Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Chimera Adjustment, Book Two (Imperium Cicernus 5)

by Caleb Wachter

  Tucking the pistol into his belt, he quietly opened the door to the pantry and peered outside. The pantry was at the end of a twenty foot long hallway and the door at the far end was locked. Thankfully Eve had installed a cracking program into his wrist-link, so he approached the door and held his ear to it for several seconds before determining there was no one on the other side.

  He placed the wrist-link beside the door’s locally controlled lock and activated the program. After twenty seconds, the light on the lock’s access panel turned from red to green and he cracked the door open to look up and down the hallway beyond.

  There was no full-time security assigned to the pantry, which had been a possibility in Jericho’s projections but it had been a minor one with only a 30% chance compared to the 70% chance of a full-time guard being posted.

  Still, Jericho was not about to argue about one fewer obstacle in his path to President Blanco. So Jericho removed his pull-away jumpsuit with a pair of sharp tugs, revealing a reasonable facsimile of a black tie tuxedo beneath.

  He had undergone rather extensive medical intervention prior to his entering the stealth pod, including a total purge of his digestive tract and the installation of a urinary catheter which he had neither the time nor pressing urge to remove. His skin had also been coated with a thin layer of material generally used in cryo-stasis pods to protect the inhabitant’s body from the negative effects of such a rapid freezing process, but the slimy substance had the added benefit of plugging his sweat glands so that even after four days inside the casket—the term he had adopted for the stealth pod—Jericho did not smell nearly as bad as he might have otherwise smelled without taking a shower during such a long interval.

  So he rearranged his pistol, wrist-link, and Blanco’s Tyrannis Mark in their various pockets before palming the seemingly innocent-looking, pen-shaped hilt of the wire-whip-style monomolecular blade and proceeding toward the stairwell which would lead to Blanco’s viewing box.

  Before Jericho reached the corner, he heard Blanco’s familiar voice boom throughout the theater and Jericho felt his heart skip a beat as the authoritative tone of the Virgin Sector President filled the nearly empty hallways.

  “Good citizens, it is with a mixture of pride and regret that I must inform you all of a wanton act of terrorism which has been foiled this very evening, on these very grounds,” Blanco intoned, and Jericho looked up to see a nearby viewing screen filled with the president’s dark, angular features beneath his trademark headwear.

  Jericho held back a sigh of relief, knowing that Blanco would claim credit for having apprehended or killed any of the people who had been part of Jericho’s plan. For a moment, he feared that Masozi might have been taken down by Blanco’s Agents.

  A wave of hushed concern swept through the theater’s auditorium, but Blanco held up his hands as a father might do to calm an anxious child, “The terrorists—for that is what they are, make no mistake—have presumably come to assassinate me and, in all likelihood, those other members of my cabinet which are in attendance this evening.” He swept the room with a cool, imperious gaze and asked, “Do I look dead to any of you?”

  A roar of nervous laughter filled the packed theater, and one woman’s voice could be heard above the din as she cried, “Blessings upon you, President Blanco!”

  Blanco gave a politician’s smile toward what Jericho assumed had been the supportive speaker, “Reserve your blessings, good lady, for I fear the Sector will need them more than I in the coming days.”

  A somber note tempered the nearly giddy crowd, and Jericho marveled at just how precisely President Blanco could manipulate the crowd with little more than a subtle expression and sympathetic tone. Blanco was, for all his flaws, one of the most charismatic—if not the most charismatic—statesmen in the Sector’s history, and he was a masterful politician as well.

  The former Jericho could forgive, but the latter was something Jericho had never much cared for—as Mayor Cantwell and Obunda could attest were they able to do so.

  “I do not wish to interrupt this occasion with any more darkness than is absolutely necessary,” Blanco continued, “but I believe, with every fiber of my being, that we have grown beyond the need for such a barbaric, gruesome, and secretive initiative like the Timent Electorum. I asked the so-called Adjusters to cease their activities until stability could be brought to the Sector, and in return what do they do?”

  “They tried to kill you!” a man yelled. “Piss poor job they did of it, too; next time they’ll have to go through us!”

  A chorus of affirmative shouts quickly filled the auditorium, and Blanco held up his hands with mock patience. “That is not your burden, my good man,” the President said, “but rather it is one which I gladly accept if such a fate should befall me.”

  “No!” dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of theater goers yelled in unison.

  “But I will, to my dying breath,” Blanco thundered, his voice filling the auditorium and drowning the supportive throng, “stand for what I believe is right and for what I think is best for every last sentient creature who calls our Sector home. If there are those who would kill me for doing such, I welcome them to try!”

  The crowd stood to its feet in unison and applause filled the theater with such energy that Jericho actually thought he could feel the floor vibrate beneath his feet.

  Blanco exited the stage with a stately grace that Jericho had rarely seen captured in any artistic medium, and even he was moved by Blanco’s dignified manner and magnetic personality.

  But Jericho had a job to do, and he was determined to do it. Thankfully, Blanco had just eliminated the greatest variable remaining in the Adjustment: by making his impromptu speech, Blanco had done precisely as Jericho had expected he would do in the face of danger. And, by making that speech, he had also confirmed that his personal security force was less robust than Jericho’s information had initially suggested.

  Jericho moved past a concessionaire and made his way to the winding staircase which would take him to the very level on which Blanco would soon be re-seated. He doubted Blanco would remain for the entire show, but he would definitely return to his seat so the cameras could snap images of him sitting calmly in the midst of attacks on his very life. It was the kind of image that just might sway an as-yet-undecided Star System’s populace to vote in favor of Blanco’s Sector-wide power grab—and that was precisely what Jericho had come to prevent.

  So he climbed the stairs to the first mezzanine level and waited for several minutes until he heard the sound of footsteps at the top of the stairs. Blanco’s viewing box was not far from those stairs, and Jericho waited until the footfalls went quiet before drawing a deep breath and moving toward the stairs.

  He was halfway up the staircase when a strikingly beautiful woman with long, blonde hair appeared at the top of the stairs. An inexperienced or less-determined man might have been caught off-guard by the sheer perfection of the woman’s appearance, but Jericho knew precisely who and what she was after reviewing every Secret Service Agent’s dossier.

  Her name was Hilda Greenburg, and without breaking stride Jericho pressed a button with each hand: the first was an activation switch on the wrist-link and the second was a button on Lady Jessica’s monomolecular whip-blade. In a practiced movement, at precisely the moment that Agent Greenburg leapt from her feet and launched her body in his direction, he snapped his wrist like a bull fighter would do when wielding a whip to taunt an enraged animal ten times his size.

  And in some ways that’s precisely what Agent Greenburg was: with her augmented physique, there was simply no way that Jericho could take her in a wide open fight using any weapons employable by humans. Her reflexes were sharper, her strength at least four times his own, and her motor cortex was ten times as refined as his was.

  But even her incredible reflexes and power—which allowed her to leap five feet into the air from a near standstill—were not enough to save her from the looping, effectively invisible wire of the m
onomolecular whip as its guide-weight snaked behind her before Jericho pulled it taut.

  Her arm flew off before she even began to fall, and Jericho swayed to the side as she fell toward him with murder in her eyes. But no matter how enraged she was, or how superior her physical reflexes were, there was nothing she could do about the simple laws of physics—or about the fact that Jericho had remotely initiated a power spike via his wrist-link, which had activated all augment-suppressing fields in the theater for several seconds. By leaping from her feet she had conceded that her body would remain in the air for several seconds, and before her exquisite leg swept toward Jericho’s face in a mid-flight kick he snapped the whip one more time after its tip had crossed her torso.

  The sight of her body coming apart at the mid-torso was only made more disturbing by the fact that she never screamed, and that the monomolecular blade never made a sound as it sliced cleanly through her alloy skeleton.

  Her lower half did slam into him, however, but it was less like a kick delivered by a master martial artist and more like a hundred and fifty pound chunk of thinly-padded metal colliding with his torso.

  The Agent, using the only limb remaining to her—her left arm—propped herself up just in time for Jericho to snaked the monomolecular whip around her neck and slice her head cleanly off.

  Knowing he had just begun an unstoppable countdown, Jericho made his way up the flight of stairs. When he reached the top, he realized he had broken Lady Jessica’s whip so he discarded it. The weapon had done its duty and now it was time for Jericho to do his.

  He opened the door, which had apparently been guarded solely by Agent Greenburg, and stepped through. The view from the box was superb, and the scene taking place on the stage below was one which Jericho had memorized during the years preceding this, the most important, moment of his life.

  President Blanco, wearing his trademark hat, turned fractionally and asked, “Is anything wrong?”

  “No, Mr. President,” Jericho said casually as he reached into his pocket and gripped the single-shot pistol, “everything’s proceeding as it should.”

  Blanco turned fully around to fix Jericho with his heavy, brown eyes and Jericho saw the light of realization flicker in the President’s eyes before he sighed, as though a great pressure had been lifted from his being.

  “Please,” Blanco gestured to the nearby seat, “join me.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t, Mr. President,” Jericho said as he carefully kept himself behind the red velvet curtains draping the edges of the booth.

  “Placing a hundred kilograms of cloned tissue inside the suit was an especially good touch,” Blanco said approvingly as the actors and actresses below frantically engaged in a foreboding musical number. “You even had my Secret Service staff convinced they had brought you down…I knew better, of course, but who am I to resist the gears of destiny?”

  “I’ll admit that I expected greater resistance getting in here,” Jericho said, having expected a turn of this type in the conversation.

  “Well,” Blanco shrugged, “I could only do so much to enable you.”

  “I don’t believe that for a second,” Jericho said, keeping the barrel of his pistol trained on Blanco’s head. “You know how tenuous your position is; even if your allies and understudies can approximate your leadership, your agenda is still in its infancy and would be best served with you at the head.”

  “That is true,” Blanco admitted, craning his neck before sighing. “Will you please have a seat? I would at least prefer to have this conversation face-to-face. Since you got past Ms. Greenburg, I can assure you that there is not another augmented Agent on the premises.”

  “Honesty doesn’t seem to be your strong suit,” Jericho retorted, having already deduced that it was extremely unlikely Blanco had secured more security for the occasion than the Agents which the Adjusters had already neutralized. He therefore decided that there was little harm in being seated and said, “But I’ll grant your request, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Blanco said coolly as Jericho sat in the chair beside the President, keeping his pistol trained on Blanco’s head.

  “I guess I do have a question for you,” Jericho said after being seated.

  “Only one?” the President quipped. “I’m disappointed.”

  “Why?” Jericho asked. Stephen Hadden had never explained to Jericho why Blanco had done what he had done, or why he had been so eager to violate the most basic, most fundamental Rights of the Sector in order to consolidate power as he had done. “Your orders have been responsible for the deaths of over one million humans since you assumed the office of Virgin’s President, and the economic oppression of at least ten times as many who disagreed with your platform. You’re clearly an intelligent man, Mr. President, but no matter how hard I try I can’t understand how a man of your intellect and learning could genuinely think that authoring such atrocities as what took place on Philippa—which is hardly the worst of your crimes—could possibly be for the common good.”

  Blanco held up a finger haltingly as the musical number being performed by the troupe of actors and actresses reached a crescendo, after which some actors dressed as law enforcement officers stormed the stage and broke up the ever-growing mob of defiant characters being portrayed. “A moment, if you will,” he said, and Jericho decided to grant this request as well. He waited patiently for the stage to go dark and the audience to applaud, and then President Blanco sighed, “Thank you…I have always found that part so poignant.”

  “I’m not even going to try to draw parallels,” Jericho said flatly. “If you’re not interested in answering the question then I’ll do what I’ve come to do.” He pulled the hammer back on the single-shot pistol, making an audible click, and Blanco nodded slowly.

  “You may not be aware of the eyes that are watching us, Jericho Winchester Bronson, but I assure you that they have not been far from either of our persons for quite some time,” President Blanco said, and even Jericho—who had spent a decade preparing for this moment, and would die before failing to Adjust the man seated next to him—was unexpectedly struck by the weight of the man speaking his name.

  “A man with your record should expect more than just eyes to be lurking in the shadows, Mr. President,” Jericho rebuked. “There are people behind those eyes—people like me—who you had to know would one day hold you accountable for your crimes.”

  “And yet, until today, eyes are all I have found whenever I have taken the occasion to peer into the darkness that surrounds our little corner of the universe,” Blanco said, and there was something in his voice that Jericho could not initially place. At first Jericho thought it was regret, but that didn’t seem quite right. Before he could place it, however, President Blanco continued in a more neutral tone, “Something is lurking in the shadows, Mr. Bronson, and I have come to believe that it is waiting for the opportune moment to move against us.”

  “So your solution was to rob the voters of their most basic rights?” Jericho asked. “The Founders established the Sector Bill of Rights precisely to provide for maximum societal stability…are you saying you honestly think you know better how to achieve that end than the Founders did?”

  “It’s true that I am an arrogant man,” Blanco allowed, “but I will not apologize for my steadfast dedication to the cause which I have taken up—nor for the methods I have employed to further that cause.”

  “All tyrants in history have said the same thing in his or her own way, Mr. President,” Jericho said with no small amount of contempt.

  “Perhaps,” Blanco shrugged as the stage sprang to life with a fresh scene, which was accompanied by a markedly more relaxed musical number, “but I believe that our doom fast approaches, Mr. Bronson, and that if we are not prepared to meet it with a unified purpose then we are already lost.”

  Jericho cocked an eyebrow, “The only credible threat to the Chimera Sector’s continued existence is the specter of the Imperium’s return, Mr. President, and they haven’t e
ven attempted to reestablish contact since the wormhole collapsed. Are you saying you have reason to believe that they’re on their way now?” he asked with faux concern.

  Silence hung between them for nearly two minutes, until the musical number concluded on the stage below them. When it had done so, the President turned slowly in his seat to fix Jericho with his dark, brooding eyes. “The only nightmare which has disturbed my sleep these past two decades, Mr. Bronson,” Blanco said as he cast a foreboding look Jericho’s way—one which conveyed more than a hint of genuine unease, “is the one in which they are already here.”

  “Even if that’s true, and even though I understand the complexities of your office are likely beyond my abilities to navigate,” Jericho said with a shake of his head, having considered this particular line of reasoning during the months and years leading up to this moment, “you made the wrong call, Mr. President.”

  “I am content that history should judge me, Mr. Bronson—not second-rate assassins bought with corporate blood money,” President Blanco said stiffly. “I was born to walk the path on which my feet are set, and I will gladly die without wavering from it.”

  Jericho could not help but admire the man for his conviction. “Before history judges you, Mr. President,” Jericho said, producing the Tyrannis Mark of Adjustment from his pocket and placing it on the floor between their seats, “the voters have exercised their privilege to do so.”

  Blanco removed his hat and placed it on the floor beside the Mark before running a hand through his short, curly hair. “Do you honestly think my cause will die with me, Mr. Bronson?”

  “No, Mr. President,” Jericho said solemnly as he stood from his seat, “history shows that ideas like yours will inevitably take root in any free society, and the seeds of your philosophical beliefs have already been scattered across the Sector.”