Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5
Page 15
My interest in meeting him was certainly piqued, but from the look of things around his housing complex it wasn’t going to be easy. The tripwire up the street was only one of his defenses. In front of his building, a labyrinth of makeshift barricades restricted access to the front door—and there were bound to be more traps. If I wanted to get to him, I would have to bypass his many defenses.
I looked around and was pleased to see that the building next to his complex was only a few feet away from it. I could go in through that building, jump from one roof to the next, and then come down through his roof access door. He could just as easily have placed a booby trap there, but maybe not. There’s always a case to be made for leaving yourself a way out.
Standing there in front of the building, I felt uncomfortably exposed. For all I knew, Jones could easily be watching me from the window—and who knew what he was thinking?
I went to the door of the building next to his, checked it carefully for traps, and went in. My scramblers were still on, so I didn’t know whether there was anyone in the building or not, but I didn’t see anyone. I didn’t see any dead bodies either. As far as I could tell, this neighborhood hadn’t been attacked at all.
That was cause for relief, but it was also a bit of a mystery. If Jones was so good at defending his space, why wasn’t he interested in helping anyone else? Some people are like that, but normally ex-military types would be the first to help in a crisis. As far as I could tell, Jones had made sure of his own safety and then locked his door, turning his back on the rest of the tower.
And the strangest thing about that was that it couldn’t work; he would die when the air ran out just like everyone else. I didn’t know the man, but I already felt suspicious of him. There was something about Andrew Jones I didn’t understand, and most people are perfectly easy to figure out. That made him a wild card, and a wild card was not what I needed.
I went up to the roof, ran across, and took the jump. As I was soaring over the gap, I was suddenly seized by the paranoid fear that the roof would explode when I landed on it. That didn’t happen, but the sudden fear did make me flinch. I landed badly and stumbled along for two or three feet until I smacked directly into the roof access door.
So much for booby traps. If he had set up the door, the trap would probably have gone off when I ran into it. So having accidentally tested the door, I threw it open and stepped through into his building.
According to the address Frank had given me, Jones was in apartment number 255. I walked through the corridor, eyes peeled for any tripwires or other traps. As I got closer, I started to call his name.
“Andrew Jones! Franklin Emmet gave me your address. Andrew Jones!”
He didn’t answer, not even when I was standing right in front of his door. For some stupid reason, it didn’t occur to me to turn off my scrambler and use my backscatter scan to see who was in the apartment. I think I was probably just so caught up in the moment, so focused on getting that dataspike to someone who could help me, that I developed something similar to target fixation.
It was a little bit like what had happened in the movie theater, when I almost let that Nightwatch officer get the jump on me until Gabriel intervened. If he had been there, he would probably have smacked me in the head for letting my mind wander like that.
Whatever the reason for it, I didn’t check whether anyone was there or not. I didn’t even try to clear the room properly. I just checked the door, found out it was locked, and kicked it open. Then I stepped in, calling out his name again. “Andrew Jones?”
As soon as I did so, I realized exactly how stupid I was being. If the door had been boobytrapped, it could have blown my foot off. I took a deep breath, willing myself to slow down—and then I froze, because the barrel of a gun was pressed against my neck. Right where my armor offered me no protection at all.
“Being a little hasty, aren’t you?”
It was a young man’s voice, disapproving but mildly amused. I would have turned to look, but not with that gun pressed up against me.
“Andrew Jones?” I asked.
“Go stand in the living room.”
In my peripheral vision, I could see that there was a living room to my left.
“I’m looking for Andrew Jones.”
“I’m well aware of that, but if you don’t go and stand in the living room, I’ll be forced to kill you. And then you’ll never know whether you’ve found Andrew Jones or not.”
I couldn’t argue with that, so I turned slowly and walked over to the living room. The further I got from whoever this was, the more they would lose their advantage. Without the gun pressed against my weak point, they probably wouldn’t be able to hurt me at all.
“Just so we don’t misunderstand each other,” said the man, “this gun is loaded with armor-piercing rounds.”
Armor-piercing rounds. That wasn’t good, but it did tend to confirm that this guy was no consultant. I reached the living room and turned around slowly. He walked over to stop in front of me with the gun still pointed at my head. It was Andrew Jones.
“Well, this is interesting.” He grinned. In person, Jones looked even more superficial than he did in his photo. He could have been the leading man in one of those ridiculous colonial movies. On the other hand, his bland good looks could be read another way. They were a blank slate, a void. You could project anything you wanted onto him.
I opened my mouth, but he held a finger up to his lips.
“I’ll ask the questions here. Let’s start with: What are you doing here, Arbiter?”
15
I wasn’t thrilled to be answering questions with a gun pointed at me, especially when Jones hadn’t yet given me any information about himself. On the other hand, I had good reason to believe I needed him, while he did not yet have any reason to think he needed me. If I wanted to get anywhere, I had to be the one to give something first.
“Franklin Emmet sent me.”
He gave me a look like I was being obtuse and made a ‘get on with it’ gesture with his free hand. I had been shouting about Emmet sending me since I got in the building. He wanted more than that.
I took a deep breath. “He told me he knew a man with the skills needed to get the power back on.”
His expression didn’t change. “And those skills would be?”
“Cyber warfare.”
He smiled, just slightly. “I’m in information security. That means I tell people how to protect themselves against cyberattacks. It doesn’t mean I’m a hacker myself.”
“If you know how to block it, you know how to write it.”
For some reason, he didn’t want to admit this point. “Maybe. Maybe I could improvise, if I had to. So why do you need a cyber warfare expert?”
“The usual backdoors in the computer system have all been disabled; I can’t get in with my skeleton key to tell the system to boot up. My mission here is to get the juice on, but I can’t do it without some help.”
His smile was no longer quite so subtle. “Probably would have been better if they’d actually trained you to hack systems instead of just giving you a gadget. Hmmm?”
Who was this guy? All I could think at the time was that he must be confident as all hell to run down Arbiter training like that. Because of the tension between Arbiters and military, we tend to be a little sensitive about that sort of thing—or maybe more than a little. But it didn’t matter. If I wanted his help, I had to play along. Looking him right in the face so he would know to tread carefully, I made my voice as flat as I could make it. “Probably.”
Jones chuckled. “Easy there, tiger. It’s not your fault. But don’t you guys usually pair up?”
“My partner was killed.”
His face clouded. “I’m sorry to hear that. I know how it feels. Nightwatch? A whole platoon, I mean? Or just a lucky shot?”
“An android proxy with heavy weapons. If you can get into the system and get the power on, you might be able to disable the proxies too.”
“You’re saying you can’t do it?” I was crushed. I had come a long way for this to add up to nothing.
“In general, yes, of course I can do it. In practical terms… no. I can’t do it at the moment. It’s a tricky situation.”
“What do you mean?”
“I do have network access, but I don’t have user rights. I’ve been working on it for days now—burrowing into vulnerable systems, moving laterally while I look for more interesting directories, trying to escalate my privileges.”
I did have a general understanding of what he was saying, but he must have thought I was staring at him with a blank expression.
He grinned, a hint of condescension on him. “Don’t worry about it, big guy. The point is, I can’t get control. Not because I can’t pick the locks to, but because I can’t get access to the only door that matters. The system is fully owned by Marcenn’s dataspike. No one can get control of it except through that. And Marcenn’s dataspike is on Marcenn’s head, a good fifty floors above us.”
He pointed up at the ceiling with a little shrug, as if to say what can I do?
And he was right. Any attempt to get up to the top level would be doomed to failure; no one alive could get through fifty floors of fanatic gunmen and android proxies to steal that dataspike off Marcenn’s head. Of course, Gabe and I had done it—but it had cost him his life.
Jones slowly lowered his gun. “I’ve decided we’re on the same side, Arbiter. I’m Andrew Jones, information security consultant.”
The way he said that, it sounded like a thief calling himself a “freelance acquisition specialist.”
“I’m Tycho Barrett. Sol Federation Arbiter.”
“My friend, if you were any more of an Arbiter, they would have used you for the movie posters. Have you seen it? Funny flick. Little one-sided though. Hang out here for a minute. I’ll fix us both a drink and we can compare notes. Yeah?”
Other than his sly little reference to Arbitrate This, he suddenly seemed a lot friendlier. I got the impression that was something he could do—change his demeanor, change his personality. He could probably change his whole identity as seamlessly as if he was changing a suit of clothes. I nodded. “Yeah.”
He left the room, and I sat down on the couch. Like with Emmet in that senior center, I had to play the game the way this guy wanted to play it in order to get anywhere. I could always turn the tables later—if I needed to.
He came back in the room with two Red Martians, one for me and one for him. Then he sat down across from me, took a sip of his drink, and said, “Okay. So, your mission is to get the power back on. Right?”
“Right.”
He was in control of the conversation, and he obviously liked it that way. “I’ll also bet that’s not your whole mission. In fact, I’m sure of it. They probably also told you to find out what’s going on, and… oh, just for the hell of it, let’s say they told you to arrest August Marcenn.”
I wet my lips with my drink, careful not to swallow any of it. The cinnamon and dry gin burned my lips. This guy was good. He knew a lot about how the people at Arbiter Command think, what their mission priorities are.
He smiled. “Not going to tell me? Okay, but I’ll tell you something. Arresting August Marcenn is out of the question. You’ll never do it, not if you stay here for a hundred years. There are just too many enemies between you and him, as I’m guessing you’ve already found out for yourself. But onward and upward. I can tell you what’s going on, so you’ll at least be able to fulfill that part of your mission. Yeah?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
He took an even bigger sip of his Red Martian, as if to give himself energy for what he was about to say. “Two days ago, Nightwatch Commander August Marcenn exercised an emergency protocol created to contain infection in the event of an extraterrestrial pathogen outbreak.”
My eyes opened wide. I get access to a lot of sensitive information, and I had never heard of such a protocol. Nor was I aware of any known risks from extraterrestrial pathogens.
He noticed my reaction. “Sexy, right? I mean, just think of it. A real war of the worlds, but on a microscopic level.”
The man was impossible to read. He would have made an excellent Stoneface player, and for all I knew that’s exactly what he was. I had no idea whether this protocol he was talking about really existed or not, and I had no idea if there was any reason to suspect an alien pathogen. It would fit some of the speculations Gabe and I had played around with, though…
Jones went on. “Here’s the basic idea. You limit movement by cutting power to the elevators, you prevent panic and misinformation by cutting the comms, and you preserve operational control by quarantining the command levels. Sound familiar so far?”
I nodded slowly. “It certainly does. Not that it worked. The situation out there is way beyond panic.”
I hadn’t noticed myself doing it, but I had already drunk about half of my Red Martian, while Jones had limited himself to those first two sips. Worse than that, he noticed. His eyes darted to my half-empty glass around the same time mine did, and they gleamed just a little bit. He wasn’t being obvious about it, but the man was amused by my self-indulgence.
I put my drink down on the end table, which only made the situation worse by calling attention to it.
The corners of his lips turned up just a little. “I agree, it is. It must have been rough out there.”
I kind of wanted to punch him in the face at that point, but I didn’t say anything.
After a moment, he just started talking again. “So, yeah. Things obviously haven’t gone as planned. Or maybe they have, and neither of us knows what the plan really is. You follow? Either way, trapping people in place with no information from the governing authorities did not turn out to be the brilliant crowd-control plan somebody thought it was going to be.”
He waved one hand vaguely when he said “somebody,” indicating every faceless bureaucrat who ever wrote up a protocol and left poor working stiffs like us to deal with it.
I wondered how he even knew all this information. If he really had something to do with information security, could this be the guy who helped August Marcenn get control of the computer system here in the first place? The longer I talked with him, the less I trusted him—and I had never really trusted him.
“Of course, the protocol has never been used on this or any other colony before.” He shrugged. “So, I don’t know, maybe we should cut the Man some slack on this one. Maybe they just didn’t understand what would really happen.”
I was confused. “But why do they even have this protocol? I mean, extraterrestrial pathogens? Do they know something I don’t?”
His face took on a sort of mocking solemnity. “No, Arbiter, no. The powers that be, as powerful as they are, still make a point of telling you everything. Everything you need to know. Exactly when you need to know it.”
My urge to punch him wasn’t fading at all, but I had to admit he had a point. There must be a lot of things my bosses didn’t tell me. “Okay. So, they didn’t think I needed to know. But still, extraterrestrial pathogens?”
He scratched behind his ear. “I have to admit, it’s a little bit far-fetched. At least at first glance. Any pathogen that evolved to infect an alien species would probably not be able to infect human beings at all. But that’s only one way to look at it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Imagine it’s not just an extraterrestrial pathogen, but one that’s been engineered. A bioweapon. An alien virus we have no defenses against, but one that’s been genetically modified to be able to infect humans. It could wipe out a whole colony at
a single stroke, and if they were lucky and got a quarantine breach it could maybe even spread back to Earth. A partial success would leave us weak, but a total success would leave us broken. They could come in and mop us up anytime they wanted.”
“Is that what we’re dealing with here?” I was stunned, although the murderous behavior of the Nightwatch did make me think of a contagion—especially the way it seemed to have spread from the Loyalists to the Defectors. First you were normal, and you knew better than to murder everyone just because August Marcenn told you to. Then, for whatever reason… you weren’t, and you didn’t.
He shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. I’ve been so busy trying to crack the computer system here that I haven’t had much time to think about it. All I really know is that August Marcenn initiated the protocol, which may imply that he thought there was a risk of such a pathogen. Whether there really was or not.”
“Why did they ever develop the protocol in the first place? Did something happen?”
“They don’t tell me everything either, Arbiter. I’m just a consultant. I’m every bit as need-to-know as you are, it’s just that they think I need to know different things.”
Jones was so good at spinning words around that I almost lost track of the parts that didn’t add up. That is, I almost lost track… but not quite. “Hold on a minute. So, Marcenn activated this secret protocol. That makes sense as far as it goes. But how is killing civilians a part of this protocol?”
He held my gaze, as if he expected me to do something and wanted to be ready for it. “It isn’t. Mass executions are definitely not part of the protocol.”
“So, what the hell’s going on then? Is that the pathogen?”
His eyes flickered sideways. It made me suspicious. Was there someone else behind me? But then he was focused on my eyes again. “It could be. I don’t know.”
I wasn’t satisfied. Jones had given me a lot of information, but I still got the sense that there was a lot he wasn’t saying. “No,” I continued. “No, that can’t be it. I mean, that can’t be all of it. August Marcenn didn’t just cut the power to the elevators; he shut down everything. He did that right at the beginning. If he’d been infected by some alien pathogen, he wouldn’t have activated the protocol at all. If he wasn’t infected, he didn’t have any reason to try to kill everyone.”