Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

Keep your eyes on the mission; that’s what Gabriel had always said. Of course, he might have made an exception here. But I wasn’t going to, not when it meant entertaining the possibility that August Marcenn wasn’t really dead.

  That was his body right in front of me, his arrogant facial expression as fixed as a statue’s. With his lower jaw missing, he looked more like some kind of undead creature than the blueblood he preferred to seem. I shuddered silently, still in the grip of that eerie memory. Two men with the same voice. The voice of a dead man.

  No. It hadn’t happened in the first place; my mind was only playing tricks on me. Too much stress and too little sleep, too much death all around me. I’d lost my bearings, but I could find them again as long as I didn’t think too much. My only job was to get the dataspike, and as soon as I did that I could head back downstairs.

  I leaned over the body and checked. Most people keep their dataspikes behind the left ear, and Marcenn turned out to be no exception. My fingers found it right away, and I yanked it off, closed my palm around it, and stood up again immediately.

  Such a simple little thing, retrieving a dataspike. A moment’s work, but a moment for which so many had already died. It made me so sick thinking about it, I considered just throwing the dataspike down the elevator shaft and forgetting I’d ever heard about it. An irrational moment, but it just shows you how much these things can get to you. I closed my hand around the dataspike and slipped it into my pocket instead. I wasn’t losing it, just overwhelmed by circumstances.

  August Marcenn was really dead.

  11

  Getting back down to Level 250 was not an easy task, although it was quicker than on the way up. With my mobility gear, I could have rappelled down—now that I had the dataspike, it might have been worth the risk that someone would intentionally cut the line. The only problem was those riot control grenades, which would most likely shake the hook loose and send me tumbling through the shaft to my death. I still had no choice but to go around them and use the mobility gear only after I had done so.

  I used the utility staircase to get back to the floor where Gabe had died, then moved across the level as rapidly and quietly as I could. I didn’t run into any opposition, and after a little while I started to wonder why. At first, I didn’t dare to move any faster, fearing that I might walk into an ambush. After a while, it became obvious that there just wasn’t anyone here. So, what were they doing?

  August Marcenn was dead, so there was at least a possibility that all his followers had surrendered. They could have laid down their arms, handed themselves over to the custody of the Nightwatch Defectors.

  It wasn’t impossible, but something told me it wasn’t true either. It didn’t feel like reality, and there was another and far worse possibility. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that they might have begun their final assault on the survivors. I started to move faster, to pay less attention to how much noise I was making. Then I started to run, just trying to get there in time.

  If everyone was dead by the time I arrived, it would no longer matter that I had the dataspike. I would have saved a building—a vast and still useful building, but just a building. It could be resettled eventually by other colonists, when the cleanup and the investigations were done. I didn’t care. The only thing I cared about was helping the people, and that meant it was no longer possible to be as cautious as I would like to.

  I reached the elevator shaft, still uninterrupted and free from pursuit. I came out on the staircase, where Gabriel had talked to me about human evil. I didn’t pause, although part of me wanted to stop and remember. I just fired my grappling hook, felt it bite in the walls of the shaft, and jumped off into the void.

  * * *

  When I came back through the doors of Level 250, I heard the sounds of battle. Gunfire raged in every direction, explosions flared, and flames burned. It had never occurred to me before, but an uncontrolled fire in a living tower like this one was an even more horrific prospect than everyone simply running out of air. The fire-control systems would all be automated, so none of them would be in operation until I got this dataspike to Emmet’s friend.

  No time for stealth, then. I ran out across the street, heading for Emmet’s by the most direct route I could manage. I activated all my scanners, knowing that there would be no way to tell me apart from anyone else in the middle of a firefight. With my backscatter radiation scanners and thermal imaging sensors activated, I would at least have a sense of where people were and how many I was dealing with.

  Someone shot in my direction. I returned fire as I ran, but never even knew if I hit them or not. I reached Big Bob’s Bold Breakfast and ran through it once again, skipping over the bodies of the men I’d killed. The breakfast buffet had been toppled over, and the synthetic eggs and meat were splattered everywhere. It was an unpleasant sight, the food slime pasted all over the face of a man whose throat I had slit myself. I almost vomited, but I held it down and just kept going.

  My sensors showed people in the area, but I expected them to be Nightwatch, so I nearly shot the first one I ran into. He turned out to be an unarmed civilian, running into Big Bob’s for a place to hide. He gasped when he saw me, then turned and ran but stumbled and fell dead just a few seconds later. He’d been shot in the back.

  A Nightwatch officer stood a few feet away, still pointing the sidearm with which he’d killed the poor man. I shot the officer as I ran by but didn’t stop to see if there were others. They were all around me, and there was no point in killing any one of them when there were so many of them to kill or be killed by. I just kept running, shooting when I was shot at or when I thought it might matter.

  I came across an officer with a dozen or so prisoners lined up against a wall and getting ready to be executed. I shot the officer and ran, leaving the survivors to wonder what the hell had just happened. I shot another Nighwatch officer who was standing in the street, firing up into the windows of an apartment building. I don’t know who was up there, but they cheered raggedly as I ran on by.

  Most of the time, I was just too late. I found bodies everywhere, sometimes in ones and twos—a young man lying on the sidewalk, two little girls, sisters maybe, still holding hands—but more often in clusters, piles of bodies heaped up and tangled.

  The Nightwatch was killing everyone, that much was clear. They had crossed the boundary, breached the defenses of the Defector faction, and started going door to door. The remaining civilians, in desperate panic, were running in all directions. Many seemed to be trying to make it to the elevators but were running straight into Nightwatch death squads instead.

  Emmet and Ophelia lived right next to the boundary, the dividing line between Defector and Loyalist. That boundary no longer seemed to matter, which meant that both of them could already be dead. With despair tugging at my heart, I sped up and ran for their home.

  As much as I tried, I was unable to follow a straight line. I was constantly forced to seek cover from a hail of gunfire or drawn aside to help someone who was about to be murdered. I found my way blocked by fire, by mounds of bodies, by toppled structures. I would go through buildings, but find the way blocked in one way or another and be forced to take a detour. I was forced to make my way to Emmet and Ophelia’s by a circuitous route. It cost me time I didn’t have, time no one in Tower 7 had. It cost lives that I might otherwise have saved.

  I came out of an office building into a plaza at one point in my run and was relieved to find a large group of civilians moving away from the fighting. They were frightened and confused, but they had a number of Nightwatch officers with them. I could only assume these were the Defectors, since they seemed to be escorting the people to safety. They moved along the side of the group with weapons at the ready, gesturing for people to keep moving.

  I ran up to the group and started shouting, “Emmet,” thinking he might have been evacuated. I shouted, “Ophelia,” looking at every face that passed. I saw every sort of person you can think of, from c
hildren to grandparents. They looked confused and terrified, but they didn’t look anything like Emmet or Ophelia.

  When the killing started, it happened without any warning at all. The Nightwatch officers just started shooting, firing point-blank into the helpless crowd. The person I was looking at—an old man with white hair, his yellow eyes as wide and terrified as a small child’s—jerked suddenly and fell down, blood pouring from a hole in his neck.

  The people all around him started screaming or running, or screaming and running at the same time. I saw another one fall, a middle-aged blonde woman with a bag in her hands. She hit the ground, and an assortment of random belongings went spilling out across the plaza. In the last moment of her life, everything she had considered important enough to leave with was scattered out all over the blood-slick pavement.

  In a flash of rage, I turned and started firing on the Nightwatch officers. Were these men and women really Defectors, or had they only pretended until they could gather their victims? And if they were Defectors, why had they picked this moment to switch sides at last?

  I didn’t care at that point; the only thing I cared about was killing as many of them as possible. I shot one in the chest, another one in the head, and yet another in the stomach. They didn’t run; they didn’t even fight back. They just kept gunning people down, so I went down the line methodically and slaughtered them all. A bullet in the back of the head for every last one of them, while they ignored what I was doing completely and just held their triggers down. Despite my efforts, by the time I’d killed all of them, they had killed or wounded dozens of people. The survivors were scattering, not knowing who to trust or what to do. As they ran down the street, androids saw them and gave pursuit.

  People always say that Venus is Hell. I’ve said it myself, and I meant what I said. But I was talking about the planet, not the life people live there. Now something had changed. Everywhere I turned, I saw nothing but murder and fire. Murder and fire on every corner, in every interaction, in every face.

  No, that wasn’t all. No matter how bad things can get, the worst is never all there is. It was all I saw at first, especially during the massacre and just afterward. But then I came across a barricade, a makeshift fortification with two men and a woman behind it. They all had guns, and the woman gasped and raised hers when she saw me.

  One of the men grabbed her arm. “He’s not Nightwatch.”

  “I’m a Sol Federation Arbiter,” I said. “When did all this start?”

  The three of them looked at me, not sure what to make of me. Arbiters are not exactly loved, but I probably rated higher at that moment than their own murderous Nightwatch. Or at least I hoped so. The woman spoke first. “Maybe an hour? Some of the Defectors started turning on us, killing everyone they saw. Our lines broke. Everyone’s just trying to stay alive now; there’s nothing left.”

  “I need to get across this level. I have something that may make it possible to turn the lights back on.”

  One of the men laughed. “What does it even matter now? It’s all over, Arbiter. You can’t stop what’s happening here. Everyone in Tower 7 is as good as dead, lights or no lights.”

  Three androids came into view, and the three civilians turned and opened fire with snarls of rage on their faces. Since they were trying to defend themselves, I wanted to give them the best chance possible. I turned and fired, killing all three androids with three shots of my weapon. The man who’d been talking to me yelled “fuck off!” I assumed he was talking to the androids at first before figuring out that he was talking to me.

  I didn’t get it; these people didn’t seem to want my help. They didn’t even seem to welcome it. I just stood there looking at them, then raised my hand in salute before moving off. They all stared at me silently, not understanding my respectful gesture. In their own minds, all three were already dead. They weren’t even defending themselves, just looking for some kind of revenge. I didn’t have anything they would even want.

  I kept moving, working my way back toward Emmet and Ophelia’s. There was fighting or killing on every block I passed. The only difference between blocks that fought and blocks that let themselves be killed without resistance seemed to be the personalities of the people who had ended up there. Access to weapons was not the only factor. Some blocks with a few guns were overrun and slaughtered anyway, while others with no guns at all had still constructed barricades. The defenders of these makeshift forts were armed with everything from slingshots to kitchen knives, and they stared out into the shadowy streets with faces as grimly determined as any Marine’s.

  No matter how determined they were, it couldn’t save them. They were armed civilians at best, and often they weren’t really armed at all. The Nightwatch and its android proxies were an organized force, acting together with military discipline. They advanced steadily street by street, killing everyone who didn’t fight back and taking a little bit longer to kill everyone who did. If you didn’t resist, you’d be shot and left on the street. If you did resist, you’d still be shot and left on the street.

  I fought as I ran, helping the hopeless defenders of the barricades whenever I could. It wasn’t enough, and maybe it wasn’t even any help at all. I had a place to get to, and I didn’t have time to stop and fight. With my Arbiter gear, I was able to attack and breach the Nightwatch formations. I used it to help the defenders whenever I could, but in the end there wasn’t much I could do. They were pushed back steadily when they let themselves retreat—and overrun and massacred wherever they didn’t.

  This was a losing battle, and I had nothing to gain by getting involved. I stopped interfering, stopped pausing at the barricades to get a few shots in. Like the first few defenders I had come across, many of them didn’t even seem to want the help. I just ran through the dimly lit streets, killing anything that got in my way. It was a bad day in Tower 7.

  12

  By the time I got back to Emmet’s neighborhood, I smelled the smoke. Like I mentioned before, I’d been forced to take a series of detours. I didn’t realize at first how bad it really was, but I had actually drifted far into the residential area by the time I got moving in roughly the right direction. While I was wandering around the level, occasionally assisting the defenders, the Nightwatch kill squads had been through this neighborhood.

  There were bodies discarded all along the streets, lying silent and broken. In a number of cases, they looked like they had been pushed from far above—or maybe they had jumped, desperate to escape whatever was behind them. I saw a man stumble by, grasping at his throat with one hand. There was smoke in the air, which meant that at least one of the buildings was already on fire.

  I checked the oxygen level on my scanner and found that it was well below normal. As huge as it was, the tower was already filling up with carbon dioxide. And if there was one thing that wouldn’t help, it was sections of the tower to filling up with smoke. From this point onward, lack of oxygen would affect everything. It would make any survivors lethargic and dizzy, interfering with our thought processes.

  An android appeared, moving from body to body. When it found signs of life, it would fire a shot at point-blank range into the victim’s head. Then it would move on to the next, determined to kill every last human being. I stepped out and shot it, and it stopped in its tracks and tumbled over. Another android stepped out and began methodically fulfilling the exact same task.

  Disgusted with the futility of it all, I left the android to its work. It didn’t even try to stop me as I ran on by, it just went about its task of killing the wounded. It was the same thing I’d seen in the plaza, as if Marcenn’s forces had made a decision. They were so determined to kill everyone in Tower 7 that they had stopped even trying to defend themselves—just as long as they could go on killing.

  I ran down the street and came at last to Emmet’s building. I didn’t know what I’d find—a burned-out shell, a blood-soaked mountain of bodies—but the building itself seemed to be intact, although black smoke was pouri
ng from one of the upper windows and an orange light glowed from deep inside.

  Even though I no longer trusted the Nightwatch Defectors, I still looked up on the rooftop for any sign of them. I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t see anything, although I was disappointed. The men on that rooftop had saved my life, and I wanted to believe they were still with the good guys.

  I ran up to the entrance and saw three of them coming down the hallway. They were done in the building and coming outside to join the others. Their Nightwatch uniforms were soaked with blood to the elbows and splattered with red droplets from helmet to boot. When I threw the door open, they paused and looked at me—and then opened their mouths simultaneously as if to speak.

  I don’t know what they were going to say, because the last thing I wanted to do was give them a chance to say it. I opened fire, aiming right at their open mouths. I erased their faces one after the other as if to shut them up. They didn’t try to stop me, they just collapsed and died, and I glared down at the bodies with disgust.

  Then I ran down the hallway and up the smoke-filled staircase, into the heart of the burning building. I had no reason for hope, but I wasn’t going to leave without knowing for sure. If Emmet and Ophelia were still inside, I would get them out alive or die trying.

  It’s not because I knew them. I had met them exactly once. It was just that they’d helped me, and I wanted it all to mean something. To have been for something.

  That building was a nightmare. If any part of me regretted killing the three men I’d just gunned down, that part was washed away. The things I saw there in those hallways will be with me forever.

  As I climbed the staircase, I found the first of the bodies—a woman in a nightgown, blood running down her arm and dripping from her fingers. On the landing above her was a man with a cracked skull, his head like the reflection in a broken mirror. As far as I could tell, they hadn’t even shot him. Why waste a bullet when you have a wall? They had smashed him into it face-first and continued doing so until his skull split.