Free Chapter: Ure Infectus (Book One of The Chimera Adjustment)

“Here are the building’s security logs, Investigator,” a subordinate officer named Riley said, proffering a data slate.

“Thank you, Riley,” Investigator Masozi replied as she accepted the slate. The scene had been secured twenty minutes earlier and the forensic analysts had only just arrived, which was unusual in itself, but more surprising was that they had not yet begun to process the scene. Masozi had been first on the scene and directed her people to gather the security logs, audio and video records of the building, and locked down the entire building in accordance with protocol. The assassination of a mayor—especially of the third most populous city on the planet—was a rare occurrence, and no matter how well things were handled there would be hell to pay in the coming days.

Mayor Cantwell had been extremely popular with the New Lincoln electorate, but recent allegations had arisen regarding possible corruption within the administration itself. Normally such allegations made during an election campaign would have been dismissed as routine mudslinging on the part of the challenger.

And had it not been for the unmistakable insignia set beside the mayor’s lifeless body, Masozi would have been inclined to dismiss those rumblings just as she had done for every other political election her planet had endured since the wormhole collapse of two centuries earlier. But the presence of that insignia, and its prominent—some might say arrogant—display at the crime scene pointed to the mayor’s death as being, essentially, a legally-sanctioned affair.

“What about the video records?” Masozi asked as she flipped through the entry and exit records for the past three days. The data pad had built-in programs for cross-referencing all of the logged names with those of known, or even suspected, malcontents or disruptive elements. But the program concluded its background search without turning up anything promising.

Riley shook his head bitterly. “The whole building’s primary, secondary and tertiary storage systems were hit with a powerful, incredibly focused e-mag pulse; there’s barely an aberrant one scattered in all the remaining zeroes. The data retrieval team says there’s not much they can get; this was a professional job.”

Masozi nodded solemnly as she considered the triangular insignia and shot an irritated look at the forensic analysts standing in the hall outside the office. “Are you going to get started sometime this millennia?” she snapped at the nearest forensics team member.

The forensic examiner pointedly ignored her, which made her set her jaw. This was her investigation, and they were there under her direction; when she gave the order, they were supposed to hop to it!

But before she could vent her spleen at them, New Lincoln’s Chief Investigator, Afolabi, appeared at the far end of the hallway and quickly locked his eyes with hers. He was a tall, imposing figure with skin nearly as dark as Masozi’s own, but his physical prime was far behind him and he sported at least an extra twenty, useless, kilos around the midsection.

“Investigator,” he said as he approached, giving a curt nod to the forensics team leader. The head forensics examiner gave Masozi a brief look before turning his back and making small talk with his team members. “A word?”

“Of course, sir,” she replied warily as he made his way into the mayor’s office. It was highly irregular for the Chief Investigator to appear prior to the scene having been examined by the forensics team, and judging by that team’s reaction to Afolabi’s arrival, they had been under orders to delay work until his arrival.

The two entered the mayor’s office, and after giving an obligatory look at the mayor’s corpse—and the wall behind it, which was covered in a gruesome layer of skull and brain—Chief Afolabi turned to Masozi and said, “What have you determined thus far?”

Masozi cocked her head slightly in confusion, since she had been unable to make any determinations due to the forensics team having failed to begin their own work to that point. “Well, aside from the obvious…” she gestured to the mayor’s head, which ended just above the lower jaw, and then motioned toward the discarded weapon on the floor. “We have something of a rarity.”

“Oh?” he asked neutrally, and Masozi was reminded just how good this man was at politics. He had served at the highest levels of the New Lincoln peacekeeping forces for thirty years, working under three separate administrations after serving on the street for over a decade.

“Yes, sir,” she replied as she turned deliberately and pointed at the chilling insignia on the desk before the mayor. “This looks to be the work of Timent Electorum.”

Afolabi’s eyes never left her own, and she furrowed her brow in confusion when he apparently refused to look at the desktop. “An interesting theory, Investigator,” he said evenly. “However, perhaps we should wait until the forensics team has had a chance to go over the scene before jumping to wild conclusions?”

“Sir?” she recoiled incredulously. “I tried to have the forensics team get started but they were being rather less than cooperative. Besides, if this was a T.E. contract then it was legally sanctioned.”

Afolabi fixed her with a cold, piercing look before sighing irritably. “Whatever gave you the notion that this cold-blooded murder was carried out by the Timent Electorum agency?”

“Chief Investigator,” Masozi scoffed as she pointed to the insignia desk and raised her voice. “Every Virginian learns to recognize a T.E. insignia in primary school!”

Afolabi visibly flustered as he took a deliberate, ominous step toward her and lowered his voice, “I see no such insignia, Investigator Masozi. Perhaps you’re mistaken?”

She opened her mouth to retort before realizing that the Chief Inspector’s presence wasn’t meant to facilitate her investigation—he meant to obstruct it! Masozi took a deep, cleansing breath before lowering her voice and saying, “Chief…I have a job to do here—“

“I suggest you head back to the barn, Masozi,” Afolabi interrupted in a slightly raised voice as his features hardened. “You’re a promising investigator with a bright future, but I think this particular situation might require a more…experienced hand.”

“Chief!” she blurted unthinkingly. This was to be her career-defining moment, and while it was far from unprecedented for a Chief Investigator to usurp an assigned Investigator, such a transfer of responsibility required recusal on the part of the assigned Investigator—in this case that was her! “I am the lead Investigator assigned to this case, and I will not recuse myself unless I am physically unable to carry out my duties.”

Chief Afolabi narrowed his eyes. “Think carefully about this, Investigator,” he warned. “Your family connections might not carry as much weight as you believe, should you follow through on this course of action.”

Masozi clamped her teeth together at the mention of her familial ties. She had worked hard to distance herself from those members of her family who had ascended to System-wide political prominence, for reasons too numerous to recount. But her colleagues never let her forget her distant connection to those people. Suggesting she hadn’t earned each and every stripe on her uniform the hard way was, perhaps, the single greatest insult which could be leveled her way.

“I’ll help you out, Investigator,” Chief Afolabi continued after a few seconds of silence, “Internal Affairs has a few questions regarding your case-load these last few weeks. I’m ordering you to report to them so you can put that bit of nastiness behind you and get back to work as quickly as possible.”

Masozi clenched her fist so tightly that she felt one of her stick-on nails pop off more than a little painfully. But she ignored the sensation as she realized that he had come prepared to force her off the crime scene. “This isn’t over, Chief,” she growled under her breath as she pushed past him toward the door.

“Forgetting something, Investigator?” Afolabi asked with a pointed look down at her off-hand.

She stopped and looked down to see she was still holding the data pad with the building’s security logs. She turned and held it out, her hand faintly trembling with anger. The Chief deliberately held her with his gaze for several seconds before reaching out and accepting the pad. “Escort the Investigator from the building,” he said with a glance at one of the uniformed officers in the hallway.

“Yes, sir,” the man replied, and Masozi stormed out of the room and down the corridor, followed at a close remove by the uniformed man.

She silently fumed for the entire ride down the elevator. The mayor’s assassination had been assigned to her and it was beyond irregular for a superior to so crudely force an Investigator off the case. Her thoughts swirled into a maelstrom that nearly saw her scream in frustration before the elevator doors opened.

Her ‘escort’ saw to it that she exited the building, and when that was done, he went back to the building and left her alone. There was a pair of forensic examiners already at work on the pavement, picking up fragments of glass which had scattered from the base of the towering sky rise to the far side of the street.

Deciding to take a risk, Masozi crossed the line of artificial light marking the boundary of the forensic team’s authority. “What have you found?” she asked, acting as though she had come down to check on their progress.

The nearest examiner, a woman Masozi recognized named Angelica, looked up briefly with her scanning monocle’s blue light flickering off as she did so. “We’ve got micro-fractures in the armored glass,” the examiner explained. “Not many people still use reinforced silicates; even in this building nearly all of the windows have been replaced with transparent alloys, but we’re seeing evidence of kinetic resonance in this material consistent with a shaped charge.”

Masozi nodded slowly. “So…the hitman knew the room.” It wasn’t exactly earth-shattering news given the rest of the evidence at the scene, but it was enough to bolster her confidence in the T.E. connection. “Did any witnesses see where the assassin landed?”

Angelica nodded. “Right there,” she replied, pointing to a fairly nondescript patch of sidewalk near the center of the glass fragments. The area where she pointed looked completely unremarkable even to her highly-trained eye, except for the marked presence of a few, hair-like pieces of material.

Masozi cocked an eyebrow. “Are you saying he just…landed?”

The examiner shrugged, “It looks that way, ma’am, with a little help from above. These cord fragments look like carbon nanotubes,” she explained, holding up an evidence bag with a pair of the small, hair-fine fibers inside. “But they’re barely better than industrial grade. He could have had these made at any of a hundred different facilities in this System alone.”

Masozi approached the patch of sidewalk and knelt down to look at it more closely. “Did you find anything unusual where he touched down?”

Angelica bit her lip for a moment before taking a few steps closer and gesturing, “The spectro-scope picked up a high concentration of carbon tubules there. I’ve taken a sample but won’t be able to produce a more detailed analysis until I’ve run it through the lab—my guess is it’s the same material which made the cord, and that he used them as a shock absorber.”

“Can I see it?” Masozi asked, glad to have finally found a thread to follow.

The examiner nodded, removing the monocle with a series of taps to its fastening surface before handing it to the Investigator. Masozi attached the small scope over her right eye and activated it, allowing the device to cycle through the various bands of non-visible light before stopping it at the spectrometric analysis setting and leaning close to the concrete surface to get a clearer look.

Even though the rain had washed much of the evidence away, there was a distinct pair of boot-shaped silhouettes surrounded by a fine, roughly-circular cloud of carbon particles. The only truly remarkable aspect of the carbon was that it was pure carbon; there was essentially no other element present in that particular layer of nearly-invisible debris.

“Thank you,” Masozi said, knowing she had risked too much already. She removed the monocle and returned it to Angelica, who accepted it and resumed her duties.

The Investigators’ offices were not far from the main government building where the assassination had taken place, so she had simply ridden with a uniformed patrolman en route to what was supposed to be her biggest assignment yet. She decided it best to walk back to the office, which might let her compose her thoughts as she considered the disturbing events of the evening.