Intrinsic Immortality: A Military Scifi Thriller (Sol Arbiter Book 2)

by J. N. Chaney

  “You could call StateSec and ask them to do a wellness check. They’d extend you that courtesy.”

  “Byron, please. I need another Arbiter on this one.”

  “That isn’t really what we do, but if you need it done then I guess I can swing by. Call me up in a few hours. I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

  “Harewood out.”

  I opened my eyes again to find Andrea looking at me. “That sounded awkward.”

  “My new partner is a little… straitlaced. He likes to do everything by the book.”

  “There’s doing everything by the book and then there’s walking around with a stick up your ass. And then there’s walking around with a stick up your ass while quoting from the book. He seems to be somewhere around there.”

  I sighed. “Yeah. But at least he agreed to go check on her. Hey, listen, I have a question.”

  Her eyes narrowed a little. Ask a spy a question, and they’ll just start skimming through their favorite lies to pick the one they think you want to hear. “Yes?”

  I thought for a moment how to best phrase it but gave up and said it straight. “How long have you been watching me?”

  She looked away. “If I hadn’t been watching you, do you think you would have made it out of that StateSec station alive today?”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “You aren’t cleared for the answer. And while I could just as easily lie to you, I have... a certain respect for how you handled yourself up there on Venus. I’d rather treat you as a colleague and just not tell you anything when I can’t really tell you anything.”

  I didn’t know how to take that. Had she been there in Sophie Anderson’s house when I spilled my guts about Daphne? Had she been in my home without me knowing it? I remembered the way the door at the station had paused just briefly, catching the attention of the desk sergeant. That must have been Andrea, slipping in discreetly behind me with her thermoptic camo on.

  “I’ve been haunted by a woman before, Andrea, but this is ridiculous.”

  “That’s a cheesy joke. I’m not your personal ghost, there’s just a lot going on. Things that concern Section 9.”

  In theory, Sol Federation Intelligence has eight working sections. Internal Security, Counterterrorism, Interstellar Crime, Interplanetary Conflict, North Atlantic States, and so on. Section 9 is beyond top secret, tasked with doing things the Federation can’t be seen doing. On Venus, they’d been given the task of assassinating August Marcenn. I got to him first, which gave me a certain amount of cachet with them. They’d even offered me a job, although I had blown them off.

  “You’re working on this… conspiracy?” I asked.

  “You know I can’t tell you much, not without permission. But our current mission does have some overlap with your investigation.”

  “Okay. So, what can you tell me about the men who attacked me? You must have picked up something.”

  “Section 9 doesn’t have a complete picture yet. We can’t ID them, but they seem to be a team of fully prosthetic enforcers working for an unknown party.”

  For the most elite intelligence network in the entire solar system, they didn’t seem to know much more than I did. Unless she was still holding out on me. “Really? I could have told you that much. I mean, they all look the same, they dodge bullets, and when they can’t dodge them, they act like they don’t particularly care about them.”

  “If they didn’t care about them, they wouldn’t dodge them. Not that they really dodge them, that’s impossible.”

  “Okay, so they see when I’m about to pull the trigger and then move just before I do it. What’s the difference?”

  “There’s a big difference. Remember Raven?”

  Raven Sommer was a sniper, a member of Andrea’s Section 9 field team. In Tower 7, she’d plugged a few enemies from ambush right before they could finish me. They would never see her, so they wouldn’t be able to pull their bullet-dodging trick. “Okay, so Raven could probably shoot them. But wouldn’t they just shrug it off? That’s what the guy I shot in the hand did. He pulled the bullet out and tossed it away.”

  “What were you using?”

  “A submachine gun.”

  She spread her hands. “Well, there you have it, Tycho. That’s just a back-up weapon. It’s pretty much the same as using a pistol. Raven will be using something much more powerful.”

  “Okay. That’s hopeful. But you’re still dodging the question. You’ve got to know more about these guys than I do. I know you can’t tell me everything, but so far you haven’t told me anything I didn’t already know.”

  “You know how it is. Some things are classified, some are need to know, but you can get in a lot of trouble for being wrong about whether someone needed to know something. You know?”

  She grinned, but I wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily. “Now you’re just trying to make me laugh to throw me off the scent. If it’s need to know, I need to know. I’m the one they’re trying to kill. They’ll probably succeed, and then it won’t matter that you told me because I’ll just be dead.”

  She sighed. “Alright. We think they’re probably connected to the murders of Anton Slotin and Stefan Graves.”

  I just stared at her for a minute. She stared back at me.

  “What?” she said.

  “The murders of… who did you say?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t remember them. You arrested them yourself.”

  “Just repeat the names, Andrea!”

  “Anton Slotin and Stefan Graves.”

  “They can’t have been murdered. They were in Federation custody. We handed them over for prosecution just yesterday.”

  “They aren’t officially listed as having been murdered, but we’re pretty sure that’s what must have happened. Slotin was found dead by hanging in an apparent suicide nine hours ago. Video footage shows one of the four guys who ran you off the road talking to a guard on the same cellblock just before his shift.”

  “And Stefan Graves?”

  “Graves’ body was discovered next to two other detainees after a fight. This was about six hours ago. One of the dead men had a visitor two hours before that, and he seems to have been one of your guys.”

  “So they’re going around eliminating anyone linked to the Marcenn weapons transfers.”

  “That’s what it looks like, although we can’t prove any of it. We have the audio from the prisoner visit and it’s just a mundane conversation. Stay out of trouble, keep your head down, the lawyers are working on it. That sort of thing.”

  “They could have been using word code.”

  “Sure.” She nodded. “In which case the real message was probably pick a fight with the target and make sure he dies, or we’re cutting you loose.”

  They would have needed some other way to tell the prisoner who the target was, but there are a dozen different ways to do that. It tracked for the most part, although they had shown a lot more subtlety in taking out the two corporate guys than when they were chasing me across the rooftops shooting grenades.

  “What about Klein? The third man we arrested. They didn’t get him too?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet, although it can only be a matter of time. But don’t worry, we’re on it. I was suspicious when Slotin died, but men who are facing criminal charges do kill themselves sometimes. When Graves turned up dead too, I ordered an extraction. One death could be chance, but two within such a short time… it felt like a pattern. Before we even found the evidence linking the Augmen to the two deaths, my team was on its way.”

  “That’s good, but what can you really do here? Assuming your team even makes it to Klein before they do.”

  “Oh, they’ll make it. We have leverage on the warden, so he’s taking steps to make sure Klein is safe until my people get there.”

  “But what are you doing with him? He’s facing Federation charges, and your outfit doesn’t even officially exist.
You can’t just pull him out of a holding facility and spirit him away.”

  “Of course we can. In case you hadn’t noticed, Tycho, we can do almost anything we want. He’s being taken to a safehouse, a place so remote they’ll never find it. That’s where I’m taking you right now.”

  This was a lot to process. When I met the man who called himself the Operator on Sedna Station, I had asked him for some time to think about his job offer. He had given me a contact number, but I had never used it and never intended to. I thought that was it, and I would never hear anything about Section 9 again.

  Now I knew they’d been spying on me, and that they were heavily involved in the same investigation I was currently pursuing. Not only that, but I was on the way to their hidden safehouse—where they would also be holding a Federation prisoner, a man they could not possibly have any legal authority to hold. Andrea called it an extraction, but it was close to a kidnapping. And if Klein was their kidnap victim, then what did that make me?

  “You look anxious,” said Andrea. “I can give you something for that, too.”

  “I don’t need any more pills. All I need is an explanation.”

  “An explanation for what?”

  “For your interest in me.”

  She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Come on now, Tycho. What makes you think I have any interest in you? Goodness, you men are all alike.”

  I almost blushed, even though I could see perfectly well that she was only messing with me. “I don’t mean you, Andrea. I mean Section 9. Why are you bringing me to your safehouse?”

  “I thought it was obvious. You’ll die if we don’t. I mean, if we’re being honest, you got incredibly lucky today.”

  I thought back over my day. I had survived a car crash, retrieved my weapon, escaped a flooded car, fought my way past four killer Augmen, jumped on a passing maglev train, survived a fall into freezing water, and won a hand-to-hand fight with a killer StateSec officer.

  “It wasn’t all luck.”

  She put a hand on my arm. “I know it wasn’t. You’re a genuine tough guy. Happy?”

  I shook my head and laughed. It took a hell of a lot to impress Andrea Capanelli, and I wasn’t there yet. “I just don’t understand what this has to do with me. I never said yes when The Operator asked me to join Section 9. I’m not one of your people.”

  “Okay, you never said yes.” She shrugged. “But you never said no. I decided to extract you. Call me sentimental.”

  “Sentimental?” That wasn’t exactly the first word I would have used to describe her.

  But she was grinning again. She had a weird sense of humor. “Yeah, you know. An old comrade in arms, gets himself in over his head, he’s marked for death… how could I not do something about it?”

  “Marked for death. I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “You get used to it.” Unfazed as ever.

  “But why me?” I asked. “I just arrested some corporate types. Surely the Huxley Industries people aren’t stupid enough to take that personally.”

  “They probably wouldn’t have if you’d just arrested them. Your partner Byron Harewood hasn’t had any trouble at all as far as we can tell. It’s not just that you arrested them, but that you’ve shown interest in the case since then. That’s what we think anyway.”

  “Hmmm. Those three were probably meant to be scapegoats. Pin the blame on them, make sure they die before going to trial, then ride out the storm. But if anyone looked too closely…”

  She nodded. “There’s a trail of some kind, even if we can’t see where it is yet. I agree. You were marked for death not because you were one of the arresting Arbiters but because you showed an interest in the details of the case. Byron, being Byron, didn’t look any closer. They probably just consider him harmless.”

  “Could you please stop using the phrase marked for death?”

  She pouted. “For a potential recruit, you’re awfully sensitive. I hope the Operator knows what he’s doing.”

  I ignored that. “It’s true that I accessed the case files just a few minutes before being hit on the road.”

  “If they were in your dataspike, they saw everything you were doing. They might even have put in the kill order then and there.”

  “I don’t know. It seemed more planned out than that.” I thought about the maglev train, and the meticulously cruel reconstruction of Daphne’s last few minutes.

  “Well, either way. We still see you as a prospect. Section 9 could use someone like you: you’re careful, you’re well-trained (no matter what Jones used to tell you), and most importantly you’re empathetic.”

  Andrea herself was such a hardcase, I was half inclined to take this as an insult. “Empathetic? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’m really not. Intelligence work requires hard choices, and some of those choices would break a weaker man. Emotional coldness is a type of brittleness. We need someone strong enough to feel things, when appropriate.”

  I thought back to Venus, and the thousands of people who died without anyone to help them, without anyone to fight for them, even though Section 9 was there all along. They didn’t intervene, not until it furthered their mission. And then they went to war, proving they could easily have done so all along. That was the main reason I hadn’t taken the job offer.

  Andrea was looking at me. “You’re still mad about Tower 7, aren’t you.”

  “I’m not… mad,” I said. “I don’t know what I am exactly. But it doesn’t sit well with me.”

  “I understand. We would have moved quicker if we could have, but we had a job to do.”

  “Then maybe it’s a job I’m just not suited for.”

  “You might be right, but on the other hand the sort of person unaffected by those hard choices isn’t right for the job either. What we do is sometimes harsh. Maybe even evil, if that’s the word you want to use. But it must be done. That’s what Section 9 is for, to do the things that must be done.”

  I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t. The Arbiter Force wasn’t all that different; our job was to solve problems for the Sol Federation by any means necessary. It’s just that we were on one side of an invisible line, and she was on the other, beckoning to me to cross.

  What do you say to that? I’m kind of bad, but I’ll never be as bad as you?

  I closed my eyes, more to get out of the conversation than anything else.

  10

  When I opened my eyes again, I was surprised at the time. We’d been driving for over nine hours, and I had no idea in what direction. When I glanced at the GPS, I found the app offline. I immediately assumed that Andrea had some device to keep it from connecting. I wasn’t just going to a safehouse. I was being taken to a secret location.

  “Where are we?” I asked, just to be obnoxious.

  Andrea chuckled. “We’re almost there. I’m glad you’re up, though. You were asleep so long, I was starting to get a little worried about you.”

  “Almost there is not a location, Andrea.”

  “You really took a hell of a beating there. I wouldn’t have thought Ornstein could have done that to you.”

  “It wasn’t just Ornstein. It was four Augmen, a river, a maglev, and the Bay. I’m not immortal. And we’ve already been over this.”

  “Well, you must be damn close to it. I think your candle was flickering there a little bit.”

  “You’re just buttering me up, so I won’t keep asking you where we are.”

  “You’ll see where we are in just a few minutes. Would your old friend Andrea steer you wrong?”

  Andrea wasn’t exactly an old friend, or a new friend, or even someone I’d known for a long time. She was someone I’d been through Tower 7 with. That wasn’t nothing—we had a connection—but I didn’t think it was solid enough to put any weight on. I didn’t really believe she’d steer me wrong unless her mission depended on it.

  I tried to put all of that into a pithy little reply, but what came out was, “I don’t know, Andre
a, would you?”

  She pursed her lips. “If you need to make a call, you’d better do it. We keep radio silence at the Grotto.”

  “The Grotto, huh?”

  “It’s just a codename.”

  “Okay.” I called Byron, crossing my fingers that he had checked on Sophie by now. After nine hours on the road, the killers had had plenty of time to get to her if they were planning to. He didn’t answer right away, and I found myself drumming on the dashboard with my fingers in impatience and anxiety.

  His face appeared in my vision. “Harewood here.”

  “Did you get the chance to check on Sophie Anderson?”

  He nodded. “Sure. I said I would, didn’t I?”

  “Well, what did you find?”

  “I didn’t find anything. No signs of trouble, nothing weird going on. If anything was wrong, I would have called you.”

  “You didn’t see anyone suspicious in the neighborhood?”

  His brow furrowed. “Suspicious how?”

  “Anyone watching the house, lurking around outside? A man with a short beard, maybe?”

  “No. That would have been something weird going on. What is this, Tycho? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  Andrea shook her head and raised a finger to her lips.

  “No. Look, I’m out of town. If you could check in on her again, I’d appreciate it.”

  I dropped the call, not giving him a chance to respond. Then I turned to Andrea. “So you don’t trust Byron now?”

  “I don’t trust anyone.”

  The car rolled to a stop, and the doors popped open. All I saw was a pine forest, so deep and dark we might as well have been in Siberia. When I stepped out and looked around, I saw that we had parked in front of a large house with huge glass windows, elegant lighting, and even tasteful landscaping. It was a rich man’s getaway, a summer retreat for some corporate overlord like Julian Huxley.

  “So… where are we?” I asked, and Andrea laughed.

  “We’re here, obviously.” She opened a panel on the side of the car, pulled out the charging cable, and plugged it into the side of the house.