Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  Raven stood and folded the hand towel into a neat square. “So do I,” she said as she placed it in the sink and ran the tap. “Andrea was the youngest spy to join Section 9, but she earned her keep. She lived up to the expectations that came with being Katerina’s daughter many times over. When Katerina disappeared, it was only natural that Andrea became field commander. That brings us to today, where Andrea is probably out hunting her mother down.” Raven turned off the water and shook her hands dry.

  “That’s quite the epic. Why did no one tell me any of this before now?”

  “Her death was never confirmed. Was she actually killed in action, or did she defect? Did she fence state secrets to a third party? We didn’t know, and that uncertainty was divisive. The Operator eventually directed that no one was to mention Katerina’s name. Not in the training classes, not in the official history, not even in private conversations like the one we’re having right now.”

  “So they kept all her training curriculum but erased her from her own story?”

  “In so many words, yeah. She’s become a ghost haunting this place. You were part of the first generation of Section 9 agents not to be told about her, until now.”

  I thought of what that must have meant for Andrea, to see her mother and mentor erased from the record like that. The greatest legend in Section 9 history, and no one was to mention her name.

  “That reminds me,” said Raven. “I didn’t tell you anything. Right?”

  “Tell me what?”

  She smiled that beautiful smile. “Good man.”

  “So what about that strange machine I found?”

  She frowned a little. “You found? I thought Thomas did.”

  “Thomas was nosing over my shoulder through the door behind me.”

  She laughed. “Typical Thomas. Well, it’s apparently called a Warwick node, but that’s all I know about it.” She regarded me thoughtfully for a second. “You know, the doc wanted me to help you go for a little walk. We could take a trip down to Thomas’s lab, see what he’s come up with. How about that?”

  “You expect me to walk halfway across this facility? I can barely even put on a pair of pants.”

  “Ah, but you did put on a pair of pants. I think you can handle it. These prosthetics are really something, Tycho. You’ll see as soon as you use them. I think it’s time.”

  “Okay, okay. Hold on just a sec.” I slid myself to the edge of the bed.

  “Hey, no. No way. You’re not going to be able to do this on your own. I’m helping you down.” She came over and placed her arms under my shoulders from behind, then she clasped her wrists across my chest. Quietly grateful for the help, I leaned my weight into her arms and swung my feet out over the floor. When I placed them down on the tiles, I was surprised to feel the cold floor underneath me.

  “Hey, I can feel that.”

  “Well, of course you can. How would you be able to walk if you couldn’t feel?”

  “I guess I was thinking of them like crutches. It’s different, but I can feel the tiles beneath my feet.”

  I tried to stand, but my legs felt like liquid at first and I wobbled on the way up. Raven caught me and kept me from falling.

  “Okay, here comes the hard part. You need to take a step.”

  “I can do that. Hold on.”

  I told my right foot to take a step, but the step it took was far too big and I stumbled. I told my left foot to follow it, but my second step was far too little and I was still unbalanced, leaning against Raven until she could swing me over to sit on the bed.

  “This might not be easy, but we’ll get there eventually. Up we go, Tycho.”

  It wasn’t easy at first, but after three or four steps I got the basic idea. From that point onward, it was just a matter of holding on to Raven Sommer and moving as carefully as possible. As we went through the door, it occurred to me that I had a long way to go before I could possibly expect to return to field duties.

  “Where’s that head right now, Tycho? You think too much, you know.”

  “That’s what everyone tells me. I’m thinking about the field. How the hell am I going to be of any use?”

  “I guess you’ll have to ask Andrea how she did it when she gets back.”

  12

  The walk down to Thomas’s laboratory was a trial by fire. Prosthetic limbs are miraculous, but they aren’t part of your body. At least not at first. It takes some time to get used to them, and until you do you’re just confused and clumsy and in a lot of pain.

  With Raven helping me, I put one foot in front of the other and we made our way through the Headquarters. Every step took conscious effort. Not falling down took a fair bit of planning, because the whole world seemed to spin and lurch on me whenever I lifted one of my new feet off the floor. Setting the same foot down on the floor sent a stab of pain up through my spinal cord. Closing one eye helped, but it was frankly hellish no matter what I did.

  After a few minutes, Raven started talking about nothing in particular, just to take my mind off the ordeal. “Do you remember where the lab is,” she asked.

  It was an effort to speak at all, but I made that effort because I saw what she was doing. If we could get a conversation going, however difficult, then the arduous journey to Thomas’s lab would be that much easier. We were slowly edging our way down a long, empty corridor, and the idea of taking my mind off that seemed like a good one.

  “Sure.” I took a short, sharp breath. “Thomas is the one who taught the training course.”

  “You mean he actually let you touch his lab equipment?” She sounded aghast at the prospect. Thomas was not exactly open to sharing his equipment with others. Even Andrew Jones, who was the closest thing Thomas had to an assistant, was often denied permission to actually use any of his devices.

  “No, not really.” I rested and caught my breath for a moment. “It was mostly theory.”

  “That sounds more like Thomas. Still, I’m surprised he even taught a course. He just doesn’t have the temperament for it.”

  “I got the impression he wanted to make sure no one else took over his patch.”

  “Oh. Well, that sounds like Thomas too.”

  We followed the hall as it turned left, which involved a lot of new experiences in ways my body could hurt me. Our conversation lapsed for a few minutes while I worked my way through the process, methodically shifting my weight and turning my body as pain screamed through my limbs.

  No one but Raven saw what I was going through. The headquarters building was largely staffed by android proxies, with a few technicians and a rotating staff of visiting instructors. It was a slick facility, nearly every surface coated in black, radiation-absorbent material that gave the place a vaguely nightmarish quality. From above, it was the Hotel du Lac, a world-class choice for dignitaries and VIP travelers passing through Bruges. Deep below, it was the secret warren of Section 9 headquarters.

  Most of the hotel staff didn’t know we were there. Using a hotel for cover made it possible for visitors and heavy traffic to enter our Headquarters without drawing suspicion. The same benefit applied to any guests with odd travel patterns, and our deliveries could be easily disguised among the normal activities of an upscale hotel.

  The funny thing was, our unit was hardly ever there. We relied on Headquarters daily—most of our support resources operated from somewhere inside the building—but even when operating on Earth, we were usually working from one of our many safehouses. Few of the staff, if any, even knew my face. I found myself somewhat grateful for the anonymity as I stumbled through the halls like a newborn calf.

  “I think you’re getting better at this.” Raven’s voice sounded bright and cheerful, although I couldn’t tell if she meant what she was saying.

  “You might be right. It doesn’t hurt as much. Keep talking, Raven. It’s helping.”

  “What was your favorite course here?”

  I thought back to the months I spent training after I first joined. Owing to my experi
ence as an Arbiter, I already had a lot of the skills I needed. Still, Section 9’s training was far superior to anything I’d ever been given before, and the unique requirements of the job meant learning techniques I’d never known.

  “Tracking,” I answered. “That’s the one skill I wanted most.”

  “So what does that mean,” she teased. “Are you trying to take my job?”

  As our expert sniper, Raven was usually responsible for assassinations. There were some jobs that simply had to be done from up close, though. In East Hellas, I had been assigned to assassinate Sasha Ivanovich with poison.

  “Your job is safe,” I assured her. “But I do like tracking.”

  “I think you’re going to need to get some practice walking before you can get back to shadowing anybody.”

  “Maybe not that much. The dizziness is gone.”

  “Do you want to try walking on your own?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Give me just a second.”

  I leaned on her, breathing deeply and gathering the strength I would need for the effort. Then I pulled my arm away and stood on my own for the first time since jumping out of that ship above Europa. I waited for the dizziness to come back and swamp me, but it never did. Everything still hurt, but my head seemed clear.

  “Do you need me to get you again?” Raven was hovering, ready to catch me if I tumbled over.

  “No, I think I’ve got this.”

  I took a step and was both surprised and gratified to find that it was possible. I took another, and moments later I was walking on my own. Slowly and haltingly, but I was walking.

  “Dr. Markov’s work is really incredible,” Raven remarked.

  “I don’t think I’m doing too bad myself.”

  “Don’t take it like that, you’re doing great. It’s just incredible your brain can sync with the augments so quickly. The physical therapy and training needed to get someone just to walk with these things even a few years ago was staggering.”

  I hobbled into the lab on my own two feet—prosthetic though they were. When I got through the door, I was surprised to see something huge and round looming over me from the center of the room. It was the device we had found on Llyr Station.

  It was exactly how I remembered it. A large metallic ring with a sort of chair suspended in the center. Andrew Jones was standing in front of it, staring into an open panel to one side of the ring. Thomas Young sat at a nearby table, swiping through something on one of his many devices. I couldn’t see it clearly from where I stood, but it looked like a blueprint or a schematic of some kind.

  Jones raised a light and peered into the open panel. “Circuit 33-G. Same structure as the last three. Flow is in the same direction.”

  Thomas stopped typing and gave him an impatient look.

  “How many times must I say it, Andrew? Unless you are specific, there is always the possibility for error. You need to report exactly what you see, every single time.” Thomas sounded testy, and as far as I could tell he had no idea we had just entered the room.

  Andrew sighed. “Of course, Thomas, of course. Circuit 33-G has… what was it, structure 15? Flow is to circuit 50.” Andrew turned and noticed us.

  “Oh hey, buddy, you’re up. That was really something, Tycho. How the hell did you manage to crash the ship?”

  Raven stifled a laugh. “He threw a grenade at Katerina.”

  Both of Andrew’s eyebrows went up. “You threw a grenade inside a luxury yacht? You do realize that type of ship isn’t armored, right?” I was obviously never going to hear the end of this from him.

  “She was going to get away. There wasn’t any material evidence on—”

  “Holy shit, Panic.” He shook his head. “I’ve got to say, your devotion to this job is breathtaking, that’s the word.”

  Thomas finally deigned to notice us. “I would characterize it as disturbing. In fact, I’m not quite sure how he survived it.”

  For some reason, his comment made me feel like I had to explain. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done. “The grenade just exacerbated what was already there. The ship was venting through a hole from an energy weapon.”

  Now Thomas’s eyebrows were raised as high as Andrew’s.

  I continued. “The grenade made the hole large enough, so I jumped out of it.”

  “Wait a second,” said Andrew, now giving me his full attention. “Just so I understand here, you mean like those energy weapons the androids were using?”

  “Yes, the exact same.”

  “So someone was blasting holes in the bridge with a beam weapon? And they were doing this on the same yacht where you were chucking grenades?”

  “Katerina was. She killed Li Fei with it, actually.”

  “Shit, Tycho. That’s kind of a nightmare scenario, actually.”

  “Once I got out, I set up for a drop on the moon’s surface. The stability thrusters on the suit kicked in when they were meant to, but I guess the insertion on Llyr took most of the fuel. They burned out early and I fell from orbit at speed.”

  Andrew whistled and shook his head. “That is one for the books, my friend. Glad to see you up and with the living. You don’t look too banged up, all things considered. So, I take it you’re here for an update on the Warwick node?”

  “What exactly is a Warwick node?”

  Thomas’s voice was dry. “The device in front of you.”

  “Thank you, Thomas. I’m asking what a Warwick node does.”

  He frowned. “I should think that would be obvious from the name alone.”

  “The name?”

  Andrew intervened. “Never mind the name. The name is not important. What’s important is that we think this is a continuity device, like the one August Marcenn tried to make on Tower 7.”

  I gave him a questioning look. “I’d say it went a little further than an attempt.”

  “Considering that it drove him completely insane, I’d say it didn’t. His experiment was a failure, and that’s why so many people on Venus died. We’ve had information from multiple sources for years about this, but never any actual evidence. We thought we’d finally found something with Marcenn, but that was just a clever exploit of a dataspike vulnerability.”

  “So this is a better version of the same thing?”

  He nodded. “Better in every way. This is a functioning Warwick node, capable of transferring a human mind from one body to another. The only problem with it, as far as we can tell, is that it’s ancient tech.”

  Raven frowned. “Ancient? What does that mean?”

  “Think back to what Huxley told us. He said that he’d been alive for several centuries, switching from one body to the next whenever it seemed like the right time?”

  “Yeah, sure,” she replied. “But I thought the assumption was that he was full of shit”

  Andrew shook his head. “Not anymore, now that we have our hands on an actual Warwick node. One thing I’m sure of: the basic design is really old. This has modern components, but the logic of how it’s built, the underlying structure, is more like something you’d see in a museum. What this machine does was possible to do 800 years ago.”

  I looked up at the Warwick node, the partially disassembled paneling and exposed internals reminding me of an unearthed corpse. Were we really looking at a revenant from the distant past? “If that’s the case,” I pointed out, “then why isn’t this tech more widely known?”

  “I think the explanation is a vast conspiracy. People wealthy and powerful enough to keep this tech for themselves, and to stop anyone else from learning anything about it.”

  I thought back to the guards who had opened fire on us during the raid. “So this Warwick node was on Llyr Station under armed guard, but they didn’t have the means to seriously resist and they shot at us anyway. How does any of that track?”

  Thomas seemed to take an interest in this question. “It implies that they had recently moved the Warwick node.”

  Andrew snapped his fingers. “That makes sense. May
be we got close to it once before without realizing, and they wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again. But they didn’t anticipate us reading Huxley’s memories and tracking down the Havisham. They would have had to move the Warwick node under pressure.”

  “So what you’re saying is that we got lucky.” Raven pointed at the Warwick node. “We just happened to follow the right lead, and it took us straight to their immortality machine.”

  “Luck is not a valid concept,” Thomas replied. “It was merely a convergence of events, perfectly normal in an investigation of this kind.”

  Raven looked like she was about to say something unkind in response, but Andrew spoke first. “Whatever you want to call it, we now have what seems to be a functioning device. Once we finish reverse engineering the thing, it’ll be a huge step toward proving the truth of Huxley’s entire story.”

  “Which part?” I asked. “That he was born in 2015? That there’s a hidden cartel of immortals manipulating events from behind the scenes?”

  He shrugged. “All of it. Or some of it. I mean, someone had Huxley killed, right? And whoever that was, there’s a good chance they were trying to keep him quiet. What was it he told us, that they were erasing him and his entire family?”

  “That’s what he claimed,” I admitted. “If true, his explanation would clear the books on several murder investigations.”

  Andrew grinned. “You’re still thinking like an Arbiter. We’re not interested in clearing any murder cases. Just in finding the truth, so the people who run the Sol Federation can make the best decisions possible.”

  “I’d hate to think the victims were never going to get any kind of justice.”

  “Hey, maybe they will when all is said and done.” He turned back to the Warwick node. “You ready for the next circuit, Thomas?”

  “I’ve been ready this entire time.”

  “That’s why you’re a legend, buddy. Circuit 33-H. This one has a new structure. I don’t think we’ve categorized it yet.”

  I gestured to Raven, and we left them to their task. Whatever secrets the Warwick node contained, it looked to be a long and grueling process to reach them.