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

by J. N. Chaney

  “No garage?” I asked.

  “It’s full.”

  I sighed as the knowledge that Sophie was alright finally sank in.

  Andrea looked concerned. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay now. I was worried about Sophie.”

  “I get it. When you have someone you care about, it makes everything complicated. You look more relaxed now that you’ve had a chance to check on her.”

  She was right, I did feel more relaxed. After nine long hours, it seemed a lot less likely that anyone was going to go looking for her. It was me they wanted, not the widow of a dead Arbiter who could no longer hurt them. I sighed again, much longer this time. I was letting the tension out, but the act of doing so did something to my injured collarbone. I winced in pain, and Andrea frowned with concern.

  “What’s going on there, Tycho? Let me have a look.”

  She took my arm and pulled it closer, and I gritted my teeth against the sudden agony. “Jesus Christ, Andrea!”

  “You’d better believe it. Without divine intervention, I don’t think you’d be standing here right now. How long has your clavicle been broken?”

  I thought back to the day before—was it the day before? Yes, it must have been. In a car with the screen off, you can lose track of time altogether. In several hours of dreamless sleep, I must have passed through an entire night like it was nothing. “Uh… eleven hours?”

  “We need to get you inside, see what we can do about this. And your other wounds too. Come on.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, although I didn’t exactly think of Andrea as the caregiver type. Field medic when she had to be, maybe—which is what this was. She led me up to the front door, where an automated cannon tracked her movements from the roof. She looked straight up at it and it powered down, satisfied that she was who she was supposed to be.

  I glanced up at it too, wondering what the AI made of Tycho Barrett. “Strange choice for a safehouse, isn’t it?”

  “Not for a location this remote. If we went with something smaller, it wouldn’t make any sense for it to be out here. On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of place a rich guy would have for a getaway.”

  “And the cannon?”

  “He’d have that too.”

  The door slid open, and we went through into a large and comfortable living room with several plush couches and piles of pillows. There was a working fireplace against one wall, a private bar, and a billiards table. The whole place was flooded with natural light from the windows, but the branches of the pine trees cast broken shadows across everything.

  “I’m back,” called Andrea. “Look who I brought.”

  I heard a kettle whistling—an actual kettle, something I’d seen maybe once in my entire life. “Hold on,” called a voice. “The tea’s ready.”

  “Lemon and two sugars,” Andrea replied. Then she turned to me. “You?”

  “Ummm… black, I guess?”

  “Predictable. One black, Raven.”

  Raven Sommer, Andrea’s expert sniper. Like all the others on Andrea’s team, I hadn’t seen her since I left Venus. Not that I’d spent much time with her then either, as she was usually skulking somewhere looking for her next shot. From our brief interactions, I remembered her as a black-haired woman with light brown skin, and a mischievous attitude that seemed mildly disturbing for someone of her profession.

  “One lemon with two sugars, one black,” she called. “Coming up.”

  Andrea touched my arm gently. “Come over here and sit down, Tycho. This isn’t going to be easy.”

  She led me over to one of the couches, and Raven came in with three china teacups. She set two of them down on the little table in front of the couch and took her own to a leather easy chair across from us. She flipped her dark hair out of her face.

  “Oh, look.” She smiled. “It’s Tycho Barrett! Welcome to the Grotto, Tycho. Are you part of the family now?”

  Her smile was so sweet, I almost forgot for a minute that her specialty was killing from a distance. “I… um…”

  Andrea’s voice was vaguely amused. “Besides being tongue-tied whenever a woman smiles at him, Tycho is currently in a transitional state.”

  “A transitional state?” I frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “It means she’s still hoping you’ll join Section 9.” Raven sipped her tea. “Try the tea, Tycho, it’s oolong. You look like you could use something soothing.”

  It wasn’t easy to try the tea, since Andrea was already starting to work my sleeve off so she could do whatever she was planning to do to me. I picked the cup up awkwardly, managed to taste it, then spilled a large swallow down my chin. Raven put a hand over her mouth to cover up the fact that she was laughing at me, but I could see it in her eyes.

  I put the cup down. “That was… hot.”

  This time, both women laughed.

  “Give the tea a break for a minute,” said Andrea. “It needs to cool down anyway, and we need to get your shirt off.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” I tried, but the shirt turned out to be crusted with blood and soaked with sweat. When I tried to wrestle it off me, I ended up yelling.

  Raven was horrified. “What are you doing? Stop hurting yourself, Tycho, you need some help.”

  She put her tea down and hurried over, moving so quickly and fluidly that it was easy to imagine that she was about to perform a mercy killing. Instead, she wiggled my shirt off me and pulled it away, leaving my broken clavicle exposed.

  “This is really fucked up, Andrea. Look at this.”

  Andrea leaned in for a closer look. Her eyes got big. “You mean you won a fight like that? Holy shit, Tycho. You are one hell of a hard ass!”

  “I don’t feel like one. I feel like a dog on the way to its last vet appointment.”

  “Well, I’d put you to sleep if I could, because this is going to hurt. We probably don’t want to put you under completely with the facilities we have here, though. I can keep the pain to a minimum, but it will still hurt.”

  “If I’m such a hard ass, I guess I’ll just have to grit my teeth and deal with it.”

  “That’s a big boy. Hold on, I’ll get my stuff.”

  I shook my head at the condescending comment. I guess she just figured she couldn’t compliment me if she didn’t make fun of me a little too. Raven sat down beside me as Andrea went into another room.

  “Is everyone here?” I asked.

  Raven shook her head. “Not quite. Andrew Jones is off world chasing down a lead for us. Everyone else is here, though. Even you!”

  I was mildly disappointed to hear that Jones was not around, which surprised me because I found the man extremely unlikeable. He was an infiltration specialist, and the first member of Section 9 I had met on Venus. He had spent most of our opening conversation making fun of the Arbiter Force and implying that our training was not up to standard.

  I had seriously considered punching the man, but in the end, we had spent several hours fighting side by side against androids and Nightwatch officers. Apparently, that was enough to make up for his personality, because I wouldn’t mind having a beer with him. On the other hand, having tea with Raven wasn’t bad either. At least she wasn’t making fun of my training.

  I smiled a little. “It feels weird to see you here.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I guess I just think of you as this force of vengeance, hovering somewhere in the background on some Venusian rooftop.”

  “It’s not always a rooftop, and it’s not always on Venus. But a force of vengeance? Yeah, that’s me. Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a cup of oolong.”

  She winked.

  I didn’t know whether she was flirting with me or not, so I looked down at my feet.

  Raven shook her head and called out to Andrea. “Tycho is one shy little guy.”

  “He’s not that little,” Andrea replied, coming back in the room with her gear. “But yeah, he’s a shy one. I’ve got my med-kit and my hyp
ospray. Raven, you know what’s about to happen.”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice. See you later, Tycho.” Raven stood up, retrieved her tea as quickly as possible, and hurried out of the room like there was a mean dog after her.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  “Hold on a sec, here’s the anesthetic.” Andrea injected the hypospray somewhere on my neck, and I was suddenly aware of a huge improvement in my situation.

  “Wow. I didn’t realize how much pain I was in until it stopped.”

  “It’s about to start up again, but it won’t be as bad.”

  She fished around in her med-kit and came out with a small but extremely sharp-looking surgical knife.

  “Now, you asked a question.” She started working, and she was right, it hurt. It felt like a rabid animal chewing on my collarbone. But it felt strangely distant, like it was all happening to someone else.

  “I did. What was that with Raven? She ran out of here like something was after her.”

  “She has aichmophobia.”

  “Aichmophobia… a fear of knives?!”

  “Knives, needles, sharp corners… you name it. She can’t handle sharp things. It’s probably why she’s a sniper.”

  It seemed kind of strange that an elite paramilitary intelligence unit would hire someone who couldn’t handle sharp things. Especially considering that Andrea’s second in command, Vincenzo Veraldi, was an expert knife fighter. “How does she get along with Veraldi?”

  “Things are sometimes tense. But that’s probably more to do with… well, I’ll leave it at that.”

  I didn’t ask. The pain in my collar was getting too intense for me to think of anything else. I was starting to see black around the edges of my vision.

  “Hang in there, Tycho. You didn’t just break this, you fucked it up nine ways to Sunday. Who told you to get in the fight of your life with a broken clavicle?”

  “You did? When you told me not to trust her and then slipped out the door?”

  “If I hadn’t done that, you would never have made it out of that StateSec station. Here comes the hard part.”

  I had definitely been under the impression we were already in the hard part. Whatever the hard part was, it hurt a lot more than what I had thought was the hard part.

  “What the hell are you doing in there?!”

  “I’m setting and bracing the bone with a nanomesh film, then injecting you with another hypo—this one filled with nanites. They’ll fill in the gaps until the bone grows back. I’ll get you back as a working team member. No need to replace you or retire you early.”

  “Retire me?!”

  “No need to worry about that. Put it from your mind.”

  I heard the laughter in her voice, but that didn’t mean for sure that she was only joking.

  “Andrea, I…”

  “Hush. I need to focus.”

  I’ll give her this—as much as it hurt for her to perform surgery on me while I was still awake, she knew what she was doing. Her movements were quick and accurate, and I wasn’t nervous. Other than her little reference to retiring me.

  She pulled back to look at her work for a second. “Okay, you can talk again. Hopefully not just to complain. I’m doing the best I can here.”

  “No complaints. You seem to be on top of it. Did you used to be a doctor?”

  “Wouldn’t that be something, if they’d recruited me straight out of medical school into a top-secret team of elite spies? No. I have my skills, but not that many. My talents have always been more about breaking things than fixing them.”

  “That’s not reassuring.”

  “I’m not a reassuring kind of girl.” This wasn’t true. She could be reassuring when she wanted to be, but it was more of a leadership skill than an interpersonal one. “Anyway, you already said I was doing a good job, so you can stop your complaining! No, I’m not a doctor, but my mother was. Back on Mars.”

  “Yeah?”

  The way she said this, it seemed kind of significant. Then I realized what she was hinting at. Judging from her age, she must have been just a kid during the Great Martian Blackout.

  “Andrea—”

  “Hush again and let me work. I’ll tell you a story if you’ll be quiet.”

  I closed my mouth. When she was satisfied that I would hold my silence, she continued.

  “This is a story about a little girl who was born on Mars about… well, never mind how many years ago. This girl had a mom, and her mom was a brilliant surgeon. A specialist in prosthetics, which is unusual off-Earth.”

  It was more than unusual; it was almost unheard of. How could a prosthetic surgeon even make a living on Mars?

  “The girl loved her mom, though she might have been just a bit resentful at how little time they got to spend together. What with all those flights off-world to perform secret surgeries and all.”

  Oh. Her mother was a black-market prosthetic surgeon. The kind of doctor that made Augmen.

  “There were always dust storms, and some of them were bad enough to cover the entire planet. During a particularly bad dust storm while her mother was away one year, the sand buried a reactor complex and it had to be shut down. The other reactors couldn’t keep up with the heavier load from all the colonies, so that one emergency triggered a cascading chain of system failures. Backups and fail-safes went down one by one, and the planet was without power for nineteen days. The Great Martian Blackout.”

  When I was wandering around through the empty buildings in Tower 7, Gabriel and I found a lot of bodies. Some of them had been killed by the androids and Nightwatch, but some of them had clearly been killed by other civilians. I remembered a dance club where the staff had been lined up in the middle of the floor and executed at point-blank range—probably over drug territory.

  The Blackout on Mars was a lot like that. Gangs settled scores with each other, people looted all the shops, rapists and robbers and killers roamed free. No one even knows how many people were killed before order was restored. There were so many bodies they used construction suits to bury them.

  “Now, the little girl had a nanny. Her mom made a lot of money, and a nanny was just a necessity since her mom was away so much. But the girl was mad; she missed her mom and wanted to find her. And she didn’t really understand what it meant to go off-world, so she thought if she went around and called out for her mom that maybe she could find her. She wandered off, and the nanny went frantic looking for her. That’s when the lights went down.”

  I almost shuddered. A little girl, wandering around in total darkness on the streets of a Martian city just as the Blackout started. It was hard to imagine anything more terrifying. Now that I thought of it, how had Andrea managed to keep her head together during the blackout on Venus? Based on everything I’d ever learned about traumatic stress she should have been curled up in a ball on the floor somewhere.

  “The nanny couldn’t find her, and of course she couldn’t find her mom. When the lights went out, she panicked and started screaming. People helped her, of course. This was before all the worst things happened. Someone came and got her and dragged her into a building for shelter. She was in that building when the fire started, and she couldn’t get out of it before the building fell.”

  Andrea went on talking about it in the same cool voice. It was like it had all happened to someone else.

  “Her legs were crushed. Pinned down under all that rubble. Everyone else was already dead, all the people who’d taken shelter there. The nanny found her like that, with her legs pinned under tons of plasticrete and her arms burnt from shielding her face when trying to run out just before it fell.”

  “I didn’t know—”

  “Quiet now. It’s just a story to pass the time while I get this done.”

  I shut my mouth again, and Andrea nodded in satisfaction. “So, there was the nanny, only she couldn’t dig the little girl out and she didn’t want to leave her. She stayed there with her, even when the gangs came through th
e neighborhood. She lay right on top of her, making sure they didn’t see that the girl was there. It worked for a while, but someone shot her in the back as he walked by. The nanny was dead, and the little girl was still trapped with her bleeding body on top of her. The girl was there for days, waiting for someone to kill her too. When the rescue teams finally found her, there was no way to save her arms or legs. And only one person who could save the rest of her.”

  Her own mother, the prosthetic surgeon. I was wrong, Andrea’s prosthetics weren’t legal—at least not originally. Her limbs came from a black-market surgery just like the kind that made those Augmen, although less extensive. I suddenly felt guilty for the prejudiced thoughts I’d had about augmented humans.

  Andrea finished up, looked at her handiwork with a satisfied eye, then switched the canisters in her hypospray. “The mom wanted her daughter to follow in her footsteps, to make a living the same way she had. So, she taught her some of what she knew. The daughter refused and went on to kill quite a few of the kinds of people her mother used to work for. Maybe even some of the exact same. They don’t really speak anymore, but she did pick up certain skills that come in handy now and then.”

  She injected the hypo-spray in my neck once more and switched back to first-person as if she’d been talking that way all along. “I’ve had prosthetics for most of my life now. I’m used to the weight distribution, the response time, the simulation of touch. They've been a part of my body for almost as long as I can remember. That’s why I can do things most people can’t, like jumping out of a four-story window without breaking any bones. I’m not superhuman—a full-body cyborg could do much more than I can. My prosthetics are still just attached to flesh and bone. But I can kill those Augmen. If they try to come after you again, I’ll put all of them in the morgue.”

  “That’s… sweet of you?” I ventured.

  She laughed. “There’s nothing sweet about me, Tycho. This was a lot of work, and I don’t want those bastards messing it up.”

  11

  I stood up from the couch, gingerly flexing my arm so I could see how well it worked. There was a stab of pain, but it was already less than what I had experienced before. I could feel my strength coming back a little. “You did a good job, Andrea.”