Masozi sat there in silence for several minutes, and was surprisingly unable to get her heart rate under control. She had even begun to sweat profusely and her lungs were filled with a vague, prickly sensation with each breath she drew.
Then a woman wearing a white lab coat drew back the curtain and entered the booth. Her skin was nearly as dark as Masozi’s own and, though she had to be nearly fifty years old, she was incredibly attractive.
“Mrs. Jefferson,” the woman said in a beautifully staccato, south-eastern accent, “my name is Afia, and I am a doctor here at the Aegis Spaceport. When did you first notice your symptoms?”
“I…” Masozi began, wondering if she should lie. But she quickly concluded that doing so would prove pointless, so she took a short breath and continued, “I was exiting the bio-scanners when a wave of vertigo came over me.”
Doctor Afia took out a small scanning device and flashed it briefly in either of Masozi’s eyes before swiping it along the palms of Masozi’s hands and checking the readings on a readout built into the bracer covering her left forearm. “It would appear that you have contracted a case of Timmaylian Flu,” she said after tapping on the screen for several seconds, and Masozi was almost smitten with how beautifully the woman spoke. She had rarely met anyone who so perfectly retained the accent of their birthplace after moving to New Lincoln—and until her trip aboard theEsmerelda Empática, she had never gone further than a hundred kilometers from that city. “Normally I would advise a course of antiviral therapy to combat the potential long-term neurological damage this disease might cause, but that would preclude you from continuing on to your destination.”
Masozi felt her stomach churn at the doctor’s prognosis. Then she remembered that Jericho had unexpectedly touched her on the skin of her neck, and she almost reached up to feel where his cool, dry hands had brushed against her skin before catching herself as she wondered if this had been part of his plan all along.
She folded her hands in her lap and took a few calming breaths before asking, “What should I do, Doctor?”
“You will accompany me,” Doctor Afia replied in her melodious voice as she stood. “We have a quarantine area where we can observe you for the next four hours, after which time you will no longer be infectious. If your symptoms have not worsened dangerously during that interval, you will be permitted to continue on to your destination with a supply of medication to manage your symptoms while your body clears the infection naturally.”
The doctor opened the curtain and Masozi stood on her surprisingly shaky legs before following the other woman. Doctor Afia led her through several doorways and dimly-lit, soundproof corridors until they came to the end of one such corridor and she opened the door—a door which had a sign reading ‘Medical Quarantine’ above it.
“Please make yourself comfortable,” the doctor instructed, and Masozi entered the room. After she had done so, the doctor closed the door and Masozi heard the unmistakable buzz of mag-locks engaging.
“Feeling under the weather?” she heard Jericho ask from the far side of the room, and she turned in surprise to see that he was lying on one of the cots.
“You…” she fumed as her tightly-wound emotions came crashing down in a flood. Her fingernails bit deeply into her palms before she forced her hands open and pointed an accusing finger at him, “You should have warned me!”
Jericho made a ‘calm down’ gesture with his hands and gave a meaningful look toward the corner of the room. “I’m sorry, darling; I can explain everything.”
“Explain!?” she blurted, unable to control herself. “You gave me this…this…disease on purpose—and don’t call me ‘darling’!”
Jericho stood and made his way to her, all the while keeping his steely, blue-grey eyes fixed on hers. “Darling, I had a meeting in the Financial District this morning to go over some last-minute transaction details with my new clients. One of them looked unwell, but I didn’t think to check if I had contracted any kind of flu from him,” he said with a meaningful look as he placed his hands firmly on her upper arms and squeezed. “This was the only way I could get the contract…do you understand?”
Masozi actually did think she understood, but it didn’t make her any less upset with him. “You could have told me about your…meeting,” she said coldly. “I might have been prepared for the possibility if you had done so.”
“Duly noted,” Jericho said as his eyes softened and he gave her a nod. “Now, why don’t you lie down—“
Just then the lights flickered off before returning at a slightly decreased luminosity and Jericho quickly made his way to the door. “What do you think that was?” Masozi asked, feeling a sense of mounting dread.
“That was our signal,” he replied as he opened the door, which swung freely on its hinges despite previously having been mag-locked in place. “Come on,” he gestured after setting one foot out of the room.
Masozi then realized that this whole sequence of events had been carefully engineered to get them past the port's most stringent security checkpoints. She felt like a fool for not having understood it and, while she would have liked to blame her physical and psychological stress for her failure to grasp Jericho’s plan, she knew she needed to recognize the cues more quickly. Gullibility was a failing she absolutely hated about herself.
She followed Jericho out into the hallway, where he proceeded for several paces until ducking off into an adjoining corridor. There were doors every few meters in the short hallway, and he stopped at the fourth one on the left. They waited there for several seconds until the door’s locking bolts clicked open, after which Jericho opened the door and proceeded through it with Masozi close on his heels.
They made their way down a set of metal stairs, and emerged in a maintenance corridor of some kind with electrical relays every few meters, dozens of high-pressure pipes of varying diameters running alongside each other, and even the occasional storage room door.
“We won’t have long,” Jericho said tensely, “Benton wouldn’t have opened the quarantine door unless we’d been compromised. Someone was waiting for us here in the Spaceport and we’ve got to slip through whatever net they’ve got in place quickly.”
“Understood,” she wheezed, her breaths now causing significant pain as her bronchi felt like they were on fire.
“I am sorry about the Timmaylian Flu,” Jericho said as he reached down and took hold of her wrist. While his hand had felt cool and dry before, it was now hot and moist, and only then did she notice that he was sweating profusely. “But I couldn’t risk you giving away the game.”
“You’re going…to need…to trust me…sooner or later,” she growled as she fought to keep her breaths shallow so as not to aggravate the burning in her lungs. Her legs were increasingly unsteady, and she found herself grateful for his steadying hand on her wrist—which was soon joined by his other hand which gripped her elbow.
“There’s more truth in that than you know,” he agreed grimly as he helped her along, their combined pace significantly slowed compared to the when they had left the Medical Quarantine room. “The Flu shouldn’t have hit you this hard, though…I should have chosen a less virulent pathogen. Again, you have my apology.”
Before she could compose a reply, they reached the end of the maintenance tunnel and Jericho looked up at the security camera which was fixed on the door.
“What is it?” she asked after they had waited for nearly a minute.
“We can’t just barge out onto the tarmac,” he replied hoarsely and she noticed that he, too, appeared to have been affected by the Timmaylian Flu to the point where his breathing had become labored. “We need to wait for an opening, but when that opening comes you have to do everything you can to get to the nearest vehicle—it doesn’t matter if it’s a personal conveyance, a luggage carrier, or even a refueling truck—do you understand?”
Masozi nodded, feeling her vision narrow and a wave of vertigo wash over her.
“Come on, Benton,” Jeric
ho growled under his breath as he cast an impatient look up at the camera, which remained fixed in its same position.
“Maybe we…should…head back,” Masozi wheezed as her ears began to pound in time with the beating of her heart.
“There’s no going back,” he said shortly. Then his eye seemed to catch something to do with the camera, and she looked up to see the small, red light indicating it was active had begun to blink. That blinking was rapid, but clearly deliberate, and after a few seconds Jericho held up two fingers to his brow in acknowledgment. “Actually…maybe there is,” he corrected as he placed an arm around Masozi’s waist and slung her near arm over his neck. “It’s not very far to the secondary route; you just need to keep conscious. Can you do that?”
Masozi’s eyes had become heavy, but she shook her head vigorously as she fought off the urge to close them. “I…think so,” she replied weakly as she fought to keep her feet moving in the direction Jericho was carrying her.
“Good,” he replied as the came to a doorway, which was already ajar but had not been so when they had previously passed it, “just keep your feet moving and we’ll be out of here in a few minutes.”
Her senses seemed to sharpen after a few minutes of walking down the metal stairway beyond the doorway when the ambient temperature dropped well below the freezing point of water. She looked around and saw that they had emerging into a chamber with a vast, interconnected set of catwalks suspended above a series of storage tanks. They were apparently within the storage facility for the Spaceport’s fuel supply—a high-security area if there ever was one.
If the wrong interests were allowed access to that chamber—where she and Jericho were apparently the only people present—the destruction they could wreak would be nearly unprecedented in Virgin’s history.
“Just a little further, Investigator,” Jericho said harshly, and she realized that her physical effort had begun to diminish as her focus drifted.
She did as he suggested, but then he stopped cold in his tracks and she looked up in alarm to see a handful of blue-clad men wearing identical visors—visors which highly-trained paramilitary outfits employed during tactical deployments—and one of the men stepped forward while the others kept their weapons trained on Jericho and Masozi.
“Looks like I finally caught you, Jericho,” the man said with deep satisfaction in his voice and a triumphant smirk on his lips.
Jericho tightened his grip around Masozi’s waist, and she did her best to focus on the new man’s features but she was ultimately unable to do so, as her vision had become so blurry she could barely make out the blue outline of the man’s uniform. She was so sleepy she could just…
Chapter XVII: The Host with The Most
Masozi sat bolt upright and looked around for the blue-clad men with the tactical visors. She saw nothing but a small, dimly-illuminated room and quickly realized she was sitting up in a soft, remarkably comfortable bed.
She looked down and felt her torso, realizing that her clothing had been replaced with a soft, plush robe which seemed to caress her fingers as she ran them across its luxurious fibers. She then realized she was naked beneath that robe—which meant someone had disrobed her without gaining consent.
Oddly enough, that was the least of her worries. As she took stock of her situation, she saw that there were several intravenous tubes running into her arm. Those tubes were connected to a wrist-mounted medical device of some kind—a device which she quickly realized was rumored to no longer exist on this side of the wormhole.
When the wormhole had collapsed, the entire standing infrastructure of the Sector had collapsed with it. Industry and interstellar commerce had ground to a halt due to the inability to import or export material wealth through the wormhole, and that included precious components and maintenance equipment for the Phase Drives which allowed for faster-than-light travel between nearby stars.
Not surprisingly, several other types of highly-valuable technological assets had been snapped up by those with the means to acquire them, including Automated Uniform Treatment of Organic Diseases Operated by Computer—or AUTODOC’s—which became worth a measurable portion of their weight in antimatter overnight when the wealthiest members of the Sector sought to acquire such technology exclusively for themselves.
The device on her wrist, while not a complete Auto-Doc apparatus itself, was most definitely a component of an Auto-Doc system…which meant that whoever now held her captive was not only wealthy in the extreme, but had also deemed her life to be valuable enough that saving it warranted expending some fraction of the Auto-Doc’s irreplaceable resources.
Careful not to damage the incalculably valuable device attached to her wrist, Masozi swung her legs slowly over the edge of the incredibly soft bed and her feet touched a soft patch of rug beside the bed. That rug’s many threads seemed to tickle the soles of her feet, and the found their way in between her toes with such a tactilely stimulating effect that she simply flexed and extended her toes for several moments while taking in the luxurious experience.
She indulged herself until the pleasurable shivers which the action sent running up and down her spine had subsided, and slowly stood to her feet. Looking around the room she saw no windows, nor did she see any apparent com-links or access panels of any kind.
“A gilded cage,” she muttered, remembering the phrase from a piece of ancient literature she had read as a child. Masozi then made her way to the door and, just before she had reached it, the door slid open automatically and revealed a well-lit corridor which extended to the left and right.
She stepped out into the passageway and, since the corridor appeared identical in either direction, she decided to go left—then she remembered she was wearing nothing but the robe and decided to see if there was any clothing available in the room.
Masozi found a well-appointed closet which was filled with clothing that appeared to be better-fitted to her body than most of the clothing she had worn in New Lincoln. The wide range of styles present in that closet—ranging from simple bodygloves of varyingly revealing designs, to complicated, frilly, exotic silk dresses which she had thought went out of style when the wormhole had collapsed. Each of the articles most certainly cost more than an entire year of her Investigator’s salary, and she allowed the small girl who still lived within her to run her fingertips over the most gaudy-looking gowns for a few moments.
She ended up settling on a padded bodyglove which didn’t leave her feeling overly exposed, accompanied by a short vest and knee-high boots which laced up all the way from the toes to the cuff, and found the ensemble to be surprisingly comfortable.
The bodyglove, also surprisingly, slid over the wrist-mounted Auto-Doc device quite easily and after checking herself in a full-length mirror—noting as she did so how the blue-tinged bodyglove seemed to smooth out the thick, muscular appearance of her physique in a surprisingly flattering manner—she made her way to the corridor.
The corridor was lined with several doors which appeared identical to the one she had passed through upon entering the corridor, but she did not open any of them to confirm that they contained a similar arrangement of furniture.
The metal walls were painted in a soft, white tone while every piece of trim was a light blue color. Also made of a distinct shade of blue was an emblem she recognized almost immediately after seeing it emblazoned on the floor of the corridor.
It was a blue planet, modeled after the image of what many believed to be Ancient Earth, and there were dozens of distinctive human hands clasped with each other beneath that blue-white orb. The image suggested that the joined hands were holding the entire world up, and it was one of the recognizable images in the entire Sector.
“Hadden Enterprises,” she breathed, as everything she had witnessed after awakening snapped into focus. Hadden Enterprises was one of the most powerful non-regulated entities in the Sector, having built the majority of its wealth by providing reasonably cost-efficient Phase Drive repairs, or outright
replacements for failed modules.
The various governments of the Sector had attempted to, one might say, ‘persuade’ Hadden Enterprises to share their knowledge of Phase Drive technology for the public good. But H.E. had never once acquiesced to such strong-arm tactics.
In fact, one such system, named ‘Rationem,’ once attempted to seize all of Hadden Enterprise’s assets in order to coerce the corporation’s compliance in the matter. Hadden had, quite famously, paid a series of exorbitant bribes to the government officials in positions of authority over the employees of Hadden Enterprises which had been imprisoned, and those bribes had seen the vast majority of those prisoners released.
After securing the release of over ninety percent of those employees—with the other ten percent remaining in government custody until their natural deaths several decades later—Hadden Enterprises sent out an official statement which had since become legendary. It had said in no uncertain terms that Hadden Enterprises would no longer supply the Rationem system with any of its goods or services. Additionally, any entity which was suspected—not proven, but merely suspected—of re-selling H.E.’s property or services on to Rationem without H.E.’s expressed consent would find themselves similarly cut off from Hadden’s services.
Unsurprisingly, the Rationem system was dealt a major economic blow by H.E.’s decision but even a century later Hadden Enterprises had refused every overture on Rationem’s behalf to repeal that decision. As a result, Rationem had plummeted from its position as one of the strongest Systems in the Sector to one of the weakest. Every major corporation that conducted business with Hadden Enterprises—which was, essentially, every corporation—had to request permission from H.E. to do business with Rationem or risk losing their own working relationship with the monolithic corporation, and generally those requests were denied.
Rationem had therefore become something of a cautionary tale for the Sector’s citizenry, as well as something of a talking point for those who believed that government should expand its role to include direct oversight of the megacorporation’s activities. One such proponent of this notion was Governor Crissa Keno, and she was only one among dozens—even the Virgin System’s President, Han-Ramil Blanco, offered frequent vocal support to the growing sentiment that entities like Hadden needed to be controlled in spite of several Primary Rights which, according to the corporate lawyers employed by Hadden Enterprises, guaranteed them their autonomy much like the First Right guaranteed the Timent Electorum’s actions’ legality.
Ure Infectus Page 19
