Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  Under the circumstances, I wasn’t surprised when I got across the street without any problems. I took up a new position in front of an office window and scanned the surrounding buildings for any sign of movement. It was hard to see anything clearly up there in the dark even with the night vision, but my systems did show that there were people watching.

  Gabriel started his run. I didn’t see anything move or hear the sound of a shot, but a fist-sized hole appeared in the window next to me about two inches away from my head. I was so startled I didn’t react immediately, but Gabe saw it too and spun around to return fire.

  With the triangulation capabilities built into his helmet, he knew exactly where the shot had come from. His gun spat fire, a rapid stream of projectiles that glowed a dull orange as they arced out and up, targeting a second-floor window. I opened fire a moment later, but we both stopped again almost as soon as we’d started. The shooter was already on the move, having fired once and then retreated. Whoever this was, they knew better than to stick around.

  You don’t normally continue contact you haven’t sought yourself. By definition, if the enemy wants something then you don’t want it. When we take some fire, we usually peel off and establish a new position before continuing the fight. Having said that, anyone shooting at us must have a reason for it, and the reason would probably tell us what we needed to know here.

  “They’re running for the door,” said Gabe. “We need to get there first.”

  I started to move, but I couldn’t help saying something. The shot had been silent, which meant the shooter was using a coilgun. “They’ve got a Gauss rifle.”

  “Military tech. I know. Just catch them.”

  We crossed the street at a run, taking the risk of a second sniper. The first one had missed, but there was always the chance we’d take a shot in the back. The joys of being a Federation Arbiter—trying to save people while they try to kill you!

  The shooter ran for the stairs and down. I was impressed with their speed. Whoever had just tried to kill me was in excellent shape, which also implied a military background. The colony’s Nightwatch was a kind of militia, half-police and half-military. One of Marcenn’s people?

  When we turned the corner, a door slammed open and a dark shape came flying out of it. I raised my weapon, but Gabriel’s voice came in over the dataspike. “We need them for questioning. Take them alive if you can.”

  The shooter was running, relying on pure speed. No evasive maneuvers, just a blur of arms and legs moving rapidly away from us down the darkened street. There was every possibility they were trying to lead us into the real ambush, as the figures up ahead on my scanners suggested. If this was a surprise party, it was time to decline the invitation.

  I paused for a moment to flick a switch on my weapon, arming the launcher with a stun grenade. Then I aimed and fired, and the grenade flew out above the shooter’s head. With a startling CRACK and a flash of light, the grenade unleashed its concussive power. The shooter stumbled and fell, hitting the street on hands and knees.

  Gabriel was almost there. He sped up as he approached. If the stun grenade had done its job, the shooter would be both deaf and blind and would stay that way for the next few minutes. I saw a flash of movement as the shooter turned, and brick exploded from the wall beside me as the Gauss rifle fired in silence. Our attacker was up and moving. Now I knew they had a protective helmet—the only thing that could have kept the stun grenade from taking them out of the fight.

  Gabe dropped to one knee and unleashed a string of fire along the whole length of the street, cutting off our attacker’s escape. The arc of orange dots moved steadily left, closing in on our fleeing opponent.

  They stopped and spun around, then let off a series of shots to force us down and behind cover. We couldn’t hear the coilgun, but the sound of exploding brick and shattering windows was all around us. As I ducked behind a recycling unit, the shooter darted between two buildings and escaped down an alley, abandoning the attempt to lead us back toward the ambush.

  “Break off contact?” I asked.

  Gabe’s voice was determined. “Negative. I want to know why the hell this guy shot at me.”

  We reached the mouth of the alley, taking care not to get in the line of fire. In theory it was certainly possible that our attacker had managed to get away somehow, but I had the feeling the alley wasn’t empty. I took the wall on the left, and Gabriel took the wall on the right. A quick check of the schematics showed that our new friend was trapped. This alley was a dead end. Somewhere back there in the shadows, a would-be killer with a coilgun was waiting silently for another shot.

  Gabriel held up a hand for “stop.” We couldn’t poke our heads into the alley without risking fire, but we were finally in a position to negotiate. Of course, Arbiters have their own special way of negotiating.

  Gabe switched from dataspike to amplifier, and his voice blasted out like a crack of thunder. “This is the Sol Federation Arbiter Force! Throw your weapon down and surrender immediately!”

  The only answer was a barrage of shots, blowing the windows out of half the buildings on the other side of the street. Whoever this was, they had no intention of being taken alive.

  I switched from concussion grenade to fragmentation grenade. “If we don’t get this resolved soon, we’re going to have problems.”

  Whoever the shooter had been running toward was now on the move. The group of people at the likely ambush spot had left their hiding place and were now advancing slowly but deliberately in our direction. If they wanted contact, it stood to reason that we didn’t want it.

  Gabriel switched back to dataspike. “Get it done.”

  I spun into the alley and shot the grenade in, then spun back out behind the cover of the wall. The blast shook the building, and the flash of light from the alley lit the whole street up at once. As the light faded, Gabriel and I went into the alley shooting.

  There was nothing to shoot, just the mangled body of a young woman in a Nightwatch uniform. She was still clutching her coilgun in both shattered hands, but a jagged shard of bone protruded up from one arm and her head hung from her neck at a strange angle. The blast seemed to have convinced whatever inbound support she had to reconsider. We were alone in the alley with the mangled corpse of a cop.

  My stomach churned. This woman was law enforcement, a sworn protector of Tower 7’s inhabitants. I’d shot a grenade at her, and this wreck in front of me was the direct result. At least it was a quick death. “So much for trying to reach the Nightwatch station.”

  Gabriel must have noticed how I was feeling. “Hey, Tycho, let’s get real here. Yeah, she’s Nightwatch. But she opened fire on two Arbiters after we’d identified ourselves. She may be wearing a uniform, but she isn’t one of the good guys. Not as far as we’re concerned.”

  I took a deep breath. “Yeah, you’re right. We still haven’t learned anything though.”

  “Of course we have. We learned that at least some of the Nightwatch are helping Marcenn, and we can assume that he plans to resist arrest.”

  “But why would they help him? It just doesn’t make sense, Gabe. He’s shut the juice off, and everyone here is going to die unless we get it back on. Even if he did have some fanatic loyalists, who would help him with that? They should have taken him into custody the moment he suggested it, not joined him on his death crusade. In what universe are a bunch of cops going to help their boss murder everyone in the place?”

  “It doesn’t make sense, I agree. But they’re heading our way, so unless we want to have a frank and earnest exchange of views with them in about sixty seconds, I suggest we get moving.”

  In Arbiter lingo, a “frank and earnest exchange of views” means an all-out firefight. Assuming the people approaching us were members of the Nightwatch, that did seem like the probable outcome if we let them catch up with us.

  “Okay, Gabe. Moving out. Should we grab that coilgun?”

  “I’ll get it.”

  He rea
ched down and took the Gauss rifle, a handy weapon to have because of its silent firing action. Coilguns use a series of electromagnetic coils to push a ferromagnetic projectile out of the weapon at extremely high speeds, with no tell-tale bang or flash like a traditional firearm. The unfortunate Nightwatch trooper must have hoped to get one of us from ambush with a silent shot, then lead the other one back toward her friends. Two Arbiters would be a problem even for a whole platoon of local troops, but one Arbiter would probably be overwhelmed and killed. Luckily for me, she wasn’t all that great of a shot.

  We moved out of the alley and crossed the street, hyperalert now for any hidden enemies. We needed a spot to hole up and a vantage point. Gabriel pointed at the building in front of us, an administrative office for Tower 7 Social Services. It had a balcony on the top floor, and the thermals showed that there was no one inside. The employees had presumably retreated to the relative light and comfort of their own living quarters, leaving the place abandoned and empty.

  “I’m right behind you,” I said, and Gabriel went in through the front door. Despite what our scanners told us, we did everything by the book. Any tech can be fooled by the right sort of counter tech, and you don’t want your last thoughts to be, I should have cleared this room properly.

  Speaking of which, the next words from Gabriel’s mouth were, “time to go dark.” Going dark means moving with strict noise discipline and using your own tech to interfere with any nearby tech to keep it from functioning properly. It wouldn’t absolutely keep them from tracking us down, but it would certainly buy us a bit of time.

  We moved through the dark offices in total silence, making sure not to bump anything or let our weapons scrape up against our own hardware. We slipped past cubicles and through employee break rooms. We glanced at the motivational posters showing the natural beauties of faraway Earth along with inspirational slogans like “Dream” and “Believe.” We crept up stairways and glided down corridors.

  The place was empty, all right—if you only count the living. Here and there we found a body sprawled out on the floor or slumped over a desk. It was impossible to tell who might have killed them, and it wasn’t our problem either. Whatever had gone wrong on Tower 7, a lot of people had already died—but those deaths were nothing compared to the disaster we were here to prevent. All we could do was move on, leaving these murders for someone else to solve. Assuming anyone would survive to solve them.

  When we reached the top floor, the stairwell door wouldn’t open immediately. I pushed against it with my shoulder, but it seemed to push back at me. I gestured silently to Gabriel, who put his shoulder into it and helped me push. The door slowly scraped open, destroying all pretense of noise discipline. A tangled little knot of bodies rolled away from the door, flopping over onto the office floor.

  Three men and two women lay dead in the same spot. More like suicide than murder, but it was hard to say for sure. The one with the bottle of pills looked a lot like the boss, so maybe she was the one who had suggested it. Why just wait around to die, when you can make the decision to go on your own terms?

  Gabriel glanced down at them and shook his head, then headed on toward the balcony door as if he had already put them out of his mind. What else could we do? These people had already made their decision.

  I followed close behind him and crouched down when I reached the balcony, trying to keep my presence as discreet as possible. We had a vantage point at last and could get a sense of the big picture.

  On the streets below us there was movement. Just a hint at first, like papers rustling in a stiff breeze. Then there was a human figure, running forward with his rifle lowered. Then another. Then another. And then came a burst of movement, like bats at sunset swarming out from a cave.

  Between one moment and the next, the streets filled up with Nightwatch officers, running forward with weapons ready. They might not know exactly where we were, but there was no longer any chance of hiding from them.

  I turned to Gabriel as if to say something, but there was nothing that needed to be said. The Nightwatch was coming.

  3

  Gabe signaled for me to follow and we slipped back into the building, trying to delay the inevitable. There was at least a chance the woman who had tried to kill us was a rogue officer, and that the armed men now swarming the streets would not be looking for a fight. Despite that hope, the fact remained that they had just found the dead body of one of their fellow officers and that we were responsible. There was no guarantee they wouldn’t kill us on sight.

  The one immediate advantage we had was that they didn’t know exactly where we were. We were scrambling their scanners, but even if their gear had been fully functional, they had no way of telling our thermal signatures apart from anyone else’s. We could just as easily be two survivors, trying to stay alive and avoid as much trouble as possible.

  Gabriel moved quickly through the abandoned corridors, relying less on noise discipline now that there were so many Nightwatch officers closing in on us. We stepped over the bodies in front of the door without even a glance and moved toward the back offices. My dataspike adjusted the schematic info as I moved, keeping a ghostly image of the most relevant map in front of my eyes.

  According to the schematic, there was a skyway near the back. We could use it to slip out of this building and into the Tax Authority building next to it if we were pressed too closely, so it made sense to get as close to the skyway as possible before any trouble started.

  Unfortunately, they had more than enough people to close off both buildings, but only if they knew we were here. So far, they probably didn’t. We reached the back doors and came out into the skyway, then paused to assess the situation.

  I crouched down next to Gabriel. “What’s the plan?”

  “We need to talk to the Nightwatch, but not when we’re outnumbered this badly. I say we slip out of here, get down to the street, and keep moving. We’ll reach out to them as soon as possible, but first we have to get out of here alive.”

  “Evade and escape, then?”

  “Evade and escape. If we stay in one place, they’ll close off every exit, so we need to keep moving. But we do it carefully. Don’t let yourself be seen if you can help it. If we run into trouble, deploy grenades and peel off. Don’t engage.”

  I nodded, and we started moving. The skyway was the hard part. Even if their scanners couldn’t detect our presence, anyone looking up from the street would see us walking by. Gabe crouched down at the skyway entrance, glanced out at the street below us, and signaled for me to wait. That meant someone was down there, someone who could potentially see us.

  From the floors below us, I heard someone moving. They were in the building, but that didn’t necessarily mean they knew we were here. If they were doing a search, it would take them some time to clear every room and get up here. We had a little time, but even so the wait was nerve-wracking. We were unable to move forward because someone might see us, and unable to stay where we were because someone was coming up from behind. I felt like a mouse stuck between two cats.

  At last Gabe signaled for me to move forward, so I ran past him in a low crouch. He followed close behind, and we crossed the skyway into the offices of the Tax Authority. The scene we found was much like what we had already seen in the Social Services building. Dark, empty rooms with the occasional body, sprawled out and staring at nothing. The main difference, as far as I could tell, was the lack of inspirational posters of life on Earth.

  Despite the grim situation, I grinned a little. One of the bosses here probably hated the things and had banned them from the Tax Authority offices completely. I understood how they felt. Despite what I’d said to Gabriel about the uniforms, part of the reason I’d joined the Arbiters was to avoid having some poster with the word “Believe” on it staring down at me all day. Well, that and every other aspect of office life. Call me crazy, but jumping out of a dropship and infiltrating a blacked-out Venusian living tower under the control of a psychopath was a
less frightening prospect for me than what most other people did for a living.

  Or at least it always had been. Creeping through the offices of the Tax Authority while trying to evade a horde of Nightwatch officers was starting to make me rethink things a little.

  We paused for a moment in an employee break room, and I glanced around. They had a coffee maker built into the wall and a fridge for snacks. “It’s not so bad. I could see myself doing this.”

  Gabe snorted. “Your odds of living a year would drop by half. And right now, they’re already not looking so good. Now be quiet and listen.”

  He cocked his head to the side as if listening for a faint sound. I did the same, which activated my audio sensors. I could hear them approaching, moving up through the Social Services building and into the skyway behind us. There was another group below us, moving up floor by floor.

  They had us in a pincer, and the two sides were closing in.

  I checked the schematic. “We can make it out through the next skyway, but we have to move.”

  Not that doing so would solve our problems, but the best we could hope for was to buy some time. Our only other option was to go to war, and neither Gabe nor I had any interest in doing that. These guys were law enforcement, men and women doing their duty. Or so we assumed. If that were no longer true, then we would act on that when we knew for sure. We ran for the skyway. The building next to the Tax Authority was a corporate office for VRM, the Venus Raw Materials company. I could only assume it would be empty, but our own scanners were just as vulnerable to our interference as anyone else’s. Until we came out of the dark, we had no way of knowing just now.

  Someone from behind me opened fire. Gabe stopped and turned, then shot a smoke grenade. I reached the doors, but there were three Nightwatch officers approaching rapidly from the skyway. Our escape was cut off, and they were raising their guns to fire.

  I armed a smoke grenade and loosed it directly at them. The grenade hit one of them in the chest and knocked him flat on his back. White smoke billowed out, and I turned to try and peel off. But there was nowhere to go. Gabe was already under fire, and Nightwatch officers were closing in. Gabe fired a flash-bang, and I turned back to the skyway to do the same. One of the Nightwatch officers took a shot at me and only missed because of the thickness of the smoke. There was no time to think, and no time to switch grenades. I ran right at him, hit him in the face with the butt of my rifle, and dropped him on the floor. One of the other officers suddenly lunged at me, slammed me into the skyway wall, and jammed the barrel of his gun up against my windpipe. I struggled to breathe, while the officer’s face pressed closer and closer. I turned my face away, struggling to escape the crushing pressure.