, front legs into the ad hoc
surgical wound. It then gently prized the margins apart, and as it did so the
itching sensation Jericho felt on the wound itself was accompanied by a lance
of dull, aching pain as the broken bone moved beneath the knot of swollen
tissue surrounding it.

“Pain,” the Popper said simply as it continued to open the wound,
and Jericho took that to be the creature’s best attempt to provide some
semblance of bedside manner. Thankfully, it was finished with exposing the ends
of the bone fairly quickly, and Jericho watched with more than a small measure
of interest as the Popper’s mouth began to work furiously.

Its mandibles moved far more quickly than an ordinary human
could manage with any part of its body, and after a few seconds a thick, slimy
wad of bubbly material appeared in the Popper’s mouth.

It spat the wad into the wound, and the burning that
accompanied it was enough to make Jericho wince in pain.

“Pain,” the Popper said again, and Jericho couldn’t help
himself but snicker softly in spite of the growing discomfort. Thankfully, just
a few seconds later the pain in his arm had decreased significantly.

The Popper drew the margins of the wound further apart, and
Jericho concluded that the first wad of phlegmy substance had been an
anesthetic—and a surprisingly powerful one, at that—in addition to, hopefully,
having some powerful antibacterial properties.

The broken bone of his forearm was clearly visible when the
Popper had finished opening the wound, and it nimbly maneuvered the two pieces
of cleanly broken bone together using its legs and pinning the arm against Jericho’s
leg.

“Pain,” the Popper said, and Jericho braced himself just in
time to see the creature leaned forward and plunge its barbed mandibles into
the wound. Amazingly, he never once saw the mandibles touch the edges of his
wound as they deftly worked their way back and forth across the broken edges of
bone.