by J. N. Chaney
“A cup of tea?” I offered. He looked up at me sharply. I had just echoed Marcenn’s favorite phrase, or the favorite phrase of his deranged Continuity. You haven’t killed us. Any more than a teacup can hold the ocean. He took another step forward, his mouth opening to explain or question me.
Andrea was irritated. “This is all beside the point. Who is this enemy? Who are the Eleven?”
Before he could answer, a glowing dot appeared on Huxley’s body and moved smoothly toward his neck. Pleximesh skin fluoresces under ultraviolet light, and Bray recognized the dot as the ultraviolet beam of a military targeting sight. He jumped forward, shoving me out of the way to push the android Julian out of the line of fire.
He just wasn’t quick enough. With incredible precision, a sequence of rapid gunshots sawed their way across Julian’s neck, severing his head from his body. The android was dead before he hit the ground, before the three of us could turn to face the threat.
The shooter was out there somewhere, in the overgrown buildings and tangled vegetation of the Jungle neighborhood. They had traced us here, waited until Huxley trusted us enough to step out of the building… then taken their shot.
“Goddammit,” cried Andrea. “Get under cover!”
But there was no cover; we were in the Waste, with our backs to the most radioactive building on the entire planet. I drew my sidearm and opened fire on the tree line, not so much trying to hit anything as trying to buy the other two some time. If I happened to get lucky, the depleted uranium rounds I was shooting ought to do the trick, even against some weaponized Augman.
Andrea dropped to one knee and followed my lead by shooting her weapon into the trees. Bray, still standing, did the same. As far as we could tell, the attacker had done nothing at all after killing the Huxley android. It hadn’t even moved.
“Did you see that shot grouping?” asked Bray.
Still firing her weapon, Andrea answered him through gritted teeth. “Yes. Precision like that... What do you think? Military-issue combat android?”
“Or cyborg, yeah. Let’s make sure it doesn’t develop the nerve to stick its head up.”
The attacker wasn’t stupid. With three people shooting at it, it was bound to get hit soon if only by chance. As we scanned the trees for any sign of it, it suddenly broke cover. I got a glimpse of some kind of armor, or maybe just an android body.
Then it was gone, disappearing in the shimmer of thermoptic camouflage.
“Shit!” snapped Andrea. “I’m going under, you two try to flank the fucker. Standard pincer maneuver.”
She activated her camouflage and disappeared from view. Bray was on my right, so he went right. That meant the left for me, so I ran across the Waste to the left as quickly as I could. I couldn’t fire, for fear of hitting the now-invisible Andrea. The goal was just to run, giving the shooter too many targets to focus on. We got closer and closer, until finally we were in the tree line.
It was a desperate maneuver, attempting a pincer across open ground with nowhere to retreat. That was just the breaks, though. We had no real choice, because our only other option would have been to fall back. If Huxley was to be believed, the result of that would have been a horrible death from radiation poisoning.
Nothing happened at first. No shots were heard, and no one even seemed to care that we were running across the Waste with guns in our hands. Then Bray stumbled backward, his jaw flying up as he was hit by a kick.
Not a gunshot, a kick. Bray was huge, and I wouldn’t have intentionally fought him for any prize I could think of. Even so, that one kick knocked Bray out cold.
Andrea dropped out of active camouflage, spun from side to side for a moment, then did a spinning kick. She must have had the sense that the killer was near her and decided to use a technique that would take out anything within several feet.
The shooter appeared for a moment, ducking under Andrea’s kick with effortless grace. Then she came up from underneath her, knocking her into a nearby wall. Andrea bounced off, then dropped down motionless. In that moment, I could see the assassin clearly, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. A muscular feminine body wearing a nanosuit, or an advanced cyborg with densely packed synthetic muscle? A combat helmet with a featureless faceplate molding seamlessly with the body armor, or an android proxy sensor housing?
Whatever the killer was, she had only committed to killing Huxley and was trying to avoid causing other casualties. This assassin had just disabled two of Section 9’s most formidable fighters without bloodshed, and she had made it look easy.
I started shooting, but the killer dropped back into thermoptic camouflage. As I ran over to help my friends, I couldn’t help thinking she could have killed us all and for some reason decided not to.
22
I opened my eyes in the safehouse, but for several seconds I remained disoriented. Was I safe at home, asleep in my own bed? No. Was in the ruins of the lost city, camping out with a badly concussed and even more badly shaken pair of Section 9 super-spies? No. I looked up at the ceiling, then out the window, and I remembered where I was.
The strange thing about a safehouse is that you wouldn’t be there if you were safe in the first place. If you need a safehouse, it stands to reason that you’re in a lot of danger. Still, I felt strangely calm. The night before—no, probably not the night before. I was losing track of time, losing track of my own life. Whenever it was, I had built a campfire in a ruined building and sat up with Jonathan Bray and Andrea Capanelli to make sure they didn’t fall asleep. When you take a serious blow to the skull, falling asleep can mean never waking up.
So, I sat up with the two of them, while they brooded over being knocked unconscious. None of us said much, though I did earn myself a sour glare when I said something about “the beauty of the present moment” while stoking the fire. As I sat there in silence, something shifted and fell into place.
Sophie Anderson was dead, and the rest of my life would be lived on a knife edge. So be it, then. It still hurt, but the stunned nihilism of the past few days just wasn’t me. I needed a direction, a sense of mission.
That’s all there is, and that’s all there ever really needs to be.
When the sun rose the next morning, I helped Bray and Capanelli retrieve the lifeless head of the Huxley android. We battled our way through the Jungle and found the Grizzly bear lying dead in one of the buildings we passed through. Huxley’s killer must have run into it on the way in, and that was the shot we heard.
Then we rode our stolen boat back to the Market and traded it for a ride to where we’d parked our car. It was a good thing it was the hard car, because someone had tried to sabotage it. The only thing they had succeeded in doing was gouging the paint, which caused Bray to spout obscenities for at least an hour. And now we were here, in the safe house that meant I wasn’t really safe.
At least I knew what I needed to do.
There was a knock on the door, and Raven Sommer stuck her head in. “Tycho? Breakfast is ready. It’s a working breakfast, so don’t be too long.”
For Section 9 the work never seemed to stop, and on reflection that was fine with me. I took a thirty-second shower, threw some clothing on, and came out to the living room. They had some excellent bread and a selection of fresh fruit. I took a roll and a plum and leaned against the edge of a couch.
Bray came out of his room, holding his head and groaning. “My head still hurts.”
Andrea looked up and shook her head at him. “I promised not to say it, but you know exactly what I was going to say.”
“You’re a horrible person. And an even worse boss.” Bray sat down and started chewing glumly on a chunk of Challa bread.
Raven sat next to me, and Thomas Young wandered out from the kitchen. “Is everyone ready?”
“We’re always ready for you, Thomas. Go ahead.”
He stared at her suspiciously but couldn’t seem to decide whether she was being sarcastic or not. “Well, then. Yes. What was it you needed to talk
to me about again?”
Andrea gave him an exasperated look. “The Huxley android. You were supposed to have a look at its head for us.”
“Oh yes. I did. It’s just that I was done with that task several hours ago, so I assumed you were talking about something else. The Huxley android. Okay then.”
“Thomas, what did you find out?” asked Andrea.
“The damage is extensive, and it's unlikely I can restore functionality, but I believe I can pull some meaningful data from it in time.”
“That’s disappointing.” Andrea frowned, and Thomas started to protest. She raised a hand to stop him. “There’s no need. If that’s how it is, then that’s how it is. There’s no one out there who could do any better. Just keep working on it for now and tell us when you do succeed in getting something useful out of it.”
Thomas looked unhappy, but he also looked determined. After what Andrea had just said, I had no doubt he would make it a point of pride to get everything out of the Huxley android that he possibly could.
Still, Huxley was gone. It was hard to believe the things he’d told us, but if his story was true, then a man who had lived for more than eight hundred years was finally dead. He was partly responsible for what had happened on Venus, but if the better part of a millennium of human experience had just been erased beyond hope of recovery then that was still a major loss. There were so many things he must have lived through, so many questions he could have answered. More than anything else, I wished we’d had time to interrogate him about his enemies, the original Eleven, if they really existed.
Bray must have been having similar thoughts. “What about all those things he was saying?”
Andrea bit into a slice of orange and shook her head. “I just don’t know. It connects to some of the things August Marcenn was saying, sure. But it wasn’t enough; it wasn’t anything we can use.”
She seemed disturbed by something. I knew I was. If Huxley’s enemy was really out there, they represented a power more ancient than human colonization of the solar system. How much wealth could you accumulate in eight-plus centuries? How much influence could you build up? An entity like that would have fingers in everything, agents everywhere. It would be in a position to corrupt anyone, and to destroy anyone it failed to corrupt.
Speaking of corrupt…
“What about Lucien Klein?”
“What about him?” asked Andrea.
“What are you going to do with him?”
I’d been wondering about that ever since I’d first seen him at the other safehouse. They had taken Klein, spiriting him away from Federation custody. They couldn’t possibly just put him back, like returning something you felt guilty about stealing. It had even occurred to me that they might just make him disappear, rather than exposing the existence of Section 9.
“What are we going to do with him?” asked Andrea. “What do you mean? Did you think we were going to take him for a ride or something?”
I looked embarrassed, and Veraldi laughed. “That’s exactly what he thought! Holy shit, Barrett, I can’t believe you were willing to hang around with ruthless killers like us!”
They all had a laugh, but I was thinking about the two men Bray had shot in the boat. They were dangerous men, fugitive killers or who-knows-what. They might have killed us if they could, and they were definitely looking for us. Still, there hadn’t been any hesitation.
“Don’t worry, Tycho, it’s not like that.” Andrea finished her orange and wiped her hands off on her pants. “We wouldn’t be able to do what we do if we couldn’t make things happen. The Operator has special legal powers, special authority. More on that in a minute, but to answer your question, we plan to get everything we can out of Mr. Klein’s situation. Officially speaking, he'll be released under a plea deal. In reality, Section 9 will monitor him under the expectation that the enemy will make another attempt on his life. With Huxley dead, it may be our only way to find out anything.”
From everything I’d ever seen, Section 9 operated outside the law and did so with total impunity. I had never known how, but now Andrea was showing me a glimpse of it. They could go into the system and just change things at will. Dropping charges, erasing cases, granting plea deals. The way Andrea put it, they had special legal authority to do all these things. That was one way to look at it. With the right kind of access, you don’t even need authority because you can make your own. With this extra-legal power, Section 9 intended to use Lucien Klein as human bait.
“You can monitor him all you want,” I said. “But you can’t protect him.”
Andrea glanced toward the closed door of one of the bedrooms, and I wondered if Klein was listening. If he could hear us, my comments would not do anything to make him feel more confident.
“He’ll have to take his chances!” Bray’s voice was loud, much louder than mine had been.
“If we’d left him in prison, he’d already be dead.” Andrea took a pastry. I realized that I hadn’t taken a bite of my food. I had the plum in one hand, the roll in the other. I thought of eating, but I just didn’t feel right.
“Even so, he’ll be human bait.” Andrea’s voice became even quieter, but it didn’t sound like she was trying to avoid being heard. It was more like she was trying to break it to me easy, because she wasn’t sure how I might react. “That’s the way it goes. You’re an Arbiter, Tycho. The mission comes first. When there’s something that has to get done, you do it. No matter what it is.”
I shook my head. “I’m not an Arbiter anymore.”
She opened her mouth as if to say something, but I was already moving on. “Look, I’m not trying to be innocent. I know how it goes. Klein is expendable when it comes right down to it. I don’t like the idea, but I do understand the logic behind it. As long as it changes something, as long as it matters. The body count in this case is massive, and the perpetrators are illegal cyborgs. That has to come out; there has to be a full investigation.”
She looked uncomfortable, and so did everyone else in the room. Raven Sommer gave me a sympathetic look. “You’re a sweet guy, Tycho.”
“What? Are you telling me there won’t be any investigation?”
“It isn’t that.” Andrea sighed. “I’m sorry, Tycho. You saw a little of this after the Tower 7 disaster, but we deal with the reality of it every single day. You think of Section 9 as this shadowy organization, but we’re a tiny little part of it. The big companies, the national governments, it’s nothing but shadows, and it isn’t our role to shine a light on anything.”
“It isn’t your… well, I guess it wouldn’t be. But you’ve been gathering information. I’m sure you can pass it on to whoever’s investigating. I mean, there has to be someone.”
“There will be an investigation, yes. And it will be massive, they can’t sweep something like this out of sight completely. More than a few people will take the fall for their creation and maintenance. It just won’t change anything.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean?”
“They’ll stage manage the whole thing. They won’t protect everyone—they can’t—but they’ll protect the right people. A few years from now, there will still be just as many illegal cyborgs in operation as there are right now. And there will still be just as many rich people willing to hire them.”
That did seem likely. In all my work for the Arbiters, the only time I felt that justice had been done and done completely was the moment I shot August Marcenn, the man directly responsible. And just a few seconds later, his Nightwatch bodyguards had come running after me, repeating their weird mantra: you haven’t killed us, anymore than a teacup can hold the ocean.
Those words had upset me so much that I started pulling the trigger every time I heard them, which only meant killing Marcenn’s mind-controlled creatures. There’s no final justice, or none that’s accessible to mere mortals anyway.
Andrea continued. “The more I think about it, the more I think you probably made the right decision for
you. At least in the Arbiter Force, it’s generally clear when you’ve completed your mission. In Section 9, it’s not so obvious. Things just tend to keep going and going. One thread leads to another.”
Everyone was nodding, so I could tell this was something they had all experienced. Still, it seemed like they just refused to understand. “I’m not an Arbiter anymore. Andrea, I shot my partner. I killed his new partner. There’s no going back.”
“That might be true for most people, if they found themselves in the same situation,” Andrea insisted. “It isn’t true for you. As a friend of Section 9, everything but everything can be undone.”
Raven looked right at me and mouthed the words not everything. That’s probably the only thing that kept me from losing my temper with Andrea right then. No matter how many strings she pulled, there was nothing she could do to bring Sophie back. It was like she had already forgotten her. But Raven hadn’t. At least one person in Section 9 didn’t just think of her like Lucien Klein, an asset to be used and then forgotten.
I composed myself, then turned to Andrea. “What do you mean?”
“It’s like I told you a few minutes ago. The Operator has special legal authority, and he’s willing to use it on your behalf. We can clear all your charges—the death of Byron Harewood's junior Arbiter, the death of Sophie Anderson, resisting arrest, and whatever else they have on you. It will take a few weeks, but you can even return to your life as an Arbiter. It will be like none of it ever happened.”
She was trying to help me, to give me what she thought I wanted. She just didn’t get it. Who knows how many years she’d been working for Section 9, living in a world where the law was malleable? But it could never happen, not even if I hadn’t decided what I had already decided.
She could clear my charges, but she couldn’t do anything about the black hatred every Arbiter in the solar system would have for me. From that moment in Sif, when I decided to fight back against the people responsible for Sophie’s death, I had become a rogue Arbiter. If they ever caught up with me, they would kill me just like I had killed Byron’s new partner, law or no law. If I tried to go back to my old job, I’d be dead within the week.
