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

by Caleb Wachter

  “Is it usable?” Jericho asked.

  “That is difficult to say,” she said with a trace of annoyance in her usually neutral voice, “there is significant information, but corroborating it has been…problematic.”

  Jericho accepted the slate and crystal, “It was worth a try…maybe Eve can make something of it when we rendezvous with the Zhuge Liang. You have my thanks, Ms. St. Murray.”

  “Hey,” Shu piped in irritably, “what am I over here, an infected appendix?”

  Both Jericho and St. Murray turned to the diminutive woman, though St. Murray was first to speak, “You have something to add?”

  “Give me that thing,” Shu grumbled, snatching the data slate from Jericho’s fingers, “we’re going to be in transit to Philippa for several days; I’ll see if there’s anything buried in here that you might have missed.”

  St. Murray arched an eyebrow and Jericho had to school his features to keep from grinning at the two women flashing their competitive sides. “By all means,” St. Murray said coolly.

  “Thanks, mom,” Shu quipped as she sat down, cross-legged, in the shuttle’s companionway before retrieving interface gear so she could begin analyzing the information.

  In truth, Jericho had hoped she would respond as she had done. Shu had proven herself surprisingly capable and, if he was being honest, he had to admit that he had indeed been wrong about her. The simple fact that she had survived by escaping Agent Stiglitz’ cohorts while Baxter had failed to do so should have been enough to convince him that he had undersold her abilities.

  But he also knew that familiarity—like that known only rarely outside of families—could corrupt a person’s opinion of another. In this case, he was forced to agree with Benton: Shu was the second most capable operator Jericho had ever worked with, and she was considerably closer to Benton’s ability than Jericho would have ever deemed possible.

  Of course, Benton would have eaten her alive at least a dozen times over in a straight-up information war before she even got a good shot in him—Benton truly had been that good. But Jericho knew he had been unfairly critical of her abilities, and silently vowed not to do so again.

  “We will rendezvous with our courier in six minutes,” St. Murray explained, “but, owing to his irrationally private nature, he has insisted that we remain aboard our own craft during the trip.”

  “That’s fine with me,” Jericho said as he eased himself into one of the chairs in the rear of the cockpit.

  “There are cabins in the rear of the craft,” St. Murray gestured, “you have been assigned berth number two, while your…operator,” she sliced a brief look toward Shu, who studiously ignored her while working on the data slate’s contents, “has been assigned berth number six.”

  “Are there water showers?” Shu asked without looking up from the data slate.

  St. Murray peered down her nose at the smaller woman, “Are you actually asking such a ridiculous question?”

  Shu snorted as her fingers never ceased their intricate dance over the slate’s virtual interface, “I just wanted to see how you’d respond.”

  “If there is nothing else?” St. Murray turned to Jericho with an expectant look.

  “That’ll do,” Jericho shook his head as a flash of pain lanced up his right side, causing him to briefly grit his teeth. Dealing with pain in the short-term was simply a matter of controlling one’s mind, but when that pain lingered for hours on end it became increasingly difficult to keep under control. After sitting through the docking with their host vessel, which was a large craft that St. Murray had assured Jericho was considerably faster than it appeared, Jericho waited for the hidden alcove where their shuttle had docked to be covered by a thick section of movable armor.

  When that was finished, he winced and made his way to the berth which St. Murray had assigned him. He was loath to surrender to the pain, but he suspected he would need pharmacological intervention before this trip was over.

  “Everything ok, Jay?” Shu asked, looking up as he made his way past her toward the berthing area of the larger-than-average shuttlecraft.

  He sighed, causing another flare of pain to erupt in his ribs as he said, “I’m just getting too old for this shit.”

  Shu did her best to hide her impish grin, but he didn’t even need to look at her to know it was on her face. He ignored her hopefully short-lived moment of triumph as he stiffly opened the door to his berth, entered the cramped quarters, and collapsed to the predictably uncomfortable bed after closing the door behind him.

  Two days later, Shu entered his quarters with the same triumphant grin he had left her wearing. He had spent the days in silent meditation as he had, surprisingly, managed to avoid dipping into the painkillers they had on-hand.

  “I think I got it,” she said, proffering the slate before pulling up the wire-frame chair and perching herself on its edge as Jericho slowly rose to a sitting position on the side of the bed.

  He looked at the information she had collated and his eyebrows rose. “Impressive…” he mused as he flipped from table to table, following Shu’s reconstructed paper trail with something between appreciation and envy.

  It seemed that both he and Tera St. Murray had been thinking too small when trying to find a pattern—any pattern—involving the mass export of rare minerals from the rings of Pacifica. Pacifica was the gas giant which held Philippa in its orbit, and Governor Keno’s clan had systematically removed all of the small, independent mining operations from the mineral-rich rings in order to mine them for themselves.

  The amount of wealth contained in those rings was significant, but far from Sector-changing. The rings of Pacifica were known as the third richest source of rare minerals—which had their most valuable use, generally speaking, in manufacturing and maintaining Phase Drives. Those drive units were what enabled the people of the Chimera Sector, and even the old Imperium, to make interstellar travel possible. The only other known way of moving through interstellar space—at anything not resembling a snail’s pace on super slow motion—was via wormhole. But since the Chimera Sector’s wormhole had collapsed two centuries earlier its inhabitants had exclusively relied on Phase Drive technology for travel between their respective Star Systems.

  Hadden Enterprises, the Sector’s lone Phase Drive manufacture-and-repair entity, had maintained standing orders for all rare earth minerals at well above market rates. Until the Keno clan had taken over Philippa, the vast majority of Pacifica’s minerals had gone to Hadden. Before he had died at H.E. One, Stephen Hadden had confided in Jericho that he had been unable to trace where the covertly-mined minerals were going now that Hadden Enterprises had been cut out of the loop.

  It was this murky subject which had ultimately led Jericho and Hadden to embark on what Stephen had referred to as the ‘Chimera Adjustment,’ of which Jericho and Masozi had already completed the first leg by Adjusting Governor Keno.

  Now, however, it seemed that Shu had been able to do what even Benton had not: she had established a credible sequence which showed where those minerals were going.

  “So the shell corporations,” Jericho flipped to the third page of her impressively professional report, “all thirty four of them, charter these containers in shipments which are marked as anything from expired medical supplies to hazardous waste—”

  “Which are really the minerals,” Shu said excitedly. Her bloodshot eyes were alight with a youthful energy that Jericho actually resented—for about a second and a half, anyway—as she continued, “These people are patient, Jay; they wait anywhere between six months and nine years between consolidating these shipments.”

  “But the overall masses check out,” Jericho mused as he ran a side-by-side comparison of the shipping manifests. “The centrally-stored records show the false information that’s supposed to cover the trail, but the drayage checks which keep on-site records confirm the actual weights of the containers…” he flipped to a set of schematics before nodding in grave appreciation for Shu’s eye
for detail, “as being perfect matches for the shipments you’ve traced.”

  “The difficult part is that they don’t seem to benefit anyone—not even a corporation or conglomerate,” Shu nodded eagerly. “And, as I mentioned, the shipments look completely random in their timing.”

  Jericho nodded slowly, “Too random, in fact.”

  “Exactly,” she said, opening a water bottle and taking a long drink before continuing. “There is literally no activity taking place within the Chimera Sector which would correspond with these mineral shipments; we would see traces in local GDP’s, corporate profit/loss statements, or a hundred other easily-traced records.”

  “What if the corporations—“ Jericho began.

  “Are cooking the books to hide whatever activity this stuff is fueling?” Shu finished, correctly, prompting him to nod. “That’s the thing: you can hide manpower, to a point, and you can even hide money for a while if you’re really careful…but you can’t hide energy consumption, Jay. The only corporation that might have a chance to hide energy consumption records on this scale is Fusi-Corp, since they supply most of the commercial fusion fuel consumed in the Sector—and they closely monitor all the supply lines of fuel that they don’t control directly. But Hadden vetted FC decades ago.” She shook her head severely, “It’s not them, which means…”

  “In the broadest sense,” Jericho continued grimly, “that there’s an outside interest siphoning these minerals off, using the pipeline you’ve discovered here.”

  “I couldn’t have done it without the Tsushima connection,” she said, “but the thing is…”

  “What?” he asked warily, having grown to despite the inevitable ‘but’ during his life.

  Shu’s gave him a pointed look, “I ran a cipher—which was one serious bitch to construct, let me tell you—and I think I’ve got a line on when the next shipment will go out.”

  He narrowed his eyes, knowing he wasn’t going to like what she said next, “When?”

  “I’ve only got a forty three percent chance of my cipher being right,” she was quick to point out, “but if I am—I mean, if it is—then the shipment happens next week.”

  “So close to the second tribunal?” Jericho’s asked in surprise before his brow lowered darkly. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Shu nodded, and they sat in silence for several minutes while Jericho considered their available courses of action.

  “We don’t have a choice,” he said finally, “we have to let the chance go.”

  “What are you talking about?!” she leapt out of her chair with precisely as much enthusiasm as he had expected. “This is once-in-a-lifetime, Jay; we literally won’t get another shot like this!”

  “It’s too dangerous, Shu,” he demurred, “besides, we’ll need all hands on deck for the Blanco Adjustment. You’ve been surprising in more ways than I’d care to recount,” he said with a serious look, “and I can’t afford to give up skilled operators just now.”

  Before she could protest further, the intercom in his quarters chimed and St. Murray’s cool voice came through with crystal clarity, “You two need to come to the cockpit immediately.”

  His hackles rising, Jericho noted with mild annoyance that Shu had made a particularly ugly face and was silently mocking St. Murray as the older woman spoke. “Let’s go,” he said as he got up from the bed and carefully made his way to the cockpit, with the diminutive Shu close behind.

  When he arrived there, the main screen was filled with vid feeds covering what looked to be murder scenes. It wasn’t until one of the expanded to fill the screen that he saw why St. Murray had summoned them.

  The headline read: 71 Adjusters confirmed dead throughout Virgin System as part of spontaneous public reprisals; 22 more have surrendered to local authorities and have officially requested protection.

  The feed switched to another image which showed a huge crowd of people with an elderly woman at the front hoisting a homemade sign which read: Adjusters or Assassins? Ask their victims if there’s a difference!

  The feed switched again, and this time it showed the familiar scene of would-have-been Vice Mayor Adewale Afolabi’s driveway. A reporter stood in front of the house, which had crime scene tape and digital projectors strewn about—with what Jericho recognized immediately to be intentionally dramatic flair. “A series of gruesome killings have sparked outrage among the Virgin populace,” the reporter said in his nasal, high-pitched voice, “and that outrage has led to the deaths of over fifty confirmed Adjusters in what the people of Virgin are calling ‘the greatest act of public solidarity since the Forge Wars.’ Behind me is the home of former New Lincoln Chief Investigator and Vice Mayor Elect, Adewale Afolabi, who was brutally gunned down in his home last night. The killer, believed to be a member of the controversial Timent Electorum agency—an agency which has made no public attempt to comply with President Blanco’s call for a cessation of their particular brand of assassinations—left behind a so-called ‘Mark of Adjustment.’ What makes this particular case so important is that the Infectus Mark was left behind even though the evidence contained within it was found to be insufficient to warrant an Adjustment, but the murderer apparently ignored this and gunned down the Vice Mayor in cold blood on his own driveway.”

  “What a bunch of shit!” Shu snapped. “He fired first!”

  St. Murray cast a sharp look in Shu’s direction, and Jericho strategically positioned his broad torso between them to prevent another war of words—he did this primarily so he could concentrate on the rest of the information streaming across the screen.

  “These timestamps are nearly a day old,” he said, pointing to the corner of the screen as the images shifted from one to the next, “how often are you getting your downloads?”

  “I have only managed one while we have been in transit, and that was sixteen hours ago,” St. Murray replied professionally.

  “So it’s already over,” Jericho said, having fully expected something along these lines but finding himself questioning his decision to leave the Mark at Afolabi’s house. There had been a purpose for it—and that purpose was aimed squarely at Mr. Newman’s elaborate death trap made of eight supposed Tyrannis Adjustments—but he found himself, for one of the rare moments in his life, doubting that decision.

  “Indeed,” St. Murray agreed. “And we are still twenty one hours from Philippa.”

  “Then we’d better get some rest,” Jericho said, turning to Shu, “that means you, too.”

  Shu clearly wished to protest, but Jericho shook his head sternly and she grudgingly made her way to her bunk.

  Ten hours later there was a knock at Jericho’s door.

  “Come in,” he said, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed as he put the data pad Shu had given him back down on the bed.

  Sure enough, the person who opened the door was none other than Shu herself. Her hair was less organized than its usual straight, silky-smooth version, but it looked like she had actually gotten some sleep as he’d suggested.

  “Jay,” she said after closing the door behind her, “you know we can’t pass this opportunity up.”

  “The truth is,” Jericho sighed, “that if you hadn’t proven yourself to be so capable these last few days, I would probably agree to let you go. But I can’t risk it; I’ll need you for the Blanco Adjustment.”

  “You’ve got Eve,” Shu said sourly, “and there are probably half a dozen people on the Zhuge Liang that could remote-crack the systems you’ll need to get past. But we have only one chance,” she held up a finger emphatically, “to trace these minerals before the pipeline is closed forever.”

  Jericho saw an unshakable resolve in her visage and, much as he wanted to argue with her, he knew she was right.

  Apparently deducing his thoughts, Shu moved forward and said, “I’ll never forget what you did for me, Jay. You set me free, and I can never repay you for that.”

  “You set yourself free, Shu,” Jericho chided,
“I just took away the hand that had been holding you down.”

  Shu snorted, “That hand did more than just hold me down, Jay, and you did more than just take it away nine years ago. You killed that scumbag who my mother welcomed into her bed…and into mine.”

  “It was an Adjustment, Shu,” Jericho began patiently, “I wasn’t there to—“

  “I know you weren’t there to save me,” she cut in sharply, “but that doesn’t change the fact that you, more than anyone I can remember, have always tried to do what was best for me.”

  “All I did was kill your abusive stepfather and drop you off at the nearest foster center,” Jericho said, remembering the day he’d carried her from the scene of her stepfather’s Adjustment. As it happened, the bastard had been about to abuse her when Jericho preemptively Adjusted him—an Adjustment which had been triggered by his embezzlement of state funds rightfully destined for, of all things, orphan foster care infrastructure in their area. Jericho had intended to send a lead slug through his brainstem after he’d gone to bed that night, but upon seeing him make his way to Shu’s room Jericho had decided to act earlier than he’d expected.

  The look Jericho had seen in Shu’s thirteen-year-old eyes that night, when he’d emerged victorious in the deadly melee, was one that told him everything he would ever need to know about her: she was strong, she was intelligent, and she would stop at nothing to make the world a better place than it had been for her. He had known from that moment on that she would become an Adjuster in her own right—but he had done everything in his power to discourage that choice, since he knew only too well the price an Adjuster paid for carrying out the public’s will.

  “You did more for me than anyone else even tried—including my own mother, may she forever rot in hell,” she said in a low voice, and Jericho recalled reading about her mother’s suicide after the truth about Shu’s treatment became a matter of public record. “And even after I completed primary school three years ahead of schedule, earning my emancipation from the system, and tracked you down you did your best to keep me out of this life. But you had to have known that you couldn’t succeed, and now that we’re here you need to stop treating me like I’m a child. I’ve chosen my path, and I’m damned good at what I do, Jay,” she said, moving toward him with fierce determination blazing in her dark eyes. “I can do this—I will do this.”