Cutter sighed and slumped in his chair. “This is going to be more boring than I thought.” He wagged a finger. “You’ll like me eventually.”
This time, it was Emma who turned her face away. “Please don’t threaten me.”
Chapter Fifty
Esposito was already waiting for them in the room. A prison guard stood in the corner, glaring at the inmate, his hand resting near his stun rod.
Jia wasn’t sure if the attitude was for their own benefit, but it wouldn’t hurt to help convince the prisoner to give up more information.
“You aren’t his lawyers, so we’re going to be monitoring everything,” the warden noted.
“Fine by us,” Jia replied with a nod.
Esposito sat at a table, his hands folded neatly atop it and a nervous smile on his face. His wrists were bound, but his legs were free. He took a few deep breaths. His cheeks were flushed.
Erik didn’t sit. He moved to the wall and turned toward Esposito. Jia stared at the prisoner. He kept rubbing his wrists and darting his eyes back and forth. Beads of sweat covered his forehead.
“Nervous?” Jia asked.
“Not as much as you might think,” Esposito replied. “But it’s hard not to be somewhat nervous when you’re about to do something big, don’t you think?”
“Why did you call us out here, Mr. Esposito?” Jia asked. “Shouldn’t you have called the CID agents who handled your arrest?”
“We both know they weren’t the real reason I went down,” he responded. He glared at her. “You were the two who shook everything up, so you were the two I needed to talk to. You’re the ones who changed everything in Neo SoCal. You’re the ones who made it hard to do…business there.”
“So, is this about Ceres Galactic?” Jia glanced at Erik, who nodded. She was more than content to take the lead on the interrogation.
Esposito licked his lips. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like to be able to take down more people and show everyone what special cops you are. Destroy more families and not think about the consequences.”
“I like taking down criminals.” Jia folded her arms. “And you’re the one who destroyed your family when you decided to commit crimes instead of remaining a law-abiding citizen. Did you call us here to give us information on Ceres or not?”
“Too damned bad for you.” Esposito worked his jaw for a moment, grimacing and tilted his head, his attention jumping between the two detectives. His forehead glistened with perspiration. “You flew all that way for nothing. I’ve got nothing to give you. You wasted your time. How does it feel, Detectives? Knowing you’ve been set up?”
Jia shook her head.
“That’s your big plan?” Erik asked. “You wanted to waste our time? Not the stuff of epic revenge, Esposito. You should have hired someone to piss on my flitter. It would have hurt more.”
The prisoner let out a strangled laugh. “Waste your time? No. Don’t you see? I lured you out here. You’re not going to leave.”
“Threatening two detectives isn’t going to get time taken off your sentence.” Jia glared at him. “You better start talking, or we’re leaving.” She narrowed her eyes, her heart rate kicking up.
The guard frowned at Esposito and grabbed his stun rod.
“So, you’re going to do what, kill us?” Erik asked. “How are you going to do that on a prison station with your hands bound and without a weapon?”
Esposito slowly stood, sneering. “You think you’re better than me, don’t you? You’re nothing. You’re cops! I was a senior vice-president of one of the most important corporations on Earth. When you die today, no one will care. You’re insects.”
“Sit down, Esposito,” ordered the guard, raising his stun rod.
“We are better than you,” Erik replied, still against the wall, his expression bored. “Because we didn’t sell our souls to whatever pieces of shit you did. You can’t be pissed at us that we caught you. You chose a bunch of garbage as friends, and so you ended up with garbage support in the end.”
“So brave.” Esposito spat at the feet of the guard. “If you stay out of my way, you don’t have to die because you haven’t screwed with me.” He nodded toward the detectives. “But those two won’t leave this room alive.”
“I told you to sit down!” The guard walked toward him.
Esposito leapt into the air, easily clearing the table, and snapped his leg up. He connected with the guard’s head and the man flew back, slamming into a wall with a grunt.
Esposito landed in a crouch, his eyes closed. He growled, and the veins in his neck bulged.
Jia moved toward the guard’s side, but he waved her off.
“I’m fine,” the guard shouted. “Time to teach this son of a bitch a lesson.” He launched himself at Esposito, swung the stun rod, and caught the man on the head. Esposito twitched for a moment before his eyes snapped open. Odd yellow striations covered his sclera, and his dilated pupils had erased almost any other color from his eyes.
Another swing of the stun rod didn’t bring Esposito down. He sank his teeth into the man’s wrist.
The guard screamed as the prisoner clamped down with a crunch, blood spewing out of his mouth to drip on the floor.
Esposito opened his jaws and the guard stumbled back, blood pouring from his half-opened wrist. The prisoner spun to deliver another powerful kick. The crack echoed in the mostly empty room, and the guard fell back, his head at an unnatural angle.
Red lights flashed, and alarms screeched.
Jia lifted her hands and shifted her feet into a combat stance. Erik circled around the other side of the table.
“Didn’t know you were augmented,” Erik murmured. “Why didn’t they take that into account?”
“I’m not a Tin Man,” growled Esposito. “I’m something better. They made it so I could have my revenge. I was afraid, but now I’m not.”
“They?”
“The people who want you dead.” Esposito cackled.
The door slid open, and two other guards rushed in. Esposito leapt onto the table, snarling and slavering, his teeth stained with the blood of the dead guard.
He jumped at the new arrivals, his shoulder slamming into one guard and knocking him into the wall, where he slumped. Unconscious, but not dead.
Jia rushed toward Esposito, dodged a kick, and slammed her foot into his head. He jerked back before jumping up and smashing his head into the chin of the other guard.
The man stumbled back, his eyes rolling up.
Jia’s flurry of palm strikes barely pushed Esposito back. He lunged for her, but she spun out of the way and brought up her knee to meet his nose with a crunch. Blood sprayed all over the floor, but he didn’t slow.
He just growled louder.
Erik leapt over the table and drop-kicked Esposito. The prisoner crashed into the wall with a resounding thud. The man’s face was a mangled mess, covered in blood, both his and others’.
Several of his teeth had been knocked out. He continued to snarl and growl like a rabid animal. Heavy footsteps echoed from the hallway, mixing with the alarm, along with the rhythmic taps of approaching bots and the hum of drones.
Esposito growled louder. One of his arms hung loosely from above his elbow, a huge bulge visible. If he felt any pain from the obvious break, it wasn’t slowing him down.
“What the hell is this?” Erik shouted.
When Esposito lunged at him, Erik met him with his left fist. The blow sent the man staggering back, his face half-collapsed, his flesh riven.
The condition of his arm and his uneven gait suggested those weren’t his only wounds.
A security bot crawled in from the hallway. It jumped onto the table and then toward Esposito with its long stun rod. The rod made contact, but the prisoner just jerked for a second before snarling and kicking the bot away.
Jia dodged the bot before she delivered a solid roundhouse to Esposito’s head, but he barely flinched. “I’m beginning to regret not having a gun.”
“Funny how that works,” Erik grumbled. “Screw a gun. I wish I had the laser rifle.”
The bot tackled Esposito once more, and this time Erik grabbed one of the stun rods on the ground.
“If at first you don’t succeed?” Jia asked.
Another bot scampered into the room and rushed toward Esposito. He bit down on the first bot’s leg, growling and snarling. Both bots shoved their stun rods against him, trying to incapacitate him, but he kept trying to bite the leg as if oblivious to either their attacks or their being bots.
Several guards arrived outside the door, all holding rods but not entering. Their faces were masks of fear.
Erik stomped toward Esposito and tossed the stun rod into his left hand. “A missile might be nice, too.” He brought up his left arm and slammed the rod into Esposito’s head with all the momentum the artificial limb could provide.
With a loud crunch, the weapon split the prisoner’s skull and entered his brain.
Esposito howled and thrashed. Jia stared, transfixed in horror. The guards outside watched, wide-eyed. One man crossed himself and murmured a prayer under his breath.
Erik brought up his boot and shoved the stun rod all the way through Esposito’s head. With that, his head fell back, and he stopped moving.
The alarm fell silent.
No one said a word for a good thirty seconds before the guards crept in, eyeing the prisoner’s body.
“He was drugged,” one of them muttered. “He had to have been.”
Jia shook her head. “I’ve had a lot of different people try to kill me in the last year, including people on drugs.” She pointed to the body as she spoke to the guard. “Have you ever seen anything like that before? That wasn’t a drug.”
“Yeah.” Erik prodded the body with his boot tip. “This wasn’t drugs. This was straight-up mutant yaoguai shit.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Warden Harris ran his hands through his hair as the guards were hauled away on hoverstretchers.
One moaned as they guided him down the hall, a medpatch on his head.
Erik figured any man who could still make noise could be saved.
He glanced back into the blood-splattered room. Paranoia had turned into prophecy. This was strange even by his standards. His earlier explanation didn’t make sense. Esposito had lived a full and public life. If he was a mutant or changeling that bizarre, someone would have noticed.
Jia’s angry gaze bored into the warden. “What just happened?” She flung her arm in the direction of the room. “You were watching the whole thing, right? He was immune to stun rods, and he had to be de-brained to be taken out. That wasn’t just an assassination attempt. It was a fight against a monster, and trust me, I’ve fought my share.”
“You don’t think I get that?” Warden Harris snapped. “One of my men is dead, and the other seriously injured. I don’t get it. Esposito’s been a model prisoner. He’s never attacked anyone, let alone bitten them.”
Erik stomped to the warden and glared at him. Three guards surged toward him but stopped at the warden’s upraised hand.
“A lot of people have tried to kill us,” Erik growled, his voice low and full of menace. “There are even cops who have purposefully dragged their feet to get us killed.”
“What are you saying?”
“You know exactly what I’m saying. Look me in the eyes and tell me you had nothing to do with it.”
Warden Harris locked eyes with Erik and squared his shoulders. The men were of similar heights, but Erik’s bulk and sheer presence made the other man seem small.
“I pride myself on keeping scum in line,” the warden replied, his voice quivering with rage. “And even if I was a corrupt bastard on some syndicate’s payroll, you think I’d send my men in there to die?” His finger stabbed in the direction of the bloody room. “What kind of sense does that make? I’m just as pissed as you are.”
Erik nodded slowly and stepped away. “Yeah, seems like it.”
“None of that changes the fact that a prisoner with no cybernetic augmentations fought off five people and two bots before Erik smashed the stun rod through his skull,” Jia stated. “His eyes and veins and earlier behavior suggest something was wrong with him, and it wasn’t just adrenaline. Something changed him. I’ve never seen a drug produce that reaction, but it’s the most likely explanation. It’s not like he had tons of cybernetic augmentations surreptitiously implanted while he was in a prison in space.”
The warden scrubbed a hand over his face. “He had a visitor recently, someone named Hadrian Conners. We did a full check on the guy. He has no record. He’s just some businessman. I assumed he was a contact from Esposito’s Ceres days. He was scanned, and he didn’t bring anything in.”
“Obviously, he did,” Erik commented.
“You don’t know that. It’s just a theory,” the warden shot back.
“What did they talk about?” Jia frowned. “I’m hoping he didn’t say, ‘Hey, you want to kill two cops?’”
“I checked the footage.” The warden shook his head. “It was just Conners talking about sphere ball and how he was planning to help Esposito’s family. It was strange because he’s the first visitor other than his wife since he was imprisoned here, but I see that all the time with fallen corp princes like him. Everyone’s ashamed to be associated with them, but after a while, they start feeling pity. I figured it was something similar.”
“Esposito said someone did something to him, and the point was to kill us. When was the last time his wife visited?”
“Not for several months.”
“The footage was probably altered,” Erik suggested. “Esposito didn’t change himself and call us out of the blue.”
The warden scoffed. “Altered footage? You’re saying this Conners hacked our systems when he was here for less than two hours? That’s impossible.”
“I’m not a warden.” Erik inclined his head toward the bloodied meeting room. “I’m a cop, and we go off evidence. Esposito was normal, and then this Conners shows up. Now he’s not normal. He didn’t pay any attention to us this entire time, and suddenly calls us? That’s a lot of coincidences stacking up.”
“I’m going to have our doctor examine the body,” the warden explained, weariness underlying his voice. “And I can’t let you leave until we get this figured out. I don’t know if this was drugs or what, but it could be some sort of pathogen you brought aboard.”
Jia laughed. “So, it’s our fault now?”
“He wasn’t biting people and able to ignore pain after his last visitor. I’m not saying you did it on purpose, but your partner’s the one who just got done talking about coincidences. If you do have a pathogen, we’re going to need to quarantine you until we can get the appropriate personnel here to handle it.”
“We need to talk to our people on our ship. Our person, I mean. If you don’t want us to leave, just don’t release the docking clamp.” Erik inclined his head up the corridor in the direction of the docking bay.
The warden took a deep breath. “I’ll allow it, but I want our doctor to take a blood sample. After you talk with your pilot, you’ll need to come back to the infirmary.”
Erik frowned. If the warden was corrupt, he could easily lie about the test results, but he was allowing them to go back to the ship temporarily, so there was no point in fighting him.
“Fine,” Erik muttered.
Cutter eyed Erik with suspicion. “So, you don’t have space rabies? You sure? Maybe you’re a carrier.”
Jia rolled her eyes. “You just flew with us for twelve hours.”
“The passive pathogen filters aren’t detecting anything unusual,” Emma reported. “It’s not impossible that a pathogen is present on the Pegasus, but it’s extremely unlikely.”
Jia frowned at Cutter. “If we were the cause, you’d already be trying to bite our throats. This was an assassination attempt. I’d suggest you keep the doors closed on the ship, though, and recycle your air ju
st in case. If it is some sort of bioweapon, it could be in the prison air, and it might be contagious.”
“Sorry.” Erik shook his head with a laugh. “I can’t do it.”
“Do what?” Jia asked.
“I’m not kissing you if you grow a mustache or try to bite my throat.”
“Duly noted,” Jia replied with a wry smile. “Shoot me instead.”
“Seriously?”
“No, not seriously.” Jia threw up her hands. “We need to figure out what’s going on. If it’s a disease, we need an antidote. I might end up trying to eat your face instead of kissing you.”
Erik blinked. “I have no idea how to respond to that.”
Jia groaned and placed a hand on her face. “Don’t. I wasn’t thinking where that would go. It sounded better in my head.”
“I’m presuming this is now a sufficient emergency to warrant special procedures?” Emma asked.
“Yeah,” Erik admitted. “I don’t know if the warden’s in on it, but this Conners is the key.”
“Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be so simple,” Emma admitted, sounding embarrassed. “And potentially not even possible.”
“What?” Erik shook his head. “What do you mean? Since when is something like that impossible for you?”
“The system is almost completely locked down from the outside,” Emma explained. “I probed a little when the alarm went off. Given the nature of this facility, I expected it, but it’s still disappointing.”
“The alarm went off even out here?” Erik asked.
“No, but I was using the ship’s sensors to do my best to monitor unusual noise from the inside,” Emma explained. “Since I wasn’t directly in communication with you, it only seemed prudent. You do tend to attract trouble. I was expecting conventional gun goblins, not hungry inmates, but that doesn’t change the trouble you encountered.”
Jia sighed. “I was afraid of that. If it was not well protected, there would be too much risk of a criminal ship getting close and hacking things. I’d read about that, but I’d hoped Emma could overcome the system.”
Cabal of Lies Page 33