“Who are you?” Masozi asked after donning the singlet. Her confidence was measurably improved now that her every inch wasn’t exposed to the night air—or whatever else might be lurking in the shadows.
“I’ll answer that, and as many of your other questions as I can, but right now you need to get on the bike and wear the helmet,” he said shortly. “They were tracking Eve visually and if we linger too long they’ll lock onto us with one of their stealth drones. A friend has a safe house in town but we have to leave—now!”
If not for the events of the previous twelve hours, she would have never accepted his offer. But Masozi was smart enough to know that she had gotten caught up in something much bigger than a simple murder investigation, and it seemed this man knew more about it than anyone else she had spoken to—except perhaps Agent Stiglitz and Chief Afolabi.
But for some reason, she trusted this man more than she trusted them…and that realization shook her to the very core. “How can I trust you?” she asked after the silence had grown intolerable and she failed to arrive at a conclusion.
“You’re going to get on the bike, so let’s just get it over with,” he snapped.
“I am?” she challenged stiffly. Who is this man to think he can predict what I will do? she thought, clenching her jaw tightly.
The man nodded. “Human psychology is about as mysterious to me as a grilled cheese sandwich, Investigator; your curiosity has gotten the better of you and you’re smart enough to know you’ve got no choice but to get on if you want to live,” he said before his helmet’s visor slid back down into place and concealed his features. He then added, speaking through the helmet’s built-in speakers, “So do us both a favor?”
She very much disliked his insinuation that he had somehow ‘solved’ her in just a few seconds, but Masozi knew he was right. Her curiosity—which had formed the foundation of Masozi’s entire life’s path—demanded that she follow the deadly mystery she had inadvertently stumbled into, so she put the helmet on and swung her leg over the seat of the bike before gripping the bars to either side of her butt for stability.
“Who are you?” she asked via their helmet-to-helmet com-link as the bike’s motivators whirred to full power.
“My name’s Jericho,” he replied, “and in a few hours I’ll be the only person in this city who doesn’t want you dead.”
He gunned the throttle and the whiplash nearly knocked her from the bike, but she recovered in time to clamp her thighs down on the seat as she leaned forward to counteract their acceleration.
The hover-bike carried them out onto the road, and they sped off at the maximum speed limit toward the city center as the first rays of the sun began to creep over the horizon.
Chapter VII: Haven
They cruised through the streets of New Lincoln for half an hour until they had crossed town and found themselves at the city’s seaport. Masozi took that time to compose herself, and she had managed to get her mind wrapped around the sequence of events which had led her to her current situation.
The bike came to a near one of the city’s many piers and her helmet’s built-in com-link activated with a short burst of static, “Inside your left hip pocket is an ident chip and a handful of credit chits.”
She had already discovered those items in her bodyglove’s pocket on the trip across town, so she replied, “Whose are they?”
“Yours,” he replied tersely as he gestured to a massive, ocean-going cargo ship at the end of the nearest pier, prompting her to dismount the bike. “Your name is Helena Pendergast; you’re a harbormaster’s agent who’s about to conduct a series of spot inspections on a handful of random cargo containers,” he explained. “Once aboard you should make your way to container EIV-1138 down in the hold. Wait for me inside.”
She removed her helmet and took another look at the ship. Its name was the Esmerelda Empática, and while it was nearly half a kilometer long, it had clearly seen better days. Its gunwales were marked by long, meter-wide streaks of rust which ran from the deck to the waterline, and its freeboard plates had clearly been patched dozens of times with no apparent consideration given to the vessel’s aesthetics.
“Won’t they assign someone to keep tabs on me?” she asked guardedly. What he was suggesting violated at least a dozen felony-class statutes and, if a capricious judge decided to throw the book at her, she could be facing up to forty years in a penal colony if caught.
The rider shook his head. “The captain is expecting you. He’ll have you present your papers before likely making a few…choice observations. But afterward he’ll give you the time, and latitude, you need to get where you’re going without being followed.”
Masozi took another glance at the ship and knew that whatever lines she might cross in the future, these next few would likely be only the beginning. “I could turn you in,” she said boldly, preferring to avoid unnecessary wordplay.
The man’s visor flipped up and she saw a bemused look on his face. “You could,” he agreed evenly, “and the truth is that I’ve already made my most valuable resources—among them my own life—vulnerable to such a gesture on your part. In fact,” he said almost playfully as he leaned across the antique-style handlebars, “after what I’ve just told you, I suspect that my apprehension would be of secondary value to your superiors compared to the apprehension of the man waiting for you on that ship.”
She shook her head and felt her jaw tighten, “Why would you tell me that?”
He fixed her with a piercing gaze, and for a moment his blue-grey eyes almost distracted her from the matter at hand. There was something penetrating about his eyes, and whatever it was sent shivers down her spine. “Because, as I already told you,” he said after the silence had grown deafening, “we both know you need to follow this thing at least a little while longer before making a decision. Oh, and one more thing,” he added as he flipped a small box from his pocket, which she easily caught, “tell Benton to take a look at that—and that I’ll bring dinner if he can give me a breakdown by sunset.”
With that, he re-powered the bike’s motivators and lowered his visor before speeding down the dockside street. He disappeared from sight just a few seconds later as he turned back toward the city’s center, and Masozi was left with a choice that she was forced to admit was no choice at all.
During the course of the ride across town, she had run several possible scenarios through her head—and each of them had left her with nothing but more doubts than she had held just a few hours earlier.
Much as it pained her to believe it, there were two logical conclusions given the available data. The first was that ‘Jericho,’ if that was even his name, had engineered each and every event of the previous night—including the Mayor’s assassination and subsequent explosion in the apartment complex—in order to gain her complicity, if not her outright trust. But to her analytical mind, that possibility seemed too elaborate. The cold truth was that while such a scenario would serve her ego and vanity, by suggesting there was something special about her, she knew that was far from likely.
That left the second possibility: that either one, or both, of Chief Afolabi and Agent Stiglitz had arranged for the explosion in her apartment building. That scenario left her feeling the most vulnerable by far…and the most betrayed, but by whom she still could not determine with any confidence.
Masozi had dedicated her entire life to the service of her fellow citizens, and believed with every fiber of her being that the Great Collapse—the negative term given to the wormhole’s sudden and inexplicable failure by those inhabitants of the Sector who regarded the event as a harbinger of the end times—had been the greatest thing to ever happen to her world. Her sentiment was the norm for a citizen of the Chimera Sector, and the populace had collectively adopted the term ‘Great Collapse’ in order to embrace the idea of change within their newfound society.
In fact, not only had her planet—one of three so-called ‘Core Worlds’ in the Chimera Sector’s Union of Worlds g
overnment—been re-named ‘Virgin’ shortly after the wormhole had collapsed, but it had also established a new calendar beginning with the failure of that conduit, which had once been considered of the utmost importance to their way of life.
The name ‘Virgin’ had celebrated their independence from what many believed to be a tyranny of unfathomable proportions which had been perpetuated by the aristocratic nobility, which maintained absolute control over every level of the Imperium.
In the immediate aftermath of the Great Collapse, a revolution unlike any in recent history had taken place which saw the vast majority of the Imperial Nobility overthrown. Those nepotistic bodies had been replaced with free elections, along with a newly-crafted Bill of Rights, which would ensure that the errors of the past did not repeat themselves on Virgin or the other worlds of the Chimera Sector.
That Bill of Rights—in which the Timent Electorum was given absolute, immutable primacy—was meant to act as a guardian of civil liberties against corrupt, tyrannical, or treasonous officials no matter how they came to power. The cold, harsh reality was that every death which had been attributed to the T.E.’s actions had boosted community confidence in the government to truly unprecedented levels. It was that faith in their unified cause which had led the citizens of Chimera Sector to not only survive, but to thrive despite their technological and material shortcomings.
And now, in the face of what appeared to be an interplanetary conspiracy aimed to obfuscate the truth of the T.E.’s actions—to say nothing of the fact that those same conspirators attempted to murder Masozi simply for trying to do her job—she was unable to ratify any course of action that did not involve doing as Jericho had suggested and boarding the oceanic freighter.
“I am not predictable,” she growled as she made her way to one of the personnel boarding ramps, where an armored guard stood vigil on the other side. Masozi took a deep breath as she flashed her false documents after setting foot on the gangway, “Agent Helena Pendergast; I’m here to conduct an inspection of this vessel by order of the harbormaster.”
The guard narrowed his eyes as he appraised her documents. “There’s nothing in the book,” he said stiffly after he had given her identification a lengthy appraisal, “request denied.”
“I have seven other vessels to check before lunch,” she snapped irritably, sliding easily into the role of an irritated bureaucrat—mostly because it was one with which she was intimately familiar, after spending so many years as a Junior Investigator. She gave a pointed look at his name badge, “Merchantman T.J. Jackson; should I remember your name when I write up my report, or are you going to let me on so I can conduct my inspection sometime before the primary burns out?”
He gave her an impassive look as his hands lowered to his hips—on which a pair of high-powered pistols rested. “You can remember whatever you want, ma’am,” he said in a tone just above a growl, “but if you cross this threshold without authorization, I’ll turn you into scraper chum.”
The Merchantman’s response had not been altogether unexpected, but Masozi knew that if she was to gain access to the vessel on guile alone she couldn’t be seen to back down from the rough display. She held his gaze as she leaned over the edge of the ramp to look at the water below.
‘Scrapers,’ as he had called them, were a whole family of marine wildlife which lived near busy maritime ports such as this one. They were more or less a kind of stingray, except somewhere on their evolutionary path they had incorporated iron alloys into the teeth and bones of their immensely powerful jaws. As such they were capable of tearing anything short of industrial grade materials apart, given enough time and determination.
“Was that your best threat, Merchantman?” she asked irritably with an emphatic roll of her eyes.
“Not a threat, ma’am,” he replied with a fractional shake of his large, square head, “a guarantee.”
“You should probably get your captain on the line,” she suggested with narrowed eyes, “if you have any desire to retain your job—let alone your freedom.”
Jackson tensed and, for a moment, Masozi thought he would make a preemptive move of some kind. Thankfully, a hatch behind him swung open with a clang as it struck the nearby bulkhead. Through the hatch stepped a tall, thin man who was at least seventy years old. He had a full, white beard and a pair of cumbersome, external hearing devices mounted where his ears should have been.
“What’s all this fuss about?” he demanded sharply as he moved toward the gangway.
“Sorry, Captain,” Merchantman Jackson said without taking his eyes from Masozi, “but the inspector here doesn’t have an appointment.”
“Oh?” the captain asked gruffly as he snatched the data pad Jackson had checked earlier from the Merchantman’s belt. He scanned it for several seconds before giving Masozi a hard look and demanding, “What’s your name?”
“Hel—“ she began, but was spoken over by the guard.
“ID says ‘Helena Pendergast’,” Jackson interrupted smartly. “But I’ve been to every port this side of the Leviathan Sea, and I’ve never heard of her,” he said as his right hand went to the grip of his pistol.
The captain narrowed his eyes, and Masozi had the sudden fear that she had fallen into some kind of elaborate trap which would see her body consumed by the scrapers lingering a few feet beneath the surface of the frigid water below.
“Ah, yes,” the captain exclaimed, causing both Jackson and Masozi to jump enough to bring a look of irritation to both of their faces. “Perkins—that would be, Harbormaster Westerbeke,” he added knowingly, “just sent over a missive saying we could move the inspection up from this evening if we were prepared. I approved the change in schedule but failed to update the ship-wides.”
Jackson’s look of irritation intensified, but he relaxed as he turned to the captain pointedly. “If I’m supposed to be in charge of security here, sir, I need to be apprised of any such changes in a timely manner,” he bit out.
“Quite so, quite so,” the captain agreed before gesturing for Masozi to board. “Welcome to the Esmerelda Empática, Inspector,” he said in an overt display of cordiality. “Sooner begun, sooner done.”
Masozi eyed Jackson, who had apparently already deemed her beneath his notice as his eyes scanned the nearby docks methodically, and took her first step onto the Esmerelda Empática.
“I must apologize for my Chief of Security,” the captain said after they were out of earshot and had begun to descend a series of stairwells, “but I fear we can never be too careful when it comes to matters of privacy. I pay him well to give would-be harassers a good stonewalling, and he’s yet to fail me in that capacity.”
“He certainly makes an impression,” Masozi agreed, more than slightly surprised at how the ship’s captain navigated the series of twists, turns, stairs, and low-lying obstructions like they were not even there as they moved toward the stern of the ship. He moved like a man half his age and, given his obviously questionable connections, she doubted the source of his spryness was a natural one.
“Indeed,” the captain agreed as they came to a large, reinforced set of hydraulically-powered doors. “You could have gotten down here via the ladders, but then you might fall and break something—and I’d hate to try explaining that to our mutual friend,” he said with a wink. He slapped the activator button beside the doors and they began to slide slowly open as the large, metal shafts retracted into their respective cylinders. “Third port stack, second from the top,” he gestured to the right side of the cargo hold.
She nodded by way of acknowledgment and made her way into the cargo bay, but after just a few steps she got the distinct feeling something was wrong. Masozi turned to see the captain’s eyes firmly locked onto her butt, and she felt a pang of relieved irritation at discovering the source of her unease.
He clucked his tongue wistfully as he tore his gaze from her far-too-exposed physique—which was essentially shrink-wrapped in the blue-black bodyglove. “No matter how many years
I live…it never gets old,” he sighed before turning and making his way back to the stairwells. His chuckles echoed through the hold until they grew so weak that the thrum of the various pieces of machinery aboard the ship drowned them out.
“Act like you’ve gotten some,” Masozi sniped under her breath as she turned back to the cargo hold and made her way to the indicated stack of containers. They were mostly cubical, and measured anywhere from three meters on a side to ten meters, and the one she was to enter was of the latter variety. Every container in the hold seemed to be covered in graffiti, but she was certain she had identified the correct one.
She got to the base of the stack and circled it completely, until concluding there was no apparent way to reach the perilously narrow ledge formed by the protruding edge of the container below the one she meant to enter.
But that was no real obstacle, as Masozi had long trained in gymnastics, kickboxing, and even some urban obstacle coursework which had earned her a handful of medals in her teens. Since reaching adulthood, she had maintained her body with at least thirty hours of exercise each week, and it was essentially the only thing she did when not working a case. The physical activity always helped her clear her mind and focus on particularly troublesome problems, so she knew she could scale the forty feet of irregular, metal surfaces without too much difficulty.
She wrapped her fingers around a half-inch diameter pipe running vertically along on the side of the lowest container, and tested the grip her bodyglove’s attached ‘footwear’ provided. She was surprised to find it behaved essentially as her own amateur rock-climbing gear had done when she had competed locally in her youth, so she gave a few test steps before scampering up the six meters of pipe on her way to the ledge some ten meters above where the pipe made a ninety degree turn.
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