But Jericho refused to die defeated, so he pressed on and actually heard the clicking of the nearest autocannon as it cycled through its restart sequence. Though he pressed on toward the safe house, he felt confident that those clicks would be the last sounds he ever heard.
Time seemed to slow as each painful, laborious step brought him closer to the tiny alcove built into the house which he had chosen as his insertion point. He knew that neither autocannon would see him if he made it to the alcove, but even if he managed to do so he had only a few seconds before the detection grid would come online—and, unfortunately, the window appeared to be closed.
In what Jericho would later realize was the first moment of clarity he had ever truly experienced, he made the final handful of steps toward the alcove before rolling to a stop against the concrete foundation of the house.
He lay there for just a moment before springing to his feet and leaping as high in the air as he could while attempting to grab the narrow lip of the window’s sill. Thankfully, his fingertips gained purchase on the first try and he was able to haul himself up to the small portal.
Jericho risked a glance inside the window and saw that it led into an empty, unlit toilet. He reached down to his belt and drew the tanto, which he then used to pry the top-hinged window open. Though it was locked, he managed to break that lock with the tanto as his silent countdown continued. He had just three seconds before the detection field came online and sent up an automatic alarm when it detected him hanging from the outside of the house.
With the window swung open, he hauled himself up and felt his left arm give slightly as he did so. But he had to focus on the task at hand or he would fail to gain entry to the house, so he ignored the pain in his arm and used sheer, brute strength to haul himself into the lavatory as the window swung closed behind him.
Jericho collapsed to the floor and cradled his arm against his chest briefly before realizing that it had broken once again, likely aggravating the injury he originally sustained entering the window of Angelo’s flat in New Lincoln.
“I should have just knocked,” he muttered subvocally. That he had re-broken the arm was actually something of a surprise, since most long bones were more or less structurally sound after a couple weeks of healing time. But he knew he was far from a young man, and was actually grateful that his increasingly fragile body had withstood as much punishment as he had put it through recently.
After collecting himself, he removed the needle-launcher from his left arm and unslung the short, pistol-gripped shotgun from its holster across his back and attached it to the front of the bandolier so he could draw it more quickly. But he needed to remain undetected, or else he could kiss any chance of escape goodbye—and he had no intention of dying during this particular Adjustment—so he would need to depend largely on Sasaki’s tanto and the tranquilizers he had brought for the mission.
Jericho listened at the lavatory’s door and heard nothing, and then he tested the door’s handle to find it unlocked. He swung it open and it was thankfully quiet as it opened wide enough for him to pass through. He entered a short hallway which had a stairwell leading up to the second floor at the far end, and the hallway appeared to adjoin both a kitchen and a parlor.
He padded softly toward the parlor-side of the hall and kept his remaining needle-launcher aimed at the kitchen until verifying it was empty, after which he turned his focus toward the parlor. The first of the three guards was sitting in a chair beside a traditional fireplace, and he appeared to be reading some sort of e-zine on a data pad.
The light of the room would create no shadows, and the curtains on the windows would prevent anyone not intently looking inside from seeing him, so Jericho carefully moved behind the man before tapping him on the shoulder.
The guard looked up blankly before Jericho unleashed a crushing overhand right which easily broke the man’s nose, knocking him out cold. Jericho had only the one needle-launcher syringe remaining, and he wanted to keep it in reserve for one of the other two remaining guards inside the house. But he withdrew one of his tranquilizer syringes from the small satchel and injected the man in his left brachial vein, ensuring the drugs circulated throughout his system quickly enough to prevent him from regaining consciousness.
Jericho then proceeded to the staircase, knowing that although he was a highly-trained operative, this entire affair had been just a little too easy. The overlapping fields of the autocannons; the relatively open lanes of approach provided by the guards posted outside; Obunda's gift-wrapped paperwork; and a less-than-alert guardsman inside the safe house itself were all major red flags which convinced him that not everything he saw was as it appeared.
But he also knew that it was only a matter of time before the tranquilized guard outside would be discovered, and when that happened the compound would become a closed death trap.
So he softly padded up the stairs, the pain in his left arm growing with each passing moment. He needed to secure the target and get some answers soon, or his only option would be killing General Pemberton before getting those answers.
He had suspected the only way to enter the safe house would be after a localized electro-magnetic pulse, and that had proven correct just a few minutes earlier. Jericho had therefore left his enhanced vision gear with the cannon, and was forced to rely on his own senses rather than high-tech gear—which was how he preferred to operate anyway.
Jericho made it to the landing and saw a glimpse of movement from a nearby open door. Ducking back down into the staircase, he saw a woman emerge from the room. She was wearing all-black, loose-fitting clothing and had medium-length, blond hair. Her physique was less a soldier’s and more akin to a ballet dancer’s, and she seemed unaware of his presence as she moved down the second floor’s hallway toward the door at the far end.
Jericho moved quickly up onto the second floor’s landing and followed her down the hallway for several steps before she turned abruptly and caught sight of him.
Her face twisted in alarm, but before she could scream he snapped a short, tight uppercut into her chin and her eyes rolled back into her head as she collapsed. Jericho deftly caught her slumping body before she fell to the floor and gently lowered her to the thinly-carpeted floor.
While scanning the hallway and its five adjoining doors, he produced another tranquilizer-filled syringe and injected her in the jugular vein. He gave her the full dose since all it would do was keep her incapacitated for another handful of hours, and then he carried her limp body to the room she had left a few seconds earlier.
If he was to get answers then Jericho would probably require some quiet time with Pemberton, so the less evidence he left of his presence the better his chances were to get that time.
Just as he set her down on the bed, Jericho heard a door open at the end of the second floor’s hallway. He quickly made his way back to the doorway and heard a man’s voice say, “Sasha? Are you coming?”
The man’s footfalls approached the room Jericho was in, and Jericho took up a position behind the door and cocked his needle-launcher in preparation.
“Sasha…don’t make me come in there after you,” the man said playfully, and Jericho’s jaw clenched in a mixture of anticipation and disappointment as the man neared the doorway. Any trained professional would have never made the mistake of continuing to give away his position…unless—
Jericho ducked down just as that thought occurred to him, and was spared decapitation as a blade sliced cleanly through the wall behind which his head had been. The blade passed easily through the heavy, wooden door and Jericho rolled across the doorway to get a bead on his adept adversary.
After seeing the man’s weapon slice so effortlessly through the wall and door, Jericho knew it had a monomolecular edge and that it would slice through his armor as though it wasn’t even there. Even blocking with Sasaki’s tanto would provide little more than a fractional chance of deflecting a single attack before it would be torn apart by the amazing, rare, expensive we
apon. He had one shot to put a tranquilizer in the man’s body, and as his foe came into view he fired the needle-launcher at the man’s chest.
The drug-laden missile struck home on the right side of the man’s chest, and Jericho quickly saw that his adversary was huge—easily two meters tall and a hundred twenty kilos of knotted musculature.
The tranquilizer’s electric jolt hit the man with enough force to put a half-ton bovine down, but amazingly he managed to keep his feet beneath him as he staggered backward. Jericho instinctively launched himself at the powerfully-built man, knowing that if his adversary could endure the electrical surge then the tranquilizer that followed would likely prove to be even less effective.
Just as the electrical surge dissipated, Jericho slammed into the man’s body and managed to get inside the guard of his weapon. Jericho’s momentum drove the other man’s through the hip-high bannister which framed the staircase, and the two men’s combined bulk reduced the wooden bannister to splinters as they crashed together onto the stairs below.
The larger man actually managed to twist his body during the fall and force Jericho to absorb as much of the fall’s impact as he did. The wind was nearly knocked from Jericho’s lungs when he felt a pair of sharp, cracking pains in his flank on impact. He had suffered broken ribs before, and he knew the sensation for what it was.
The brutally powerful man brought his meter-long blade around in a one-handed grip and drove its tip toward Jericho’s neck. It was all Jericho could do to keep the man’s single arm at bay using both of his, and he silently cursed his aging body’s fragility and swore to have a complete physical if he survived the Adjustment—an outcome which was proving to be increasingly questionable.
The larger man—whose movements seemed jerky and uncoordinated while still retaining incredible, raw power—drove his knee into Jericho’s hip and Jericho’s leg exploded in pain unlike anything he had ever felt in a melee. The powerful man followed up with a pair of crushing knees to Jericho’s abdomen, and whatever wind the fall had failed to take from him vanished after the second punishing knee to his gut.
Knowing that he was outmatched—and nearly out of time, as the monomolecular sword’s tip came perilously close to his throat—Jericho arched his body upward with everything he could muster and drove his hips into his foe’s torso. The tip of the sword wavered briefly, and Jericho adjusted his grip on the man’s arm before twisting and forcing the tip of the blade into the wooden staircase.
The weapon drove into the wood steps all the way to its box-shaped hilt, and a brief look of surprise came over the other man’s face as he moved to recover—but he was unable to do so before Jericho bared his teeth and savagely clamped them onto the man’s neck below his left ear. Jericho was rewarded with a powerful spray of blood which flooded around—and inside—his mouth.
By biting the man, he had just exposed himself to the same tranquilizer which had incapacitated three of the guards. Possessing no enhancements which would help his system fight that drug’s effects, unlike his foe, Jericho released the man’s wrist and reached to his belt for Sasaki’s tanto while spitting as much of the metallic-tasting connective tissue from his mouth as he could.
The larger man thrashed violently and managed to buck Jericho off, sending him tumbling down the stairs. Jericho recovered his posture just before landing at the base of the stairs, and even then he was barely able to avoid the deadly, sweeping arc of the man’s monomolecular blade. The weapon sliced silently through the space which Jericho had barely managed to evacuate as he backpedaled down the hallway, moving inexorably toward the same lavatory through which he had entered the house.
“You’re better than I expected,” the larger man growled as he put his left hand to his neck. Amazingly, the blood flow seemed to have almost ceased and Jericho concluded that the other man had an active repair system, likely based on nano-technology of some sort—yet another advantage the younger, stronger, better-equipped man held over him. As Jericho’s adversary charged forward, he plucked the needle-dart from his chest and dropped it to the floor before taking stiff, laborious steps toward the backpedaling Jericho.
Jericho could already feel the powerful tranquilizer’s first effects in his own body, and knew he had no choice but to attack if he was to have any chance at victory. Even the tiny quantity he had exposed himself to via the other man’s blood would be enough to slow his reflexes enough to make the affair utterly one-sided—and lethally brief.
The hulking warrior stepped forward and expertly whipped the tip of his blade in a seemingly wild, but clearly well-practiced series of slashes, swipes, and stabs. Any one of them would be more than capable of crippling Jericho, but the only reason Jericho was still alive was because the tranquilizer in the other man’s system seemed to be affecting his legs more than his arms. His approach was therefore slowed just enough that Jericho could stay out of range of the weapon.
A monomolecular blade was especially dangerous since very little kinetic force was required to penetrate all but the most advanced personal armor. So a person wielding one would only need to make contact with a lightly-armored target to inflict a serious wound.
The blade came closer and closer to finding Jericho’s flesh with each swipe, and Jericho knew he was out of options. He threw Sasaki’s tanto at his assailant, but the larger man reflexively batted it away using his monomolecular blade.
However, by doing so he created a brief opening—and Jericho used that opening to enter inside the other man’s guard and bring the pistol-gripped shotgun’s muzzle up into the other man’s gut. No sooner had the shotgun pressed against the hulking warrior’s abdomen than Jericho pulled the trigger.
There was a muffled ‘whump’ which was barely noticeable, even to Jericho, and three separate pieces of the man’s body went flying in opposite directions. Those pieces—the head and attached arms, along with each individual leg—then fell to the floor in the middle of the hallway amid a spray of half-congealed blood and other tissues which had previously formed the man’s powerfully-built torso.
Wiping the man’s gore from his face—and careful not to allow any of it into his mouth in the process—Jericho reached down and picked up the monomolecular blade, along with its sheath, before returning to the staircase.
His left leg hurt terribly, but his range of motion was more or less unaffected for the time being. So he stiffly ascended to the landing and made his way to the far end of the short hall after collecting Sasaki’s tanto and sticking it back in its own sheath.
The door where the brutally powerful assassin—since that is clearly what the now-dismembered bull of a man had been—had come from was ajar, and Jericho pushed it open to see precisely what he had expected to see.
General Pemberton was seated in the very chair which the intelligence packet had indicated he would be sitting in, and that chair provided a reasonably clear line of sight to the hilltop on which Jericho had intended to set up on with his anti-material cannon.
But the General was not sitting in that position of his own free will. He had clearly been restrained chemically, as well as physically via polymer bindings which wrapped around his wrists and secured them to the arms of the chair.
Jericho's time here was limited and, seeing as he had actually expected to find some variation of the scene which was now before him, he wasted no time in retrieving a pair of syringes from the satchel he had brought. He winced in pain as he knelt beside the General, as a lance of white-hot fire ran down recently injured leg.
He injected the first cocktail into Pemberton's neck, which would nullify the majority of readily-available tranquilizers and pain killers within thirty seconds of administration, and then waited for the medicine to work through Pemberton’s system.
Precisely on schedule, General Pemberton’s head lolled around and a grimace of pain flashed across his face. His eyes wandered aimlessly for several seconds until finally settling on Jericho, and when that happened Jericho injected the second syringe's con
tents into the Lieutenant General’s brachial vein.
“Who…are…you?” Pemberton asked as he slowly came to from the drug-induced stupor.
“Your executioner,” Jericho replied evenly after withdrawing the second needle from the other man’s arm. “I’ve injected you with a truth serum that you’re ill-equipped to resist. Tell me why you stood down the automated defense grid when Blanco’s drones came into range—why did you betray the people you swore to protect?”
Pemberton looked at him dully, and Jericho heard a commotion outside. They had apparently discovered the tranquilized guard posted at the barn. It was only a matter of seconds—perhaps a minute—before the entire compound encircled the safe house and cut him off from any chance of escape.
“It was inevitable,” Pemberton whimpered as his face contorted into a look of pure misery. He began to sob, but Jericho slapped him across the face as hard as he could—emotional lability was a common side effect of the particular truth serum he had employed, and physical pain was sometimes capable of cutting through it.
“Die with some dignity, General,” Jericho growled. While the slap seemed to only barely get the other man’s attention, Jericho’s words seemed to snap him out of his stupor completely. “Why didn’t you open fire on the drones? Answer quickly.”
Pemberton nodded as his eyes seemed to gain some measure of focus. “They…the SDF Admirals…they had my granddaughters,” he replied as his face twisted in shameful remorse. “They…they were going to destroy them…do you understand? They were going to hurt them, and only if they were lucky would they be allowed to die afterward!” Once again he began to sob, but Jericho had no time for the other man’s protestation.
The man’s dereliction of duty was at least explainable now, if not still wholly inexcusable. “You accepted the credit transfer to your off-world account so that you would take the fall—better you be Adjusted than your grandchildren be…harmed,” Jericho concluded, and the other man nodded rapidly. But Jericho shook his head adamantly as he stood and made as if to leave, “I can’t Adjust you.”
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