ARTIS PRIME
Page 33
RIGA knew that he had a superior, an overlord, not of the council, but had never successfully tracked them down. Always, they seemed one step ahead of her, but one day she would find them. Her QDE mode had already calculated that the day was coming when she would know who it was that had designed her, had her constructed in synovats and bio chambers, hidden her away from prying eyes until she was mature, then ensured her training and abilities were honed to perfection.
She had a destiny, she was not someone’s tool and RIGA knew there would come a day when she would know what she was.
All she had to do was stay alive until then.
Opening the door, RIGA moved silently into the room, looking carefully at the man lying on the bed. Humans, she thought to herself, they want to conquer everything and everyone, yet the one thing they cannot conquer is their own weakness. Sleep was always their undoing, that and the desire to have a single point of existence. She looked around the room, noting all the personal items that this human had collected around himself. He needed the security of his home around him, even when travelling to foreign worlds.
RIGA zoomed in on a holopic of the man on the stand and viewed the image. She zoomed in further picking out details that were hidden from the human eye, but picked up by most digital image recorders. She observed the vegetation, the distant traffic and an aircraft frozen in time as it flew across the sky in the background. She could resolve the logo on the tailplane. She had it seen it before - on naval vessels belonging to the Tochin.
This only served as additional confirmation of the sleepers identity. She knew him well. He was Talbeck, Senator Talbeck of the Empirum’s High Council and he was a Tochin agent. One of the identities uncovered by her discovery of the intelligence records on the TELLUR. Only she, Gossie and Bollida knew of that list. It had been a month ago and since that time RIGA had silently eliminated twenty two of the enemy agents.
Councillor Talbeck would be the last of the civilian agents to be removed. He was the leader of the opposition and his actions had been spectacularly successful in undermining the military spend in the Empirum. It was he that had tied the hands of the Navy and forbidden them to act against hostile forces between the planets. His consistent undermining of the Empirum’s defence over the decades represented high treason in military circles, but was described as the actions of a healthy democracy in political circles. RIGA knew the truth was neither. It had been a secret army of Tochin agents working towards the day of an invasion to take over their empire.
He had planted seeds of pseudo-pacifism that had allowed the Tochin to grow their forces within Empirum space. Now, he would have an unfortunate death. One that would send a clear message to his home world and wake them to the fear that would follow and haunt them. There would be no escape, their exits had been locked down, and every move they made was monitored until RIGA arrived to carry out their sentence.
RIGA took one last look at the items on the table and desk. There were no more secrets to uncover, ESSG knew all of them now. Sentence was to be carried out tonight, before the Senate meeting in the morning. She lifted her leather jacket to expose her abdomen. A small container emerged into her waiting hand. Opening by mental command, it exposed a small glass vial with a broken stopper. It was damaged enough for the contents to leak out, given the right incentive.
She removed a tiny comms transmitter pin, allowing it to fall to the floor near the sleeping form. It only had a very short range, but didn’t need to be more for her needs.
RIGA sprayed the area around Talbeck’s head with an enhancement drug, used by many humans to improve their senses. In her line of business and in this concentrated form, it ripped into the nerve endings and laid them bare so that any feelings of pain or pleasure, inside or outside of the body, were enhanced one hundred times over. As a tool for torture it was impressively effective.
RIGA wanted him to feel the pain in revenge for another's life taken. The agony she had witnessed, while being bound by an oath to not interfere; one that had marred her early career in ESSG, and had stayed with her. Now, here in this room and in the process of righting a wrong, RIGA felt good about herself, and the work she had to do.
Talbeck inhaled the drug as it drifted around him. It was also absorbed by his skin. This version had been specially formulated to work quickly. He would feel the effects within minutes.
RIGA raised the local temperature of her hand by ten degrees. The heat quickly transferred to the glass tube in her hand which proved more than enough to begin the hatching process. Loosening the stopper slightly, she placed the vial on the table near Senator Talbeck’s sleeping body. Watching the process RIGA was satisfied that justice was about to be served.
She moved back to the door, retracing her steps to the stairs and cautiously returned to the street. The quiet click of the door behind her confirming its reset.
Standing outside in the darkness, RIGA’s sensors picked up movement from the newly hatched nu-worm as it sensed body heat and emanations from the sleeping body nearby. Its frantic efforts to reach its natural prey eventually forced the broken stopper out enough for it to squeeze through the narrowed opening until it was free and able to fly.
THE END
Dear Reader,
Thank you for buying and reading ARTIS PRIME.
I hope you enjoyed the first book of RIGA,AI
I loved writing the story and have other adventures as well as a prequel coming soon.
EPSILON GAMMA and ZETA NINE are the first two planned - also due in 2015, hopefully.
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Two of my other SF books you might like to read are:
The Pattern Ship (book 1 of the Pattern Universe) more than 12,000 copies sold in 2014
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Tobias Roote