“89% and discharging at a rate well within operational parameters,” Eve said. “We’ll have plenty of juice left come game-time.”
Masozi looked down at her own suit’s HUD and saw that it was at 94% power capacity. The internal generators could theoretically recharge the suit’s capacitors from empty to full in just a few days, but those generators would create undue thermal signatures which would give away their location.
This meant that when it was time to act, Masozi’s suit would have significantly less energy available to it than she had previously been able to depend on. But, like every other aspect of this Adjustment, every joule of energy had been carefully accounted for and budgeted.
“And it looks like Jericho’s inside,” Eve said after a few minutes of silence, during which time Masozi practiced manipulating the suit’s controls with her facial muscles and eye movements. “He passed through the two sets of scanners and it doesn’t look like they were any wiser for it.”
“Then all that’s left to us is the waiting,” Masozi said with a sigh. “How about some poker to pass the time?”
“No way,” Eve deadpanned, “you’re stuck inside the suit—and regardless of the rules, the only stakes I ever play for are strip!”
Masozi laughed and nodded, “Fine, what about chess?”
Eve tapped her chin thoughtfully before shrugging, “I guess we’ve got nothing better to do. But you know I’ll clean your clock, right?”
“Sometimes it’s more valuable having a superior player point out your weak points,” Masozi said with mild irritation. “Besides, I’m guessing you can’t mate me in less than thirty moves.”
“Mate you? If only…” Eve said with a mischievous grin as a chess board and set appeared on the suit’s HUD. “White or black?”
Masozi gave her a scolding look, prompting Eve to giggle and sigh dramatically.
“Fine, I’ll go first,” Eve said, pushing the king’s pawn two spaces up the board, to which Masozi responded by meeting it with her own king’s pawn. Eve pushed the king’s bishop pawn up beside her king’s pawn and Masozi snickered.
“A poetic opening,” Masozi said.
“I thought so,” Eve agreed, and they proceeded to play three hundred games in the following days within the privacy of Masozi’s Infiltrator suit.
Chapter XXVIII: Gambit Accepted
The crowd of two thousand people was filed neatly around the far corner of the block as they waited to enter the building which would serve as the site of the Adjustment. From her vantage point in the hover barge, and using audio-video equipment feeds which Eve had tapped into, Masozi was able to watch as the people were individually scanned by the security forces which had sealed off the building even prior to Jericho’s covert insertion within.
The marquee above the venue proudly displayed the title of the play, Consobrinam Nostram a Virginia, and with even greater pride that same marquee made clear that President Han-Ramil Blanco would be in attendance for the night’s lone performance.
Using Eve’s hacked vid signals, Masozi saw a woman with perfect hair and an even more perfect figure make her way to the head of the line. Her delicate dimensions and unnatural grace made it clear that Lady Jessica had arrived, precisely on schedule.
She was allowed to enter through a side entrance—where she was subjected to a thorough search, including via several portable scanners—before she entered ahead of at least ninety percent of the attendees.
“Well…she’s in,” Eve said dryly.
“I still don’t trust her,” Masozi muttered.
“I doubt she would turn on us,” Eve said confidently. “Her record suggests that the only thing she hates more than tyranny is a failure to follow protocol—and Blanco hasn’t exactly crossed his I’s and dotted his T’s this last decade.”
“I think you’ve got that backwards,” Masozi quipped.
“Do I?” Eve asked as she batted her eyes innocently.
“Whatever,” Masozi rolled her eyes, “let’s start the clock.”
“Way ahead of you,” Eve said as her avatar seemed to throw a timer across the HUD, where it stuck to the edge of Masozi’s peripheral vision. “We’ve got two hours and thirty one minutes until she makes her move, and then it’s forty minutes until our turn.”
A quick glance at her HUD showed that her own suit’s power supply was at 53% while Jericho’s suit was at 16%.
“Ok,” Masozi breathed, feeling her heart rate quicken in anticipation, “keep calm, Masozi.”
No sooner had she said that than her HUD picked up an emergency signal which filled her HUD.
“Uh oh…” Eve said ominously as she began manipulating the signal’s icon on the HUD.
“What is it?” Masozi asked tightly.
“The Zhuge Liang just sent a coded message,” Eve explained, “seems like they were discovered in the inner asteroid belt.”
“Are they going to make it out?” Masozi asked as one of their worst fears was realized. The least they could hope for was the ship and its crew to escape more or less unharmed.
“I…” Eve began tensely before trailing off. A few seconds later she said, “I honestly don’t know, Soze. But they’re bugging out, which means they won’t be picking us up.”
“How long until they make the Phase Threshold?” Masozi asked as an odd, unexpected wave of serenity came over her. Knowing there was no hope for a quick extraction meant that she needed to focus even harder on the task instead of allowing her mind to wander to concerns of a more personal nature. In that instant, she fully understood why terrorists employed suicide attacks: the relative certainty was, in a way, liberating.
But Masozi would not surrender to the temptation offered by martyrdom. She was going to do her part and she was going to survive.
“If they aren’t forced to divert from an optimal course, and if their engines are operating at maximum,” Eve replied, “three hours and seventeen minutes.”
“Which means they’ll be long gone before we do what we came here to do,” Masozi concluded.
“Right,” Eve said, and for a brief moment Masozi wondered if her digital companion was holding something back. But the thought came and went as Eve initiated a full systems check of Jericho’s suit and reported, “Everything looks good to go here, Sis.”
“Then let’s just hang tight,” Masozi said as her heartbeats quickened yet again. “We knew this was going to get rough before it was over.”
“That’s the spirit,” Eve said with a ‘thumbs up’ and a wink.
Though Masozi felt her mood slightly elevated by her little pep talk, she knew that things just got a whole lot tougher for them.
Two and a half hours passed, and precisely on schedule there was a buzz of local comm. chatter which prompted Eve to put up a series of video streams on the suit’s HUD.
“An Adjuster infiltrated the theater and has been apprehended following considerable resistance,” Masozi heard a heavily distorted voice say through her suit’s speaker system. “Agents Hatfeld and Arnold are neutralized and being sent to nearby medical facilities, but are likely DOA; Anderson and Smith have been assigned to secure and interrogate the suspect off-site.”
For a moment Masozi feared they had captured Jericho—which would reduce their chances of accomplishing their objective by nearly ninety percent.
“Copy that,” a woman’s much clearer voice responded promptly, “Hatfeld, Arnold KIA; Anderson, Smith will oversee transfer of Lady Jessica to dark site designated Bravo—repeat: transfer to dark site Bravo for interrogation.”
“Bravo,” the distorted voice answered, “copy that.”
“Four down,” Eve said heavily, “which means there could still be as many as eight more in there. Except…”
“What is it?” Masozi asked sharply.
“Well…it’s just that I was going over the Zhuge Liang’s transmission,” Eve explained, “and I think there might have been a couple agents aboard the ship.”
“How?!” Maso
zi demanded.
“This is why I didn’t say anything earlier,” Eve sighed, “I wanted to be sure, but there’s just not enough information. I was able to examine a few status report encodes that accompanied the transmission, and there was clearly a firefight taking place inside the ship when they broke cover and made for the Phase Threshold. The thing that makes me think there was an Agent—“
“Is that it would be a waste to send normal humans in to do a job like sabotaging the Kongming,” Masozi finished. “So that suggests there was an agent, or possibly two, involved.”
“Right,” Eve agreed. “Plus I didn’t want you worrying about James,” she added rather bluntly.
“Worry about him?” Masozi asked archly. “He can take care of himself,” she said forcefully, but she knew that Eve was right. She couldn’t let thoughts of a personal nature interfere with what she was there to do.
“Oh, I’m sure he can,” Eve said hastily, “it’s just that he…well…”
“You think he might have been involved somehow,” Masozi finished for her. James had been subjected to extensive medical scans which had shown he was 100% organic, home-grown human. His records had checked out as well, and he’d had no connection to any of the players in this dangerous game of death and politics.
“You said it, not me,” Eve held her hands up defensively.
“It doesn’t matter,” Masozi shook her head, “nobody aboard the ship knew the details of our plan—including James. Even if there were infiltrators aboard, and even if they did aid Agents in secretly boarding the ship while it waited in the asteroid field, there’s nothing we can do about it now except wait for the Kongming’s last-minute signal saying they’ve reached the Phase Threshold and are bugging out.”
“That’s right,” Eve agreed, “I just…well, I didn’t know if you could compartmentalize the information this close to crunch time. Sorry if I was wrong.”
“You were right to worry about it,” Masozi said, forcing down the surge of resentment she felt at Eve’s admission. “But next time you need to bring the information to me earlier; I could have spent the last few hours working through it, but now I’ve got less than one hour before we have to move.”
“It won’t happen again,” Eve said solemnly, and Masozi believed her.
Forty minutes later, the countdown in Masozi’s suit reached zero and a short alarm sounded.
“Go time,” Eve said hungrily as she rubbed her virtual hands together in eager anticipation.
“Is everything set?” Masozi asked.
“Jericho’s suit still has 12% of its power remaining,” Eve replied, “and I just completed a full round of diagnostics. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”
“Then let’s do it,” Masozi said as she fired up her own Infiltrator suit’s stealth systems with a few well-practiced movements of her eyes and facial muscles.
Her suit’s HUD showed the Infiltrator’s systems come online one by one, and after ten seconds everything was ready to go. She tested her gauntleted hands and found that they responded precisely as they should, and a glance at her HUD’s virtual representation of the theater showed that Jericho’s suit had begun to move.
“How’s your connection?” Masozi asked as she made her way out of the barge’s hidden compartment. The barge had been parked not far from the theater, but they were at Eve’s maximum range for remotely operating Jericho’s Infiltrator suit so Masozi knew she needed to close distance quickly in case any local jamming fields were erected.
“It’s weak, but workable,” Eve replied as her virtual fingers danced across a series of icons on Masozi’s HUD.
“I’ll get you a little closer,” Masozi said as she emerged from the barge and scanned the nearby streets. When she was convinced the area was clear, she leapt from the barge’s deck to the pavement of the parking lot and landed with a muffled thud. She ran toward the nearby, ten foot tall fence between her and the street. Using her suit’s power-assist servos, she leapt over the fence with two feet to spare and landed in the middle of the street.
She sidestepped an approaching vehicle before making for the corner of a nearby building and beginning to scale it using her suit’s grip mechanisms built into the gauntlets, knees and boots and quickly stood atop the fifty foot tall structure which was located on the same side of the street as the venue where President Blanco had already been seated.
The pale sun was already halfway below the horizon, and the heavy cloud cover seemed oppressive to Masozi as she set off at a sprint toward the theater.
The twenty foot wide gap between the first building and the second was nothing her suit could not handle, and no sooner had her feet touched down on the second of what would be five different rooftops than her suit’s sensor suite picked up an EM signature on the roof of the theater which matched those of the Agents she had fought on Carter’s station.
When Masozi had fought Governor Keno, she had been a total novice in terms of operating her suit to its maximum effect. But after months of practice in VR suites—which practice had taken place whenever she had the time to do so—she had increased her effective combat rating to twenty thousand, which was more than twice what it had been during the fight with Keno.
These Agents seemed to be similar in overall combat prowess to Governor Keno, which meant that if Masozi could use the advantage of surprise it was entirely possible she could kill one of those heavily-augmented warriors before he—or she—could sound an alarm.
“I see him,” Masozi said as she vaulted across the second gap between buildings. Without needing to be told, Eve pulled up a series of pre-programmed suit control algorithms which they had developed for situations like this one.
Her feet churned beneath her power-armored body, and Masozi easily cleared the third gap between the rooftops. The Agent did not seem to notice her approach, so her nearly four-meter-long strides quickly brought her to, and over, the final space between buildings and she felt her feet touch down on the roof of the theater.
The Agent’s head cocked slightly, as though he heard her approach but by then Masozi was too close. She activated the algorithm after taking a pair of strides, and her suit launched into the air over the Agent’s head, with her body twisting and her feet rotating above her head as the perfectly-executed leap saw her body align directly above her target with their heads less than a foot from each other.
For that brief instant, her body was aligned with that of her target, though her feet were fifteen feet above the rooftop. In his last moment, he looked up just as her gauntleted hands reached around his chin and twisted sharply while her momentum carried her flipping, twisting body over and past him.
Her suit’s incredible inertia provided enough kinetic energy that she actually decapitated the Agent, with his head coming free of his body as her power-assisted gauntlets held it tight between them. When Masozi’s body finally completed its flight, she released her hold on the head and landed in a three point stance beyond where her target’s headless body quickly fell. The Agent’s head skittered against a nearby thermal duct where it lay silent and motionless.
“Nicely done,” Eve purred.
“Thanks,” Masozi said, controlling her breathing as she stood and approached a nearby heat vent. “Is this position better for your remote control?”
“This will be perfect,” Eve nodded. “Just hang here; the signal’s strong enough I should be able to do what we need.”
Masozi’s HUD split into two separate displays, with the old information on the right and the new feed on the left. The HUD displays were nearly identical, except for the new feed showed a power supply hovering at 11% while her own suit’s power supply was fluctuating between 23-24%
As she watched, Eve’s avatar moved over to the new display and was quickly encased in a three dimensional wire frame which represented Jericho’s Infiltrator suit. As Eve’s avatar walked, the suit did likewise and it made its way out of a maintenance closet and entered an empty corridor.
A vi
rtual display of the corridor appeared, and a pair of flashing red icons—which represented security personnel, but not augmented Agents—were shown at the end of the corridor opposite where the suit stood.
“And here we go,” Eve said as she directed the mostly-empty suit to run toward the two icons. The icon representing the other suit’s stealth systems winked out, and the two security personnel turned to face the suit with weapons raised.
They opened fire but their weapons were unable to penetrate the suit’s armor, and Eve brought the suit’s arms up using a carefully-crafted set of algorithms. With unerring precision, a needle was launched from the suit’s forearm-mounted needle launchers, and each of the security guards took a dart in the neck.
It took only three seconds for the paralytic compound to take effect, and by the time Eve’s remote-controlled suit reached the pair of guards they were already on the ground and unmoving.
“Good work,” Masozi said as Eve directed the suit to climb the short stairs in front of a door which would grant the nearly-empty suit entry into the theater’s kitchen area.
“Thanks,” Eve said as she opened the door and moved into the hallway beyond. “Looks like those two got a signal off right before I got to them.”
“Just like we planned,” Masozi said as Eve controlled the suit, closing the door behind it and causing a series of panicked shrieks from the kitchen staff. “So far, so good,” Masozi muttered as the kitchen staff ran as fast as they could from the menacing-looking Infiltrator.
“Incoming,” Eve said as she cycled through the suit’s built-in weapons, abandoning the nonlethal gas darts in favor of heavier firepower.
The Agents were assigned directly to Presidential Security unlike the general security personnel they had incapacitated, who had been drawn from the ranks of local law enforcement. While collateral damage was something that Adjusters generally avoided, the Timent Electorum was quite clear when defining personal body guards—and, even more specifically, secret service personnel—as without the bounds of such collateral damage. And while it would likely be frowned upon if Eve and Masozi actually had killed the now-unconscious security officers, there was ample historical precedent for such collateral damage being deemed acceptable.
Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Chimera Adjustment, Book Two (Imperium Cicernus 5) Page 41