The flavors exploded through his mouth and seemed to even light his teeth on fire with the powerful concoction of oils and spices. “Wow…” he said as he loudly chewed a mouthful of food—and while Masozi looked on resentfully, “that is the best damned taco I’ve ever had.”
The team was assembled in the Zhuge Liang’s conference room adjoining the bridge. Masozi was still fuming about missing out on the opportunity to get some payback against her old boss, Chief Afolabi—who had apparently aligned himself with Mayor Cantwell’s Vice Mayor during a late bid for the second most powerful position in New Lincoln.
The idea that he had used the public approval garnered from his supposedly successful manhunt for Masozi—one which Benton had fabricated a scene which had depicted her death in a rundown area of Virgin’s primary spaceport—to even try to ascend to the Vice Mayor’s office was enough to make her sick with anger. She actually felt as though her stomach would split open whenever she thought about it, which had been a near-constant condition for the last four hours.
“Ok,” she said as she forced thoughts of Afolabi from her mind, “you’re saying the plan is for you to take Shu back to Virgin while I go to Rationem with Eve?”
“That’s the long and short of it,” Jericho agreed. “I’ve got a few connections to make back in Virgin, anyway; Shu can help with some of what I need, but we’re going to need Tera St. Murray’s particular skillset for what I’m planning.”
“What about President Blanco?” she asked. “In the last few hours we haven’t brought up his…” she hesitated when the word ‘Adjustment’ nearly passed her lips, opting instead for a different word, “case. How can we prepare to deal with him if we’re off jumping through the tribunal’s hoops?”
“Ms. St. Murray will help in that regard, as well,” Jericho assured her, though she still felt anything but assured. “The truth is that, while President Blanco’s Adjustment is the primary goal we need to keep in mind, we’re going to need to focus on the jobs ahead of us without distraction or we won’t complete them in time. If we fail to satisfy the tribunal’s little test, I doubt we’ll even make it out of whatever systems we happen to be in when the deadline elapses.”
“They’re that dangerous?” Masozi asked disbelievingly. The Zhuge Liang had stood up to a full-frontal assault authored by the most powerful warship in the Chimera Sector, the Alexander, and had emerged with relatively little damage while inflicting a crippling blow against the other, larger ship. She had difficulty believing that they would be less than safe while aboard the small-but-powerful warship.
“I’ll tell you three stories, and you can decide for yourself,” Jericho said patiently. “Let’s start with Russo: six years ago, a businessman-turned-member-of-parliament on New Britain was found to have manipulated the verbiage in an inter-System trade treaty for his company’s benefit. His company profited while its competitors found themselves caught in a three month window during which time their fundamental practices were slowed to a snail’s pace as government agencies issued cease-and-desist orders against them until they could satisfy the fine-print-language he had cleverly included. Nearly forty thousand jobs went out-of-system as a result, and these were manufacturing jobs which paid nearly double the average wage. Anyway,” he said as Masozi rolled her eyes at the history lesson, “long story short, the businessman in question fled to Far Point since he had established permanent residence there some years earlier. Russo was waiting for him in a pristine, Imperial-tech gunship just beyond the sovereign border of Far Point’s space, and he executed the Adjustment via torpedo.”
“Ok,” Masozi shrugged her shoulders indifferently, “so he’s got a gunship—we’ve got a warship that stood in against the Alexander.”
“True enough,” Jericho allowed. “So let’s talk about Newman: he once—quite famously, at least among our circles—Adjusted a planetary governor with nothing but a phone call.”
Masozi blinked. “What do you mean?” she pressed when Jericho made no attempt to explain further. “He called a professional assassin in to do the work for him?”
“Nope,” Jericho shook his head deliberately, “he called the Governor at his house.”
Masozi arched an eyebrow. “He called the Governor’s residence, you mean…was there a bomb or something in the Governor’s desk that went off when the call connected?”
“Nope,” Jericho repeated in that insufferably patronizing tone of his, “the phone call lasted precisely forty three seconds, and it was between Newman and the Governor. After the call ended, the Governor—who had already laundered his ill-gotten gains, secured his family’s safety at an out-system location, and was preparing to board a courier ship which would take him to that same location just a few hours later—cranked the temperature in the residence up to maximum, undid his belt, cinched it around his neck, and hung himself from a three hundred year old chandelier. His body remained there for six days before being discovered; he had already dismissed his attendants from service under the pretext of granting them extra vacation time, so it wasn’t until a neighbor noticed the horrid smell that anyone investigated.” Even Masozi was impressed by this particular tale, and Jericho waited a few seconds before adding, “I’m told that smell, owed to his body’s decomposition occurring more rapidly at the sauna-like temperatures, was one which even the coroner’s assistant declared she would never forget.”
“What did he say?” Masozi asked, intrigued in spite of her desire not to feed Jericho’s ego by playing along.
“No one knows,” Jericho shrugged. “But if Newman’s story isn’t enough to convince you about how dangerous these people are, let’s talk about Lady Jessica. She was born the third child of the most prestigious family on New Britain. When her elder sister—who was the rightful heir to the family fortune—died while trying to subdue an angry mob formed over some civil rights protests, her elder brother took control of their family’s many business interests. Chief among those interests were the starship construction facilities in orbit of New Britain Prime, and he began to habitually cross the lines of propriety expected of New Britain’s corporate elite. Just a few years after assuming leadership of their family’s many corporate entities, her brother made statements which were taken as direct threats against New Britain’s elected officials if they did not acquiesce to several demands he made on behalf of his corporation. The demands were petty, and would have amounted to little more than mild tax breaks, and this was apparently the last straw for Lady Jessica.”
“What did she do?” Masozi asked archly, still unable to ratify the notion that Lady Jessica could have genuinely deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as the other two Adjusters—or even in the same breath as Jericho—but finding something vaguely familiar about the story.
“Put bluntly, she seduced the second highest-ranking commander of New Britain’s System Defense Fleet, Admiral Cornwallis,” he explained, and that same look she had seen in his visage during the tribunal flashed across Jericho’s features. This time, however, he allowed the expression to linger for several seconds before continuing, “She convinced him that, while firmly in the darker end of the ‘legal gray area’ of the law, he would be justified in executing a series of ad hoc inspections on her family’s holdings. She even provided him with access codes which would deactivate several of the corporate headquarters’ defenses in the all-too-likely event that her brother should refuse to comply with the inspection requests. Admiral Cornwallis smashed through the corporation’s defenses and destroyed her brother’s corporate flagship while her brother was still aboard it after a fierce, but brief naval battle erupted over their home world.”
“She sounds like a common seductress,” Masozi snorted, “nothing more. What good would she be without someone else’s army to manipulate?”
“Funny you should ask,” Jericho grinned, “because during the press conference where Admiral Cornwallis was making his official statements following the battle’s conclusion, Lady Jessica drew a wire-type m
onomolecular blade from concealment—which had been made to look like an elaborate hairpin—and cut down his six personal guards in less than three seconds before removing his head and placing it neatly on the podium.” Jericho snickered, “All of it happened before the first drop of the Admiral’s blood had hit the ground.”
Remembering where she had heard this particular story before, Masozi thought one part didn’t make sense. “That was supposed to have happened nearly a century ago,” she said, cocking her head dubiously.
“Eighty one years, to be precise,” Jericho nodded. “She surrendered herself there at the podium after producing the Mark of Adjustment which she had just executed against Admiral Cornwallis, and became something of a cultural celebrity for a few decades.”
“How was it a sanctioned Adjustment?” Masozi asked, now thoroughly impressed with the apparently century-old woman after learning her true identity. “The Admiral had been operating within the gray area, hadn’t he?”
“That’s the thing with Adjustments,” Jericho said pointedly, “just because something might technically be legal doesn’t mean the voters will approve of it. And the threshold for Tyrannis Adjustments is considerably lower than it is for Infectus Adjustments; to Adjust someone of Cornwallis’ stature, in accordance with Infectus rules, he would have needed to accrue several thousand RL before an Adjustment would be instigated. But for Tyrannis Adjustments, the threshold is only a fraction of that. That she set him up and was prepared to act on the people’s behalf doesn’t really factor into it from our side of things, and she was well within her rights to execute the duly-instigated Adjustment on him.”
“I thought she went to prison,” Masozi said after a moment’s consideration, realizing there was clearly more to Lady Jessica than met the eye.
“She did,” Jericho agreed, “after willingly surrendering herself, she was placed in a maximum security facility while her case was reviewed at the highest levels of New Britain’s judicial system. It was eventually decided that her main crime had been one of entrapment to commit illegal acts. The courts decided that the blame should fall at the Admiral’s feet, and that Cornwallis should have done his due diligence. The official opinions of New Britain’s highest magistrates unanimously agreed that there was nothing wrong with her having manipulated him to do what he did, but that he had allowed himself to be manipulated was a crime worthy of punishment. Cornwallis’ Adjustment was reviewed by a tribunal not unlike the one we just sat through, and they found that he had indeed abused his power on the basis of several important technicalities which he had ignored. Had he observed them, he would have been required to submit the operation to the one member of the SDF who ranked higher than he did, and then that Admiral would have been granted primacy in the case’s public profile.” Jericho shook his head contemptuously, “It wasn’t lust or stupidity that cost Admiral Cornwallis his life; it was simple, naked ambition. He saw the situation as an opportunity to leapfrog his superiors in both prestige and position, and his failure to fill out all the necessary paperwork and include his actual superior in the process made his actions tyrannical—in the view of the voters and the tribunal.”
“Didn’t she serve something like thirty years?” Shu asked, interrupting the back-and-forth for the first time in the meeting.
“Thirty two years in an eight by ten isolation cell,” Jericho nodded. “Eventually, her planet’s people started a public petition to have her released on the condition that she would serve their interests for the rest of her life. Given the choice between prison and public service,” Jericho grinned appreciatively, “it took her four years to eventually decide on the latter. She’s been a jack-of-all-trades, or a troubleshooter of sorts, for New Britain ever since—and, as an aside, she’s probably nearly as heavily augmented as Stiglitz was.”
“What was her family name?” Masozi asked after being unable to remember that particular detail.
“It was stricken from their planet’s records, so she dropped it as well,” Jericho replied. “She quite famously tried to surrender the noble title of ‘Lady’ several times before her people actually attached a motion to a bill in Parliament which prohibited her from doing so. So now she’s known only by her title and first name.”
“Ok,” Masozi relented, “the tribunal members are all impressive. Do you actually think they’d kill us for failing to satisfy this,” she waved a hand at the data slate at the center of the table, “list of Adjustments?”
“They’re clearly divided along more than one set of ideologies,” Jericho mused, drumming his fingers thoughtfully. “Russo voted to have us killed so the whole matter could be put to bed, but he was the only one who seemed amenable to our qualifications to execute the Blanco Adjustment.”
“I still can’t believe you ate his tacos,” Masozi said, knowing that the mouth-watering smell the food had given off had very nearly caused her to relent and take a bit for herself. “If he wanted us dead, wouldn’t his poisoning of us be more effective than putting the matter to a committee vote again somewhere down the line?”
“It’s not, to borrow a phrase, proper for his idiom,” Jericho explained. “He’s direct to the point of being offensively blunt, and has no love for conniving and backstabbing.”
“You know this how?” Masozi challenged.
Jericho nodded approvingly, “Hadden assembled dossiers on every Adjuster within spitting distance of the 100,000 RL mark—dossiers which contained complete psychological profiles based on publicly- and privately-gathered data.”
Masozi scowled, “I think I could guess who constructed those profiles.”
“I think you could,” he agreed. “That Russo voted to have us spaced seconds after the tribunal began was less confrontational than it might at first appear. He knew that Lady Jessica values the rule of law more than nearly anything else, so she wouldn’t have voted to execute us before a thorough examination of the pertinent facts could be made. If anything,” Jericho narrowed his eyes in thought, “Russo was trying to send us another message by voting the way he did…but I’m not quite sure what that second message was.”
“What about Newman?” Masozi asked, more curious about him than either of the other two tribunal members.
“Unfortunately,” Jericho sighed, “we had incomplete information on him when I constructed those psych profiles. He’s clearly duplicitous, and a master information broker, but there was literally nothing on him prior to his twenty third year.”
“What do we know?” Masozi asked, her mind falling back into the familiar Investigator’s patterns which she had employed for so many years.
“His official records indicate he was born on Rationem,” Jericho replied, “and his genetic profile seems to support that particular claim. He immigrated to Kirin in his late teens and has never had a single run-in with the legal system at any level. It’s not that he erased the records,” Jericho said, holding up a halting hand when Masozi opened her mouth to suggest precisely that, “which would have left some traces; it’s that he’s never even been present at a single traffic checkpoint. The only times he’s ever been publicly photographed in the last decade is at Kirin’s spaceport when he comes and goes from Kirin Prime.”
“What about Far Point’s surveillance records?” she asked. “Doesn’t it have pretty tight security?”
“Extremely tight,” Shu said bitterly. “I’d need fifty terahertz of processing power, operating on senary architecture in order to even have a chance at cracking their centralized data storage systems.”
“I have no idea what that means,” Masozi said irritably.
“Neither do I,” Jericho said, “but why don’t you get with the ship’s quartermaster and see if she can put something along those lines together for you before we get back.”
Masozi gave Jericho a strained look, “You want to crack Far Point’s data storage?”
“I want the option available if it turns out we need it,” Jericho said evenly before turning to the black-haired operator. �
��Can you do it, Shu?”
“If you can give me twenty minutes at a hard line,” Shu nodded confidently, “I can get you in. I’ve broken into military archives with defensive systems more powerful by an order of magnitude; this would only take time.”
“Good,” Jericho nodded. “Which brings us to your half of the portfolio,” he said, turning toward Masozi. “I think Eve should be present for this, Adjuster.”
Masozi was reluctant to include Eve, since doing so essentially made Eve’s program increasingly unstable and she had yet to do a proper round of maintenance with her as Eve had requested. Masozi was far from a tech expert, and having Eve place the responsibility—to say nothing of the trust—in her hands for performing maintenance on her digital ‘health,’ for lack of a better term, was a little overwhelming.
“I’d really prefer not to,” she said hesitantly.
“You’re going to need her as your operator, Adjuster,” Jericho said sternly, “we don’t have the luxury of allowing personality conflicts to dictate our actions at this stage in the game. She’ll be your right-hand—and probably even more than that, according to your report from the Keno Adjustment on Eve’s overall capabilities. Much as I have my own reservations about her, she’s going to need to be in this briefing.”
Masozi knew he was right, so she held back a sigh as she accessed a console built into the conference table. She called up the activation sequence for Eve’s com-link, which was located near her hardware. That hardware was now stored deep within the Zhuge Liang, and was completely disconnected from the rest of the ship. Without Masozi physically collecting Eve’s mobile hardware—which was a metal cylinder a foot long that weight nearly twenty kilos—Eve would only be able to interface via audio/video protocols similar to those used in most com-links.
Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Chimera Adjustment, Book Two (Imperium Cicernus 5) Page 8