Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  “Fair enough. You still did it though. You’re on your way to Young, right?”

  “That’s right,” said Jones. “It looks like they’re about to rush us though. They’ve got us pinned.”

  On the schematic, I could see the Nightwatch gathering their numbers on the streets around us. In the larger scheme of things, I could see them pulling their forces back. They were withdrawing toward the elevators, possibly even abandoning this level. Unfortunately for us, they seemed to want to kill us first.

  Veraldi seemed unconcerned. “Sommer will deal with it. And Capanelli’s on her way.”

  I checked Sommer’s profile. Raven Sommer, listed as a tactical sniper specialist. She was a dark-skinned woman with long black hair and a look on her face I would have described as challenging, perhaps even defiant. Section 9 had its officers, but it didn’t seem to function like a normal unit. The members all had a different expertise, and they seemed to have a lot of leeway to make their own decisions. In a unit of eccentrics, a woman who didn’t think much of the chain of command could probably still do fairly well.

  As the Nightwatch closed in, the image on my scanner wavered and then blinked out entirely. Someone in the area had turned on a scrambler, most likely Raven Sommer. An infiltration specialist like Andrew Jones might not have needed one, but a sniper just can’t afford to show up on backscatter.

  I heard a shot, then another one a few seconds later.

  “That’s Sommer alright.” Veraldi grinned. “She can hit them through cover, she can hit them in motion… she can hit them no matter what they do. She probably isn’t even in range for them to shoot at her; she just doesn’t want them to know where the next shot will come from.”

  The shots continued, although I had no way of seeing the effects with my scanner not working.

  Veraldi crept over to a window. “Over here, Arbiter. You should get a look at her handiwork. It’s impressive stuff.”

  Maybe the fact that I had killed August Marcenn was making Veraldi think of me as a fellow assassin, but his work-crush on the sniper seemed a little ghoulish to me. I crawled over to the window anyway just to keep things friendly and saw dead Nightwatch officers lying in the street.

  There were others nearby, turning wildly from one direction to another. They must have been trying to spot her muzzle flash, but it wasn’t getting them anywhere. As I watched them looking for her, she took them one after another. They fell by the dozen, but more of them were still pouring into the neighborhood.

  Most of the Nightwatch on this level had withdrawn toward the hub, but there were still enough in the immediate area to overrun us before long.

  “Come on,” I told the others. “We’ve got to do something to cut their numbers.”

  “You think?” asked Jones. “I’d say Raven’s doing just fine on her own. Precision optics, you know?”

  I would never have said that Jones was a coward, but he was weirdly lazy when it came to combat. It probably came from the fact that he was their infiltration specialist. He didn’t see it as his job to kill the enemy, but to sneak past and do whatever he was supposed to do.

  “Come on, Jones!” I snapped at him. “One sniper cannot handle that many hostiles.”

  “Yeah, come on Jones!” Veraldi grinned. “Stop being a shifty fucker for just a minute and help us fight some bad guys.”

  “Shit. Okay, then.”

  Jones broke cover in the most dramatic way possible. He rolled up from his hiding place, aimed his gun down the street at the approaching Nightwatch officers, and fired through the window of the store. Glass exploded everywhere, enemy gunmen started dropping, and I jumped back to avoid the flying glass.

  Veraldi laughed and disappeared through a backdoor to go knife some more people. I opened fire, mentally cursing Jones for being Jones.

  As we fired on the Nightwatch, I noticed a shimmer nearby. It was Capanelli, holding position just long enough to fire and then dropping out of sight again. They couldn’t see her except when she took a shot, and even then it was only for a fleeting moment.

  My scanners were down, which meant that I couldn’t see her either, except for those little moments when she fired. “Hold off, Jones. That’s Andrea out there.”

  “Andrea, huh?” He stopped shooting, not wanting to accidentally shoot her any more than I did. Instead he refocused on mocking me. “You on a first-name basis now? Thinking of asking her out for coffee? She’s way too much for you, Arbiter.”

  “I don’t doubt that for a second. I just don’t want to shoot her accidentally.”

  He ignored me and kept up the mockery. “Andrea. The guy calls her Andrea. You know how long I had to work with her before I grew balls big enough to do that?”

  “Drop it, Jones. No disrespect intended.”

  “I’m Jones, she’s Andrea. No disrespect. Well, that’s Mr. Jones to you, buddy. Come on, they’ve got this. If we head out the back, we can go find Young. That’s what she told us to do, right?”

  She couldn’t tell me to do anything, since we weren’t even part of the same service. But Capanelli was a natural leader, and that doesn’t have anything to do with rank. “Alright.”

  Jones peeled away and went out the back, and I followed behind him. There was no one out there, and we were only two or three blocks from Young’s last known location. Now that we’d gotten so close, the man had the gall to do what Jones had asked him to do at least an hour ago. As we approached his last position, he stepped out from a nearby building and walked over to meet us.

  “Jones.” His voice was cultured, with hints of an elite accent. Unlike the others, he was neither wearing armor nor carrying weapons. He wore a long black coat, and his hair hung chaotically over his oddly vulnerable face.

  “Young. Why the hell didn’t you answer my message?”

  “You asked me to meet you halfway. If you calculate the distance between the building you were in most recently and the one I was in, you will find that I am standing.”

  “I could kill you, Thomas,” Jones said irritably. “I really could. What the hell were you doing, anyway?”

  “As I already told you…”

  “Never mind. I don’t want to know. This is Tycho Barrett with the Sol Federation Arbiter Force. He has Marcenn’s dataspike.”

  Unlike the others, Thomas Young did not seem especially impressed. From the look on his face, people usually brought him whatever he needed… and how they got it was none of his concern. He held out his hand without so much as an introduction. But it was what he said next that really got to me.

  “Took you long enough, didn’t it?”

  18

  I just blinked at Thomas Young a few times and then turned away from him. Geniuses like Young have their own way of doing things, and they don’t always understand the rest of the world and how it works. I wasn’t going to take it personally.

  Jones sighed. “Don’t mind Thomas. He’s always like that. Here comes Capanelli.”

  I saw the telltale shimmer, and then she seemed to materialize right in front of me. “Jones, Barrett. I see you caught up with Young.”

  I nodded. “Eventually. How’s the fight?”

  “I’d say we’re winning. They’ve been ignoring casualties, acting like it just doesn’t matter, but that suddenly changed. They’ve started pulling back. The numbers must be making Marcenn nervous.”

  I didn’t like it when she talked like that, even if I couldn’t disprove what she’d told me about the hivemind. Whatever those guys in the Nightwatch had now become, I wasn’t willing to refer to them as August Marcenn.

  Capanelli noticed and grabbed my arm. “Council of war. Come on.”

  “What?”

  “We have to decide what we’re going to do next, and you’re not under my command. Let’s go have a meeting. Young, are you ready for us?”

  “I’m ready.” He turned and started walking back toward the building we’d seen him coming out of.

  Jones threw Capanelli a sharp look. “
You mean you knew what he was doing?”

  “Of course I did. I’m the field commander.”

  Jones hurried to catch up with Young. “If it’s not over her head, why is it over mine?”

  Young shrugged. “Capanelli has a certain capacity for analysis that you don’t.”

  “You’re such an asshole, Young,” Jones muttered.

  It turned out that what Young had been up to wasn’t really all that secret in the first place. The building he took us to was a kind of control center, where Tower 7’s authorities could access the lights, the life support system, and so on. He must have been trying to beat Marcenn’s security and regain control of the Tower, using a handheld interface that fed power to one of the access terminals. Jones had been doing pretty much the same thing until I arrived, which told me that Young preferred not to work with Jones. He probably preferred not to work with anyone.

  Without the dataspike he hadn’t been able to get the lights or the life support back on. But he hadn’t been idle. As he entered the building, he gestured toward a bank of computer screens on the far wall. “I’ve got my fingers in all of it now. I couldn’t get control, but the system had a lot of known vulnerabilities.”

  Jones scoffed. “I wouldn’t say a lot.”

  Young pursed his lips. “I’ll clarify. The system had a lot of vulnerabilities known to me. I couldn’t get past the permissions issue, that was airtight. But I put my little spiders to work in every system with a weak point, and as soon as I get this dataspike hooked in I’ll own it all. I’ll be able to control everything in Tower 7 from right here.”

  Capanelli seemed pleased. “Everything?”

  “I can lock or unlock any door, turn command systems on or off, set off sprinklers or alarms or lights… everything.”

  I had an idea. “Can you send a command code to a bunch of riot control mines?”

  “Of course. I can disable them or set them all off at once. Anything you want.”

  Andrea frowned. “Riot control mines?”

  “They’re in the elevator shaft. It’s why we got trapped by those heavy droids. We couldn’t keep going up.”

  “Speaking of which…” She turned to Young. “Can you get the androids on our side?”

  From the way he was looking at her, his respect for her “capacity for analysis” only went so far. “They’re just machines. I can make them do anything I want them to do.”

  “Well, get on it then.”

  “I’m already on it.” He wandered off with the dataspike, and Andrea found a seat nearby.

  “Sit down, Tycho. We need to make some decisions.”

  I looked at Jones and raised my eyebrows. See? First-name basis.

  He shook his head and found a seat of his own. I sat down and noticed the dead security guard in the corner. He’d been shot in the head, and someone had dragged his body halfway across the floor to get him out of the way of the computer banks. You could tell from the long, dark blood streak all along the floor. I glanced at Young, who was busy interfacing with the dataspike. Did he kill the guard himself? Probably not, but he at least dragged the man’s body out of the way because it was inconvenient for him. He might be a genius, but that didn’t mean he was any less ruthless than the rest of them.

  “Okay. What’s next?”

  Andrea’s chair was backward, so she was leaning over the chair back. “Marcenn established a perimeter at Level 250, but the levels below that have mostly been left alone. Why do you think he did it that way?”

  I thought about it, but it’s hard to apply rational analysis to irrational actions. “He was going to kill everyone, right? I mean, that’s what would have happened. If no one had done anything to stop him, the air would have run out and everyone would have died. And that’s not even counting the fact that they’d have baked to death as soon as the heat built up in here. So, he didn’t even need to have anyone shot. He just had to wait.”

  “Follow the thread. If all he had to do was wait, why establish a perimeter at Level 250?”

  “Gabriel and I were talking about this on our way up the elevator shaft. Well, that and a lot of stuff about August Marcenn and the nature of evil…”

  “Uh-huh. Pretty philosophical for a couple of guys slipping on banana peels all the time.”

  That shitty little movie. The Arbiter Force would never live it down. “Yeah, that’s it. Philosophical. I was just trying to figure out what he was up to so I would know the best strategy, but I’ve never been able to make any sense out of it. We can sit here talking about what he was up to, but we’ll never know. The man was deranged.”

  “Don’t give up so easily, Tycho. Even if he was deranged, he must have had some sort of strategy.”

  Jones pointed at the wall, where some optimist had hung one of those godawful motivational posters. It showed a construction drone building a Venusian living tower, hanging in mid-air over a swirling acid cloud. The slogan on the poster said Hang in There!

  “I don’t know. Marcenn was probably just trying to give himself space to stay safe and deny access to the tower control system overrides. That way he could afford to just wait out the clock. We figured he probably had his own way out of here with whatever he was stealing up there.”

  Andrea’s brow furrowed. “What, like a heist? No, Barrett. You’re way off with that one. If this was a heist, it would be the stupidest and most pointlessly bloody heist in the history of crime.”

  “Well, what is it then? You tell me.”

  “I’ll tell you this. For a smart guy, you can be weirdly naïve.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were just holding the line before, right?” she asked.

  “Before I killed Marcenn, you mean? Yeah. They weren’t even trying to dislodge the Defectors; all they were trying to do was defend the upper levels and let the clock run out.”

  “From the way you phrased that, I’m guessing you think the killing is about revenge. Marcenn’s Loyalists are killing everyone because you killed Marcenn.”

  “Well, yeah. What other explanation is there?”

  “The attacks didn’t start after you killed Marcenn,” she said.

  “What do you mean? And how would you even know that?

  “I was out there on the streets when you were in the shaft; I caught a glimpse of you on my backscatter and figured the Federation must have sent a few Arbiters in. And the killings were already starting at that point.”

  “When we were still in the shaft? You mean, when Gabriel was still alive?”

  “Yes. I saw both of you, decided you were on a suicide mission, and went back to my work.”

  That was a lot to absorb. She knew we were there. If we’d had her help, Gabe might not have died. But she had her own orders, which were different from mine. I couldn’t decide whether there was anything to blame her for or not.

  “If I’d known then what I know now,” she started.

  I held a hand up to stop her. “It doesn’t matter. What exactly happened?”

  “While you were climbing up to the higher levels, they turned the Defectors and started the massacres. They caught us flatfooted, and we were only able to establish a defensive perimeter on this side of the central hub. The other side…”

  “The other side is fucked. They’ve probably killed most of the people who were over there. When I left that area, there were just a few scattered survivors defending barricades.”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen it.” Andrea Capanelli was a hard one, but the slaughter on the other side of the level had affected even her. I could see it in her eyes.

  “So, what do you make of it?” I asked.

  “If you want my opinion, the killings were a direct response to you reaching the upper levels. Not to your killing of the Marcenn original.”

  The “Marcenn original.” What a phrase!

  “Look, we need to secure the levels below this one, where there are still a lot of survivors. They need our help.” I was trying to change the topic, but she wasn�
��t having it.

  “I’m trying to get you to understand something, Barrett. I need you to focus.”

  “I’m as focused as you are, I’m just saying we need to concentrate our efforts on a rescue operation. If the Nightwatch gets down there, the body count is just going to keep getting higher.”

  “You don’t treat a bad tooth with painkillers if you can get it filled instead.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Barrett, you know what I’m saying here. We need to get up there!” She pointed up at the ceiling, toward the upper levels.

  “But why? Take a look at your scanners!” On my schematic, I could already see the Nightwatch staging for an attack on the lower levels. The people down there hadn’t seen the horror yet. They’d be totally unprepared for the death squads.

  “I can see what’s happening as well as you can.” Her voice was calm, but cold at the same time. “There’s a reason the killings started when you went up that elevator shaft.”

  “If you know what the reason is, then just go ahead and tell me. You don’t need to fence around about it.”

  “Marcenn wants to distract anyone else that might try to stop what he’s planning. He wants us focused down here, where we can’t do anything about whatever he’s doing up there.”

  I stood up suddenly and left the building, letting the door slam shut behind me. I was mad, but the look on Jones’ face when I stormed out was at least a little bit satisfying. Why the hell did they have to keep talking about it that way?

  Marcenn was dead!

  I stood out on the street, looking at the bullet-scarred and rocket-blasted buildings all around me. Out of all the missions I’d ever been on, this one was by the far the strangest. And for whatever reason, their insistence that Marcenn wasn’t really dead was still the hardest thing for me to accept.

  Andrea came out and put a hand on my shoulder from behind. “You’re okay, Tycho.”

  She wasn’t asking, she was telling. And I suppose I was, though I didn’t like the way she kept talking about the situation.