“You should sue the carpenter,” Shu grinned.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jericho grumbled, tearing the door from its remaining hinge and tossing it off to the side, “everyone’s a critic.”
Inside the lean-to was a heavy tarp draped over his vehicle, and he carefully removed the tarp to reveal the vehicle below.
Shu whistled appreciatively, “Nice wheels…old, but nice. I thought internal combustion engines were illegal without a grandfather clause?”
“If you want a ride…” he said with mock irritation after swinging his leg up over the seat and stomping down on the kickstarter—which, predictably, resulted in the internal combustion engine firing on the first try. He tested the throttle, and was rewarded by the full-throated growl of the bike’s engine, creating reverberations that threatened to rattle his teeth from his head as he finished, “Then you’d better cut with the ‘old guy’ jokes.”
Shu held her hands up in mock surrender as Jericho produced an adjustable helmet, which she accepted and placed over her head while he did likewise with his custom-fit one.
She hopped on the back of the bike, and they sped off toward the highway which would take them to the site of their first Adjustment.
Chapter X: Genocide Is Never Gentle
Masozi pulled her hover-bike to a stop in a roadside restaurant’s parking lot just outside of her next target city. She had spent most of the trip in silence as she’d contemplated the Kearcher Adjustment, and she finally felt like she had come to terms with what had so unexpectedly unnerved her.
She had lived her entire life thinking that reasonable, rational people—and she considered herself to be such a person—would not fall victim to the same temptations usually associated with blind belief. But in Mrs. Kearcher it seemed there was tangible, undeniable evidence that a career spent practicing and promoting logic and other mechanisms of higher learning could not completely undo all of humanity’s most basic nature.
“Everything all right, Sis?” Eve asked into her earpiece—which she had not taken out following the Adjustment.
“I’m fine, Eve,” Masozi said, “I just need to get a bite to eat.”
“No prob,” Eve replied with a hint of relief in her voice, “I’m just gonna go scout out our next spot.”
Masozi swung the door to the diner open and was immediately met with the smell of smoke-sticks. There were so many varieties present that she had a hard time discerning which variety of weed wasn’t wafting into her nostrils. Still, in a strange way, it made her feel at ease; there had been no such smell aboard the Zhuge Liang with its sterile air supply. She realized in that moment just how different her life had become, though she had scarcely noticed that fact until stepping into the diner.
At the end of the bar was a pair of empty stools, so she took the furthest one and perused the menu. She was surprised to find that they had—or at least claimed to have—fresh red meat products. She was not much of a carnivore, but absence appeared to have made the heart grow fonder so she produced a small credit chit which Eve had gathered—along with their weaponry and other gear—and ordered a buffalo burger.
She drank the dusty-tasting, but reasonably cold water from the glass provided by the server and concluded that there were some aspects of familiarity which were less desirable than others.
Just as she was about to bite into her burger, her earpiece crackled to life, “Bad news, bakeshop; you’d better finish up your meal double-quick.”
“I haven’t even started,” Masozi grunted softly enough that her fellow patrons could not hear her over the nightly newscast streaming via the holo-projector behind the bar. But despite her irritation at being interrupted, she knew that Eve wouldn’t have made contact unless it was urgent. “What is it, Eve?”
“Have you got a newsfeed nearby?” Eve asked as the static in her voice became less pronounced with each passing second—a sure indication that she was on her way to an unscheduled rendezvous.
“I do,” Masozi nodded after glancing up at the image of the newswoman as she read off a list of stock market shakeups for the past week.
“Should be coming on any time now,” Eve said confidently.
Masozi decided to take a bite of the burger, since she suspected it would be her last chance at anything resembling a real meal for several days. Just as she swallowed the decidedly not fresh red meant, the image of the newswoman was replaced by a panicked man’s features.
“We interrupt this broadcast for a planetary alert,” the man reported in a tremulous voice, and more than half of the diner’s patrons gave the image their full attention in a matter of seconds. “Ten minutes ago, a fleet of warships emerged at the Phase Threshold of our system.”
At this, the remaining half of the patrons—aside from one clearly passed-out-drunk man who was slouched bonelessly over the bar—gave the feed their full attention. Were it not for the man’s drunken snoring, Masozi could probably have heard the proverbial pin drop on the synth-stone floor of the diner.
“The fleet is ignoring our calls to remain at the Phase Threshold,” the man continued, clearly reading from a prompter of some kind, “and our SDF, despite Governor Haxley’s orders to stand down, is prepared to engage them at the orbit of Conscientiae which is presently located near the midpoint between Rationem and the Phase Threshold. This reporter cannot, in good conscience, allow this report to be delayed from reaching our viewers.”
Masozi pushed the door open and left the diner as she ran toward her hover-bike, “Eve, how bad is it?”
“Well…” Eve said slowly, “it’s not good. It looks like half of the ships are squawking V-SDF idents—including the Alexander.”
Masozi swung her leg over the hover-bike and fired the engine, snapping to the maximum speed allowed in the zone in just a few seconds. “Can you raise the Zhuge Liang?” Masozi asked.
“No luck,” Eve shook her head, her virtual image appearing on the screen built into Masozi’s helmet. “That seems odd; I was making regular contact with them just an hour or so ago.”
“Then we’re on our own,” Masozi growled, “and things just got a whole lot more complicated.”
“You can say that again,” Eve nodded. “Where you wanna hook up?”
“I’m taking the most direct course I can toward the next Adjustment, but I’m still a couple hours away,” Masozi replied, realizing only after she’d done so that Eve could calculate her ETA more accurately than she could. “You should turn around and get things set up,” she instructed, “we need to do this next one as quickly as possible. How long until the fleets engage?”
“Depends on their velocities,” Eve mused, “but no more than twenty hours, and it could be as few as twelve.”
“That will have to be enough,” Masozi growled as she snapped the throttle to maximum and made for a cross-country course directly at their target.
“Ok,” Eve said as Masozi stripped off her helmet and locked it onto the mount built into the hover-bike’s handlebars, “this one’s going to be a bit tricky.”
“What is it?” Masozi asked as she approached Eve’s drone, which popped open the side compartment bearing the gear she had secured shortly after landing on Rationem.
“You know the brief already,” Eve said before hanging her head in shame and sighing, “but I can’t satisfy this Adjustment’s reasonable certainty threshold using publicly available data.”
Masozi stopped after withdrawing a pistol and holster, which she cinched around her waist after a momentary pause. “What do we do, then?” she asked, knowing that the majority of this whole ‘Adjustment’ business was still well beyond her comfortable grasp—which, she knew, was the whole point of splitting her and Jericho up.
“It’s last-ditch, babe,” Eve said with resignation, “we have to enter his house and find records which corroborate that he was actively practicing eugenics while serving as the Surgeon General of Rationem System. Otherwise this one’s in the red light district—and I don’t mean the fun kind.”<
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“There isn’t another way?” Masozi asked tightly, peering across the street at the fortress-looking house in which their target was apparently sleeping.
“’Fraid not, girlfriend,” Eve said with obvious disappointment. “I’ve gone over every public document—and even a few not-so-public ones—and I can’t find sufficient evidence to legitimize the Adjustment. It all points that way, of course, but comes up just short of ‘reasonable certainty’ as defined by the Timent Electorum’s mandate and established precedent—the latter means a lot less than the former in Tyrannis cases, but it would still weigh on the so-called scales when we return to the tribunal.”
“So let me take a guess…” Masozi said as she considered the alternatives, before arriving at a certain conclusion, “this house is hardened against intrusion, which means he’s been expecting trouble for his past misdeeds?”
“Righty-o,” Eve nodded. “He’s got top-of-the-line equipment in there, with most of it having been installed several years ago. It’s not quite military grade, but it’s as close as you can get on the grey market—and most of it’s disallowed under Rationem’s current personal and property protection laws. We’ve got four roof-mounted anti-material guns slave-rigged to a central processing center, providing overlapping fields of fire everywhere but the back door; IR, thermal, motion, and EM tracking with triple overlays of each interior junction; and I’m even detecting the telltale signs of a gas delivery system at the center of the structure, which probably means the whole house is rigged to incapacitate incoming trouble while the owner waits for the auto-summoned police to show up. And that’s just the stuff I’ve got a better than 93% chance of having predicted are within the structure, based on purchase histories and available surveillance data.”
“What about an EMP like you used for Jericho at the Pemberton Adjustment?” Masozi asked hopefully.
“Sorry babe,” Eve sighed, “that particular capability was linked to my E.E.V. in orbit of Virgin, which burned up in the atmosphere a few minutes after Jericho made it back to the Tyson. But Soze…” she said after a short pause,” don’t tell me that you think cracking this nut is above my abilities?!”
Masozi breathed a short sigh of relief. “What do you have in mind?” she asked.
“This is a stupid idea,” Masozi grumbled as Eve’s drone lifted her from the ground nearly a kilometer from the target’s house. Around her head was a gas-mask, and every inch of her body was now covered in a protective body glove which would prevent even the most powerful of gases from acting on her in less than twenty minutes.
“Even a stupid idea can work if you give it everything you’ve got,” Eve retorted easily, “besides, if you had a better plan then you should have spoken up already.”
Masozi’s legs dangled beneath her body as her arms gripped the undercarriage of Eve’s drone, and the two moved toward the house in question at a far slower clip than Masozi had come to expect of Eve’s mobile platform.
“Remember,” Eve said as they approached the house, which towered above its neighbors, “I’m going to sling you through the third story window; all you need to do is cross your arms and keep your legs straight. Let Sir Isaac Newton take care of the rest. Once you’re inside, head for the central processor; his data storage should be located in the same room and you’ll need to give me a little time to crack his system’s security. No matter what, I can only give you twenty minutes after we succeed.”
“Got it,” Masozi nodded, as the monocle over her right eye fed a three-dimensional layout of the house’s interior directly into her field of vision. A flashing red section indicated where Eve suspected the processing core would be located, and Masozi knew it would require more than a little alacrity to reach the area before Eve’s first time window closed.
“Good luck, Sis!” Eve said as she increased speed while aiming directly at an open window on the third floor. Apparently the house’s security system was directed not to fire at drones like Eve’s—a hypothesis which Eve had tested prior to hatching her plan.
The drone banked up, and the portions of the undercarriage gave way in Masozi’s hands. She was slung directly through the window precisely as Eve had said she would be, and came to a hard stop against a padded sofa of some kind.
Fortunately, her new prosthetic leg had taken the brunt of the impact, and the sofa clearly lost the contest of relative material strengths as its light, metal housing collapsed and Masozi—aside from biting the left side of her tongue—was remarkably unscathed.
“I’m in,” she said into the gas mask’s vocal receiver, “have you confirmed locations for everyone inside?”
“I haven’t; the sensors on my drone aren’t good enough,” Eve replied as an explosion went off outside the house, which was part of Eve’s plan to divert attention until Masozi had gained access to the house’s security control center, “but the boss man apparently likes his bedtime nightcap a little stiff—an inadvisable cocktail of benzo’s and opiates, coupled with direct neural stimulation—so he’ll probably only recognize the explosion outside if anything wakes him up beforehand.”
“Probably?” Masozi repeated as she made her way into the hall. She knew that she had already triggered the internal sensors, but Eve had assured her that the house’s uplink line to local law enforcement would be disabled for another three minutes.
“If you had a better idea—“ Eve started, but Masozi didn’t listen to her next words as she spotted a figure moving down the hallway toward her. Acting purely on instinct, she ducked behind the corner and silently counted off the seconds as Eve’s voice continued in her ear.
As soon as the figure came into view, Masozi lashed out with a right head kick that knocked him out cold—and she saw as he crumpled to the floor that it had been the Adjustee himself, Dr. Barnes!
Producing a ball-gag and pair of zip-ties, she dragged him off into the adjoining hallway where she had hidden before restraining him and making her way as fast as she was able toward the central data processing nexus of the house. She despised the fact that she had laid figurative hands on him prior to verifying the evidence, but Eve had been 99% certain to the fifth decimal place that he was indeed guilty of the crimes for which he had been slated for Adjustment.
“—police units inbound to investigate the exploded power transformer outside the house,” Eve reported when Masozi was once again able to focus on her virtual operator’s words. “Did you hear me?”
“I’m busy, Eve,” Masozi hissed as she peeked around the corner of the stairs after descending to the second floor.
“I can see that,” Eve replied without a hint of emotion, and Masozi was genuinely grateful for her adoptive, virtual sister’s capabilities in that moment, “when you reach the door, it’ll be locked; just hold your wrist-link up to it and I’ll crack the door open in a jiff.”
“Got it,” she replied after quickly moving down the hallway and arriving at the very door which Eve had indicated. Without a word, she placed her wrist beside the door’s locking mechanism and a series of beeps and blips were emitted by the link for several seconds.
“It’s gene-locked as expected; place your left hand on the pad and the trace DNA I put on there should satisfy the requirements,” Eve said confidently. “Then input the following digits: A25d53^%dY on the panel beside the hand-scanner.”
Masozi did as bidden, and a few seconds later the door opened automatically. “I’m in,” she reported after slipping inside the data nexus.
“All right,” Eve said, her voice suddenly filled with static, “we’ll lose contact once you go to the far side of the room where the gear’s set up, so you’ll have to connect the wrist-link’s attached multi-port line anywhere on the cogitator’s housing that one of the attachments will fit. When you’ve done so, wait for the link to go silent for three seconds or more and then come back to the door so I can transfer the data to my drone.”
“Got it,” Masozi nodded as she wedged a nearby chair between the door and its jamb to
prevent an undesirable lockdown of the room. She then moved to the opposite side of the room, where the cogitator was indeed set up. After far longer than she would have preferred, Masozi found a compatible hard port and jacked the wrist-link into it.
The wrist-link’s mini-screen immediately began to flood with symbols, documents, and clearly encrypted data. The stream continued for several seconds until it ceased, and the accompanying blips and bleeps went silent as well.
After waiting for the proscribed period, Masozi ran back to the door and the link once again sprang to life once she reached the portal. Several seconds later, Eve’s voice returned to her earpiece, “Good; I’ve delayed the distress signal by twelve minutes before LEO’s will beat down the door in response to the auto-alarm. This will take me a few minutes to go over, so head on back to the third floor and wait beside Dr. Barnes. We’re going to be cutting this close, babe.”
Masozi did as Eve suggested, finding Dr. Barnes beginning to stir as he slowly roused from unconsciousness.
She moved him to an alcove, which contained various pieces of cleaning equipment, and ducked inside herself as his eyes opened to look at her. The only source of illumination was the streetlight outside, but even so Masozi was able to see a fast progression of confusion, fear, resignation, and finally anger as the doctor processed his situation.
The klaxons of incoming response vehicles began to slowly but steadily grow in volume and clarity outside, and after no fewer than six minutes of silence in the closet beside the Adjustee, Masozi heard Eve’s voice crackle in her earpiece.
“Got it, Soze,” the virtual girl declared with a note of relief in her voice. “Feeding it to your wrist-link now.”
Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Chimera Adjustment, Book Two (Imperium Cicernus 5) Page 14