Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Chimera Adjustment, Book Two (Imperium Cicernus 5)

by Caleb Wachter

  “Working on it now, babe,” Eve said, “I should have an answer in a few minutes.”

  “Eve…?” Carter asked, his eyebrows climbing before he nodded in comprehension. “You have a guardian angel…I am glad for that.”

  Eve’s image returned to the monocle, “Well…it took some digging, but the fifth hab module was in fact the victim of a life support malfunction and the terrorists did leave it. That’s as far as the public files go, though,” she said with a frown of disappointment.

  “Damn,” Masozi swore, “that’s just not enough…”

  “Aww, c’mon,” Eve said with a mischievous grin, “you didn’t think I’d be limited to the public records, did you?”

  Breathing a short sigh of relief, Masozi nodded sharply, “What have you got?”

  “Looks like his story checks out five by five,” Eve said smartly. “I didn’t access every file in the Station Security Council’s restricted archives, but I did find documented evidence, signed and co-signed by Mr. Carter and every other member of the Security Council, that corroborates every detail he relayed.”

  Masozi was impressed that Eve had been able to crack the station’s secured databases, but she had no time to congratulate her virtual assistant. She turned to Mr. Carter, “Due to my corroboration of your story, I can’t Adjust you, Mr. Carter.”

  “No, please—you have to,” Carter pleaded. “If word ever gets out as to what really happened, voter confidence in the current administration will plummet and community security will suffer. I don’t want their blood on my hands—I already have too much!” he said with fierce conviction. “I failed them because I was too weak…too weak to deal with the situation on my own, and then when opposition to my plan arose I faltered and allowed actions which I adamantly opposed to be taken. I deserve to be punished,” he said, tears returning to his eyes as he unthinkably begged her to kill him.

  “I can’t,” Masozi said, torn between horror at the situation and pity for the man. He had clearly been in over his head, and while she suspected he would be a perfectly fine person to know in private life—and was almost certainly one of the most respectable public officials she had ever heard of, let alone met—he had been in over his head in the terrorist situation. “The people called for your Adjustment,” Masozi said, shaking her head solemnly, “but in this case they’re just an angry mob looking for someone to blame. You failed them, yes, but it wasn’t because you were abusing your power. You failed them because you weren’t equal to the task put before you; there’s no shame in that, Mr. Carter. You’re a fine public servant…I only hope I can do as well as you’ve done.”

  Carter’s last shred of resolve failed him as he sank into his chair, but surprisingly the tears ceased almost immediately. A few moments of silence passed, after which he seemed to regain some measure of composure and said, “Then we have to get you out of here.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” Masozi said with a lopsided grin, “I suspected this wasn’t what it appeared to be, so I set up my own escape route.” She turned to the faintly distorted area where the Infiltrator suit was standing and said, “Light it up, Eve; it’s time for us to get out of here.”

  “You got it, Sis,” Eve acknowledged, and the light surrounding the cloaked Infiltrator suit shimmered and the sleek, formidable-looking armor seemed to appear out of thin air.

  Carter recoiled in surprise but made no sound of protest as he recollected his wits. “This is your guardian angel, I take it?” he said as he stood from his chair.

  “That’s a great way to put it,” Masozi agreed, causing Eve’s image on the monocle to blush with what she was certain was mock embarrassment. “Open up, Eve.”

  “Sure thing,” Eve replied, and a series of clicks, whirs, and whines were emitted by the suit before its front sections folded outward, revealing the empty space which Masozi would soon occupy.

  “There are auto-turrets hidden throughout the station, originally installed to provide for defense in the event of a hostile invasion,” Carter said hastily after clamping his slackened jaw shut at the sight of the empty suit and moving toward the apartment’s kitchen. “The codes were changed after my successor took office, but perhaps your angel could make use of the command frequencies?”

  “That would help, actually,” Eve admitted with a look of surprise.

  “How did you know they were watching you?” Masozi asked.

  Carter withdrew a scrap of paper from one of the drawers in the kitchen and handed it to Masozi. “I may be a weak man, Adjuster,” he said, his words seeming to cause him actual pain, “but I am observant. They have been shadowing me for four days and I know for a fact they are not local, so I had some friends identify them and found they were black ops specialists out of the Virgin System.” This revelation, while less than surprising, was something she would need to consider after she escaped the station with her life. “I am also a dedicated public servant,” he added, “and this station’s laws state that former Head Administrators should retain significant portions of their security access after leaving office, to prevent the assassination of standing officials from crippling our self-defense capabilities.”

  “Then why would you give me access to those defenses?” Masozi asked after holding the scrap of paper in front of the monocle long enough for Eve to assimilate the numbers and confirm their validity.

  “I am not a fool,” Carter said gravely. “That you are a relative of President Blanco, and also an Adjuster, suggests that you are either a supremely capable covert operative—in which case I am committing an unforgivable breach of protocol—or you have a personal stake in the chaos in which our Sector now finds itself immersed.” He held her gaze with his own for several seconds before finishing, “I, bein’ something of a betting man, am willing to wager my entire life’s work that you mean to put an end to that chaos before it consumes us all…which means you will need to survive this trap.”

  “How do you know I’m telling the truth?” Masozi asked as she stepped into the Infiltrator suit, which began to close around her body in a now-familiar sequence of motions, starting with the straps which held her body securely in place and ending with the closure of the various plates of armor over her limbs, trunk, and finally her head. But the faceplate remained open, probably at Eve’s command so that Masozi could finish her conversation with Carter face-to-face.

  “I am a lifelong politician, Ms. Blanco,” Carter said with a wry grin that seemed to erase the despairs and sorrows he had felt a few minutes earlier, “if I could not reliably tell when people are lyin’ to me, I would not have risen to the level where I ultimately failed my constituents.” He moved to the corner of the room, where the first of his cameras was located, and said, “Would you agree it wise for me to activate this now?”

  Masozi nodded. She had already concluded that there was a very real possibility that, even if she escaped the station alive, Mr. Carter might be killed in order to frame her. She had no idea what game she was playing, but she did know that covering her bases at this point could well prove pivotal to her ability to continue with the Adjustment of her cousin, Han-Ramil Blanco.

  In fact, that had been the whole reason Eve had brought the Infiltrator suit along for the mission. She and Masozi had concluded the likelihood of this particular Adjustment being a trap of some kind was very high, but if she had simply shown up in the Infiltrator suit there was a good chance that doing so would have violated the means clauses which Adjusters must adhere to when executing an Adjustment.

  The suit had officially been given to Masozi by the late Stephen Hadden for use in the Keno Adjustment. Had it sustained no damage in that particular Adjustment, there was a good chance that her using it for these other Adjustments would have been valid. But it—and she—had required extensive repairs prior to redeployment, so Eve and Masozi had decided against using it for the Adjustments themselves.

  But there was absolutely nothing prohibiting her—or any other Adjuster—from using external resources
to escape a trap laid for her by interests who wanted to stop her from succeeding in her assigned tasks.

  It was a fine legal line, but it was one that Eve, Masozi, and Ms. Schmidt—the Zhuge Liang’s legal counsel—had agreed was an important one given the overtly adversarial nature of the tribunal she would soon answer to.

  “Thank you, Mr. Carter,” Masozi nodded her gratitude, and the visor of her helmet closed as he returned the nod. “Now,” she said as the suit’s HUD sprang to life in her field of view, “let’s get out of here, Eve.”

  Chapter XIX: The Great Escape

  “Systems are all in the green, babe,” Eve reported, her digital avatar having transferred to the corner of the helmet’s HUD. She was now ‘dressed’ in an all-black body glove and had the familiar eye black stripes on either of her virtual cheeks. “Let’s blow this hole!”

  Masozi tested the suit’s range of motion and found it was precisely as she remembered it. She had only practiced a handful of times with it since the Keno Adjustment, but operating it felt incredibly intuitive to her.

  Flexing the fingers of her right hand into a fist, she activated the suit’s stealth systems before opening the apartment’s lone door. The corridor beyond appeared empty, but Masozi knew that its appearance was a lie so she straightened herself, drew a deep breath, and launched her armored body out of Carter’s apartment.

  No sooner had she emerged into the corridor than a hail of weapons fire impacted against her armor, causing a series of mild alarm icons to appear on the bottom of her HUD.

  “Damn!” Eve snapped as her virtual hands flew over the icons springing into life around her avatar. “Get to cover—quick!”

  Following her so-called ‘angel’s advice, Masozi complied by launching her body into a nearby junction to escape the incoming fire. Looking down at her torso, she saw several large sections of the suit’s stealth systems had been rendered inoperable—and there were large scorch marks on each of the inoperable sections.

  “Gimme a sec,” Eve said, her little hands working furiously as she re-routed power from the suit’s systems. “Shutting down the stealth suite…that should give us a little more firepower.”

  The suit’s invisibility field went down just as Masozi regained her feet, and the former Investigator growled, “How bad is the damage?”

  “Not bad, Sis,” Eve assured her, “but our stealth suite’s toast; they knew how, and where, to hit us.”

  “Did you get a look at them?” Masozi asked as she drew General De Rossi’s hand cannon from its new holster on her suit’s left hip. The weapon had only five of its overpowered cartridges loaded—its maximum capacity—but it also featured a sonic emitter which would prove exceptionally lethal at point blank range and may even be useful at longer ranges.

  “I only saw two,” Eve replied promptly, and a pair of icons began flashing more brightly than they had done a second earlier and Masozi considered her best approach. “No idea where number three is.”

  “Let’s deal with those two, then,” Masozi said as she held the pistol before herself, seeing Eve’s recently-installed targeting program spring to life in the center of the HUD. Cross-hairs appeared where the hand cannon was pointed, regardless of its orientation to her eyes, and Masozi quickly leaned around the corner of the intersection to snap off a round at the nearest assailant.

  No one was more surprised than Masozi when the first round slammed home in the armored agent’s chest—but she was far from surprised when that armor, and the chest it protected, exploded under the incredible power of the specially-made rounds Eve had designed for the weapon during their time on the Zhuge Liang. The ship’s engineers had been all too eager to work on a few dozen prototype rounds in their off hours, and this particular version carried a powerful explosive which reduced her target’s torso to a fine mist of blood, bone, and ceramic armor fragments.

  Masozi cocked the hammer twice to cycle through the weapon’s cylindrical magazine and get to the other high-explosive round she had loaded.

  “Nice shot,” Eve said approvingly. “The other one’s falling back—get him!”

  Masozi whirled around the corner and fired the second high-explosive round as soon as she found her target in the HUD’s crosshairs. This time, however, she missed the mark and the bulkhead behind her target exploded in a shower of sparks and metal fragments.

  Cocking the hammer back, she continued running toward her adversary and fired a second round at him. This time she found the mark, as the armor piercing bullet made of a depleted uranium core and a specially hardened alloy jacket—the composition of which Masozi still did not really know—blew cleanly through his left leg just below the hip.

  He collapsed to the ground, but just before Masozi reached him she saw a warning icon appear she felt the suit move against her will and flatten itself to the ground as Eve belatedly yelled, “Duck!”

  There was a brief hiss, followed by an explosion so powerful that Masozi’s body was hurled ten meters by the power of it as the bulkhead beside where she had stood was reduced to a ruined pile of slag.

  “Get to cover!” Eve urged, but Masozi was already doing so as she scrambled to a nearby junction.

  “Did you see him?” Masozi asked after reaching cover, only realizing how stupid the question was after she’d asked it.

  “10:48,” Eve replied, “behind a short, hydro-pump housing.”

  A virtual representation sprang into the HUD’s screen showing precisely what Eve had described, and Masozi cocked the hammer back on De Rossi’s hand cannon. An armor piercing round was now loaded, and the technical specifications of the pump suggested that the bullet would penetrate even the thickest part of the pipe assembly housed in her foe’s makeshift cover.

  “Can you jack into the station’s auto-defense grid?” Masozi asked tightly as she drew steadying breaths in preparation for her next shot.

  “Already tried,” Eve said sourly. “Looks like they’re offline; the good news is they probably won’t fire on us, either.”

  “Unless that jackass out there is the one who shut the grid down,” Masozi growled.

  “Right,” Eve allowed grimly, “unless that.”

  “See what you can do to slow any defense systems’ restart cycles,” Masozi said, “I’ll deal with this one.”

  “Gotcha,” Eve nodded, and her pixie-like avatar disappeared from the HUD.

  Masozi drew one more breath and spun around the corner, firing the hand cannon as soon as she saw the barest hint of her enemy’s body armor on the other side of the water pump assembly.

  The cannon barely bucked in her power-armored hand, and a moment later the assassin hiding behind the metal framework fell into view as her armor piercing round sent his body flying. Apparently the round had nearly been stopped by the water pump enclosure, and the full kinetic load it had retained was delivered with the force of a hover-car impact that sent the armored agent tumbling away from his chosen cover.

  Snapping a switch on the grip of the hand cannon with her thumb, Masozi sent several sonic waves toward her adversary in rapid succession while she never broke her stride. Half of the shots missed their mark, but the others landed with enough power to keep her foe from regaining his feet while she closed distance with him.

  Just when she had exhausted the sonic emitter’s power supply, she raised the hand cannon and smashed its butt down onto the badly wounded man’s visor. The protective plate shattered into countless pieces with the ferocity of her attack and he reeled backward. She swiftly followed up with a brutal, armored uppercut to the chin of his helmet—and that helmet actually went flying, or at least most of it did, revealing her enemy’s face for the first time.

  What she saw beneath was enough to turn her blood cold: the man had eyes glowing with a malevolent shade of red, and those eyes were surrounded by scraps of human-looking flesh hanging from a metal skull.

  “Augments,” she hissed as she drew her left leg back—her very own augmented limb—and delivered a blow to
his torso that would have broken every rib in a normal human’s torso. The assassin’s armor cushioned some of the impact, and his likely metal-reinforced musculoskeletal system absorbed the rest. But Masozi had expected as much, having already fought one heavily-augmented opponent in Governor Keno and knowing it would take more than a single lethal blow to put this man down.

  He somehow staggered to his feet, and as he did so Masozi noted how very little blood was oozing from the center-mass hit she had scored with the hand cannon’s armor piercing round. But she kept pressing forward, firing long punches and longer kicks in order to keep her adversary off-balance, which she succeeded in doing for several frantic paces until her foe’s back was literally against a wall.

  Before he had time to recompose himself, Masozi launched a front kick to his exposed head and sent several normal-looking teeth flying from his mouth. Before those teeth had even landed in the nearby bushes, Masozi lunged forward with a sharp, cracking elbow aimed at his right collarbone. The blow landed, but the assassin fired a counter uppercut of his own which took her in the midsection with enough force to briefly lift her armored body from the deck.

  She cocked the hammer back once, knowing she would need two more in order to cycle it to the last remaining round in the hand cannon, but before she could cock it a second time her foe snapped an inhumanly fast punch at her left hand. She saw alarms go off on the HUD, indicating significant damage had been done to the left gauntlet. Without thinking she drove her knee between the man’s legs with enough force to briefly lift him off the ground.

  But she realized her error as soon as she’d connected, and her foe was only too happy to react by grabbing her leg with both hands and lifting her entire body off the ground. She crow-hopped a pair of steps in an effort to gain distance which would provide her enough leverage to avoid being thrown, but the augmented warrior was simply too quick.

  Before she knew what had happened, her helmet slammed into a nearby rail with enough savage force to decapitate a person outright. A few alarms went off on the HUD, but none appeared critical and she quickly snapped her left leg up in a blind, sweeping arc that thankfully connected somewhere on her foe’s body.