Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) by Caleb Wachter

joining the Interplanetary Investigative Unit
danced in her head, and if she was honest with herself it was like a dream come
true. She had never heard of anyone ascending to the IIU so quickly in their
career and while Masozi knew there were precious few Investigators of her
ability, she also knew she was no scion of the field. It was that fact—and only
that fact—which had nurtured the seed of doubt which had taken root in her mind
after seeing her Chief tamper with a crime scene and later attempt to explain
the action.
    His stated reasoning had been sound enough, and Agent Stiglitz
quite clearly was with the IIU—or, at the very least, some other
high-level agency with similar, System-wide jurisdiction.
    But Masozi just could not shake the notion as she arrived at
her flat’s door that there was something wrong with all of it. She decided she
would sleep on it, since four hours of continuous exercise at the gym had done
little to ease her troubled mind.
    She was, thankfully, one of the few people whose unit’s
ceiling was high enough for her to stand within. At five feet, ten inches tall,
she could even wear her general purpose shoes in the six feet of space her unit
afforded without bumping her head into the ceiling. It was a significant
upgrade over her first ten years in the NLIU, which had seen her living in a
studio with barely four feet of ‘headroom,’ if such a term could actually be
applied to the tiny dimension.
    She closed the door behind herself and touched a nearby pad
on the wall, causing the lights to turn on, some of her favorite music to play,
and the standing shower unit to run through its pre-activation routines.
    Masozi stripped out of her gym suit and tossed her
sweat-soaked clothing into the hamper before making her way to the shower.
Running water was expensive, so a hot, relaxing shower was a luxury she could
only truly afford twice a week without eating into her food budget.
    She let the water cascade over her body as she tried to
imagine the warm droplets of water washing away the troubles of the previous
night. But no matter how long she stood there, or how hard she scrubbed, she
couldn’t escape the feeling that she had somehow already become party to
something reprehensible.
    There was a chime from the window of her apartment,
indicating she had a delivery waiting outside. Masozi stopped and tried to
recall whether she had ordered anything, but then she remembered that her
cousins had taken a trip off-world recently. It was the only reason she could
imagine for receiving a delivery, so she turned off the water and wrapped a
towel around her body as she passed her hand over the window—which was actually
a part of the shower stall—and caused it to turn transparent.
    Outside was an Okavango delivery drone, which was itself a
common sight on her world. Okavango had revolutionized several aspects of urban
retail not long after the wormhole had collapsed, when Virgin had been
violently cut off from the rest of the Imperium—which many believed was a
diving blessing.
    There was a short, gruesome series of local conflict known
two centuries later as the Forge Wars, and out of those wars had sprung the
Sector Government of Chimera. While there were nowhere near enough worlds in
the Chimera Cluster—as it was properly known in the Imperial records—to
classify the group as a Sector in its own right, its surviving inhabitants had
realized they did not possess sufficient wealth to mount a meaningful
expedition to return to Imperial space. The realization that they were utterly
cut off, unless and until the Imperium decided to re-establish a wormhole
somewhere within the Cluster, had caused some to despair in the years and
decades that followed the collapse of the wormhole. But most of Chimera’s
citizens had embraced their newfound freedom from the yoke of Imperial taxes,
the all-seeing eyes of the Imperial Aristocracy, and the uncontested might of
the Imperial Navy. The Virgin System,
and