Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  Despite Andrea’s order to stay on target, I turned and ran back in the direction we had just come.

  Did it take any courage to run back toward whatever had caused those sounds I had heard? Not at all. Courage is action in the face of fear, a decision to act despite rational instinct. I had no time to think, so I had no time to make any real decision. I just turned and ran, determined to find Jonathan before it was too late.

  As I turned a corner, a StateSec officer came stumbling up to me with both hands clasped over his stomach, stepping on his own entrails as he tried desperately to hold them in. He stumbled and fell to the floor, dead. I jumped over him to keep going, nearly running headlong into a Black Kuei gunman clutching his throat and making a gurgling sound. He bled out right in front of me before I could even push him away. As he slumped down lifeless into my outstretched arms, I shoved him away from me with both hands and kept on going.

  It was the same story the whole way. Dead, dying, and mangled people choked the path. I jumped over bodies and shoved past the walking wounded, just trying to get out of the labyrinth so I could somehow find my missing teammate.

  I don’t know why, but I was assuming the whole time that he was still where I’d last seen him, and that I would have to get all the way back there before I could do anything to help him. Based on all the carnage, the Erinyes were obviously up ahead. I had no plan for getting past them, other than to improvise somehow.

  No doubt that’s what many of the dead had been hoping to do. A few of them—the lucky ones?—had nonlethal injuries, like the man whose hamstrings had both been cut. He’d be crippled for life without prosthetics, but for some reason his life had been spared. As I ran past him in the corridor, he was still trying to crawl on his elbows to get away from the things I was running toward. He looked up at me as I went by, his face fearful and uncomprehending.

  Then I turned another corner and saw the body of a massive human being slumped over against the walls, bleeding and unconscious. In my head, I still had to get back to where I’d last seen Bray, striding forward with his shotgun while his enemies ran away in all directions. It was a long second until I got the picture and understood that this broken body in front of me was the man I was looking for.

  I heard a sound, a kind of wordless pleading. When I looked up, I saw a gangster backing fearfully away from a cyborg with three long claws on the back of each hand. It was the same one we’d encountered on the train, white nanosuit skin splattered in blood, its crown of horns tinged with red. The syndicate gunman was whimpering, a pitiful mewling sound. His weapon, a submachine gun with an extended magazine, hung useless from his limp fingers.

  The clawed Erinys walked gracefully forward and passed one of its razor sharp blades through the man’s open mouth and out the back of his neck with an almost effortless precision. As the gangster died, he stared up at the cyborg chimera with eyes wide and hands weakly raised, looking almost like he was praying to the thing that killed him.

  Ares Terrestrial was so determined to kill Sasha Ivanovich that they had released the cyborg Erinyes to kill every living thing they found at the checkpoint, no exceptions for either allies or employees. Was this how it always ended with these creatures? Were they just unthinking beasts set loose in the direction of the company’s enemies, or did these things understand?

  As I stood there staring with my jaw hanging open, the clawed Erinys seemed to notice me. It cocked its head to the side, and I wondered for a moment if it remembered who I was. Then it glanced down at the huge shotgun Bray still clutched in his hand. My eyes followed its movement, and both of us must have realized the same thing at the exact same time.

  This was the only weapon in those narrow corridors that could possibly hurt it.

  I dove for Bray’s shotgun. In the low Martian gravity, I practically flew across that corridor. Even so, I only grabbed the shotgun just in time to duck below the Erinys’s sweeping talons. I hit the floor with my shoulder, awkwardly leveled the gun at the Erinys’s chest, and fired. The heat and roar of the shotgun so close to my face, in such a tight space, was agony.

  The shot hit the cyborg full in the chest and staggered it, but failed to knock it off its feet. As I tried to recover from the blinding light and deafening sound of the shot, the Erinys paused as well. It stood still and stared at me with its eyeless face, like it was calmly curious about who I was and why I was trying to hurt it.

  I aimed this time, tilting the gun to the cyborg’s head, and fired again. It dodged just as it had on the train, but instead of closing in to counter-attack, it darted back around the corner so quickly I hardly had time to process its absence. A glass wall in front of me splintered as a trio of spider’s webs appeared on its surface before exploding into a thousand shards. I heard shooting up ahead, followed by screams, then silence once again. A spray of blood hit the other side of the wall beside me, startling me back into full alertness.

  Despite their lethal nature, these cyborg chimeras seemed to almost always run if you hit them with anything they could feel. It was kind of strange, the way they would shy away and find a place to hide like that. Whatever the reason for it, I wouldn’t have much time before the Erinyes were back on top of me. They didn’t stay away for long, and the shotgun wouldn’t hold them off forever. To save Bray’s life, I’d have to get him out somehow.

  The man was huge, and I didn’t think it too likely that I could really drag him. Even a much smaller man, unconscious weight like Bray now was, would be a heavy thing to drag. Someone of Jonathan’s sheer size and bulk, lying there as dead weight—

  “Fuck it,” I said to myself, and slung the shotgun across my back. I leaned down over Bray, got my hands below his armpits, and started to pull. As soon as I did, I had to laugh. In the Martian gravity, Bray was less than forty percent of his weight on Earth. As huge as he was, I could feasibly drag him to safety.

  I heaved and strained, then I twisted until my spinal cord felt like it was going to telescope into itself, and Bray moved. He slid a few feet in the right direction.

  I braced myself again and slid him a few more feet. He was still breathing, but his breath sounded uneven and ragged. Knowing that he was alive, I redoubled my efforts and yanked him forward. I was able to drag him along for several steps this time, and I actually started to think I might be able to do it.

  That’s when two alien shapes came around the corner, padding toward me with quiet, predatory grace—a chimeral dog and a chimeral primate, their nanosuited bodies slick with blood and filth. I slowly lowered Bray to the ground and raised the shotgun in front of me, aiming directly at the primate’s body. It stopped where it was, and the dog looked to it before apprehensively stopping as well.

  Aiming the shotgun in a single hand despite its considerable size, I reached down with my other hand and grabbed hold on Jonathan’s collar. I can only describe this as an act of childlike optimism, because the idea that I was going to pull Bray along with just one hand was really out of the question, as was the equally bizarre notion that I was going to successfully fire that bullpup shotgun one-handed. The kick alone would probably have snapped my arm in two.

  The shotgun wobbled in my outstretched hand, and the dog took a slow step forward. I let go of Bray’s jacket and steadied the weapon with my other hand. The Erinyes stopped again. From around the corner, their clawed companion stepped into sight.

  I was in deep shit. If I turned and ran, they’d rip me open before I could make it three steps. If I backed away and left him, that was tantamount to killing Bray myself. If I stayed where I was, they would eventually realize I couldn’t get them all or that my weapon was at most a limited threat.

  The primate edged forward, and I swiveled to aim the gun at its head. It froze in place, but then the dog stepped forward. I aimed at the dog, and it stopped while the clawed Erinys came up from behind. I aimed at the clawed Erinys, and it actually shrank back a little, but the dog and the primate both inched forward.

  They were inte
lligently closing the distance between us. They were forcing me back, inch by irrevocable inch. When they got to Bray, would they simply ignore him and keep moving forward, or would they notice he was still breathing and finish the job?

  “Don’t come any closer.” My voice was cold. I was trying to intimidate them, and they did seem intimidated, but I was certain the source of their caution was my powerful weapon and not my voice. The dog stepped forward, more confident now. The clawed Erinys stepped in a half-second later, and the primate a half-second after that. They were staggering their movements, ensuring that I would have to keep turning constantly just to keep up with them.

  I wondered grimly when the moment would come, when they would rush me as I swiveled my aim. I had fired twice, and the gun had an eight shot capacity. Had Bray topped off before he’d fallen? That would give me at most six shots. Was that enough? The Erinyes were almost close enough to reach us.

  I had to make a call.

  Then a dark shape came into view behind them. Vincenzo Veraldi creeped up like a shadow, his shard of glass gleaming in his hand, a streak of blood still rolling down its edge.

  When the tension broke, everything seemed to happen at the same time. The dog leapt for my throat, and Veraldi tackled it, slamming it sideways into the glass wall. The other Erinyes charged, and I fired but missed them both. Behind them a glass wall exploded, not because of my shotgun, but from a barrage of steady gunfire. Andrew Jones and Thomas Young approached from behind me, firing continuously at the advancing Erinyes.

  I took aim and fired again, knocking the primate backward. Vincenzo was stabbing the dog Erinys with his improvised blade, wedging it between the plating in the thing’s body. This couldn't do much more than shred the silica fiber, but he must have been trying to find some way to make it bleed, to cut anything alive inside there.

  I fired once more and hit the clawed Erinys directly in the chest. It showed no signs of being seriously harmed, but it did clutch at its chest. It stared eyelessly at me then retreated around the corner, followed closely by the primate.

  “I’ve got the dog!” growled Veraldi. “Get Jonathan!”

  Like a lot of the things Veraldi did, this didn’t make much sense. Taking on a cyborg chimera with nothing but a piece of broken glass? It could only result in his death, but there was no time to argue, not if we wanted to have the slightest chance of saving Bray.

  “Come on!” yelled Andrew. “While we have the chance!”

  He slung his weapon across his shoulder then grabbed Bray by the arm and started pulling. I did the same, and Thomas covered us both. With both Andrew and I pulling, we were able to drag Bray quickly back down the corridor and caught up with Andrea just a few minutes later.

  “Where’s Veraldi?” she asked.

  Jones pointed with his thumb. “He’s playing with a dog.”

  Ivanovich was staring at us like he couldn’t understand what we were doing. “Don’t we need to be going somewhere?!”

  No one paid him any attention. Andrea came over and put an arm around Jonathan, then she dragged him easily the rest of the way. It was all Sasha could do to stay ahead of her, and we were out of the labyrinth in just a few short minutes. When we stepped out onto the bridge, I glanced over the edge and saw what looked like rooftops down below us.

  We were on the border at last, the legal dividing line between the two hostile halves of the city. West Hellas was so close, but I no longer felt the confidence I’d felt before. It had been replaced by dread, a gnawing feeling that there was no escape.

  Andrew was standing near the turnstiles, craning his head to look for any sign of Veraldi. It seemed like a senseless waste, going so far to save Jonathan’s life just to sacrifice Veraldi’s. I was talking myself into going back in when the primate Erinys came charging out. It caught Andrew with a backhand and knocked him tumbling backward. He fell over hard onto the bridge, and the creature jumped forward and stomped him in the stomach.

  Andrea opened fire and called out to me. “Tycho! He’s crashing! I’ll keep you covered, stabilize Jonathan.”

  I shook my head to clear it then leaned over and checked for a pulse. It was faint, but there. He was still bleeding badly from a gash in his right leg, so I ripped a long strip of cloth from my ridiculous uniform to make a tourniquet. For the next few moments, I tried not to pay attention to the sounds of shooting, the bullets flattening against nanosuit plating, the screams from Andrew as the creature mauled him. I focused only on the task at hand: stop the bleeding as much as possible and check his pulse again.

  His pulse had stopped. Jonathan Bray’s heart was no longer beating. With my jaw clenched tight, I started immediately on chest compressions. I would get him out of this. I wasn’t losing another—

  “Tycho, the shotgun! I need backup!”

  I looked up when Andrea called my name and saw that the primate had abandoned Jones and was now bounding in our direction. I unslung the shotgun and fired, and the thing was staggered by the impact of the shot. It fell over mid-stride and tried to catch itself with its hands.

  As it hopped back up onto its feet, I pulled the trigger again, and the primate bent in half. It curled into itself, and I saw blood seep through shattered plating on its chest. I had at most thirty seconds to press the momentum before the nanosuit could repair itself, so I leveled the shotgun, aiming square for the fracture, and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  It was the loudest sound you could ever hear in a firefight.

  Andrea didn’t miss a beat. She closed in on the primate and punched it in the face for all she was worth. The hit lifted the creature off the ground and sent it skipping across the bridge. It had barely come to a rest when she laid into it again, raining blows. As Andrea bought us time, I checked Bray’s pockets for ammo. He had eight shells, hopefully more than enough. As I reloaded, I saw something I realized I had never expected to see: Vincenzo Veraldi walking through the turnstiles with new blades in his hand.

  I found out much later that he hadn’t found knives somewhere. Veraldi was holding the severed talons of the dog, which he had ripped out of its body after killing the creature with his shard of glass.

  I cocked the shotgun and called out to Andrea, “Chief, get clear!”

  Andrea dove aside as I fired. Andrew Jones, despite having just suffered the beating of a lifetime, sat up and started shooting at it. Thomas Young, waking up from the data stream if only for a moment, aimed at the primate as well and held his trigger down.

  The thing began to fall back, looking first at us and then at the turnstiles as if unsure of what it should do next. Judging only by its body language, I’d say it was the same strange nervousness I’d seen in these Erinyes before. They’d kill scores of people without a moment’s thought, then shy away if you hurt them at all despite being practically indestructible. A short time later, and they’d come back at you again from another direction.

  Vincenzo might have been a deranged obsessive when it came to bladed weapons, but he was no fool. If the primate wanted to back away, he wasn’t dumb enough to stop it. He edged away from the turnstile, leaving the cyborg a path to retreat. It backed away from us warily then turned and looked again as if it heard a sound. A shape came up from behind it, and I realized, with a sinking feeling of abject weariness, that we were still just as far as ever from getting away.

  The clawed Erinys had returned. You could say we were winning, you could say we had driven the primate back and killed the dog, but it didn’t matter. Now that the clawed Erinys had rejoined the fight, the primate cyborg had regained its confidence. It turned back toward us aggressively, slammed a clenched fist into its mended chest as if to make a point, then dove into battle like that was its favorite thing in the all the world.

  21

  That was one of the strangest fights I’ve ever been in. The primate cyborg ran at us on all fours, jumping from side to side, blindly trying to grab whatever it could. If it got any of us, I have no doubt it would have rip
ped off limbs and broken every bone it could feel beneath its powerful hands. We didn’t give it the chance. Between the concentrated fire from Andrea, Thomas, Andrew, and myself, the primate couldn’t make a clean grab.

  It couldn’t get any closer, but we couldn’t kill it. With three of us shooting at it all at once, Veraldi was left to deal with the clawed Erinys by himself. To the limited extent that I was aware of him at all, he did seem to be equal to the task. I could vaguely see that he was using the dog Erinys’s talons to block everything the clawed cyborg could throw at him.

  Of course, blocking attacks is not the same thing as making effective counterattacks. As breathtaking as Veraldi’s display of combative mastery might be, he was only succeeding in defending himself, just like we were. If we couldn’t kill these Erinyes, we would die through attrition. Either we’d run out of ammo, or one of the Erinyes would manage to get that one hit to open us up. A talon to an artery or a heavy hand crushing bone, and that would be it for Section 9.

  The primate suddenly stopped cringing beneath our fire, threw its shoulders back to look as big as possible, and charged right at me. Out of everything we were throwing at it, my shotgun blasts must have been hurting it the most. I fired at it again, and it staggered back but then kept coming. I pulled the trigger, and it made that all-too-loud sound again.

  Click.

  I needed to reload, but I wasn’t going to get the chance. The primate hit me, a savage openhand that knocked me sprawling. At about that same time, the clawed Erinys succeeded in driving Veraldi to the edge of the bridge, where there was no more room to retreat without plummeting down onto the rooftops in the dark far below. Andrew Jones saw what was happening and called out to Ivanovich.

  “Sasha, RUN!”