Ure Infectus

by Caleb Wachter

  “The short version,” Jericho said, turning to Masozi, “is that there was resistance to these mining efforts from Philippa’s wealthiest families each and every step of the way, but Marquez fought through. Naturally he needed the assistance of powerful allies to deal with such deeply-entrenched enemies. You’ve already met one of those allies.”

  Masozi gave him a questioning look until realization dawned. “Hadden,” she breathed unthinkingly, and St. Murray cocked an eyebrow.

  “You have met S.R. Hadden, Director of Hadden Enterprises?” she asked in a challenging tone.

  “She has,” Jericho interrupted before Masozi could reply, “shortly before his home was attacked by the V-SDF.”

  St. Murray inhaled sharply. “You mean he is…”

  “Dead,” Jericho replied with a curt nod before turning to Masozi, “Hadden Enterprises provided the mining equipment for the families who staked their claims here, and those materials were provided for less than their cost to manufacture and distribute. In exchange, Hadden Enterprises put in standing order prices for every single mineral produced by the small-hold mines. He also requested the option to match any purchase price an individual could prove they had secured from another source.” Jericho gestured to the screen with the mining leases still scrolling by one at a time, “The elements mined here became the backbone of H.E.’s Phase Drive technology, and Hadden worked closely with Marquez to ensure that the miners were treated fairly while infusing Philippa with a source of income unheard of for a colony of its size.”

  St. Murray nodded, her eyes widening briefly as she likely processed the news regarding H.E. One. “Director Hadden is thought of as a true benefactor of this colony,” she said slowly. “His passing will be mourned.”

  “You won’t have time to mourn it,” Jericho said darkly, and the two exchange a meaningful look which Masozi did not understand but which filled her with even more dread.

  “True enough,” St. Murray agreed after a momentary pause before turning to Masozi and pointing a single finger at the screen which contained the data she had pulled up minutes earlier. “This record describes the absolute damage which Governor Keno has done to Philippa’s economy,” she said coldly. “Her first act in office was to de-fund the program which provided families with the legal assistance required to secure and maintain their mining claims. Her second action,” St. Murray’s lips twisted contemptuously, “was to provide a legal framework for a claim to be sold back to the Philippa government. As a result, only a handful of the most successful families were able to maintain and operate their claims, while the rest promptly sold their claims and left Philippa behind. But one by one, even those families which were wealthy enough to continue working their interests eventually sold their stakes. Not a single mine is in operation in Pacifica’s Ring today…officially.”

  Masozi felt her hands tighten into fists at her sides. “How did she get away with this?” she demanded, angrier at this situation than she had ever expected to be. “Why wouldn’t the people stand up—they’ve re-elected her FOUR TIMES!” she snapped.

  Jericho snickered, and Masozi turned to him to see a look of approval on his face. “As Madame St. Murray said,” he replied before gesturing to the plethora of data feeds streaming into the room, “the Keno family controls the media. And the Governor is their most celebrated personality—whatever she says, the people believe.”

  “There is a small underground which collates feeds like this,” St. Murray said with a short nod to the monitors, “but we can only disseminate information to roughly ten percent of Philippa’s citizenry. If we went for a broader distribution network, we would be crushed just like those before us.”

  “And that’s not the best part,” Jericho said knowingly before pointing to the T.E. insignia in Masozi’s hand. “The best part is what you’re holding in your hand: proof that Governor Keno has privately taken over each and every profitable mine in the Ring and has been secretly funneling the rare elements out of the system. If my suspicion is correct, we might even be able to tie her activities in with the most powerful office in the Virgin System, but we’ll need Benton to make that determination.”

  Masozi felt cold fury welling up inside her. “How much?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper as she felt a surge of anger unlike anything she could have previously described. “How much has she stolen from her people?”

  St. Murray downloaded the information on the readout which Masozi had been studying onto a data crystal, and then handed that crystal to her as she said, “It is impossible to calculate—“

  “No,” Jericho cut in, “it’s not.” He shook his head and flexed his jaw as he looked around at the room for a few seconds before finally saying, “According to Sector-Gov’s census data, Philippa’s population currently stands at just over three million souls, which is more or less consistent with its number under Marquez. In per capita GDP, this colony’s economic output under the Marquez Administration was over one million, three hundred thousand credits per person. Today, under the Keno clan, it’s not even nine hundred thousand.”

  “Those are rate statistics,” St. Murray reminded, and Masozi was almost unable to come to terms with the numbers being bandied about. “Assuming a linear decline in GDP, and factoring in a fifty year period of productivity per citizen—a number which is probably high, given Philippa’s decaying healthcare system—this means that the total damage to Philippa’s economy under the Keno family has been—“

  “Four hundred…billion credits?!” Masozi reared back in shock as she said the words. The number made absolutely no sense, even to her scientifically-inclined mind.

  “That number is only informative to a point,” Jericho chided. “The real damage has been, quite literally, four hundred thousand ‘lifetimes’ of productivity which Governor Keno has stolen from her constituents by shutting down the frontier mining initiative. Even if we only attributed five percent of the decline to the Governor directly…”

  “Twenty thousand…” Masozi breathed in disbelief. “How much did she steal?”

  Jericho smiled tightly and nodded. “That’s the right question, Investigator,” he approved. “We could have only guessed without the information Madame St. Murray is about to provide us.” He then turned pointedly to Tera St. Murray, “How much is it, Madame?”

  St. Murray bit her lip briefly before replying, “Our covert surveys, made possible only with Hadden Enterprise’s assistance, show that the richest mining operations fully quadrupled their collective output after the last claim was abandoned by its rightful owners.” She exhaled slowly as she concluded, “By now they’ve easily mined over a trillion credits worth of minerals—a value based solely on Hadden’s standing order prices.”

  Jericho nodded as Masozi’s mind reeled from the data. “And they’ve been careful about covering their tracks,” he said pointedly as Masozi tried to come to grips with how horrific the crime against Philippa’s people appeared to be. “We haven’t been able to trace a single credit back to Pacifica’s Ring…but we caught a break when Benton discovered a small, underground market for these rare elements operating on Virgin. To make another long story short, my investigation into the matter led me to a man named Janus Angelo. He was formerly an official in New Lincoln whose bribe had been partially paid in complex indium, gadolinium, and yttrium matrices. Those matrices’ constituent elements were traced back to Pacifica’s Ring—they were also proven to have been mined, and processed, in the last six months.”

  Silence hung over the room as the workers at the various workstations quietly continued their tasks of compiling and transferring data from the System’s various data feeds. Masozi could barely believe that an official would be so corrupt…and that such a corruption would not only be permitted to linger, but that it wouldn’t be commented on by the other governments of the Sector.

  And then, in a flash of understanding, she understood why they needed to act quickly. “If she gets to the Summit—“

  “
Then she’ll be placed under maximum security by Blanco’s security forces,” Jericho interrupted grimly, “and we’ll never get another shot at her. It’s obvious that Governor Keno is aligned with President Blanco, and that Hadden Enterprises was one of their most powerful mutual enemies. Retaliation against her by Hadden’s now-disparate loyal factions would be a mathematical certainty in the aftermath of H.E. One’s destruction, so we have to expect Blanco to circle the wagons.”

  “You two should go,” Tera St. Murray said shortly, “I’ve given you what you came for and we need to dismantle this site as quickly as possible now that we’ve passed the information along.” She shook her head in wonderment, “I never thought a qualified T.E. Adjuster would make it here in time.”

  Jericho smirked, “My appearance here following Governor Keno’s suddenly precipitous fall in approval rating is far from a coincidence, Madame St. Murray.”

  “I only wish we could have thanked Director Hadden personally before…” St. Murray trailed off. “I fear we can provide you with no more assistance in this matter, Adjuster.”

  Jericho shook his head sharply, “We won’t need anything else, Madame. You’ve given us everything we could have asked for.”

  Chapter XXIII: A Confrontation

  Nearly an hour later, Jericho and Masozi came to a tavern in the main settlement. They had left Madame St. Murray’s establishment and made their way for the main portion of the settlement near the crater’s center.

  “You have to drink extra water in this atmosphere,” Jericho explained as they sat down in a corner booth of the darkly-lit structure. “Your lungs dry out faster than they would on Virgin.”

  A server brought them a container of water and a pair of metal mugs. Jericho poured them each a glass before gesturing for Masozi to take her pick of the two.

  Masozi’s thirst had grown slightly but she suspected the odd, burning sensation in her lungs was precisely what he was talking about. She downed a mug of water, finding it incredibly sterile-tasting compared to the water she had grown up drinking.

  “It takes a little getting used to,” Jericho admitted before downing his own mug of the stuff, “but water’s one of the most precious commodities on a world like this one. The atmosphere doesn’t retain it as well as on Virgin, or any other Core World with a homeostatic biosphere for that matter, so they’re constantly bringing in comets and breaking them up in orbit before letting the remnants impact safely near the poles once they’ve been reduced to small enough pieces.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this place,” Masozi said, already having deduced that he had lived on Philippa by his familiarity with the customs and equipment.

  “It’s true,” Jericho admitted after pouring her another mug of water, “my family came here not long after I was born. Philippa was all I knew…until we had to sell our mine back to the government.”

  Masozi was half-finished with her second mug of water before she set it down and realized that his admission made perfect sense. “That’s why you want to punish Keno,” she concluded with a slow nod.

  Jericho shrugged. “To my mind she’s at the top of a very short list of people requiring Adjustment,” he replied in a low voice. “But I haven’t acted against her because I didn’t have the evidence.”

  “Speaking of which,” Masozi said, producing the T.E. insignia and sliding it across the table, “this should have everything you need on it now, right?”

  “Not quite,” he replied as he stood abruptly from the table, “I have to hit the head. The last pieces of evidence are on St. Murray’s data crystal; load them up while I’m gone.”

  Jericho made his way to the ‘head,’ which Masozi took to mean the lavatory, and she hesitated before doing as he had suggested. Placing the crystal against the T.E. insignia, she was once again rewarded with a rapid sequence of flashing lights. But this time the display was over much more quickly, and when it was she took a moment to study the insignia itself. It was a pair of triangles which formed a six-pointed star, at the center of which was a large, unblinking eye. Surrounding that eye, on the sides of the ‘inner,’ or ‘topmost’ triangle were the three mottos of the Timent Electorum: Ure Infectus, Sic Semper Tyrannis, and Mors Proditores.

  As a young girl she hadn’t really understood their meaning, but after spending time with Jericho and contemplating the whole situation at some length, she believed she had a reasonable idea of what they meant.

  The verbiage was from a long-dead language of Ancient Earth, and the first phrase, Ure Infectus, roughly translated to ‘the corrupt shall burn.’ Sic Semper Tyrannis, the second phrase, meant roughly, ‘the same for all tyrants.’ And Mors Proditores quite clearly said, ‘death to traitors.’

  As she was thinking about the T.E.’s mandate, Masozi noticed a public access node which her data link could connect to via wireless protocols. Her mind was bombarded by possible actions when she saw it, and she knew that she might not get another chance to generate any leverage against Jericho if he was less than agreeable to her desire to leave his company.

  While he was still in the lavatory, Masozi entered the access codes to her link and was rewarded by a simple connection protocol which successfully connected her data link to the settlement’s secondary information nexus.

  She scrolled through the public services until finding the one she was looking for and, after a brief moment of hesitation, she saved the connection she had found to the slate and set it to a five minute countdown to activate. If she failed to swipe her finger across the screen during that time, it would automatically make the connection she had saved. Masozi truly hoped it would not come to that, but if it did she was determined not only to safeguard her own safety but potentially the safety of hundreds…or even thousands of civilians.

  Jericho pushed the swinging doors open and she smoothly replaced the link in her pocket as she took a look at the room’s chronometer. Five minutes, she reminded herself as Jericho sat down across from her in the booth.

  “How is an Adjustment initiated?” she asked as she finished her water. When she had done so, she emptied the remaining contents of the larger container into their mugs more or less equally and began to sip on her own, third, cup of the sterile-tasting liquid.

  “There’s a formula,” Jericho replied after taking a sip of his own water. “Sudden downward shifts in approval ratings are one component of the formula, while overall approval is another one. Obviously there’s more to it than that, but in the case of Governor Keno her Adjustment was essentially requested when her approval rating plummeted from ninety two percent to forty eight percent over the course of the last six months before once again beginning to climb.”

  “That’s it?” she blurted disbelievingly. Masozi simply could not accept that approval ratings could determine whether or not an official was assassinated.

  “No,” Jericho replied measuredly, “that’s not ‘it.’ That is just one way in which an Adjustment may be initiated. But remember,” he pointed to the T.E. insignia, “there’s a process of discovery and verification which needs to take place before an Adjustment is green-lit.”

  “Who checks your work before you execute an Adjustment?” she asked. “I can’t believe that Adjusters never make mistakes?”

  “Oh, we’ve made mistakes,” he allowed with a derisive snort. “But the answer to your first question is ‘nobody.’ We communicate with each other using public messaging systems—some of which Benton probably showed you—but even then we don’t say anything other than the fact that an Adjustment has been initiated. We don’t even give our names. After it’s been carried out, the Adjustment is verified by a senior Adjuster as having been done in accordance with the T.E.’s mandate. That’s basically it; it’s nowhere near as complicated as you might think.”

  “That doesn’t seem like it would work,” she argued, “you said the Keno Adjustment would be highly sought after. Why wouldn’t someone here on Philippa just take care of it?”

  “There aren’t as
many of us as you might think,” he replied between sips of his water. “Also, higher-level Adjustments like the Governor’s can only be undertaken by an Adjuster who has accrued enough RL—Redeemed Lives,” he said before fixing her with a hard look. “I can’t reveal the formula’s specifics to you right now, but there are only two Adjusters in this entire System who could have even qualified for the Keno Adjustment. You’re sharing a drink with one of them…and there’s reason enough for me to believe the second would have little interest in pursuing this particular Adjustment.”

  Masozi considered his words, which alarmingly seemed to suggest that there was some measure of discord within the Timent Electorum’s ranks.

  “I’ve been hesitant to reveal some of these details to you, Investigator,” Jericho said as she silently mulled over the implications of her society’s last line of defense against political corruption having been compromised. “But it seems I may have been wrong to exclude you to this point. So I’ll start by saying that no Adjuster who reaches my level sets out to make an Adjustment without multiple backup plans in place. Personally, I don’t undertake an Adjustment unless I have three, distinct methods I can use to carry out the mission. Those methods must each provide a minimum of eighty percent success likelihood, and I think it’s time I shared the ones I’ve devised for the Governor’s Adjustment with you.”

  Masozi felt her pulse quicken. Will he actually tell me about the bomb? she wondered silently, working hard to keep the anxiety she felt from her expression.

  “The first method I devised for this particular assignment,” he explained as he withdrew a small key card similar to the one Masozi had used to gain entry to her residential building back in New Lincoln, “involves a long-range, high-powered, anti-material rifle.”