Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) by Caleb Wachter Page B

deactivate the device a man’s deep, tense voice spoke,
“Investigator, I’m glad you took my advice. Activate the pad and open the message’s
attached file—do so quickly since we don’t have much time.”
    “Who is this?” she asked warily, knowing she needed to get
as much information as possible while she had this person on the line.
    “You have forty six seconds before I will have taken a very real
risk and accomplished nothing but a short conversation with a very fresh—very
stupid—corpse, Investigator,” the voice replied harshly. “If I wanted
you dead you would already be so—thirty eight, thirty seven, thirty six—”
    She had to admit that he had a point, so she reluctantly
opened the file contained in the link’s lone message and the screen showed
dozens of security camera feeds. The feeds cycled quickly through until stopped
on what appeared to be a maintenance room somewhere in her residential building.
    “Good,” the man’s voice said as he ceased his countdown,
“what do you see?”
    Masozi looked intently at the image and, at first, saw
nothing. Then she saw that one of the panels appeared to have been tampered
with, and her throat tightened when she realized it was the control panel for
her quadrant of the building.
    The image shifted around quickly in a strange,
pseudo-realistic panning shot until it came to rest on a man’s motionless body
which was propped up against the wall. She gasped when she recognized the man
as one of her building’s maintenance staff—she had even taken a somewhat
regrettable tumble with him a year earlier when she’d had too much to drink
after a high-profile case’s successful conclusion.
    “Tom,” she breathed, trying to fathom why someone would kill
a superintendent of a relatively poor building like hers.
    “I have reason to believe that your quadrant of the building
is about to be destroyed,” the man said, as though he was speaking about the
evening’s weather forecast. “You have only one hope if you want to survive.”
    “Who are you?” she demanded as suspicions swirled in her
head.
    “You know who I am, Investigator,” the man said gravely, and
her eyes widened as she concluded she was speaking with Mayor Cantwell’s
assassin, “now jump.”
    “Jump?!” she blurted.
    “Yes, Investigator,” he said far-too-calmly. “If you don’t
want to die in twelve seconds, I suggest you jump out the window—the sooner you
jump, the higher your chance of survival. Eight seconds; you should be able to
smell the gases by now.”
    Now that he mentioned it, she did smell something that
seemed like methane. Her building used it for quick heating of water, like for
her shower, and apparently it had somehow been plumbed into the air cycling
system.
    Having only a few seconds, she performed some quick math and
felt her heart stop. The evidence did, in fact, seem to suggest that there was
enough gas flooding her room—and possibly adjacent rooms as well—to kill her
and everyone in her part of the building.
    She swung open the window and, after hesitating for a
moment, leapt from the window and braced herself. As she fell she became
absolutely certain that her lapse in judgment would amount to little more than
a footnote in the next shift’s incident log at the NLIU unit assigned to her
zone of New Lincoln.
    But then two things happened. There was a massive ‘whump’ of
hot air behind her which briefly deafened her and splayed her arms and legs out
to either side violently as she fell, face-down, toward the ground. The wind
whipped around her naked body as the ground approached far-too-rapidly, and she
closed her eyes in preparation for the end of her life.
    Then she landed and felt the wind knocked from her lungs,
causing her to gasp in agony as she struggled to regain her breath. But Masozi
realized after a second that only her torso had ‘landed,’ and when she opened
her eyes she looked down to see that she had been ‘caught’ by an