by J. N. Chaney
Andrea hadn’t really been trying to kill them up until that point. Even the rockets from her launcher had been fired near them, not at them. Her only goal had been to drive them back so we could extract ourselves from the situation without unnecessary bloodshed.
Raven must have been thinking the same way, because she could have targeted the gap between Byron’s chest and throat. Instead, she targeted the gap at the bend of the elbow, putting his right arm out of action. He staggered at the impact and dropped to his knees, and the other Arbiter rushed over to cover him and get him out of the line of sniper fire.
My head came clear, or clear enough that I stopped trying to shoot through Arbiter armor with a simple handgun. I turned and ran, then I ducked back into the office building Raven was shooting from. I reached in my pocket, retrieved another magazine, and clicked it in place. I was thinking clearly now, but the rage hadn’t lessened. Sophie was dead, and Byron was trying to frame me for her murder. There would be a price for that, but if I wanted to stay alive long enough to extract my payment, I would have to think.
Arbiter tactical doctrine relies heavily on technology, because that’s the biggest advantage we have over most of our opponents. It’s against Sol Federation law to sell or possess any weapon capable of piercing Arbiter armor to any of the off-world colonies, the crime Klein and his buddies were accused of committing. Because of this law, Arbiters can wade into battle against far superior numbers and know that they still have the advantage. You can die by mishap, such as a stray bullet getting in through the gaps in your armor. You’re not likely to die in the line of duty just because someone is shooting in your general direction.
When Byron got moving again, his first priority would be to take out the sniper or force her to move. He would probably do that with a grenade volley, after which he would pursue and clear the building. When he came through the door, he would come in hard. A concussion grenade like before? Perhaps, but now that I’d started shooting at him, he would probably go for the kill. He’d kick the door open, send a grenade in, then come in behind it shooting.
In that brief moment, when the door was open but he was relying on his armor to protect him from my handgun, that’s when I would have my chance. I holstered my gun, knowing that it wouldn’t do me any good right now. At this point, I was glad Andrea didn’t have any more rockets. She would have used one to drive him back and protect my position, but I didn’t want her to do that. I was a cornered rat, and I was about to bite the cat.
From the floor upstairs I heard the THUMP of an explosion and knew that Byron was doing exactly what I had expected him to do. There was another THUMP and then another, and by that point I knew that Raven had either escaped the room upstairs or been mangled beyond all recognition. I ran up to the door and crouched up against the wall, counting slowly as I visualized Byron running in for the kill. 3… 2… 1…
The door flew open, and an Arbiter rifle stabbed into the empty space like a spear. I grabbed it with both hands and yanked it forward violently just as the person holding it pulled the trigger. The frag grenade launched, but the weapon was now pointing at a spot on the floor a few feet away. As the Arbiter stumbled forward a few paces and fell, the grenade bounced back up toward his stomach and detonated there.
In that enclosed space, the sound of the explosion was horrific. My ears were ringing again, but worse than that, they were burning. The grenade would have killed me, and killed me in the ugliest way, but the Arbiter’s body took most of the blast. Because of his armor, he wasn’t killed when the grenade went off. He was killed when I jumped on him, wrapped my legs around his body, drew his knife from his utility belt, and stabbed him repeatedly at the weak point under the armpit.
The man went limp on the floor, and I knew right away that he was dead. I grabbed his rifle and managed to get it leveled on the other Arbiter just as he came through the door to help his buddy.
I pulled the trigger three times, and he staggered backward as it punched through his armor and into his body. As he collapsed on the street, I heard him say my name.
“Tycho…”
So I hadn’t killed Byron; I’d killed the other one. I resolved to fix that error. Consumed with rage, I took the rifle and aimed it under his chin. Andrea slammed into me then, knocking me sideways, and I lost the rifle as I fell over.
Andrea was glaring at me. “Don’t make it worse.”
“He killed Sophie!”
“You don’t know that! Now get your head in the game, or you won’t be alive another hour! StateSec is on the way, they’re flooding this whole city. We need to go to ground!”
I blinked at her stupidly, trying to make sense of what she was saying. StateSec didn’t really have a strong presence in Sif, which meant they would have to fly a strike team in if they wanted to do anything like what she was saying.
Then I heard the roar and saw the dropship come streaking by above our heads. That was exactly what they were doing. In a matter of minutes, the streets would be swarming with StateSec officers. I’d be arrested for murder—not just of Sophie Anderson, but of an Arbiter on duty.
“What are we going to do?” I asked, bewildered. I wasn’t sure if there was anything left to do. I was as good as dead, with all the resources of the solar system stacked against me.
Or maybe not quite all the resources. “I’ll draw them off. We’re all going to scatter in different directions. Get out of this neighborhood and get that wound closed, then meet at the rendezvous.”
She cloaked herself so quickly I didn’t have time to reply. I looked down to see what she was talking about and saw that she was right. Even though the dead Arbiter had taken most of the frag grenade blast, I’d still been hit, and I was bleeding from a wound in my chest. It wasn’t too bad, but it would have to be dealt with. I looked up and she was gone, and I didn’t have any idea where the rendezvous was.
I started running, knowing that I had no chance at all unless I got out of the neighborhood. A small drone shot by above me, then it turned and swooped back in my direction. So, they’d already found me, and if that drone had a shoot-to-kill order—
I turned and jumped, smashing through the window of a store. The drone fired and missed, and I had a moment to savor the pure joy of being wanted “dead or alive.” I scrambled to my feet, knocking over a display of fishing lures. As I ran out the back door and into the street beyond, an image came through on my dataspike of an underground parking deck with a sleek black car in it, license plate 659-SF-DIP. The image included an address and a rendezvous time just one hour away.
I powered down my dataspike, knowing that they could use it to track me. If I couldn’t evade them, there was nothing more my new friends could do for me. My life was over.
The next few hours were strangely like Venus, running and hiding from my enemies in the darkness while they hunted me down. It was a strange night for Sif, a city where the law was never much more than a convenience. There were militia fighters everywhere, but none of the clans wanted a war with the North Atlantic States. The game was power: getting more of it for your own family, not going up against it when you didn’t have to. At first, the clans probably thought that StateSec was there to arrest their chieftains. I heard some gunfire, but it didn’t last long. Whoever was in charge of liaison made the calls they needed to make, and the shooting stopped.
That’s when it got bad, because the clan militias decided to turn out in force as a show of loyalty. StateSec was one thing, but the Polar Bears and the Narwhals ruled these streets. Worse than that, they knew these streets. I cleaned my wound up behind a pile of trash bags where I was lucky enough to find an unopened bandage, while a militia patrol walked by and a drone hovered two streets over.
Come to think of it, it was worse than Venus, at least in one way. In Tower 7, the people who were hunting for me were also law enforcement, but I outranked them as the representative of a higher authority. On the streets of Sif, I represented no authority at all. The godfather of the Sn
ow Wolves, a corrupt machine boss, had more sway with the ruling powers than I could ever expect to have again. It was a lonely thought, but I felt no sorrow over my fall from grace. All I felt was rage, and the determination not to go to the grave alone.
“Hey, Tycho. It’s good to see you. We were starting to wonder if we’d have to leave without you.”
Vincenzo Veraldi, the second in command of Andrea’s team, was leaning on the car, seemingly unconcerned. On my way to the parking deck, I’d had to evade a drone for four blocks and dodge two StateSec patrols and three militia crews. Veraldi looked like he’d spent most of that time catching up on his light reading.
“How do you plan to get out of here?”
“Diplomatic plates. They won’t even question it, and they couldn’t stop us if they did.” He pointed at the license plate: 659-SF-DIP. “Sol Federation Diplomat.”
The door opened, and I crawled in. When I looked in the back, I was relieved to see both Raven and Andrea. Up until that moment, I hadn’t known for sure whether either of them had made it out. Especially Raven, considering the two grenades the Arbiters had fired in her direction.
“It’s good to see you, Tycho.” Raven smiled, but I couldn’t bring myself to smile back. Andrea frowned with concern, but I didn’t react to that either. I closed my eyes and curled up like I planned to sleep for the rest of my life.
16
It was morning in the safehouse, but it didn’t feel like morning. The sun had risen. Light flooded in through the branches of the trees and shadows played across our faces. I had a cup of coffee in my hands, and I’d slept through the night.
All these things were true, but the fact remained that it didn’t feel like morning. It felt like midnight, a sky without the moon or stars.
I sipped my coffee and stared, not seeing the forest outside. Not seeing anything. I don’t remember thinking, not for those first few minutes when I was sitting there alone. I just looked out that big front window, watching the breeze stir the branches outside. Watching the loons fly by. Watching the world, like I wasn’t part of it.
Andrea came in and sat down across from me in one of the easy chairs. She had coffee too, but she wasn’t sipping at hers. She was looking at me, and the expression on her face was deeply worried. It looked like she didn’t know what to say and wasn’t sure she should be saying anything. She was a warrior, and far more comfortable with setting up an ambush than talking to people about their feelings. For her to have decided she needed to do so, the look on my face must have been something to see.
“Tycho,” she started.
“It doesn’t matter.” My voice was cold, as tense as a coiled spring. “I don’t need you to do anything. I don’t need you to say anything. It doesn’t matter.”
She frowned, and this time she did take a sip of her coffee. Her first attempt had not succeeded, and this wasn’t her strong point anyway. She could walk away and tell herself that at least she’d made the attempt—but she tried again. “You need to talk about it.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? That’s what people do. They talk about the things that bother them. They share their burdens. Let me take a little of the weight off.”
“How? Will it bring her back?”
I’ve seen a lot of death. I’ve caused a lot of it, though I like to think I’ve prevented more. But the people that mattered—Daphne, Gabriel, and now poor Sophie—I couldn’t save any of them. I’d been trained for one purpose, to be an expert at fighting and killing so I could prevent conflicts from getting out of hand. None of it had helped me save anyone I cared about in the first place.
Andrea was staring at me, searching my face for any clue of how to proceed. I didn’t even know why she was trying, especially when I could see she didn’t want to be having this conversation.
“It won’t bring her back. You’re right, Tycho, I can’t help you. I can’t undo any of the things that happened.”
“Right. So, because there’s nothing you can do, it doesn’t matter. I don’t need anything. I’ll just keep moving forward. Until I’ve killed every last one of the bastards. And maybe then I’ll keep killing, we’ll just have to see.”
I took another sip, but even I could see that my hand was shaking.
“You’ve lost a lot, Tycho. But sometimes it can help to talk about what you’ve lost. Even if just a little.”
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing else to say. It wasn’t just that I’d lost Sophie, though that was bad enough. I’d lost my whole life. I wasn’t even an Arbiter anymore, but a wanted killer. And Byron had betrayed me. In the Arbiter Academy, they drill it into your head that your partner is everything. The one you can count on, the one you would lay down your life for. We’d never been close, but it was still supposed to mean something. The man had taken everything I believed in, set it on fire, and then pissed on the ashes. What was there to say about all that?
Andrea suddenly changed direction. “Have you ever read the Hagakure?”
“No. I’m not into that stuff.”
A lot of Arbiters read the Hagakure, or Sun Tzu’s Art of War, or Musashi’s Book of Five Rings. Gabriel always laughed at them for it. He said it was a fantasy, that they wanted to be ancient warriors on some honorable mission because it made them feel better about all the garbage they actually had to do for the Sol Federation on a daily basis. He felt so strongly about it that I stayed away too, although I have to admit I did glance at those books from time to time.
“Well, the Hagakure says this: There is surely nothing other than the single purpose of the present moment. A man's whole life is a succession of moment after moment. There will be nothing else to do, and nothing else to pursue. Live being true to the single purpose of the moment.”
I looked her in the face, impressed in spite of myself. I didn’t know if it was good advice, but it did have a certain obscure profundity. “That isn’t bad. So, what is this purpose? What are we doing?”
She sighed in relief and put down her coffee. “You had me worried for a minute there, but now you sound like yourself again. Come on, Thomas has some things he wants to show us.”
“Doesn’t he always?”
I stood up. It’s not that I felt better. I hardly felt anything, except a dark combination of numbness and rage. It’s just that I wasn’t stuck anymore. I could move again, and I could take steps toward getting justice for Sophie.
Andrea nodded slightly, like a little bow. “Good man. Come on.”
We went downstairs, where Thomas was tinkering with all the things he tinkered with. He looked up when we came in and smiled benevolently. Thomas Young wasn’t always irritated or condescending; when he wanted to show off, he could be downright charming.
“Barrett and Capanelli! Just the people I wanted to see!”
“Sorry we were delayed.” Andrea knew how to handle Thomas, which is to say with extreme caution.
“Think nothing of it. I have things to show you.”
He beckoned Andrea over to a screen that showed an image of what he had under his microscope. It was the fragment of pleximesh skin I’d recovered from Misha Orlow’s apartment. On another screen, I could see the metallic composite I’d collected at the same time.
Andrea leaned in toward the screen. “What am I looking at here?”
“Well, pleximesh skin, of course. And silica fiber joint lining.”
“So, an android?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell Raven when you called us.” I looked closer, but I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. What was Thomas so excited about? “I think the person staying with Misha Orlow wasn’t a person at all, but an android. Which raises the question of why a rent-by-the-week slumlord in the shittiest city on Earth would have an android of his own.”
“I suppose it does,” said Thomas. “But that’s not all. Don’t tell me you aren’t seeing it. I mean, it’s right in front of you.”
“Don’t tell you I’m not seeing what? If you t
ell me what I’m not supposed to tell you I don’t see, then I’ll tell you I see it.”
Andrea glanced at me, perhaps wondering whether my dry sense of humor was coming back or whether I was just having a nervous breakdown. “We’re going to need you to help us out here, Thomas.”
Although he smiled, I have no doubt that Thomas was simply overjoyed. He got to show us the thing we should have been able to see for ourselves. For a guy like him, it doesn’t get much better than that.
“First, it should be obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of android design that both the pleximesh and the composite are identical to the materials used by Huxley Industries.”
“Um… okay.” Andrea frowned. There was nothing I could see in either image that could possibly have given me that information, and Andrea was obviously just as baffled. It looked like neither of us had “a passing knowledge of android design.”
“Second, there’s the little matter of this number right here.”
He pointed at the screen, where a series of numbers tracked different facts about the samples. “Do you see what I’m saying now? That’s the spectral signature.”
“Wait, you mean the radiation exposure?” Andrea was starting to get excited.
Thomas nodded enthusiastically. “That’s right. Just collecting that sample probably took a year off our good Mr. Barrett’s life. I’m joking, Mr. Barrett, it’s not as bad as that.”
“I don’t know why you insist on calling me Mr. Barrett.”
“Because you insist on calling me Thomas.”
That was an awkward moment, but I handled it by just not saying anything at all. He held my gaze until he knew I wasn’t going to say anything, then went back to his rant.
“This is where things start to get intriguing. There aren’t many places you can get an exposure like that. Not many at all. In fact, I’d be willing to bet my next paycheck that the android this sample came from spent at least a year in the ruins of Artorias.”
