“The V-SDF mobilized not long after you left aboard the Zhuge Liang,” the other woman replied as they moved toward the stern of the cramped shuttle. There were only four seats in the cramped cockpit, with the pilot and co-pilot occupying one each, and Tera St. Murray clearly having occupied the other. “Martial law was declared on Philippa, predictably, but rather less predictably was the fact that all major port cities on Virginia—or, Virgin Prime, if you will—were also placed under the same effective restrictions. Of course,” she added as they entered the sternward cargo compartment of the small shuttle, “the authorities wish to ensure the citizenry understands that these restrictions are for the populace’s safety and with society’s best interests in mind.”
“They always do,” Shu spat disdainfully, and Jericho found himself nodding in agreement as he opened the first duffel bag to examine its contents.
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure?” Tera St. Murray said, arching an eyebrow expectantly toward Jericho after giving Shu a brief, appraising look.
“You’d have remembered it if you had,” Shu quipped with a wry grin, “I’m unforgettable when it comes to pleasure.”
“Now, now, ladies,” Jericho said sternly, though in truth he enjoyed the prospect of seeing them unsheathe their claws on each other. “Tera St. Murray, this is Shu—who at this moment is the best operator I have ever worked with.”
“Well,” Shu said sourly, “the best that’s still alive, anyway.”
Jericho said nothing, but turned to Shu and said, “Shu, this is Tera St. Murray. She’s an Adjuster, like us, but her true talents appear to be in free media exchange.”
“An underground uplinker…then you must be from Philippa?” Shu said with a hint of approval as she nodded. “I’m glad you got out in time.”
“Predictably, I share your approval of that particular turn of events,” Ms. St. Murray said before gesturing to the duffel bags—the first of which Jericho had nearly finished inspecting. “These packages were retrieved precisely as you requested; no one but myself and my pilots have been within ten meters of them since they were retrieved.”
“Thank you,” Jericho said, finding every article within the first bag that he had expected to find. “This looks to be in order.”
“You indicated you would require my services,” St. Murray said leadingly, “but if you already have an operator, I fail to see how I can best serve our mutual goals.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk with you about,” Jericho explained, “but I needed it to be a face-to-face conversation.”
“I’m listening,” she said, her eyes narrowing slightly.
“Shu,” Jericho said, pointing to the duffel bag he had just inspected, “put that on while I talk with Ms. St. Murray.”
“What is it?” Shu asked after pulling out a body-glove with several metal grommets pressed through what looked, at a glance, like extraneous folds of material.
Jericho chuckled, “It’s our ticket to the surface.”
A look of recognition came over Shu’s face and, though he knew of her peculiar fear of heights, she swallowed hard and nodded as she began to work her way out of her current outer layer of clothing.
While she did so, Jericho turned to Tera St. Murray. “There are a few things I’ve been thinking about in the last few days that don’t add up,” he explained. “I need you to use your skills to gather as much intel as you can get on the items contained on this list,” he said, producing a data storage crystal and handing it to her. “I’ll be adding more items in the next few days via the method described in the first file,” he said after she accepted the crystal, “but that should be enough to get you started.”
She took a data pad from its holster at her waist and plugged the crystal into an adapter which she deftly retrieved from a pocket near her left breast. She then attached the adaptor to the data pad and scanned the contents for a few seconds before nodding, “Give me two days.”
Jericho felt like pushing her to get it done faster, but he knew that people like Tera St. Murray were unlikely to respond well to that kind of pressure. So he took a different tack, “I’m hoping to be done with these Adjustments in the week; if I am, I’ll need you to come with me and bring whatever portable resources you think might help collect and collate data in other star systems. We’ll need to run at least one more intensive search before you break down your network, though.”
Her mouth drew into a tight line before she nodded, “Understood.”
“How long until we’re in position?” Jericho asked.
“One hour, three minutes, twenty four seconds,” St. Murray replied promptly.
“That’s awfully precise,” Jericho said as he began unfastening his overcoat in preparation for donning the contents of the second duffel beside the nearly-dressed Shu.
St. Murray quirked an eyebrow, as though offended, and said, “The details are everything—as any successful Adjuster knows.”
He chuckled, “True enough.”
“I can’t believe you’ve talked me into this,” Shu said as she opened a pill pack and popped another small, yellow tablet into her mouth—her third in the last thirty minutes.
“Relax, Shu,” Jericho said as he performed a last-minute check of her suit. “Didn’t you ever want to be a superhero when you were a kid?”
“I wanted to be a princess when I was a kid,” she fired back after stowing the small pill pouch into a hip pocket on the yellow-colored suit. “I wanted to have horses I didn’t have to actually ride; host tea parties where no one came so I wouldn’t have to deal with all the drama; contemplate rainbows while handsome princes fought each other for me; and cupcakes—I wanted to eat lots and lots of cupcakes,” she said pointedly, her words coming faster and faster as she spoke. “I also wanted every weekend to be my birthday so that I could do whatever I wanted and not have to clean up afterward—”
“Thirty seconds until drop point,” the pilot’s static-laden voice came over the intercom near the shuttle’s side door. “Sealing off the cockpit now.”
The door leading to the cockpit closed with a clang, causing Shu to jump nearly six inches off the ground in surprise. Jericho placed a hand on her shoulder and said, “It’s ok, Shu.”
“It is very much the opposite of ‘ok,’ Jericho,” she snapped fiercely, the tone of her voice at nearly comical odds with her petite frame and entirely pleasant-looking features. “I don’t even climb stairs unless I have to, and now I’m about to do this? I can’t…I can’t!”
“Yes you can,” Jericho said patiently as he produced a tether from his suit’s belt and surreptitiously attached it to a metal ring just above her slender butt, “and, more importantly, you will.”
“I know a dozen people on Virgin who can do what you need,” she shook her head as her nerves appeared to be getting the better of her. “I’ll give you their contact information and a personal reference,” she said in a pleading tone as he fastened her helmet to her head, “just don’t make me do this. Please, Jericho; don’t make me do this!”
“Shu,” he said after finishing with her helmet and reaching up to the manual unlocking mechanism on the inside of the door, “you’re going to be fine. Just keep your legs straight and your eyes on me; the suit does just about all the work for you.”
Before she could protest, he gave the door a hard shove with his right hand—feeling a sharp spasm run down his forearm as his ringers refused to relinquish their grip on the handle. The brief spasm very nearly cost him his balance as the door slammed open with his fingers briefly curled around the latch, but he managed to regain his balance by leaning back from the now-open hatch.
The roar of air throughout the cabin drowned out whatever protests Shu may have been making, and Jericho reached back to grip Shu by the shoulder with his good hand. She struggled, but he gripped her tightly and fell, back-first, out of the doorway while giving her body a hard tug.
The shuttle executed a hard roll as they exited its fuselage, and Jer
icho lost his grip on Shu almost as soon as they cleared the craft’s metal body. The shuttle leveled off and banked hard as Shu tumbled head-over-feet above him.
Jericho extended his arms and legs, causing the wing suit’s extra flaps of material to brake against the air. His own descent quickly slowed, and Shu’s tumbling body fell past him as he clicked a button built into the palm of his left glove.
“Relax, Shu,” he said in a soothing tone after activating the helmet-to-helmet link, though he knew she likely failed to register his words as her panicked movements continued. “Just push your arms and legs out, Shu,” Jericho said as she plummeted past him—trailing a long cord with a mini-chute on the end which provided just enough drag to let her eventually right her alignment.
“I’m going to die!” she screamed, and he could hear her hyperventilating. “I’m going to die—help me!”
Jericho leveled his body out nearly fifty meters above her, and saw a puffy white cloud below them which they would no doubt pass through in a few seconds. He toyed with the idea of trying to grab onto her before they entered the cloud, but decided against it as he continued to brake his own fall with subtle manipulations of his posture, “Just place your hands and feet as far from your body as you can.”
“I can’t—I can’t,” she gasped between rapid breaths.
“Yes you can,” he said firmly, “just pretend you’re making snow angels like you did as a kid.”
“There wasn’t any snow where I grew up, you son of a bitch!” she snapped, and for a brief moment before her body entered the cloud, he thought he saw her posture stiffen enough to brake against its inexorable descent.
“That’s good, Shu,” he said, glad that her conscious mind was working well enough to process his previous words. “Just keep doing that,” he said as he, too, entered the cloud. Just a few seconds later they emerged and he saw that she was now more or less controlled in her descent. The chute-cord, which had been meticulously crafted to prevent it from catching on her body or helmet, had kept her posture face-down as it needed to be.
“I can’t do this,” she panted, but to Jericho’s mind she was already doing everything she needed.
“You are doing this, Shu,” he said calmly. “Now listen to me: there’s an orange ring near your left hip. You should be able to see it just by tucking your chin.”
Her head bobbed down and she nodded frantically, “I see it—I see it.”
“Reach down and pull it,” he urged, “it will release your guide-chute.”
“Why would I do that?!” she asked, anger warring with fear in her voice.
“Because if you don’t, your real parachute won’t open in time—and I’ll need to find a new operator,” he explained dryly. He knew the guide-chute was designed to release automatically, assuming everything went off according to specifications, but he never trusted a machine when a human could do the work his or herself. “Just pull it with your right arm; you’ll start to tumble a bit, but all you have to do is splay your arms out again and the suit will level off.”
The ground, in one of nature’s most convincing illusions, seemed to be rushing up toward them. He knew they had only another minute and fifteen seconds before their low-altitude chutes would open automatically, and he never trusted his life to a machine unless there was no other choice.
Besides, it would be good to see if Shu could get her nerves under control since that particular ability might serve several uses in the coming days, weeks, and—if they failed to properly Adjust President Blanco—even years.
She reached down and fumbled with the ring before finally getting a hold of it just as her body went into an awkward somersault. She succeeded in pulling the cord, prompting the guide chute to fly away. Jericho tucked his arms and legs in as he allowed his body to fall toward her own at a much faster rate. Her removal of her guide chute had increased her rate of descent by enough that he had to nearly free-fall, headfirst, toward her in order to provide support in the event she needed it.
“Good work,” he said evenly, “now keep your eyes on that lake below us.”
“What lake?” she asked tremulously, but to her credit her body remained in a good posture as she looked left and right until finding it directly beneath her. In fairness, the lake’s surface looked grey and very much unlike how a native to a planet like Virgin Prime—or Virginia, to a particular segment of counterculture with which Jericho had more than a few ideas in common—would expect it to look with varying hues of blue on the surface.
“Just breathe in and out, Shu,” Jericho said encouragingly, “we’re almost there.”
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said as Jericho pulled up into a position alongside her so she could see him.
“I can,” Jericho said easily as his helmet’s altimeter showed they were no more than fifteen seconds from auto-deployment of their chutes’ automatic deployment. “Now when your chute opens in about ten seconds you need to tuck your chin; the whiplash might make you bite your tongue off if you’re not careful.”
“I don’t think we can be friends after this, Jericho,” Shu said angrily.
“Just tuck your chin,” he repeated as his lips parted in a toothy grin. He had set her chute to open twenty seconds before his, just in case she needed help deploying her chute—or in case his chute would be needed for both of them.
She tucked her chin and, thankfully, her chute deployed right on schedule. Breathing a sigh of relief, he quickly went to pull on the cord by his right hip and was spared an anxiety-laden descent to the lake’s surface when his own chute opened and broke his descent.
“Good work,” he said after his own chute opened. “Now all we can hope for is a water landing; otherwise I might be carrying you to our ride out of here.”
Less than an hour later, after successfully landing in the water—though far closer to the shore than Jericho would have preferred—they came to an old, dilapidated-looking cabin built on a hill overlooking the lake which had been their landing site.
Shu’s nerves had cost them about ten minutes on the shore of the lake as she had gone through the various stages of emotional shock—including several physical assaults against his person for which he more or less forgave her—and she had eventually gathered her wits just as he’d hoped she would. After checking the duffel he had strapped to his chest during their jump from the shuttle, Shu had been satisfied that none of the equipment she’d brought was damaged but Jericho had insisted on keeping it stowed for the time being.
“What is this place?” Shu asked as they stepped up onto the porch of the wooden building.
“What does it look like?” Jericho asked in surprise. “A run-down cabin by the lake.”
“Oh, come on,” Shu said irritably, “you’re the top Adjuster in Virgin now; don’t tell me you don’t have some secret, underground lair nearby with this pathetic-looking place serving as a secret entrance.”
He looked at the cabin pointedly before shrugging, “Sorry to disappoint you; it’s just a cabin. Sometimes things are precisely as they appear.”
“And sometimes that’s exactly what us peons are meant to think,” she quipped.
Jericho reached up behind the gutter and felt along the contours of the aluminum fascia board before finding what he was looking for. His hand came back down with a pair of keys on a key-ring in it, and he unlocked the front door with the first key before gesturing for Shu to enter, “Why don’t you see for yourself?”
With a skeptical look on her face, the diminutive woman moved through the portal and took in the cabin’s meager interior after just a few seconds. “Ok,” she said after a moment, “if this is just a run-down cabin, why did we come here?”
Ignoring her question, he gestured to the miniature kitchen before going there himself to retrieve a sealed bottle of electrolyte-replenishment solution and offering one to her. “If you’re thirsty, now’s the time; we won’t be stopping again until it’s time to go to work.”
She grudgingly
accepted the drink, twisted off the top, and made a sour face after swallowing a mouthful. “How can you drink this stuff?”
Jericho had already finished downing his entire bottle of solution and was opening a water bottle. “It serves its purpose,” he replied, “it’s not supposed to taste good.”
Squinting at it, Shu managed to finish the admittedly foul-tasting liquid before he handed her a bottle of water to wash it down with.
He knelt down and opened a cupboard, from which he retrieved a small first aid kit. It was far from all-inclusive, but it would at least give them a chance to deal with simple injuries during the first leg of their mission.
“Does this place have a net-link?” she asked after quitting halfway through her water bottle and replacing the twist top.
Jericho shook his head as he stuffed the first aid kit into the duffel bag, “Our first Adjustment is less than an hour from here; we can use a public access link once we get within striking distance. Can you get all the information we’ll need with just ten minutes of access time?”
Shu nodded, “My gear’s all preset; all I have to do is turn it on, connect to the net, and feed my ghost networks the search parameters we developed back on the Mustang. We should get results about five minutes after I hit the net.”
“Good,” Jericho said, more than a little surprised at her confidence. He had previously thought her to be a full tier below Baxter in terms of ability—and Baxter was at least two full tiers below Benton—but it seemed that he may have indeed been wrong about that particular assessment. “Then let’s get out of here.”
He slung the duffel over his shoulder and made his way to the door, which he locked with the key after Shu exited the tiny cabin.
“Where’s our ride?” Shu asked, the anxiety of their harrowing HALO jump no longer present in her voice or visage.
Jericho pointed to a small lean-to attached to the side of the cabin. He unlocked the padlock which secured the lean-to’s flimsy door, and swung the wooden panel to the side. Unfortunately, the door’s upper hinge came undone and the door fell to the ground in a clatter where it split in two roughly equally rotten halves.
Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Chimera Adjustment, Book Two (Imperium Cicernus 5) Page 13