Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  When the door finally opened and Gabe came in, he found me drenched in fresh blood among the bodies of three dead Nightwatch officers. He looked back and forth for a moment, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

  “Way to show initiative, Barrett. But Jesus Christ.”

  “What took you so long?” I scowled, wiping the blood off my face with the back of my hand.

  “I didn’t know you were going for it, so I wasn’t ready. They started to get active, and I had to play the frightened little bunny rabbit and stay in my hole for a minute. Little did I know you were the big bad wolf.”

  “I’m as surprised as you are, believe me. But not as surprised as these guys.”

  He grinned, shaking his head at my gallows humor. “The path is mostly clear from here. These guys must have been covering the approach from this direction. If we get moving before they notice, we should be able to slip through to the elevators.”

  “Lead the way,” I said. “I’m done showing initiative for the next few minutes.”

  6

  The stairs in the elevator shaft were sturdy and solid but climbing them was still a sickening experience. The staircase was a spiral, winding around the walls of the shaft and upward. In the light from my helmet, the shape it made as it rose up into the darkness was like a monstrous snake. If either of us tripped, we’d have a long time to think about it on the way down. That wasn’t a pleasant mental image, so I just tried to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. It’s like they say: just don’t look down.

  Of course, we could have rappelled up as we had done before, but now that we knew the extent of the forces arrayed against us it seemed like a bad idea to trust our lives to a line any Nightwatch officer or android could easily cut. The staircase felt precarious, but at least it was a platform we could fight from if we had to.

  The levels were marked by huge red numbers along the inside of the shaft, so we knew exactly where we were in the climb at any given moment. As I stared at the latest number—255—all I could think was that this was going to take a hell of a long time.

  More than enough time for Gabriel to debrief me on what had just happened. This is standard practice, because it helps to prevent the worst consequences of post-traumatic stress. As we proceeded up the endless staircase through Level 255, I had just finished describing the fight in Big Bob’s.

  “I have to admit, it’s hard to accept. These guys are in uniform, but to finish this mission we have to fight them and kill them. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “It doesn’t feel right because it isn’t right,” said Gabriel.

  “Is that supposed to be helpful?”

  “It’s just reality. It isn’t right for people to stab each other with knives or shoot each other with coilguns. The moment you accept that as a normal thing, you’re no longer in the right mental state for this kind of work. They don’t call us annihilators or exterminators. They call us Arbiters. We arbitrate conflict to keep the peace.”

  I couldn’t help myself. In a deep, stern voice, I quoted that movie title at him. “Arbitrate this!”

  “Don’t joke around, Tycho, I’m being serious. You had to do something horrible to stay alive, to keep this mission moving forward. The key isn’t to tell yourself that black is white or bad is good, but to remind yourself that you had to do it. Yeah, it’s wrong. But the wrongness comes from the people who put you in the situation. It doesn’t come from you.”

  “They could say the same thing,” I pointed out, knowing that it was a cheap argument.

  Gabriel scoffed. “The hell they can. They can’t say anything at all. They’re dead. It’s like that old saying, you know? War doesn’t solve who’s right, it only solves who’s left. Well, that’s exactly what war is intended to solve. By the time you’re shooting at each other, it’s no longer a question of right or wrong. It’s just about survival and imposing your will on the situation. When you came through the door of that restaurant and saw those Loyalists, you weren’t looking at three cops anymore. You were in a war, and the men in front of you were your enemies.”

  “I hear what you’re saying, Gabe. It still doesn’t sit right. They may not be Arbiters, but they’re still law enforcement. It’s hard to see them as the bad guys.”

  “Think about what you’re saying. The Defectors who covered our asses out there are the real Nightwatch. These guys are obeying an illegal order. They aren’t law enforcement anymore. They’re outlaws.”

  “Yeah.” I was looking at another of the numbers. 257. “So let’s talk about that.”

  “What do you mean?” Gabriel sounded a little suspicious. He didn’t approve of my tendency to think too much, especially because it sometimes caused me to make big mistakes like what had happened in the movie theater. “I just want to go over all the information we currently have, to understand what Marcenn might have planned and why he did what he did.”

  This was as much about getting up that staircase as anything else. Putting one foot in front of another over and over again was a lot like climbing a steep mountain without any view. It helped to have something to take my mind off the process.

  Gabriel still wasn’t sure about the whole thing. “Figuring out what Marcenn might have planned—that makes some sense, although we aren’t going to know whether we’re right or not until we see for ourselves. Figuring out why he did what he did? That’s just irrelevant.”

  “I take it you didn’t pay any attention in Criminology.” I was only teasing. Gabriel was no meathead; he was perfectly capable of understanding whatever they wanted to teach him even if he chose to disregard it.

  “Of course I did. I wanted to pass the test and graduate from the Academy. But come on. Even if you figure out all the motives, all the mental or social problems or whatever you want to pin it on, the only thing that matters in the end is what people do. All the whys in the world can never change that.”

  “Just humor me, okay? This is a long staircase.” We were just coming up to level 262.

  “Okay, sure. If you just want to pass the time, we can talk about whatever you want.”

  “Much obliged. So, let’s review. He suddenly announces that everyone above Level 250 is going to get executed. Then he shuts off the life support. Murder-suicide. Can we think of any possible motive other than some kind of apocalypse cult?”

  “Maybe it’s not a murder-suicide. He controls the system. Maybe he has some way to keep himself alive while everyone else dies. Or himself and his Loyalists, maybe. They could start to pull back to the upper levels as time runs down.”

  “A simple mass murder without the suicide? Okay, but still. What possible motive could there be? It seems like a cult is the only option.”

  Gabriel sounded skeptical. “The more I think about it, the more far-fetched the whole cult thing sounds. The logistics of it just don’t add up.”

  “I know it would take a lot,”I admitted.

  “That’s not the half of it. When would he have recruited his followers? Before they joined the force? But then the psych screenings would have filtered them out. After they joined? But then why didn’t anyone come forward before now? Let’s say he had a death cult—the most convincing death cult anyone’s ever come up with. You hear the pitch, and you just can’t wait to murder everyone and get your spot in heaven. Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But plenty of the Nightwatch officers didn’t decide to follow him. So, the pitch is not quite as convincing as all that.”

  Level 263. “I see your point. If that’s what happened, why didn’t anyone come forward and report it? I joined the Nightwatch to fight crime and protect the public, but my boss wants me to help him murder a half million people.”

  “Right, exactly. It’s not a cult. Whatever convinced those Loyalists to do what August Marcenn ordered, it was something that happened very recently.”

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s put that to the side. If this isn’t a death cult, then what could Marcenn be trying to accompl
ish? Is there some way to make money off all this?”

  “An elaborate heist? We can’t rule it out. Remember Diggs-Markley?”

  The Diggs-Markley Outfit was an interplanetary crime gang with a flair for the complex. They were known for infiltrating and corrupting colonial governments, then siphoning off vast sums of money and laundering it through still other corrupt governments. They’d all gone down a long time ago, but Marcenn was not so old that he couldn’t have been involved in the Outfit when he was young.

  “Sure, they taught us all about that case at the Academy. I could check the dataspike, see if there were any members that were never caught.”

  “I can tell you right now,” said Gabe, “there definitely were. But you wouldn’t be able to link Marcenn to them even if you checked. Diggs-Markley moved a lot of money—more than enough to build a fake identity. If he’s a former member, every last thing about him will be completely different. If we had the time for an investigation, you might be able to build a case, but we don’t. The more important question is how the heist works.”

  “We don’t even know that there is a heist,” I pointed out.

  “Exactly. We don’t know anything. It’s still a question of means, motive, and opportunity, just like any other crime. Money is a motive, and it’s one that makes at least a little bit of sense. Opportunity is covered by getting everyone off the top 50 floors and keeping them occupied just staying alive. So, is there a means? If there’s anything worth stealing on the top 50 floors, we’ve got means, motive, and opportunity. And that would answer your question.”

  I wasn’t sure. This didn’t seem like an ordinary crime. “It would have to be worth a hell of a lot of money. Just like what you were saying about Diggs-Markley, he’d have to be able to launder his profits. He’d have to be able to get plastic surgery, new identification, everything.”

  “It still makes more sense than the other options. But money’s only one of the classic motives. Let’s talk revenge. Maybe he just wants to make Tower 7 pay, because they did something that pissed him off. Or maybe he’s psychotic, and he thinks killing everyone in Tower 7 is the only way to save Earth from the Venusian space-vampires. You see what I’m saying, Tycho? You can speculate all day about Marcenn’s motive, and none of it means anything.”

  Level 266. “Fair enough,” I said. “But some of those explanations just don’t add up. If he’s psychotic, the Nightwatch Loyalists would have no reason to follow him. If he wants revenge, there’s no way they could all have the same grudge he does. I can see the money thing; he could have recruited some of the officers if the payoff was big enough. But even then, I can’t understand why they’d go along with it. We’re talking about killing more than 500,000 people here. That’s a bit more extreme than simple corruption.”

  “Maybe they don’t really plan to kill all those people. If they complete the heist, they might just turn the juice back on before they get away.”

  I shook my head. “Even so. What could compel so many people to follow Marcenn? You saw what it was like back there. People are dying already. The Nightwatch lives here. These people are their neighbors, their lifelong friends, their extended family. How could so many willfully follow orders to kill members of their own community?”

  Gabe was silent for a few minutes. The only sound was our footsteps, and the cascade of echoes like peals of bells. At first, I thought he was just irritated. Gabriel often tells me that I think too much, and he had already made it clear that he considered all this speculation a waste of time. We walked up to Level 270 in total silence, then Gabriel said, “let’s catch our breath.”

  We stopped for a moment and leaned against the wall, and Gabe took a deep breath. “I don’t know the answer. I’ve been thinking about it for the past few minutes, and I just don’t know. But I think you’re giving people too much credit.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I could hear the hesitation in his voice. Whatever this was, he didn’t really want to say it. Then he took a deep breath. “You remember that story, the one I used as my sales pitch?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, sure.” I wasn’t likely to forget it. When I first met Gabriel Anderson, he’d been recovering from an injury. The Arbiter Force put him on recruiting duty while he rested up, and he’d gotten drunk with me in a dive bar and told me a long story about the Ganymede Genocide. The perpetrator had been named Frank Wallace, the mass-murdering prime minister of the Jovian Alliance. “I don’t know if I’d call it a sales pitch though. It was more like you were trying to talk me out of enlisting.”

  “That’s a standard recruiting tactic. Weed out the people who can’t handle it, intrigue the ones who probably can. It isn’t something I like to talk about. But here it is. I was on the drop-team they sent to Ganymede to capture Frank Wallace.”

  I didn’t say anything, but a chill went up my neck when I heard those words.

  “You probably know the basic facts,” he continued. “Tension between the Corals and the Jensonites over mining jobs, a tight election, some irresponsible speeches. Then one of the Coral kids turned up dead, and somebody said a Jensonite did it. No one knows how it started, but by the time I even got there the killing had already been going on for days. I was briefed on what was happening, but I didn’t really get it. Not until I saw it for myself. So, you remember the story, but what I didn’t tell you back then is I was on the surface. I saw what happened for myself, when we were tracking down the major death squad leaders. I didn’t really get it until then.”

  I had seen the pictures, but I had the feeling I didn’t get it either. It always looks so abstract, the image of some random atrocity. Like those weren’t even people, just mindless objects. And maybe that’s just how their killers saw them too.

  Gabe went on. “The things I saw… hell, not just saw. Do you know what five hundred burned bodies smells like? I know that smell. I’ll never forget it till the day I die. But the things I saw were just as bad. On my first day on the surface of Ganymede, I was supposed to go meet with this Coral elder—not one of the Cavadoras they were targeting but one of the Jovian loyalists. They said he was the only guy with enough pull to stop the killing. We would maybe just have to throw him some bags of cash and a bunch of contracting jobs he could hand out to his cronies.”

  I nodded. “Sure. That’s standard procedure, and it usually works. I sometimes wonder if the good old boys on these planets start trouble just so we’ll throw some money and jobs at them.”

  “You know they do. But it isn’t always like that. So I get to his compound, but he takes a long time coming out to meet with us. We get sick of waiting and push past the guards to see what’s causing the hold up. When we get inside, we walk in on him shooting a kid in the head. A thirteen-year-old boy, and this kind-looking old grandpa holds a gun up to his temple and blows his brains out all over the courtyard. Turns out the old man was the main force behind the massacres—one of the main conduits between the Jovian Populist Party and the death squads. Those cronies of his we’d been planning to give jobs to? They were the same as the death squads. They’d been out all week setting fire to people’s houses, chopping arms off, throwing bodies in pits and then bulldozing over them. I can’t even tell you everything they did, but this guy who was supposed to stop it all was one of its two or three main architects.”

  “So it stopped when you arrested him?”

  “It did not. The Jansonites Mining Syndicate regrouped and put together their own death squads. We were grabbing up the Coral Populist leaders and throwing them in lock-up, and the Jansonite Cavadora leaders were unleashing their own gunmen. It got so much worse. What started out as a Coral Jovian ethnic cleansing against the Jansonites Ganymedes turned into a Jansonite revenge campaign against the Corals, and they were doing everything they could to see if they could outdo them. By the time it was done, I could have slaughtered both groups personally and slept like a baby right afterwards. I probably would have, too, if I’d had the power. I hated them that much.
And that’s exactly how they felt about each other. You follow what I’m saying?”

  “Ganymede sounds like a horrible place.”

  “That’s not the point. It’s no more horrible than here, no more horrible than anywhere else. People can be godawful, Tycho. That’s all there is to it. If you underestimate how bad they can be, you’ll always be surprised by the things they do. You have to accept the facts. There is nothing so monstrous, nothing so depraved, that a human being could not be capable of it. And that includes you and me, so it sure as hell includes the Tower 7 Nightwatch.”

  I didn’t want to contradict him. He’d been on Ganymede during the ethnic cleansings, and I had not. The man was entitled to his impressions of human nature. But no matter what he’d seen, I just didn’t think it was the whole picture. “You said you could have slaughtered them all, Gabriel. But you didn’t do it.”

  “That wasn’t my job. My job was to stop the killing. To get them to sit down and talk to each other, to work out a truce. Even if what they really deserved was a bullet to the head, my job was to keep it from happening. I did my job, just like we’re going to do our job here. But I won’t forget what people are, and I won’t be surprised by anything they do.”

  “So that’s why you don’t like to speculate about motive? Because you just figure that people are basically evil?”

  “I guess that’s part of it. But thinking too much just gets in the way, especially in this job. Keep the mission in front of you, and don’t worry too much about the bigger picture. I don’t really know if people are evil, but I do know they can be. It’s not my job to heal them, and it’s not my job to punish them either. It’s my job to stop them. And that’s more than enough for any two Arbiters. You get what I’m saying?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Then we’d probably better get moving again. We have a long way to go.”

  He pointed up the shaft, where the spiral staircase disappeared in the darkness. I knew he was right, and there was no way to deal with it except to keep moving forward. One foot in front of the other, until we reached the sky.