Ure Infectus (Imperium Cicernus Book 4) Read Online Free

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 nearly 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 whose name
was 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 news to her given the rest of the evidence she had managed to
observe in her little time with the scene. “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 over 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