Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  Andrea pushed the door open quietly, her rifle up in front of her just in case someone was waiting inside with a gun for us. No one started shooting, so she cross-stepped her way into the room. I slipped in behind her, visible only as a vague distortion in the air.

  The real lab was in the secret room, and the sleek lab out front was just for show. Whatever Ivanovich was up to, he’d been doing it in here. The space was filled with what looked to be bioprinting tanks.

  Some of them were empty, but others contained what appeared to be mutated animals. I couldn’t make them out at first, but they looked wrong. Twisted into unnatural shapes, the things in the bioprinting tanks were no longer whatever they were meant to be.

  A man was standing in front of one of the tanks, his hand on the glass and his head bowed. As Andrea crept up to him with her weapon pointed, it looked like he was speaking to the creature within.

  I almost activated my text system to crack a joke about Dr. Moreau, but then I remembered that she would only snap at me to focus. She probably wouldn’t have gotten the reference anyway. Late Victorian manuscripts aren’t to everyone’s taste.

  Andrea finally spoke. “Sasha Ivanovich?”

  He turned away from his macabre pet in the bioprinting tank and registered the weapon pointed at his face. It didn’t seem to bother him. As soon as he turned, I recognized the man I’d been trying to kill that morning. He really didn’t look like a researcher. He had a short but not particularly neat gray beard, receding hair combed back along his scalp, expensive purple floral shirt and shabby blue jacket.

  “Yes?”

  Andrea slowly lowered her gun. “This is an extraction. We’re here to get you out.”

  He smiled.

  I was supposed to be watching him, but I was more fascinated by the monstrosities in the tanks. All of them seemed to be predatory mammals, or to originally have been predatory mammals anyway. I couldn’t quite make out which mammals, but I caught glimpses of sharp canine teeth, front-facing eyes, and wickedly curving talons. As far as I could tell, these beasts were chimeras—combinations of DNA from different sources, different species even. Something about them was horrifying, like they should never have existed in the first place, but there was something sad about them too.

  Some of the chimeras had missing limbs, others were missing the lower halves of their bodies, and others had partially integrated prosthetic interfaces. I wondered how Andrea felt about that. A standardized socket for artificial limbs, the prosthetic interface was an electronic device surgically implanted onto the stump of a severed arm or leg to allow the user to control the prosthetic with the same neural pathways as an organic limb. With four prosthetic interfaces herself, Andrea would recognize them instantly.

  Ivanovich’s demeanor in talking to the thing in the tank had seemed almost tender, in skin-crawling contrast to the abject cruelty of these experiments. His smile made me feel vaguely nauseated. “Welcome to my laboratory. It’s a bit sad to have to leave it, but as you can see all my colleagues have been murdered anyway so I’ll just have to start over somewhere else. I take it you’re from the Federation?”

  I couldn’t believe the man’s sangfroid. He was in his secret lab, the one place where he should be confident that no one could find him, and we had walked right in on him anyway. Considering that the dead bodies of everyone he worked with were lying out there with their eyes still open in the room just past that door, his lack of concern was disconcerting.

  Andrea cocked her head to the side like she was trying to figure something out. Maybe she was just as creeped out by this guy as I was. Then she gestured with the barrel of her rifle for him to step aside.

  “Dr. Ivanovich, I’m going to need you to step back for a moment. Please go stand over there.”

  “Doctor,” he chuckled, but he stepped aside. She took a closer look at the thing he’d been talking to—a creature that looked something like a primate and a large cat. It had no arms or legs, just prosthetic interface sockets. She looked at those sockets then glanced down at her own prosthetic limbs.

  Her mother had been a black-market prosthetic surgeon, but when she was a child there was no work of that kind on Mars. She’d spent a lot of time alone with a nanny while her mother worked off-world, including several days trapped in the ruins of a collapsed building during the Great Martian Blackout. Her mother replaced Andrea’s shattered limbs when she returned home, but there was no helping the nanny by that point.

  Andrea turned and looked at Ivanovich again. I couldn’t have described the look she gave him, but any ordinary person would have wilted under that gaze. Sasha Ivanovich just kept on smiling, a faint little grin that could have meant almost anything.

  Always the professional, Andrea straightened up and turned away from the creature. She didn’t see it, but it was staring at her with an unsettling intelligence. Its eyes looked lonely to me at first, like a shelter animal, but then it slowly and menacingly bared its teeth at her. With those yellow fangs exposed, the eyes somehow didn’t look sad anymore. They looked deranged, like the thing it would enjoy most of all would be to dig its face into her intestines and paint the walls with her blood.

  I was sure it couldn’t get out of the bioprinting tank, but even so, I stepped into a position where I could open fire immediately if I had to. The whole situation was making me nervous. I wouldn’t have been able to explain it, but I had never trusted anyone less than Sasha Ivanovich. I could only hope Andrea felt the same way.

  “Okay, Dr. Ivanovich.” Her voice was calm. “I’m going to get you out of here, but first I need to know what happened out there in that lab.”

  The smile faded out from Ivanovich’s face. He shook his head and sighed. “Tragic business. Some of the finest researchers I’ve ever worked with.”

  She glanced back in the direction we had come from. With both doors open, you could still see the empty eyes of one of the corpses staring in at us.

  “Who did it, and why? And how did you survive?”

  “Ares Terrestrial must know I was planning to defect.” His eyes flashed angrily. “You have a leak, and a lot of good people died because of it!”

  Andrea was unflustered. “Are you saying you personally saw Ares Terrestrial staff carrying out these murders?”

  “I was in here working before anyone else this morning, but I saw corporate security officers come in the lab on that monitor there.”

  He pointed to a nearby monitor, which showed a split-screen image of each room in the lab. He must have seen us come in, and he must have watched us trying to figure out where he was.

  “Security lined everyone up in the clean room, made them lie face-down on the floor, then executed them one by one. But they didn’t know about the Nursery.”

  There was that little smile again. The man seemed genuinely angry about the deaths of his fellow researchers, but he also seemed pleased that he had not been forced to share their fate.

  Andrea frowned. “You’re saying the company didn’t know about this lab at all?”

  That seemed beyond unlikely, but it would also undermine his bargaining position considerably if it turned out to be true. After all, his only value to us as an informant was his ability to testify about the company’s wrongdoing.

  “No, no.” Sasha frowned, holding up both his hands. “They knew, of course they knew. But it was a secret lab, yes? You can see this.” He gestured vaguely at the tanks, which certainly looked like the sort of thing you would want to keep secret. “Need to know, I believe you call it. Well, the security guards didn’t need to know.”

  He was having trouble holding in the laughter. As ghoulish as this was considering the twelve dead bodies, I had to admit to myself that it was perversely funny. Send a death squad down to kill everyone in the lab, but don’t tell them about the secret room. Why? Well, it’s a secret, isn’t it? Sasha’s survival was the punch line for a joke about corporate incompetence.

  “Weren’t you worried they’d come back?” she asked.
“I mean, someone had to figure it out at some point, right?”

  “I’ve already changed the pass-code.” He pointed to the door. “They’d never get in here.”

  “Dr. Ivanovich, the door was unlocked.”

  His eyes got huge as he realized that anyone could have come in at any time. He rushed over to the door to examine the keycode terminal then whistled quietly. “I sometimes leave it unlocked when I’m waiting for people. I must have forgotten.”

  Andrea shook her head. “You got lucky today, Doctor.”

  He didn’t know how true that was. Hours ago, I was standing a few inches behind him grasping a splinter gun loaded with nanite poison.

  “I truly did.” He shrugged. “I just assumed you used one of those universal keys or whatever they are. You’re a spy, right? It’s a good thing the guards didn’t know about the Nursery, or…”

  I decloaked suddenly, causing our informant to jump like a spooked horse. He stared at me in a panic for a moment and then pointed. “You! The asshole from the train station!”

  “What do you mean by the Nursery? What is this?”

  Andrea threw me an exasperated look and sent me a text message.

  You just broke protocol!

  I didn’t answer her. She might be pissed, but she wasn’t stopping me from asking my question, so I kept going.

  Sasha shook his head then said, “He’s the asshole from the train station…”

  I could see my new nickname becoming The Asshole from the Train Station all too easily, especially since Andrea wasn’t too happy with me right now. Luckily, she intervened to get the conversation back on track. “We’ve been planning this extraction for days now, doctor. My colleague asked you a question.”

  He looked at her blankly, then back at me. Did he suspect?

  “The Nursery,” Andrea repeated.

  Sasha blinked. “Yes. The Nursery, because it’s where we grow all our little friends here. It’s just a joke really.”

  “A joke?” asked Andrea, her face darkening.

  “Okay, a dark joke. A joke in poor taste. But it’s essential work, believe me. The research here requires live test subjects, but sourcing an animal from Earth is prohibitively expensive.” He shrugged again. “So… we clone our own.”

  He said it casually, a throwaway comment, but it was a major admission.

  I nodded. “If the Sol Federation knew Ares Terrestrial was performing illegal cloning, it would lead to more sanctions East Hellas can’t afford. They must be really afraid of those sanctions to kill the whole team, though.”

  Cybernetic augmentation research on humans was banned by law everywhere, but animal research wasn't. Still, cloning was illegal outside of very specific circumstances, so what Ivanovich had just said was already an admission of a crime.

  “I suppose they must be.” He nodded thoughtfully, apparently pondering the sheer wickedness of his corporate masters. I couldn’t figure out what this guy’s deal was. One moment he was indignant about our hypothetical security leak or mournful about all his murdered colleagues. The next moment he was chuckling to himself about his own cleverness and the stupidity of the company bureaucrats. A few seconds more, and he was contemplating the evil of which human beings are sadly capable. He was like a gallery of every human emotion, and which one you saw depended on whatever you had just said to him.

  Andrea took a deep breath. “Let’s get back on track here. You say the corporate security guards didn’t know anything about this room. Who did?”

  He gestured vaguely. “Company men. Bigwigs. No one here.”

  “Let me get this straight. No one at this facility knew about the existence of this room?”

  “That is correct. It’s also what I just said a moment ago. No one knew except my team here.”

  “What about your own bodyguards?”

  He scoffed. “My bodyguards? Their job is to get me to work and back safely. They don’t come in here.”

  “Okay. Next question, Doctor…”

  “Don’t call me Doctor. Call me Sasha.”

  Andrea glanced at me and I gave her a wink. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who liked to use first names.

  “Okay, Sasha…”

  It felt weird, hearing her speak in familiar terms to someone I’d been planning to kill less than twenty-four hours ago.

  Andrea continued. “My second question is this. Is there another way out of here?”

  This one seemed to delight Ivanovich. “Another way out of here? Oh, that’s wonderful! A secret room, with a secret passage out of the secret room! You spies are delightful!”

  “So, there’s another way out?”

  “No. There’s no other way out. Silly Sasha Ivanovich. He built a secret room, but he forgot to include a secret underground passage.”

  “There’s no need to refer to yourself in the third person,” I said sternly. If I wasn’t going to kill him, I certainly wasn’t going to let him develop delusions of grandeur either.

  “Alright then,” he replied. “But no, there’s no other way out.”

  “Okay,” Andrea said as she checked her rifle. Satisfied, she slung it across her back, then she checked her sidearm to make sure it had a magazine in it and a round chambered. I did the same, figuring that if Andrea was anticipating a fight, then I should probably do the same.

  “Are you two getting ready to go to war?” asked Sasha. He seemed a bit anxious.

  “It’s a standard precaution,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Andrea looked at Ivanovich. “Considering all those bodies, I think we ought to be ready for anything. Don’t you?”

  He didn’t answer. He just gave her that weird smile of his.

  She turned to me. “We’re going out the way we came in. We’ll go cloaked, so unless they’re looking closely, the only thing they’ll see is this guy. You’re on point. If there’s anything suspicious, just start shooting and we’ll make a fight out of it. Clear?”

  An order to open fire the moment anything unusual happens is not the sort of thing you receive every day. It was almost like something had spooked her, like she had a feeling that things were about to go wrong. In the moment, I just thought she was being paranoid. Sure, there was a big pile of bodies between us and the door, but I’d seen mountains of bodies on Venus. How hard could it be to get one creepy scientist out of East Hellas?

  4

  Sasha had lapsed into a mood I couldn’t really describe. Glum, perhaps. Andrea briefed me on our exit strategy.

  “We’re not going to use our own scramblers; I want to be able to see who’s near us. But it’s going to be slow going at first. The jamming system in this lab will keep Thomas from reaching us, and it will keep us from knowing who might be out there. So, we’re going to move slowly until we get a signal back. Check the scans before you step out, then clear every room, even if the scans didn’t show anything. Got it?”

  “Got it, boss.”

  “Go with Cap, or Chief. I like those better.”

  “Got it, Chief.”

  Sasha chuckled. “Ares would make me take a training course for this sort of behavior.”

  “What sort of behavior?” asked Andrea. He didn’t elaborate, but it seemed like he interpreted our banter as a form of flirting. I wouldn’t say it was, but at best it was the innocent kind. Our sniper, Raven, liked to banter with me too, though Raven could turn that sort of thing on and off like a switch. With Andrea, I wasn’t sure she could help it if she wanted to. Now that she was my boss, she was supposed to be enforcing a tighter standard of behavior, but it just didn’t seem to take.

  “Here we go.” Andrea dropped out of sight, and I followed suit.

  Ivanovich seemed disconcerted. “How am I supposed to follow you?”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and pulled him more or less gently into place. Andrea must have put her hand on his back and started pushing him along, because he was soon grumbling about it. “Pulled by a ghost, pushed by a ghost… how wonderful…”<
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  Following Andrea’s instructions, I checked the lab’s monitors before cautiously edging out back into the room with all the bodies. She didn’t close the doors behind us, maybe because she was no happier than I was about the idea of leaving those creatures in their tanks. Despite the fact that we’d found him talking to one of the things like a favorite pet, Sasha didn’t seem concerned at all about leaving them behind. The thought of them starving to death in a secret room was not a happy one, and I would have liked to see them all destroyed humanely. I didn’t take any pleasure in killing, even a man as twisted and murderous as August Marcenn, but I felt I would have been more comfortable with our original mission than with this new one. In saving the life of Sasha Ivanovich, what else were we enabling? For a moment, I thought It might be better for the solar system if he just didn’t make it.

  Because we were using active camouflage, anyone we ran into would see only Sasha unless they were unusually observant. That wouldn’t necessarily make me any safer, though. If they were under orders to kill Ivanovich, they’d try to shoot him and hit me instead. The only thing I could do was shoot them first, which was probably the reason for Andrea’s unusual shoot-on-suspicion order.

  I stepped cautiously around the bodies on the floor, with Sasha muttering the whole time.

  “Poor Jensen. He was a good man, a good scientist. And oh, there, that’s Rebecca. Such a kind woman. But what is Maximilien doing there? He should never have been there. Poor Sasha, left all alone…”

  Poor Sasha, indeed.

  The protocol for clearing a room is different when you’re doing an exfiltration. Normally the first person through the door would go either right or left along one wall, getting out of the kill box in front of the open door as rapidly as possible. The second person would then follow, moving along the other wall, so if I went right then Andrea would go left. In a situation like ours, that would just result in Sasha taking the full brunt of any ambush, so the tactics had to be adjusted accordingly.