Up The Middle (Spineward Sectors: Middleton's Pride Book 2)

by Caleb Wachter

  When New Lincoln had served as host city to the Anvil and all of its attendant fanfare, the city had been promised massive economic benefits in exchange for major renovations and public works projects which were to be undertaken at taxpayer expense. Of course, there had been certain setbacks and the event had become a PR black eye for the Mayor’s administration.

  “Forgive me, Mr…” Mayor Cantwell pressed for the third time since the meeting’s unscheduled outset.

  “Bennett,” the man replied in his crude, low-born accent.

  “Of course…Mr. Bennett,” Mayor Cantwell nodded knowingly as he surreptitiously activated a data retrieval program to search for information about the man sitting before him. “And you fill an…” his lips twitched sardonically, “advisory role for Commissioner Heinlein?”

  “That’s right,” the man with the square, chiseled jaw replied as his grey-blue eyes bored into the Mayor’s own. “I’ve served in my current capacity for thirty years, and I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

  The data retrieval program activated a retinal display device, and Mayor Cantwell began to flick through the several gigabytes of data the program had retrieved on the man sitting before him. It seemed that he had, indeed, been a standout player for the Hampton Hoarkers prior to suffering an early, career-ending spinal injury.

  According to the laws of Virgin, such an injury—while easily treatable with modern medicine—precluded a player from continuing to professionally compete in athletics since such an injury’s repair would involve measures that had been deemed to be performance-enhancing.

  The Mayor scrolled through the first few pages of relevant data, with extra scrutiny placed on Mr. Bennett’s affiliation with the League Commissioner. Apparently he had served in an ‘advisory capacity’—which, in political terms, generally indicated that he acted as a ‘bag man’—for nearly two continuous decades. His other records were more or less nonexistent, including no traffic violations, domestic disturbances, or anything else aside from a handful of off-world visits to the nearby colonies which coincided with the Commissioner’s own travel schedule. In short, he presented a completely typical profile for the very person he claimed to be—which put the Mayor on his guard.

  “Mr. Bennett,” Mayor Cantwell leaned forward and laced his fingers together as he deactivated the retinal display with little more than a twitch of his cheek, “I must admit that I was surprised—and more than a little disquieted—by this unscheduled meeting.”

  Bennett fixed his gaze on the Mayor, and Mayor Cantwell—a lifelong politician who had debated some of the most powerful people in the entire system—actually felt the urge to recoil from the weight of the man’s gaze. Instead, he did as he always did in such circumstances and affixed a patently false, well-practiced smile on his lips. “Mayor Cantwell, the Commissioner has expressed…concern regarding recent allegations directed your way relating to the New Lincoln Anvil which took place two years ago. The League can’t exactly afford another Watercress incident—especially not so soon.”

  Cantwell’s smile tightened, knowing a veiled threat when he heard it. “I can assure the Commissioner that these concerns stem from little more than off-cycle news fodder; I’m currently running a seventy three percent approval rating with over two thirds of my constituents having expressed a desire for my re-election to a fourth term. Tell Commissioner Heinlein that this will all blow over in a matter of days.” Cantwell’s smile broadened as he decided to make a play of his own, “But I’m afraid these numbers are inaccurate.”

  Bennett cocked an eyebrow. “Oh?” he asked, his expression somewhere between surprise and wariness.

  Cantwell nodded solemnly as he highlighted one passage of the coded letter—a passage which, using predetermined verbiage, confirmed the amount of bribe money he had accepted in order to secure the public works committee’s support. That committee had been the most instrumental component of bringing the Anvil to New Lincoln, and Mayor Cantwell had distributed the Commissioner’s bribe monies to several key members of that department…well, Mayor Cantwell hadn’t given all of the bribe monies to the committee.

  “Indeed; I fear we miscalculated the secondary impact on our fair city’s waste disposal systems,” he explained as he tapped out a new set of numbers in an addendum to the document. “I have discussed it with the committee at some length and they assure me that this figure must be increased accordingly.”

  He slid the data pad across the desk to Mr. Bennett, who accepted the pad as his jaw clenched tightly. His eyes flicked down to the figures Mayor Cantwell had added and Mr. Bennett’s eyebrows rose briefly before grudgingly nodding his head, “Commissioner Heinlein has authorized me to accept these figures on his behalf.”

  Cantwell’s eyebrow cocked in a mixture of amusement and incredulity. “It would seem the Commissioner trusts you a great deal…I find it strange that we have not met until just now.”

  Bennett seemed to ignore the prodding comment as he produced a small, familiar data link from his pocket and activated it. The former player input a series of commands to the uplink before speaking a series of coded phrases into it. It was all quite regular procedure and this set the Mayor at ease, since Mr. Bennett was using the exact same uplink his predecessors had used to initiate clandestine payments to a series of dummy accounts Mayor Cantwell had established throughout the sector.

  Cantwell re-activated his retinal display and, with little more than a few twitches of his cheek and the rhythmic clacking of his teeth, logged into his secret banking portfolio and verified that the agreed-upon sum of money had indeed been transferred to his handful of secret accounts, and that the money had originated from the same accounts the Commissioner had used in the past.

  The Mayor’s smile broadened as he reached for a DNA-locked compartment of his desk, and after opening the compartment he produced a pair of glasses and some of the rarest liquor known to the entire Sector. “I believe the conclusion of such a productive business relationship calls for celebration,” he declared as he used his implanted uplink to cycle down the auto-turrets which had been on a hair trigger activation sequence since Mr. Bennett had entered the office.

  The thought had occurred to him to simply execute the man using those defensive systems, but had he done so he would have certainly been detained by public security forces. Such a detainment would have caused him to miss his appointment with a set of sisters—quadruplets, at that—who were waiting to…indulge his appetites on the other side of town.

  “I’m not much for the sauce,” Mr. Bennett said with a disapproving look, and Mayor Cantwell shrugged as he slid one of the glasses back into its compartment. The League representative reached into his jacket’s pocket and withdrew what looked to be a cheap—possibly hand-made—cigar and gestured as though requesting permission.

  Mayor Cantwell nodded as he suppressed a sigh, knowing that inhaling smoke was perhaps the least efficient method of delivering the desired chemicals into the body. “To each his own,” he said as he put three fingers of the expensive liquor into the tumbler before replacing the stopper on the bottle.

  Mr. Bennett produced a small, petroleum-fueled lighter from another pocket and lit the cigar before taking a long, deep draw from it as the Mayor took the first sip of his drink. It burned his throat almost badly enough that he wanted to gasp, but he knew that like all things of great value in life, he needed to savor that measure of pain just as much as the pleasure which would soon follow.

  “I’m afraid I’ve got a confession to make, Mayor Cantwell,” Mr. Bennett said after a polite silence had hung between them for several seconds.

  Cantwell leaned back in his leather chair and swirled his drink absently, wanting nothing more than for the man to leave his office as quickly as humanly possible so he could skip over to the quadruplets’ flat and engage in his latest, sordid indulgences. “And what confession might that be, Mr. Bennett?”

  Bennett took a second, long draw from the cigar before deliberately stam
ping it out against the arm of the posh, leather chair in which he sat. The smell of aerosolized leather preservative wafted into Mayor Cantwell’s nostrils, and his eyes narrowed at such a blatant sign of disrespect. Commissioner Heinlein will be hearing of this, he promised himself silently.

  When he had ground the last of the cigar’s embers into the leather cushion, Bennett stood to his full, imposing height. Without breaking eye contact he cracked his neck first to the left, then to the right, before saying in a calm, conversational tone, “I’ve never cared for politicians.”

  In a blur of motion almost too fast to see, the man who had defiled the antique, leather chair with his cigar produced a cleverly-concealed pistol…

  …and blew the top half of the sitting Mayor’s head off just as the lights went out.

  The Mayor’s body began to twitch spasmodically in the faint light, and the gunman’s arm ached from the vicious kick his crude weapon had produced. “Wlad,” the gunman posing as a PHL rep said after inserting his earpiece and opening a channel to his equivalent of tech support, “glad to see you got those sentry cannons under control. I need an update.” He let his eyes adjust to the darkness as he checked a small, concealed, carbon-fiber clasp which was attached to a harness hidden beneath his overcoat.

  “You got it, ‘Mr. Bennett’,” the other man said sarcastically in his ridiculous, long-practiced accent. “You got six—no, eight private security dudes outside the door. I done sealed it tight, but that’ll only buy you forty seconds if these guys be packin’ what they supposed to be packin’.”

  “Cut the shit, Benton,” he snapped, irritated at his operator’s chosen vernacular. The Mayor’s office had been rigged with all manner of scanning hardware, so there had been no way to get his standard gear for a job of this type into the room with him. Exiting the room was therefore going to be tricky—and hearing his operator’s archeo-slang wasn’t helping him focus.

  “Thirty seconds, Jericho,” Benton said through the earpiece, his voice taking on a slightly more serious tone as he briefly abandoned his adopted vernacular, “looks like the window’s your way out.”

  “Thanks for that update, operator,” Jericho quipped dryly as he flipped the emblem of his office onto the Mayor’s desk. The hexagonal insignia landed in the middle of the desk near the Mayor’s body, adding an intentionally dramatic flair to the macabre scene.

  Jericho took a second cigar out of his pocket and carefully unwound the wrapper. Inside was the standard assortment of dried leaves and seeds which made up the low-cost alternative to chemstix and other, less destructive, methods of stimulant introduction. But buried within the cigar was a pair of small, brownish, metallic beads. He plucked these out of the mass of dried leaves with his surgeon-steady hands and made his way to the window.

  “Twenty seconds, Jericho,” Benton reported altogether unnecessarily. Jericho suspected the big guy just liked to hear his own voice, and since the two of them had a history—not to mention that Benton was easily the best operator he had ever worked with—Jericho had grudgingly learned to deal with the other man’s peculiar idiom.

  Jericho carefully placed the two beads a precise distance apart on the glass at about chest height before producing a carbon-fiber clasp from beneath his trench coat and attaching it to a nearby vertical support beam. He then took four measured steps back and turned to face the window. Jericho knew that for the beads to work their technological magic, the shot needed to be taken from a precise location. His concealed weapon only had two rounds, and he had used one of those to execute his Adjustment of the Mayor—whose body had only then stopped twitching.

  He took careful aim between the two beads, knowing that if he even missed his shot by a few inches that the bullet would be deflected by the super-strong, floor-to-ceiling window of the Mayor’s lavish office. Closing one eye—to improve his focus as much as his vision—he took a slow, cleansing breath and squeezed the trigger of his relatively primitive slug-thrower.

  The pistol bucked hard in his hand as the window shattered into a shower of countless pieces, and the wind began to whip violently through the office carrying the heavy, greasy smells of industry into the previously sterile chamber. Jericho dropped the spent weapon to the floor and took a steadying breath.

  “Ten seconds, Jericho,” Benton reported as the sealed door began to glow near the locking mechanism as they began to burn their way through the portal. The security guards outside were apparently just ahead of schedule, and would breach the room in no more than five seconds.

  Jericho hesitated for one of the few times in his life. The principles at play in his ‘safe’ egress from the office had been explained and tested—then re-tested—so many times he felt confident he could do what he was about to attempt in his sleep. But, contrary to the opinions of some, he was human—and that meant that in spite of his meticulous preparations, he still harbored a sliver of doubt.

  “Man’s sake, Jericho,” Benton chided through a static-laden, crunching noise which Jericho took to be the chewing of junk food by his rotund operator, “the science is solid—solid, know what I’m sayin’!? Take yo’ leap, boy!”

  The sound of the locking bolts retracting from the vault-like door was enough to spur Jericho into motion. Running as fast as he could, he cleared the window and began to fall to the street below just as a volley of energy beams erupted into the space above his head as the security force narrowly missed their mark after breaching the Mayor’s heavy door.

  The rain-filled, night air whipped around his body as he fought to keep his feet pointed to the ground and his body reacted to the sensation of falling just as it had during his several test runs back at headquarters. No more than a quarter of the way to the ground, a series of sharp, repeating impacts could be felt as a the tiny cord he had attached to the beam at the window began to unwind through a series of meticulously, painstakingly designed loops which provided just under four gees of resistance at their peak.

  This was the only part of the operation Jericho had taken issue with. Killing the Mayor had almost been too easy; infiltrating his office had been marginally more difficult, but still eminently do-able. It was the leaping-out-the-window-and-ensuing-insanity which had bothered him.

  But his body hurtled toward the ground below in an ever-slowing descent, and before he knew it his feet met the pavement and despite his instinct to do otherwise—and due to literally thousands of practice sessions—he kept his legs straight and his feet slammed flat against the ground just as the cord attached to his harness finally broke near the fastener a hundred and thirty six feet above him.

  The sensation of landing on the slick, dark pavement was far from unpleasant—in fact, it was anything but remarkable save for the fact that it was utterly anticlimactic. The impact felt like nothing worse than jumping down from a height of three meters, and Jericho could not help but marvel at the simplicity of his escape mechanism as bits of the very cord which had safely lowered him to the ground fell to the pavement all around him.

  That cord—and the soles of his boots—had been meticulously crafted with a lattice-work of ablative, carbon nano-fibers which had absorbed the entire energy transfer of his fall. The devices had been relatively cheap to produce and, more importantly, had passed through the Mayor’s security scanners undetected. The boots, like the cord, were now worth little more than their weight in pencil shavings, but they had served their purpose beautifully.

  “Y’all still with me…or do we need a clean-up on aisle nine?” Benton asked into the silence as Jericho took a glance up the massive, towering building from which he had just leapt and marveled at the fact that he had actually survived.

  He exhaled a breath he hadn’t even realized he was holding. “I read you, operator,” he replied after shaking the imagery of the potentially lethal fall from his mind as he reached up to remove the earpiece, “I’m going dark. You’ll get your payment within the hour; nice working with you again.”

  “Any time, boss-man—any time,�
�� Benton replied with a boisterous chuckle. “Bro, I’m so psyched…I can’t believe that shit actually worked!”

  Despite his operator’s pre-jump confidence, Jericho had known he had been far from alone in his trepidation regarding the use of such primitive, crude technology. “Timent Electorum,” Jericho said wryly, invoking the name of his own branch of the government—a name which also served as a warning to corrupt officials everywhere in the Chimera Sector, where Virgin Prime was located.

  “True dat, bro; gotta fear them voters,” Benton agreed seriously before Jericho removed the earpiece and tossed it into a nearby drainage grate.

  His latest voter-endorsed Adjustment executed, Jericho made his way to a nearby hover conveyance—which he had contracted specifically for the occasion—and the vehicle disappeared into the sprawling cityscape while law enforcement vehicles sped toward New Lincoln’s seat of government in response to their city leader’s Adjustment. Some would think of the act as little more than an assassination, but any true son or daughter of Virgin Prime would recognize it for what it was:

  Justice.

  If you want to read more, check out Ure Infectus on Amazon.com!