Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  It was too hard to swallow. “There is no Section 9.”

  My voice was flat, but Andrea responded with a laugh. “That’s the spirit!”

  That was the moment when I accepted it. She wasn’t lying; anyone in the same situation would have recognized it instantly. She really did work for Section 9, which was therefore a beyond-top-secret unit with no public face at all. I thought back to all the “spooky” characters I’d brushed shoulders with over the years, and wondered if this was not the first time I had encountered some of their people.

  When you work for the Federation, you just get used to accepting reality the way it is. And then if it changes you accept it again and rearrange your mental furniture as much as you need to. Before too long, I’d be sitting comfortably with information that changed my whole picture of the world I lived and worked in. Section 9 existed, and it had existed all along.

  “Okay,” I said. “You work for Section 9. What does Section 9 do exactly?”

  “The stuff that needs to get done, without anyone seeing the Federation do it. Stuff too sensitive to send an Arbiter for.”

  “They’ve used Arbiters for everything. They even used a pair of Arbiters to resolve the Jovian genocide,” I pointed out.

  Gabriel Anderson himself was on that mission, paired with a Senior Arbiter named Wojtek Dimek. Dimek never made it back, an exact parallel to my current mission. I wondered what Gabriel would have thought about that.

  Andrea broke in on my thoughts. “They resolved it by kidnapping the Jovian Prime Minister, something that caused almost as many problems as it solved. The Sol Federation authorities felt it might be wiser to have another option, something that could never be pinned on the ruling authorities.”

  “Plausible deniability.”

  “Exactly. Section 9 is off the books; we do the things they can’t acknowledge.”

  “Okay.” This was all possible enough, even if it was a lot to take in. “So, what are you doing here? I mean, this is kind of a fucked-up situation. The Arbiter Force never told us you were going to be here.”

  “They don’t even know we exist. It’s like that saying, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Too much insulation for our own good. We’ve probably been acting at cross purposes.”

  “We don’t know that for sure yet,” I said. “What exactly are you doing here?”

  She glanced toward the kitchen, but Jones seemed to read her mind.

  “Don’t mind me! I won’t tell anyone you told him all these extremely classified things!”

  “Stop listening, Jones,” she replied.

  “It’s a small apartment,” he returned.

  “So, Jones has been here longer than the rest of us. He’s not really an information security consultant.”

  My voice was drier than the gin in my Red Martian. “You don’t say.”

  Jones wandered in, wiping his hands off with a kitchen towel. “I’m an infiltration specialist. I go in early, establish contacts, set us up with a home-base.”

  “Emmet figured you for a spook.”

  “Did he? Well, the old man has good instincts. I reached out to him because of his war record. I figured he might have buddies in the Nightwatch or maybe some of the government agencies here. You know how that goes. And it’s a good thing I did, or we would never have gotten our hands on that dataspike.”

  “I can handle this, Jones,” said Andrea.

  “Still mad about the sour drink? Alright, I’ll go organize our travel documents or something.”

  He wandered out again, and Andrea took another sip of her drink. “It’s disgusting, honestly. I don’t know how much he paid to get that certificate, but he shouldn’t quit his day job. So, yeah. Jones came in ahead of the rest of us, set up this apartment, and started observing. Things have been off here for a little while. Whatever’s going on, it didn’t start when Marcenn turned the lights out.”

  “I know. The thing that killed my partner was a heavy weapons droid, military tech capable of shooting right through our armor. It’s not supposed to be here on Venus at all.”

  Of course, they were also carrying weapons capable of piercing Arbiter armor. Having the ability to kill Arbiters seemed to be everyone’s priority these days.

  “I’m sorry about your partner, Tycho. And you’re right. Marcenn has been bringing in a lot of military hardware. Our contacts in the smuggling networks gave us a head’s up a while back, but the stuff he was buying through petty smugglers was only the tip of a damn big iceberg. Most of what he was doing looked legal on paper.”

  “What do you mean? None of that stuff is legal to own, not out here on the colony worlds.”

  “It is if certain conditions are met. Those heavy droids, for instance—they can be modified to do high-risk mining work; their armor makes them especially resistant to harsh conditions. So you can buy them used when the military is done with them, but first they have to go through the modifications to make them harmless.”

  “Those droids we ran into were anything but harmless.”

  “Right. Marcenn was buying them, but he was using a network of shell companies. To any regulators, it would look like everything was on the up-and-up. When we followed the thread, we found out the droids were never going to any middlemen for modifications. They were just getting shuffled around from one imaginary corporation to another until Marcenn was satisfied no one would follow the paper trail. Then he’d ship them here.”

  “Okay. I can see how that would get your attention. What did you think was going on?”

  “We didn’t know, but we sure as hell wanted to find out. The most likely guess is he was planning an uprising, some kind of Venusian nationalist nonsense. That was our big mistake, assuming his motivations would be rational in the first place. But how can you plan for something that doesn’t make any sense?”

  “You can’t.” I sighed. “Neither could we. We’ve been chasing our tails since this whole thing started.”

  I winced when I heard myself say “we.” Gabriel was gone; there was no “we.”

  Andrea frowned sympathetically. “Like I said, the heavy androids were just a piece of it. He was buying coil guns, all sorts of old military equipment… and a few things he really should not have been able to get his hands on.”

  “Worse than what I’ve seen so far?”

  “I’m afraid so. He went through back channels, got his hands on some experimental tech a military contractor was developing. Stuff that outclasses anything we have with us.”

  The thought made my skin clammy. It was a good thing he was dead, but what if his Nightwatch Loyalists figured out where he kept his private stash? I had achieved most of my mission goals, but we might not be as close to a resolution as I was hoping.

  “So, you decided he was planning an uprising and you sent Jones in. What were you planning to do to stop the uprising from happening? I mean, that’s your job, right? To do the Federation’s dirty work?”

  I left it unspoken, but the fact is they hadn’t prevented this tragedy. If there was a black ops section of Federation Intelligence, why did the Arbiters even have to get involved?

  “I get it,” she said. “You think we fucked up. And maybe we did, but we had no way of knowing what he was about to pull. As we dug around in his life, we uncovered some connections to another ongoing case”

  Jones stuck his head in the room with eyebrows raised. She may have been the boss, but he was not without influence.

  She waved him off. “Something I just can’t talk about, so don’t even ask. Satisfied, Andrew?”

  He backed out of the room again and she laughed. “That guy. It’s not like I’m giving away the shop here. An ongoing case, but top secret, and you’re not need-to-know on that one. At least not yet. You with me, Barrett?”

  I nodded. Whether she called me Tycho or Barrett seemed to depend on how much sympathy she felt like showing me in that moment. Either one beat “Arbiter,” the way Jones had been addressing me since I walked
in the apartment. “I didn’t ask. Unless it looks like it’s directly relevant to my mission, I won’t.”

  “Good man. So, here’s the thing. The fact that it was connected with this other business tripped us up. We thought we had time, and we didn’t want to jump the gun and gut the whole investigation. Like I said, he has some tech that could cause us serious problems. A decision was made: don’t move on him immediately, sit back and observe, go after the guy when we know exactly where he’ll be and when he will be there.”

  It was a defensible decision, but one that had cost a lot of lives and would probably cost a lot more. That was one for the generals and section chiefs to worry about, though. All we could do was follow their lead and die when they made the wrong decisions.

  I thought of the story Jones had given me. “What about this pathogen? I don’t see how any of that’s connected.”

  “There is no pathogen. Or at least, if there is, they haven’t told me about it.”

  “So that was just a lie?”

  Jones called from the kitchen. “Lie is a bit harsh.”

  She shook her head. “Quiet, Jones. The pathogen containment protocol is real, and Marcenn really did invoke it. As far as we can tell, he did that just to cover his tracks. To delay any kind of organized response until he achieved whatever he’s trying to achieve here. If the Sol Federation thinks the pathogen containment protocol is in effect, they won’t send a full-scale military intervention—after all, that would only risk infecting the soldiers.”

  I was starting to get the picture here—and I didn’t like the frame. “But a two-man Arbiter drop team.”

  “That’s right. You’re expendable. They can send you in to find out if the containment protocol is an actual infection, and if it turns out it is then they’re no worse off. I mean, they’re out two Arbiters plus gear but otherwise the situation is exactly what it would have been if they’d done nothing.”

  That made me feel a little defensive. “Our training is pretty damn expensive…”

  A quiet cough from the kitchen. I added Punch Andrew Jones to my mental to-do list.

  Andrea continued. “It’s still a lot less expensive than losing the sheer number of men they would lose if they blundered into a large-scale bioweapon attack without the means to deal with it.”

  At least I understood now. It wasn’t great, but at least I knew what the brass was thinking. “Okay. Enough of that. I have another question.”

  “Go ahead. As long as it’s something I can answer, I will.”

  “You said you were planning to get Marcenn when you were ready, when you knew exactly where he was and so forth.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, what do you mean by that? It’s not like you could arrest him. Section 9 doesn’t officially exist. You wouldn’t have any legal authority to do anything, and he could expose what you did.”

  “It’s like I told you,” called Jones, who in theory was supposed to be doing something else. “There was never going to be a trial.”

  “We’re here to kill him,” said Andrea. “I know that’s extreme, and maybe not what you’re used to as an agent of the law. But we’re here to assassinate him. This whole situation with the juice being off has delayed us from acting. We were trying to hack the system and at least get the droids shut off before we had to fight our way up there. Give ourselves every advantage, you know? And make sure all the people here are safe.”

  She said that almost like an afterthought, and that may be exactly what it was. Spies are a bit strange when it comes to normal human feelings.

  But as for me, I started laughing. All those cracks about my training, and I had done the thing they didn’t feel ready to attempt yet.

  “What is it?” asked Andrea. “What’s so funny?”

  Jones came in again. “He brought us Marcenn’s dataspike. I’ve been wondering how you got your hands on that, Arbiter.”

  “You’ve got it. I killed August Marcenn myself. He’s already dead.”

  Andrea Capanelli, Field Commander for Section 9 of Federation Intelligence, was suddenly looking at me with a respect that neither of these two had shown me up until now. She turned to Jones. “You are officially ordered to stop kidding around about Arbiter training.”

  “Order understood. Seriously, Barrett. That’s a hell of a feat.”

  I stopped laughing, because nothing about the situation felt funny anymore. “Gabe didn’t make it. And I couldn’t have done it without him.”

  “We all lose people in this line of work,” said Andrea. “What you did is still damn impressive. If you don’t get a medal when all is said and done, I’ll hack into the system and give you one myself.”

  “I couldn’t care less about a medal. The only one who deserves it isn’t here to enjoy it.”

  She knew that feeling. We all do, all of us who have lost friends and companions in service to the Federation. She reached out briefly and touched my arm, a gesture of sympathy.

  “The only thing I care about,” I went on, “is that Marcenn is dead. At least he paid for what he did. Now that the lights and the life support systems have been turned back on, the rest of the Loyalists should start to surrender…”

  “They won’t,” said Jones. There was no doubt in his voice, not even a hint of it.

  Andrea agreed with him. “They won’t surrender.”

  I frowned. “How can you be so sure? They’ve lost their commander, they’ve lost their android proxies, and time is no longer on their side. Of course, they’ll surrender.”

  “They won’t, though,” said Jones, “because August Marcenn isn’t really dead.”

  I stood up suddenly, with my hands balled into fists. I was about to cross one item off my mental to-do list. This smug little punk.

  “Sit down, Tycho,” said Andrea gently. “I’ll explain.”

  “I shot August Marcenn myself. I watched him die.”

  You haven’t killed me. No more than a teacup can hold the ocean.

  Jones was looking at me with what I can only describe as curiosity. If I had actually punched him, he would probably have pulled some high-level martial arts move and dislocated my shoulder or something. I sat down slowly, regretting my own ability to control my temper.

  I looked at Andrea, without much friendliness. “Explain, then. I killed the man, so what do you mean he isn’t dead?”

  “This is a complicated situation. There are aspects here I can’t…”

  Jones sighed. “Go ahead and tell him. He’s need-to-know now, at least on that one subject.”

  “Yeah. I suppose he is. Okay, Mr. Barrett. You’re about to learn something hardly anyone knows. I assume I can count on you to make sure no one else outside this room finds out about it?”

  “Of course.” If whatever she was about to tell me had a classified rating, I wouldn’t even be able to tell my own commanding officers. It was an awkward situation, but if I didn’t agree I wouldn’t learn anything.

  “Okay. I get the sense that I can rely on your discretion. If it turns out that I’m wrong, well… there are other methods.”

  I wasn’t happy with the implied threat, partly because it didn’t even need to be said. Obviously a black-ops intelligence unit with no real accountability could shut me up anytime. I gestured for her to continue.

  “You might find some of this a little hard to believe, but I promise you it’s all true. A long time ago—I’m not going to say how long, at least not yet—a group of scientists succeeded in developing a method for distributing a human consciousness across a complex neural network.”

  “A complex neural network? You mean a high-level AI?”

  She shook her head. “An organic neural network.”

  “So… a brain? I mean, the brain is already a complex neural network, and it already has a human consciousness. So, what are we talking about here?”

  “Think of the brain as hardware. Like a computer server. Right?”

  “Okay, I follow. I mean, that’s a really old met
aphor, but yes, I follow.”

  “If the brain is hardware, then what would the mind be?”

  She was staring at me intently, trying to tell if I could understand what she was saying or not.

  “You know,” I began, “Arbitrate This is a comedy. The Arbiter Force isn’t just a bunch of knuckle-draggers. We’ve been to school like everyone else.”

  “I never said you were knuckle-draggers, but you’re not answering the question.”

  “You’re thinking I might not understand the difference between the brain and the mind. Most people use those words as synonyms, but they really aren’t. The mind is what the brain does. If the brain is hardware, the mind is software.”

  “Yes. And hardware can just as easily run one piece of software as another.”

  I was starting to get where this was going, and I didn’t like it. If what she was hinting at was true, it was simply monstrous. But I didn’t see how it could be true. “Your analogy kind of falls apart there. Hardware can only run software it’s compatible with. And that’s even more true with the brain. Your personality comes from your DNA, from the way your neural pathways develop in the brain—it can’t just be rewritten.”

  “Not completely, no. But your brain can get instructions to stop using certain neural pathways, to start forming others. The software can be reprogrammed. Maybe it would never be exactly like whatever you were trying to copy, but it could get close. Either way, it would be totally different from whatever it was before you reprogrammed it.”

  I shuddered. “I don’t even want to think of what that would do to you. I mean, unless it was done as slowly and carefully as possible.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Had this actually happened? I looked at her sharply, trying to figure her out. “What do you mean it wasn’t?”

  “I mean, you’re right. Having your brain completely reprogrammed would be incredibly damaging; the only way you could hope to survive it with some of your sanity intact would be if they took months to do it properly. But that’s not what happened here. Instead, he rushed it.”