Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  Thomas scoffed. “You call that a challenge?” Those were the last words I heard him say before I went through to the control room. The layout in there was different than on the city train I’d hacked before, but using a skeleton key is a simple matter of plug and play. It only took me a few seconds to find the spot where the key would fit, and my expectation was that the train’s AI would be fully under my control immediately afterward.

  Instead, all the lights on the control board started blinking at once.

  I just stood there staring at it for a second in a total panic, then I pushed the door open. “Andrea, I need some help in here.” Thomas threw me a smug little look, despite the fact that he’d been given the much more exciting job.

  Andrea turned in my direction, but Andrew touched her arm. “I’ll deal with it. That skeleton key can’t do everything.” He came up front and saw the blinking lights all over the control panel, then he shook his head mournfully. “What did you do?”

  “I just inserted the skeleton key right there.”

  “Oh shit, okay. I think I know what happened. Hold on.”

  He pressed on a spot on the control panel then lifted it away. Behind the panel, there was a mess of circuit boards and wires that meant absolutely nothing to me.

  “Yeah.” Jones pointed. “See? The AI itself uses standard parts, so it probably has all the backdoors the Arbiter Force insists on. But that wasn’t good enough for the Black Kuei, so they had their own experts install this little setup here. You can put in a skeleton key, but it never connects. Instead, it goes to this secondary system and locks it out.”

  “So there’s nothing we can do?

  Jones snorted. “Hardly.” He reached into the panel, disconnected a few wires, then reconnected them in a different spot. “Try it now.”

  I pulled the skeleton key out and stuck it back in. The lights stopped blinking, but nothing remotely useful happened.

  “Huh.” Jones scratched his head then rearranged the wires a different way. “Go ahead and try it again.”

  I tried it again, and this time the maglev’s AI rebooted. It took far too long, and with every passing second, we came closer to the border, but when it finally booted up again I was in complete control.

  Andrea came in. “What’s taking so long?”

  Jones turned to her. “They left a little surprise for anyone trying to override the controls. We’re good now.”

  She went up to the window and looked out at the buildings speeding past. “This is going to get messy.”

  “What’s the plan, chief?” I asked her.

  “The trap is probably waiting for us at the border control station, so we’re not going to stop for it.”

  “We’re not going to stop for it?” Jones frowned, confused. “You mean we’re going to stop the maglev early and jump off? Like we did before?”

  “No, we’re going to weaponize the train.”

  “We’re going to weaponize the… oh. Oh shit, Andrea.”

  “That’s how border control is going to feel about it.”

  Thomas Young stuck his head in the door. “A challenge you said? I’m done. The sensor data is being ghosted. To anyone watching, this train will appear to be behaving normally no matter what it’s actually doing.”

  “Excellent work as always, Thomas. Okay, Tycho, time to shine. Open the throttle as far as it can go.”

  Jones grabbed her arm. “You’re serious, Andrea?”

  “You’ve survived one derailment, you can survive another. Come with me. Tycho, join us in the rear car as soon as you’re done.”

  They went out the door, and I did exactly as she’d ordered. Her plan meant turning the maglev into a kinetic missile. When we hit the border station, we’d punch right through it. Anyone waiting for us at the other end was as good as dead.

  The train accelerated forward, rocketing through the city at such a terrifying speed that I was barely able to make it through to the rear car with everyone else even holding onto the seatbacks for stability as I went. From the looks on their faces, only Andrea was genuinely unconcerned. Her jaw was clenched, but more from determination than fear.

  Even Ivanovich was scared, and as I’ve mentioned, he wasn’t a man who seemed to scare all that easily. His eyes were huge as he stared out the window at the buildings flying by. Andrea pointed to the wall. “There’s a manual control panel for the car right there. Tycho, you’re on the brakes. Jonathan, I need you to get up there and be ready to decouple us from the lead car on my signal.”

  As I made my way to the control panel, Jones shook his head. “I cannot believe we are actually doing this.”

  “But why?” asked Ivanovich. “Why? Why are we doing this?”

  “Shut up, Sasha!” snapped Jones.

  Sasha was getting even more agitated. “If I’d known what you people were like, I never would have come! I would have taken my chances with the company! I would have made my own way out of the city! You’re a bunch of goddamned lunatics!”

  Bizarrely enough, Sasha’s little rant at the effect of calming me down a little. It was just so funny, and a little unfair too. Andrea Capanelli might well be a lunatic, if lunacy is defined as intentionally crashing a train after having survived a train crash. Still, it wasn’t my idea.

  On the other hand, is going along with someone else’s crazy idea any less crazy than coming up with the idea yourself?

  “Listen up, everyone.” Andrea’s voice was flat, the nothing-but-business tone of someone who knows they don’t have any good news to impart. “We’re alone in a city that wants us dead. That’s just how it is. Between us and safety, there’s a giant wall and a border checkpoint crawling with East Hellas StateSec. We have to assume they’ll shoot on sight. If we make it past that, there’s the West Hellas side and the Royal Guard. We don’t even know what to expect from them. We don’t have any ballistics, and we don’t have any blades. Our survival depends on our ability to outthink anything that stands in our way. I expect everyone to do exactly that. We all go home. Understood?”

  There was a grim and awkward silence. We glanced at each other nervously, not sure how to respond to what she was saying. The idea that we could really survive on our wits alone, in a city being torn apart by revolution, seemed impossible.

  Thomas Young broke the silence. “So what you’re saying is that I’ll be the only survivor.”

  The silence continued for another second, although now it was more of a stunned silence than an awkward one. Then we all started laughing at once, and I suddenly realized that Young actually had a sense of humor.

  “Alright, alright.” Bray shook his head, still trying to control the laughter. “Fuck it, then.”

  There was nothing else to say. “Fuck it, then” was now the official motto of Section 9 for the remainder of the mission, however short and fiery that might turn out to be.

  The border station came into view up ahead of us, with the great rampart looming behind it. Thomas consulted his dataspike and decided it would be a good time to give us continuous updates on a terrifying situation we had no control over.

  “1000 meters and closing. 950 meters… 900 meters…”

  “Get ready.” Andrea raised her hand. Jonathan braced himself to pull the coupling on her signal, and I stood ready to engage the brakes.

  “850 meters… 800 meters…”

  Andrea’s hand went down, and Jonathan yanked out the coupling. I engaged the brakes, and our car stopped so suddenly that we were all thrown off our feet. I flew across the car, bounced off a row of tastefully upholstered seats, and fell backward into a sitting position. It isn’t impossible for a maglev to derail—as East Hellas StateSec was about to find out—but it isn’t easy either. We survived the stop, and the lead car surged ahead without us.

  It’s hard to describe what happened next. I could describe sight and sound of it, how the force of the impact’s shock traveled through the rail like a wave across water, how the engine car sheared through the half-ton plastic
rete support columns as though they were made of sand, but that wouldn’t do the event justice. You’d have to feel the train rail whip your car through the air and know that you are held aloft only by the grace of electromagnetism flowing through a closed circuit that could fail at any moment. You’d have to feel the heat of the blast as broken fuel cells explode in a thirty-meter ball of flame doused almost immediately after with the byproduct of the reaction that created it. Most of all, you’d have to smell the carbonized flesh of everyone that had been too slow or unlucky to get clear. That was the second time I’d encountered that smell, and it never gets away from you.

  Everything in front of us was shattered and broken, and where the train had hit the checkpoint, there was now just an ugly gash of a wound across the stately, white facade. Beyond that gaping maw there would be broken bodies, human beings torn and mangled and flash-incinerated. As the wreckage settled, I looked on in awe and thought about Andrea Capanelli’s words. A nano scalpel, not a blunt instrument. How could something like this be the most discrete action possible?

  Sasha was holding his palm to his head, his eyes wide. Veraldi was pulling himself up from the floor. Jones had been knocked back into a seat and was wincing with what looked like lower back pain. Thomas Young was against the wall, shaking his head and breathing out slowly. Bray was grinning, still in a nearly hysterical humor.

  Andrea stood, her face as grim and humorless as it had been before the crash. “On your feet, Section 9.”

  19

  There were bodies everywhere, most of them in StateSec uniforms. The men we had just killed had indeed been waiting to ambush us, based on the weapons some still clutched in their severed hands. Half of a ribcage and a right arm hung from a twisted metal pole about fifteen feet up, and it was still holding a submachine gun. Nearby, I saw a severed leg, the top half of a woman, and a decapitated head with degloved face.

  “This shit is gruesome,” Bray commented, and I suddenly felt the urge to vomit. I stumbled over to the side and threw up against one of the many physical security barriers the maglev had sheared through. As far as I could tell at first, the train had left no survivors on the East Hellas side of the border control checkpoint. Andrea wanted to weaponize the train, and she had done so in spectacularly destructive fashion.

  “Hang in there, buddy.” Andrew clapped me on the shoulder. “This is not a great day at the office, I’ll give you that.”

  I closed my eyes for a second, having no idea how to respond to that bit of gallows humor. Jones went on right on talking. “Hey, it’s okay, Tycho. You don’t have to like it. You can always self-medicate later.”

  I opened one eye. “Are you planning to continue along these lines?”

  He grinned, but it looked as sad and sick as I felt. “Only if I have to. You need to keep moving forward, unless you want to join all these people.” He gestured at the ruined bodies strewn out all around us, and I nodded weakly. I stood up straight, wiped my mouth off on my sleeve, and said, “Okay.”

  Andrew just looked at me. “You know that was disgusting, right?”

  I shook my head and walked off, trying to get a sense of what was up ahead of us. The smoke made it hard to see, but we would have to go through that smoke to get where we were going. Andrea Capanelli was doing the same thing I was, peering into the gloom ahead of us with her hands on her hips.

  “What’s up there?” I asked.

  “The demilitarized zone. Which, as always, is a hell of a misnomer. It’s four kilometers wide and the only thing standing between us and West Hellas.”

  “Can we make it across?”

  “I don’t see why not. As far as I can tell, everyone on the East Hellas side was killed on impact.”

  Her voice sounded completely cold, but when she lifted a hand to brush her hair away from her face, I saw that she was shaking. I was surprised to see that. Her limbs were prosthetic. Her mother really must have been an expert surgeon to get that kind of integration when the science was two decades younger.

  She noticed me looking and balled her hand up into a fist. “Go see if you can find a weapon.”

  I didn’t move immediately. Before I had joined up with Section 9, Andrea and I were well on the way to being friends. But an officer has no friends, so they say, and now that I was on the team, she was my commanding officer. She turned away from me, making it clear she had nothing else to say. I finally stepped back and wandered over toward the first set of bodies to see what I could find.

  Bray was already looting the dead. He looked up as I approached. “Is the chief okay?”

  “A bit shaken I think, but yeah.”

  Jonathan shrugged. “Killing is hard the first time you do it. After a while, it’s just like any other job.”

  That wasn’t my experience, but I didn’t want to contradict the man. I sometimes felt like I was haunted, like the ghosts of all the people I’d killed as an Arbiter and now as a Section 9 operative were always there, just beyond the periphery of my vision.

  “Don’t make that face.” Bray cuffed me on the shoulder. “The thousand-yard stare isn’t a good look on anyone.”

  I ran my fingers through my hair. “Yeah. I need to find a weapon.”

  “Ammo too.”

  Bray was already doing just that. I looked around for a moment, trying to find something useful that didn’t have to be pried out of a deathgrip. It didn’t take too long. A few feet away from me, a StateSec officer crushed from the chest down lay staring up at the ceiling. He had a rifle beside him and a few spare magazines in one of his pockets.

  I grabbed the magazines, tossing aside one that looked too bent to be used, then took the rifle. It was still warm to the touch from the blast. I checked to make sure that it still seemed functional. The bolt carrier moved cleanly, and there didn’t seem to be any warping of the barrel. I had to admit to myself that it felt good to be holding a gun again. The thought crossed my mind that the dead man I’d taken this from had probably felt pretty secure with it too.

  I stood and saw Andrea pulling a submachine gun from inside of a body. The person had died in a fetal position and the flesh had fused, meaning the easiest way to free the weapon was by pulling through the stomach and out of the lower back. It came free with a sickening noise, and she looked it over then nodded in satisfaction.

  “Okay, everyone. We’re about to make the crossing through the demilitarized zone to the West Hellas border. I want all of you to move slowly unless we come under fire. The Royal Guard should be considered friendlies, but remember that they have no idea who any of us are. When they see a group of armed refugees in work-suits, the first thing they’re going to do is tell us to drop our weapons.”

  “I’m not dropping my weapon again.” Bray scowled, holding a high-capacity handgun that looked like a child’s toy in his massive hands.

  “These are in case we run into surviving StateSec on this side. When we reach the West, we’re going to have to let them take us into custody. We can coordinate later through the consulate for release and assistance. That’s our only chance.”

  Jonathan shook his head, clearly unhappy with the whole idea. Andrea looked around, waiting to see if there were any other objections. No one said anything. Even Ivanovich kept his mouth shut, although his face was positively mournful.

  “Right, then.” Andrea stepped aside. “Bray and I will bring up the rear. Jones and Barrett on point. Veraldi, stick tight to Ivanovich. Understood, everyone?”

  “Understood.” The chorus of voices sounded grim and subdued.

  Up until that moment, we had been standing directly in the wake of the train as it slammed through the station. Up above us, the ceiling had collapsed and sections of the floors above were visible. I glanced up as we moved out and was surprised to catch a glimpse of movement.

  “Someone’s alive up there.”

  “Move fast,” Andrea called out. I headed out at a jog, keeping an eye on the upper floors as I went. I caught a glimpse of a StateSec officer taking
up a position near the hole in the ceiling. A few feet away from him, I saw the unmistakable figure of a Black Kuei gunman.

  A bullet suddenly pierced the floor in front of me, and like the first drop of rain that precedes a thunderstorm, it was rapidly followed by a downpour of fire. I was already veering off to the right so I took cover behind a slab of the shattered ceiling. With nowhere to go, I just listened to the rain pour down.

  When it finally started to taper off, I popped and shot at the first human form I could spot, a syndicate gunman who was peering down over the edge to see what they’d accomplished. He clutched at his chest, staggered, then tumbled over through the gap and slammed into the floor a few feet in front of my cover.

  I managed to get a glimpse of the other side of the thoroughfare before ducking back down and was able to confirm that Johnathan, Vincenzo, Andrew, and Ivanovich were all huddled against the wall on the other side. That only left Andrea and Thomas, but before I finished the thought, there they were, sprinting to my position.

  “Suppressing fire,” Andrea ordered, and turned back to the task. She backed me up, and between us we managed to convince our opponents that it wasn’t a great idea to get too close to the edge. We were firing conservatively, making every shot count. We didn’t always hit anything, but we always came close enough to force the shooters to back off.

  I was feeling pretty good about it for the first few moments. The more I thought about it, though, the less I liked it. We were making them keep their heads down, yes, but we had only killed a few of them, and there were a hell of a lot more than a few of them up there.

  Our original impression that the train crash had killed everyone in the checkpoint had been completely wrong. Everyone on the ground floor had died, but there had been a large presence on the upper floors as well, and most of them had survived unscathed.

  Our previous encounters as we crossed the city must have convinced them to take us seriously, even when they thought they had us trapped and unarmed. Now they had us heavily outnumbered and pinned down, and it was only a matter of time before those advantages swung the fight in their favor. In fact, there was every possibility they were only holding us here until a reserve force could come up from behind us.