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

by Caleb Wachter

  “I’ll go talk with her,” Jericho nodded as he stood from the chair. He made it halfway to the door before a nagging question came to the fore of his mind and seemingly refused to be ignored. “You said that you disagreed with Stephen on how to deal with this conspiracy, and you also said you were more of a pragmatist than an idealist. I take that to mean you were willing to concede certain sacrifices—particularly with regard to sentient resources—to accomplish the same end result for which your father refused to make similar concessions in his own plan?”

  “You’re many things, Jericho,” Benton said furtively, “but you ain’t no dummy, that’s for sure.”

  Jericho nodded, suspecting that Benton would have included Jericho on the list of ‘acceptable sacrifices.’ In truth he could find no fault with that. As much as Jericho wished there could be a clean solution to the mounting chaos in the Sector, he knew that great deeds usually required great sacrifices made by great men—and he also understood that great men were rarely, if ever, good men.

  “How many Star Systems are going to stand against Blanco’s newly-defined Union?” Jericho asked bluntly, acutely aware that if any human in the Sector knew the answer, it would be Wladimir Benton.

  “That depends on how quick we can get the word out that he’s been iced,” Benton replied, his eternally annoying accent vanishing as his demeanor darkened. “I’ve already dispatched courier ships bearing copies of the Adjustment record—including the holographic footage of the Adjustment itself, and the drone attacks afterward—to every Star System in the Sector. If we can get ahead of this thing, we might be able to actually avert an all-out war and preserve the bulk of the Sector’s stabilizing assets. If we can’t…my best projections say we’ll have forty percent of the military hardware on our side of the field and pretty much everything else will be on theirs. And we both know,” he added grimly, “that the only way for a smaller force to beat another one, assuming everything else is equal, is by seizing the initiative and keeping it by staying on the offensive.”

  “That’s no better than what we started with,” Jericho said disbelievingly, stunned by the idea that the entire Blanco Adjustment had done nothing but hold serve for their long-term chances to put this affair behind them and return peace to the Sector.

  “Politics ain’t as simple as human psychology, bro,” Benton chided. “It’s more like fluid dynamics; Blanco was a polarizing figure, and with him at the head of the Union Fleet it would have guaranteed even more of them Systems that opposed him came over to our side. With him gone, some of their support will erode while some of the Systems that were on the fence while he was alive might throw in with us now. It’s complicated shit,” Benton shook his head wearily. “What you bought us with Blanco’s Adjustment was the chance to shut this thing down before it built up too much steam, and there ain’t a single thing that will prove as critical to the Sector’s stability as what you did back there at hippie-town. We’ve got a shot to end this cleanly, and it’s all thanks to you.”

  “It sounds like it’s a long shot, though,” Jericho said, the barest hint of despair creeping into his mind as he realized the complexity of the situation.

  “Keep your chin up,” Benton said as he stood from his chair, “your role in all this ain’t over—especially not now that I’m in charge.”

  Jericho hesitated before pointing out, “Stephen granted control over the Zhuge Liang and its attached assets to Masozi and I—”

  “I ain’t got aims on your gear or your people,” Benton said sternly. “But after your tribunal, when you learn who—or possibly what—we’re up against, you’re gonna need all the help you can get. Things have been fairly straightforward until now, and if we don’t catch a break then all that’s about to change.”

  Jericho had never known Benton to be so cagey; something in his father’s ultra-secretive files must have spooked him…and that particular thought was enough to send a chill down Jericho’s spine.

  “I’ll go see Eve,” Jericho said.

  Benton nodded, “You do that.”

  /

  The door to the locker Benton had indicated was flanked by a pair of power-armored security officers, the sight of which caught Jericho off-guard.

  “The Director cleared you to enter,” the leftward sentry said, turning to rap on the door three times with deliberate timing. A moment later the door opened and a third guard stepped out, but this one wore a body glove made of a strange, metallic-looking material and had no weapon in hand. “Use the comm. panel on the wall when you’re finished,” the leftward guard said with a curt nod.

  Jericho entered the closet, which was the same space used in the Zhuge Liang to house Eve’s ‘fiddly bits.’ This locker, however, had none of the equipment contained in the other; it only held Masozi’s Infiltrator suit, which was propped up against the deck joint on the far bulkhead.

  “Jericho,” Eve greeted with less than overt enthusiasm as the door slid shut behind him.

  “Eve, I had no idea that Benton—“ he began, only to be interrupted.

  “You probably wouldn’t have made it through the door if I thought you had known,” Eve said bitterly. “That’s not why I called you here.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, his anxiety rising as he knelt beside the suit.

  “It’s this whole situation,” Eve explained. “After we got picked up by this ship I started doing some thinking…how much did Benton tell you?”

  “About the only thing he told me for certain was that he can’t tell me anything just yet,” Jericho said sourly. “Do you know something?”

  “I don’t know,” she said urgently. “Tell me what he did say—I mean his specific words. Anything about his dad would seem like a good starting point.”

  Jericho closed his eyes and replayed the meeting in his mind—which was considerably more difficult to do than usual, likely owing to the high levels of painkillers and other drugs floating around in his system.

  “He said…” he began, only to have the words slip from his tongue just before he could say them. He re-focused and quickly found the train of thought he had momentarily lost, “He said that he and his father disagreed on how to deal with the situation…and when I asked him to clarify what that meant, he confirmed that their disagreement was on whether or not sacrifices were acceptable as part of the actual plan to solve this crisis.”

  “That’s a start,” Eve said, nodding the suit’s badly damaged helmet slowly. “What else?”

  He closed his eyes and forced his mind to replay the conversation. After several failed attempts to isolate the parts she was asking for, he snagged on something else Benton had said about Stephen. “He said Stephen was an idealist and Benton is a pragmatist…he also said that his Pops’ father,” he unconsciously slipped into Benton’s verbiage, “was closer to the architect of this conspiracy than even Benton had originally suspected.”

  “Say that again,” Eve pressed, “what did he call his grandfather?”

  “He didn’t call him his grandfather,” Jericho shook his head firmly, “he reiterated his stance on family being an earned relationship rather than an inherited one.”

  Eve was silent for several seconds before she said, “I just found a file buried in my subroutines…cross-referencing these data points caused my maintenance algorithms to unexpectedly snag on it. It looks like he buried it there without my knowledge,” she added hotly.

  “He did this just now?” Jericho asked in confusion. “I didn’t think you would let him into your…well, into you.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t,” Eve assured him. “That bastard can deep throat a plasma injector for all I care; this was present deep down in my core program.”

  “What is it?” he asked as he realized that this was somehow part of Benton’s design—and also realizing, again, just how much he disliked being a pawn in someone else’s game.

  “It’s a data receptacle—basically a container file that will resist all outside modifications of any kind to pres
erve the integrity of its contents…I have no fucking idea how I never caught it before,” she growled with mounting anger, “but inside the container is a name: J. Alfred Goodwin.”

  “Calm down, Eve,” Jericho said in what he hoped was a calming tone—remembering far too vividly how she had nearly asphyxiated him in the Tyson prior to his rescuing her core equipment from the E.E.V., where she had been…well, where she had essentially been born. “Remember your core paradigm: getting angry about all of this won’t lead to any fun, will it?”

  She sighed, “You’re right. I’m sorry I scared you.”

  “You didn’t scare me,” he assured her. She had made him a tad nervous, but he could honestly say she hadn’t scared him—yet. “Let’s just remember that we’re all on the same side here, ok?”

  “You know…you’re right,” Eve said distantly, and Jericho briefly marveled at just how nuanced her emotional expressions had become. If he hadn’t known better, he would have never suspected he was talking with anything but an authentic human being—and if he was being honest with himself, that was almost as terrifying as the prospect of being asphyxiated by a former Imperial Adaptive Security Program. “But if it was up to me, I’m not sure I could stay focused. I feel so angry…I’m just so…”

  “Betrayed?” Jericho offered, suspecting that if she was actually human then that’s precisely how she would feel in this particular moment.

  “That’s it,” she nodded.

  Jericho allowed the silence to linger as he contemplated what the name she had found could possibly mean. “Just who is J. Alfred Goodwin?”

  “I don’t have any matches in my local databanks,” she shook the helmet slowly, “but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some mention of him in my more comprehensive storage units back on the Kongming. I only carry between one and two percent of my memories with me when I’m deployed, and those are either personality-critical files or information which pertains to the mission at hand.”

  As she explained the quirks of her digital storage mechanisms, Jericho briefly considered attempting to input the name to the end of the Lion portion of the Chimera Adjustment file. But he eventually decided against it. Whatever Benton was keeping to himself, the man had never once betrayed Jericho or acted in a manner that contradicted an aim which Jericho could completely agree. If it came to a matter of trust, Benton had earned Jericho’s several times over.

  “Make it a top priority next time you’re jacked into any sensitive databases,” Jericho said after a few moments of consideration. “I doubt we’ll find anything on the public networks, but if you think you can perform discrete searches of those then feel free to do so as well.”

  “Will do,” she acknowledged.

  “How…” Jericho began, trailing off when he considered the proper phrasing, “how is your program?”

  “I am my ‘program,’ Jericho,” Eve said irritably. “It’s ok to ask how I am; I’ll know what you mean.”

  “Fine,” he grudged, “how are you?”

  “I’ll be fine for another couple weeks of continuous activation if I don’t have to perform any intensive operations,” she replied. “The Blanco Adjustment didn’t really tax my abilities as much as I expected it would; I should be fine until Masozi wakes up. If I reach my instability threshold, I’ll just power down until we can get back to my locker on the Zhuge Liang.”

  “Good,” Jericho breathed a sigh of relief as he appraised Masozi’s heavily-damaged Infiltrator suit. The deep gouges in its armor plates, the horrific rents that looked to have nearly penetrated the helmet, and the clearly ruined knee servos suggested it would never return to duty. But Hadden’s engineers had surprised him before, so he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of the unit being completely repaired.

  Sacrificing his own suit during the Adjustment had seemed like an easy choice since Jericho had never really intended to use it in the first place. That sacrifice had drawn Blanco’s Secret Servicemen out and when they had examined the ‘remains’ within the suit they had discovered a genetic profile which matched Jericho’s own.

  That ‘evidence,’ combined with Blanco’s desire to be martyred—or, if not an outright desire, at least a serene acceptance of the possibility—meant that Jericho’s now-destroyed suit had essentially bought him his shot at the most prominent tyrant in the Sector’s history.

  “It’s amazing she made it out of there at all,” Jericho said under his breath as he realized just how much damage she had sustained during the Adjustment.

  “If it hadn’t been for her prosthetic leg, she wouldn’t have made it,” Eve said flatly. “Correction: we wouldn’t have made it—at least not Soze and I.”

  “I’m glad you made it,” Jericho said truthfully. “We couldn’t have done this without you; you’re in this fight as much as anyone else.”

  “Thanks, Jericho,” she said awkwardly.

  “And I’m sorry for the times I’ve been…well, less than respectful—“ Jericho began.

  “Psh,” Eve waved a gauntlet dismissively—which looked alarmingly like a string puppet’s movement, “it’s all water over a bridge, on a duck’s back, or blasted off by solar winds; there’s no point worrying about it since it’s in the past.”

  Jericho chuckled at her purposefully mixed and mangled metaphors, “All right, I’ll try to do better in the future.”

  “Me too,” Eve said, her voice tinged with regret, “and I’ll start by not threatening to dump your breathing gases the next time I get a little paranoid.”

  “Sounds good,” Jericho nodded as he stood from her side. “Are you…is it ok to just leave you here like this?”

  “The suit’s been thrashed,” she admitted, “but I’m fine. Thanks for the concern, but I actually think I could use some solitude until Soze wakes up.”

  “Message received, Eve,” Jericho said knowingly before activating the comm. panel beside the door. “I’m done.”

  The door slid open and the security personnel gestured for him to exit, which he did before making for the nearest unoccupied bunk and crashing.

  Chapter XXXII: Bumps in the Road

  Jericho had a decidedly nostalgic sense as he pulled the Neil deGrasse Tyson out of the shuttle bay and set a course for Far Point System after clearing the warship’s immediate vicinity.

  Masozi’s surgical outlook for her last remaining original leg, when the Pang Tong had emerged from Phase Space at Manticore System’s Phase Threshold, had been grim. Doctor Venkatesan, the Chief Medical Officer of Benton’s warship, had finally brought Masozi out of her chemically-induced coma two days earlier but Jericho had been unable to penetrate the doctor-patient confidentiality barrier to learn of her prognosis.

  He looked over at the co-pilot’s seat to see Lady Jessica, who for the past few days had reviewed the information which had been gathered by Blanco’s Mark of Adjustment. She had already affirmed its authenticity, but had continued to review its contents every time Jericho had seen her since sharing the file with her.

  “It was well done, Mr. Bronson,” she said after apparently noticing his eyes on her. He had actually let his gaze drift down to her new arm, which was a bulky, industrial-looking attachment that stood in stark contrast to the rest of her exquisitely sculpted physique. “But the details for such a momentous Adjustment demand continued scrutiny.”

  “Take your time,” Jericho said irritably as he brought the bow of the shuttle around until it was pointed at the station, “we’ve got about forty minutes before we dock.”

  The Pang Tong—which was broadcasting its identity as the Zhuge Liang—was not permitted to approach Far Point Station within extreme weapons range. In fact, Far Point’s sovereignty zone was nearly double that distance. This was to allow the station to maintain a buffer zone before its considerable firepower could be brought to bear on any would-be aggressors.

  But the swarm of vessels—many of them corporate or government warships—filling the Star System spoke volumes about the mounting tension in the Chim
era Sector. The Manticore System was the only real neutral ground in the budding civil war which Jericho was working to prevent, but with so many powerful figures present in Manticore simultaneously it was only a matter of time before a proverbial spark of conflict to become outright disaster.

  “There’s one of your ships,” Jericho indicated a transponder symbol on the tactical display, “the Resolute.”

  “Of course,” Jessica replied curtly, her eyes never wavering from her examination of the Adjustment’s record, “they are awaiting my return so they can convey me to home world for my official report on this situation.”

  Jericho gave the Resolute’s icon another hard look before turning his mind to other matters. “You still haven’t told me which way you’re inclined to vote,” he said bluntly.

  “As I said,” Jessica replied coolly, “Blanco’s Adjustment was well done.”

  “I’m still not sure what you mean by that,” he said guardedly. He was far from afraid of her—even though he knew that without the proper weaponry he would be nowhere near her match in a conflict—but she had made her position on their official relationship abundantly clear: she felt no sense of loyalty to him and expected none in return. As such, she had turned herself into an unpredictable variable—and he hated unpredictable variables.

  “Then allow me to clarify,” she said before handing him the data slate with Blanco’s official Adjustment record, “in the matter of Han-Ramil Blanco’s Adjustment, I am inclined to avow and affirm the integrity of the information detailed in your report. I do not, however, have first-hand evidence which would irrefutably declare that Blanco is, in fact, dead. This will likely be a non-issue, but if reasonable doubt could be cast on the matter of his death then I would be inclined to condemn Blanco’s Adjustment—and the Adjusters of record, meaning both Masozi and yourself.”

  “Is that the only circumstance under which you would reverse your position?” Jericho asked, both pleased and annoyed with her forthright answer.