His face twisted up. “Too fucking late for that, Arbiter. Too fucking late!”
But then he lowered his head and reached out one hand to touch my arm. “Okay. You got it. Just tell me what you need me to do.”
Here it was. I knew Emmet would come through for me, as long as I was patient.
“I have August Marcenn’s dataspike. With the usual backdoors disabled, I can’t just get into the computer systems with my skeleton key and get the system back on. This dataspike can; his network permissions must be stored inside. But I don’t know how to access them. We’re not really hackers. They just give us a few tools, and they work in 99% of the situations we’re ever going to run into. This isn’t one of those situations. I need a cyber warfare expert, and you said that you know one.”
“Yeah. I do. But you’re not going to find it easy to get to this guy, assuming he’s even still alive. He lives over on the other side of the central hub.”
Shit. “One thing at a time. What can you tell me about him?”
“He’s an information security consultant. I don’t think he’s active military, but there’s something about him. He carries himself a certain way, if you know what I mean. A bit spooky, you know?”
I did. There’s a type of person, you don’t run into them often, but you know them when you see them. In my line of work, I usually run into this type when I’m investigating an interplanetary crime syndicate or maybe a corporate espionage case. And sometimes you can’t even tell who these guys really are, or who they really work for.
Frank stood up. “Hold on a sec. I can send you everything you need to find him.”
He turned and looked directly at me, and I realized he was talking about a dataspike transfer. All the information I see on my personal feed is stored on my dataspike, which communicates wirelessly with my holographic contacts. If I agreed to the transfer, he could send the information from his dataspike to mine just by holding my gaze for a few seconds.
I looked into his eyes, and the information transferred over. It popped up in my field of view, hovering in front of my eyes. Andrew Jones was a sharp young man, clean-shaven and dressed like a businessman. He had a fashionable haircut, but his furrowed brow gave an intense impression. That serious look on his face was the only clue to his personality. Other than that, the face looked bland, like he could be any one of a million guys—good looking, successful, and superficial.
The perfect cover for a spook? Perhaps. His listed title was Information Security Consultant, but he didn’t look the part. There was no slovenly brilliance here. He looked more like a stockbroker, or perhaps an assassin.
I checked the address against my schematics, and sure enough it was a long way off. I’d have to cross the war zone, get past the central hub, and then on into who-knows-what.
“How did you meet this guy?” I asked.
Emmet sighed. “He came to me. Because I’m ex-military. Thought maybe I might have some interesting contacts that would help his business, or that’s what he said anyway. To tell you the truth, I never really believed him. He asked a lot of questions.”
“What sort of questions?”
“A lot of stuff. How government works here, who he should talk to about information security, good contacts for contract work… he circled around a lot, but I picked up the gist, you know? He was interested in the government, but especially in August Marcenn.”
I was intrigued. If someone was looking into August Marcenn before the crisis started, that raised a lot of questions. Who would it be? Some kind of law enforcement other than the Arbiter Force? Military intelligence? A criminal syndicate?
“I think your instinct was on the money, Frank. The guy sounds like a spook.”
He nodded. “Yeah. So, you gonna go find him?”
“I am. Do you want to come with me?”
He thought about it for a minute, then shook his head. “It sounds like the people here are starting to fight back. I have the experience. I can probably help more here than I could if I tagged along with you. I’d only slow you down.”
He was right, of course—but I was relieved that he said it. “I’ll team up with you till we get to a barricade then leave you there and get this dealt with.”
“Don’t lose any time, Tycho. We need the lights back on. That’s a lot more important than getting me where I’m going. I don’t need a damn babysitter!”
“Of course you don’t. But some of the worst fighting is right near here. I’ll have a better chance of getting out of the neighborhood alive if I stick close to you.”
His only response was a dismissive grunt, but he didn’t argue with me. He just grabbed his shotgun, stood up from the chair, and headed for the door. I followed right behind him, confident enough in his evasion skills to let him take the lead.
When we got outside, he stopped for a moment and listened for the sounds of fighting. We had to pick a direction that would lead us to a barricade, but without delaying me from my crucial mission. When Frank was satisfied, he pointed toward a burning building in the near distance. There was a lot of shooting from that direction, and the pattern of shots sounded more like a firefight than a massacre. According to my schematic, it would take me only about two blocks out of my way. I nodded in agreement, and we set off.
When I had first arrived here, Tower 7 was already wounded. Gabriel and I had passed though empty restaurants and abandoned office buildings, always with a quota of bodies. But it still looked like a city; I felt like I could have said what Tower 7 was like before it went dark. Now this level was changing, becoming less like itself and more like some strange new thing.
A few of the buildings were on fire, and a few had collapsed. That was only a small part of it. There were broken windows, bodies everywhere, splatters of blood on the walls and streets. Those things were only a part of it too. It wasn’t anything I could explain, but the place was starting to feel like it was no longer real.
Maybe it was the shadows flickering across the shattered windows, or the light from the fires reflecting in the puddles of blood. Maybe it was the ongoing clap of gunfire, the thump of explosions, the occasional desperate scream. Whatever it was, Tower 7 didn’t feel like civilization anymore. It felt like an apocalypse. I supposed that’s what it was, all things considered.
We moved as rapidly as we could without exposing ourselves and came up behind a mixed unit of Nightwatch officers and android proxies assaulting a barricade. From where we were, we couldn’t see how many defenders were still alive. But they were holding on. I saw a Nightwatch officer come running in at them, only to be dropped by a volley of shots.
It couldn’t last, though. With their suicide attack approach, the Nightwatch were basically unstoppable unless you killed them all. As Frank and I emerged behind them, Marcenn’s forces charged all at once.
I aimed for the head, going for the quick kill. One man fell almost as soon as he stood up, the next one halfway to the barricade, and the next one just as he was reaching it. Frank had no choice but to get in close, because his shotgun didn’t have the range of my rifle. He fired as he advanced, trying to make sure that our enemies would keep their heads down rather than taking a shot at him. The Nightwatch didn’t care; they were solely focused on overrunning that barricade. As Frank’s shots started to have an effect, an android stepped out of the dark behind him. I blew its head clean off, and the fight ended with a last few shots as the defenders killed everyone who was still standing.
“We’re friendlies!” I called out. “Let us come over!”
There was a pause, and then a voice called out to us. “We saw what you did there. Come on up!”
When we got to the barricade, we found a determined little band of fighters armed with everything from rifles to a homemade flamethrower. The leader seemed to be a young woman with long dark hair and serious eyes. “I’m Marissa,” she said. “Are you… are you an Arbiter?”
“I am. And this is Franklin Emmet. He has military training.”
&nb
sp; Frank spoke up. “If it’s alright with you, I’d like to help you defend this barricade.”
Marissa turned to Emmet. “Of course. Just pick a spot anywhere that makes sense to you. We have some food and water, so help yourself.” Then she turned back to me. “Are you staying with us too?”
I shook my head. “I can’t. I might be able to get the lights back on, but I need to go find a guy on the other side of the level.”
“Are you sure? If we’re all dead, it won’t make any difference whether the lights are on or not. We could use you here.”
“I’m sure. The oxygen is already running low. If that runs out, it won’t matter if you managed to defend this barricade.”
“Okay, then. Best of luck, Arbiter.” She turned away having already dismissed me.
I turned to Emmet. “You okay here, Frank?”
He looked me right in the face. “I’m a long way from okay. Go do what you gotta do, buddy. I’ll do my bit here.”
There didn’t seem to be much else to say, so I just saluted him. He returned the salute, and I faded into the shadows.
14
As I crossed the city, the Nightwatch strategy changed right in front of me. Their suicide death squad approach had resulted in many casualties, and at some point, the math must have made the decision for them. If you want to kill everyone, you need to have an army—and they were losing people too quickly.
As I snuck from place to place as quickly and quietly as I could, I noticed that they were no longer launching those reckless human wave attacks. Instead, the Nightwatch officers were moving in formation from place to place, using androids as scouts and flankers.
Fighting like this might be a little bit slower, but it would virtually guarantee that they could destroy the barricades. None of the barricades I had been to so far had looked capable of holding off a combined force of the size the Loyalists were now using.
On the other hand, the civilians on this level were no longer restricting themselves to static defense from behind barricades. Many of them, after being driven away from whatever spot they were defending, switched over to guerrilla warfare.
I saw a young man throw a Molotov cocktail from a window then duck back into the dark apartment when the Nightwatch returned fire. He got away and reemerged about ten minutes later further up the street to shoot one of the Nightwatch officers in the back. This time, they killed him—but then a teenage girl came running in, throwing another Molotov overhand. It set one of the Nightwatch officers on fire, and he stumbled around blindly as the flames consumed him. He didn’t scream, but the Nightwatch filled that girl with so many bullets I could only wish she’d picked her moment better.
Many of the attacks did not succeed, but some of them did. Marcenn’s forces continued to take casualties one man at a time, and when they came to one of the remaining barricades they still had to pause and fight their way through it. I don’t know if you can say the guerrillas had a strategy, but the effect of what they were doing—whether intentional or not—was to slow the Nightwatch down. They didn’t know I was out there, but in fighting for every minute of life they were buying me the time I needed to get across the city.
I reached the central hub, but then had to work my way around it to the other side. The enemy now had a large number of androids guarding the elevator shafts, and I didn’t want to be delayed even further trying to deal with them.
As I moved around the hub, I started to move out of the area that was actively contested and into a zone where the massacres were still going on without much resistance. I knew I should just keep moving forward, since I couldn’t save everyone no matter what I did. But I just couldn’t do it. Every now and then, I would run into a situation that I just couldn’t ignore.
The streets near the hub were completely dark, unlike the twilight streets near the external wall. As I was running in a crouch down one of these black streets, something on my backscatter scan caught my attention. Two streets over from where I was, a small group of people were running away from a much larger force of pursuers. The Nightwatch wouldn’t be fleeing, so the people on my scanner must be civilians. I hesitated, knowing how vital it was for me to get where I was going. In the end, I just couldn’t abandon them.
I diverted from my course, ran over to a side street along their route, and waited for them to run by. A few seconds later, they passed me—a group of teenage friends, running for all they were worth. One of them stumbled, a girl maybe sixteen years old. Her friends turned and grabbed her, hauling her up by the elbows and moving her again.
These kids weren’t going to die if I could help it. Soon after they’d passed, the pursuing androids and Nightwatch officers came up behind them. They could see me on their scanners, so they didn’t run right into the ambush. Instead, they held back, giving those kids the chance to escape. They fanned out through the streets, but when I took an android and two Nightwatch officers with three shots, they all stopped in place.
Speaking simultaneously, they called out to me at once with August Marcenn’s voice. “Is that you, Arbiter? You haven’t killed me.”
I came out shooting in a blind fury, and in a short firefight lasting no more than a minute or so I killed them all. Pausing just long enough to strip their bodies of grenades, I tried to put what I’d just heard out of my mind before it drove me nuts. I wasn’t myself, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind, I had to be hallucinating. That’s what I told myself, because the alternative was even more upsetting.
When I came out around the other side of the central hub, I found the first of the gassed buildings. It wasn’t burning, and there were no Nightwatch officers in it or near it, but a single glance through the window as I ran by showed me that everyone inside was lying dead. There were a few bodies on the street in front of the building too, implying that a handful of people had made it out only to be gunned down.
When I figured out that they were using gas, the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I didn’t know how they’d managed to get their hands on chemical weapons, but they obviously didn’t have enough for the whole tower or they wouldn’t have had any need for the death squads.
That building was only the first, though. I found others soon enough, including a huge office building with broken windows on the tenth floor, where people had actually smashed through the windows trying to escape the deadly gas. I could still see their bodies, stretched out across the jagged glass shards. They died gasping for air to breathe.
I caught up with the gas squad a few minutes later, coming out behind them as they were gassing another building. The android proxies ran up and threw grenades through the windows, and then a handful of people ran out of the building choking. The Nightwatch shot them as they stumbled out.
I had to stop them, but I didn’t want any of those gas grenades thrown in my direction. As soon as I saw what they were doing, I turned on my scramblers. The Nightwatch officers stopped and looked around, realizing that someone in the area had just gone dark. But they could no longer track me, and I took one of them a moment later. Reaching out of an alley when none of his friends were watching, I cut his throat from ear to ear with my knife.
They all starting shooting down the alley immediately, but I had already ducked into the building through a delivery entrance. And a good thing, too, because they followed up with one of those gas grenades. If I had still been in the alley, I would have died the same horrible death as the people in those buildings. As it was, I went out of the building on the other side and snuck around, then stabbed another officer in the back.
I escaped again and kept taking them one by one until they circled up for protection. Now that they were all in the same spot, I primed a grenade, and threw it just as they all started speaking.
“Is that you?”
My grenade exploded, and the Nightwatch gas squad was all but wiped out. Again I ran, compelled by some urge to get as far away from them as I possibly could.
The destruction on this side of the hub seemed
more uneven, with some streets choked with bodies while others didn’t seem to have been touched at all. On my backscatter scans, I could see the survivors huddling in fear behind the walls of their buildings.
They didn’t seem to understand, but if they didn’t get out there and join the defenders soon, they would all be slaughtered eventually. This was not a situation for sitting tight and riding things out, as understandable as the urge to do so might be. Cut off from any means of communication, they probably just didn’t realize that their neighbors not far away were fighting back.
It’s always like that. Anytime there’s an uprising, the majority sits back and waits on events while a much smaller number fights it out. If that wasn’t the case, not even an army of men like me could control a population that wasn’t willing to be controlled. The truth is, we count on that—but right now I was wishing the majority would show a little more spirit.
According to my schematics, I was finally getting close to the address Franklin Emmet had given me. I slowed down a little, gripped by a sudden fear that I’d be taken out from ambush just as I was finally about to fulfill my mission. Call it superstition if you want, or magical thinking, but every Arbiter I’ve ever known would have done the same. When your gut tells you to watch out, you watch out.
I’m glad I did, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have seen the tripwire in time. It was stretched taut across the street, less than a block from the building Jones lived in. I saw a gleam of light, stopped because I couldn’t figure out why, and there it was. If I had walked straight into it, the military-grade explosive attached to the other end would have exploded a few feet away from me.
I stepped over it carefully and proceeded with the highest level of caution from that point onward. Someone in this neighborhood was serious about security, and I was willing to bet that man was Andrew Jones.
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 14