I just stood there looking at her, not sure whether I was okay or not. She said, “I understand,” and I didn’t bother to contradict her. Then she nodded slowly. “Okay. I don’t. But I do know something that might help a little.”
She opened a drawer and pulled out a blackened badge. It read: Senior Arbiter, Gabriel Anderson. She held it out to me.
“When an Arbiter dies in the line of duty, we usually send the badge and a flag with a trained grief counselor to the next of kin. They try their best, but perhaps it would mean more to his widow if you brought this yourself. And it might help you too.”
I kept silent, but I reached out and took the badge from her hands. I looked her in the eyes, held her gaze for a moment, and nodded.
Thank you.
22
As I walked up to Gabe’s house on that tree-lined street, the first thing that occurred to me is that I’d never been there. I’d never been over for dinner. I’d never even met his wife. We were almost always away from home, getting shot at or waiting around for orders. When we had time off, he would usually have a few beers with me and then slip away, heading back to the life waiting for him.
I paused outside, trying to see some hint of the Gabriel Anderson I knew in the white walls, the cozy little fenced yard. I couldn’t see him there. Every time I tried, all I could see in my mind was that jump over Venus, with Gabe yelling about how much he loved it while we dropped through the clouds of poison.
I would have said I knew him, but I only knew what he chose to show. He had another side, a part of him that made more sense here in this comfortable little home than in an armored dropsuit. I held a folded flag and a memorial badge, but those things weren’t him, and they didn’t seem to belong here.
I held back a moment longer, trying to make the puzzle pieces fit together.
The front door opened, and a blonde woman with sad eyes stepped out and smiled. “Are you Tycho Barrett?”
“I am.”
“My husband told me so much about you. Please come in.”
She never touched the badge, at least not while I was there to see it. I held out the flag of the Sol Federation, neatly folded in a crisp triangle. The badge was on top, and I’d been told to expect the widow to break down when she saw it.
That’s not what happened. She just took the flag, not even really glancing at the badge, and placed it on a shelf in front of his picture. Like the house they had lived in, the photo of a smiling, domestic Gabriel didn’t seem to match the man I had known. She looked up at it briefly, as if she was saying something to her husband in her own mind. Then she turned away and walked into the kitchen.
I followed her awkwardly, not sure what I should say or do. She went to the cabinet and pulled down two mugs. “Coffee, Mr. Barrett?”
“You can call me Tycho, if you like. And coffee would be nice.”
“My name is Sophie. I’m sure Gabe already told you that.”
I sat down at the table, and a few seconds later she passed me a mug. It was steaming hot, and the smell of the coffee beans seemed to bring me back—to snap me out of my dissociative mindset.
She sipped her coffee and gave me another sad smile. “I wish we’d had the chance to meet before, but Gabriel liked to keep the two halves of his life separate. He said it helped him, that it made it easier to control the stress. But he liked you. He always said you were a fine Arbiter.”
“Thank you, Mrs… Thank you, Sophie.”
“Don’t thank me yet. What I’m about to ask might be hard for you to do, but I’ll ask just the same. I need to hear the truth, not some comforting story about how he died protecting you, or any of that garbage they like to feed widows. Years ago, Gabe’s partner died under similar circumstances. He played the hero and it got him killed, when all he had to do was run. I always told Gabriel, if he ever pulled a stunt like that, I’d divorce him so fast it’d make his ears pop. Even if he was already dead.”
She laughed nervously at the joke and flashed a pained smile. All she wanted was the truth, or so she said. But Gabriel had gone down fighting, like any Arbiter would have wanted to do in his place. And he’d been covering me when he died, just like his partner Wojtek had been covering him back then. It wasn’t like she thought, but it was probably something she just couldn’t handle.
I took a sip of coffee, trying to put the words together.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Don’t worry about it.”
Her eyes glistened, and I could tell this was something that had been bothering her since she got the news. Had he done something stupid, and gotten himself killed when he could have made it back to her?
“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “We just got unlucky. An android with a heavy weapon pinned us down, and Gabe got hit as we tried to escape. He was just trying to stay alive.”
She closed her eyes, and a single tear rolled down her face. She brushed it off and said, “Thank you, Tycho. That means a lot to me.”
When I stood to leave, she was still sitting there with her eyes closed. I didn’t know what to say, but she solved that problem for me.
“Goodbye, Tycho. And thanks again. I’ll see you next time.”
“See you next time, Sophie.”
I walked out of the house and headed for my car on shaky legs. As I opened the door, I noticed something on my front seat that hadn’t been there before. I felt a surge of adrenaline, knowing that someone must have broken into my vehicle. But who breaks in and leaves something instead of taking something away?
When I looked closer, I quickly saw the dataspike. Even before I saw the note, I was certain it belonged to August Marcenn.
Under the dataspike, on a scrap of paper, I found three simple words, and after everything I had seen on Tower 7, each of them turned my stomach into knots:
There are others.
Epilogue
90377 Sedna is a tiny planetoid, so far from the Sun that its orbit takes 11,400 Earth years. As far as I knew, there was no human colony of any kind out that far, not even a research facility. When I got the message asking me to attend a meeting there, I thought it was a prank.
Then my commander told me I’d been given some unexpected time off, that the time off was mandatory, and that I should take a trip.
When I’d gotten back home, still wondering what the hell was up, I found another message. Aperture tickets for 90377 Sedna, with the flight scheduled for my surprise vacation. I didn’t much like the cloak and dagger aspect, but I knew this must have something to do with what had happened on Venus and decided to go. After all, anyone who wanted to do me harm could have done it much more easily back on Earth.
Now here I was, after the longest Aperture flight I had ever taken, in a small station that didn’t appear on any map, in a featureless room, looking into the face of an almost-featureless man. He was the only person there as far as I could tell. The station itself seemed to be run entirely by androids. They had welcomed me to Sedna, guided me into this room, and then left me alone. The man had come in a few minutes later, and he sat down across from me, giving me a quiet and empty stare.
It was an awkward moment. All I could do was look back at the man as my mind ran through a dozen questions. Who would live in a place like this, and why invite me here for any kind of meeting? And, if we were here for such a thing, why not get to the point?
I held his gaze, and after a few moments he appeared to be satisfied.
“You are Tycho Barrett, currently an Arbiter of the Sol Federation. You’ve just completed your interview, the first stage in the on-boarding process. You may call me the Operator, if you have reason to call me anything.”
This little speech of his was so strange that I couldn’t even understand the words at first. When I figured them out, it still didn’t seem to make any sense.
“Interview? Application process? What are you talking about?”
“Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Barrett? I’m offering you a job. How would you like to work for Section 9?”
Continue reading for INTRINSIC IMMORTALITY.
1
The wall in front of us wasn’t all that high, but the active denial cannons mounted along the top swiveled ominously, scanning the surrounding area for any threat from rival corporations, or even one of Earth’s legitimate governments. Here on the moon, there were plenty of both to contend with, and they often overlapped in dangerous ways.
We were there to arrest some important people who didn’t want to be arrested. That’s a dicey proposition under the best of circumstances. If anyone up here started shooting, the consequences could spiral out of control before anyone had a chance to even ask themselves if it was worth it. The man beside me was probably thinking along the same lines.
Senior Arbiter Byron Harewood was wary, holding his combat rifle in the ready position and eyeing the craters surrounding us. The terrain on Luna, like most moons, was ripe for ambush. Shadows were pure black, and no atmosphere meant no sound to tip you off. There was a very real chance that at any moment a hundred killers could slip from the dark and overrun us. Between Byron's demeanor and the automated weapons over our heads, I got the impression that someone was about to die regardless of whether it made any sense.
He gave the order. “They’re not answering. Do it.”
I inserted my skeleton key into the corporate security gate, immediately bypassing their defenses. The outer airlock slid open and a cultured female voice said, “Welcome to Lua Campus, home of Huxley Industries. Let’s conquer the future!” Somewhere inside, an alarm would already be sounding. They couldn’t stop us from entering without starting a war the company wouldn’t win. That didn’t mean they couldn’t kill us.
I keyed up my dataspike and told our car’s A.I. to park inside. We followed behind it and once we were in, the outer airlock closed and a timer started. I caught myself absently thumbing the safety on my rifle before glancing to Byron and noticing he’d already disengaged his.
The timer hit zero and the inner airlock slowly opened.
As we stepped through into the campus, I had the distinct impression I was walking into enemy territory.
Huxley Industries' Lua Campus is legally a territory of Earth, but from the blatantly hostile stares and tense body language all around me I might as well have been on some outer world, just waiting for someone to lose their nerve. That was when the shooting always started.
That didn’t usually happen here, though. People didn’t just start shooting each other, not even when they really wanted to. Here on Luna, the potential fallout of a clash made people particularly cautious about killing anyone. Still, walking through the Lua Campus didn’t feel much different from walking through the dark corridors of Tower 7 on Venus just before the first sniper spotted us.
Byron stepped up to the elevator and hit the button, then flashed me a look that said be ready for anything.
I gave a nod. We entered the elevator, leaving our escorts staring as the doors closed, and rode up to the top in a spartan silence. Byron stared at the walls as the elevator ascended, lost in whatever thoughts he wasn’t choosing to share with me.
The elevator stopped, the doors slid open, and we found ourselves looking down the barrels of cutting-edge weapon prototypes in the hands of several nervously assertive guards. Byron looked at them like puppies that had just made the potentially fatal mistake of waking the big dog from his nap.
A well-dressed exec strolled over, said, “Stand down, gentlemen,” in an almost-bored tone, then looked at Byron and me. “Yes?”
The guards did as they were told, lowering their weapons and backing off slightly. We stepped out of the elevator, and Byron brought up a holographic image for the exec to look at.
The man leaned in to glance at it then shook his head. Along the top of the image, I could see the words ARBITRATION WARRANT. “I don’t understand.”
“We’re Sol Federation Arbiters. We have an arrest warrant for three of your executives. Combatives A.I. Division Chair Anton Slotin, Ballistics Development Chair Stefan Graves, and Generative A.I. Division Chair Lucien Klein.”
The exec smiled. I don’t know what it was exactly, but something in his face creeped me out, like a rictus grin on a living head. “Whatever the fine is, the Federation will lose much more in the lawsuit that follows,” he said. “Even if you win the lawsuit. It’s just not worth it.”
Senior Arbiter Byron Harewood stepped closer then, intentionally violating the man’s personal space. Byron was a dark-skinned man with a neatly trimmed goatee and mustache, and eyes so serious you could easily mistake him for always being angry. As large and as heavily armed as he was, this would have frightened most people into panicky compliance.
“Do I look like a civilian to you? These are federal charges.”
The exec shrugged, then held his wrist up to his mouth. “Shelly, this is Nguyen. Could you send Anton, Stefan, and Lucien down here please? There’s a misunderstanding they need to clear up. No, they’ll make their two o’clock.”
Byron frowned. He wasn’t the sort of man to put up with any disrespect. “These are criminal warrants. They won’t be going to any two o’clock meeting.”
The exec just shrugged again. He didn’t seem to believe it, or if he did, didn’t seem to care. To a corporate power, the forces wielded by any nation state in the solar system were little more than a nuisance. The Sol Federation was supposed to be the exception, but we hadn’t yet convinced every company of that fact.
One of the guards stepped forward—the one most interested in getting a promotion, I would imagine. “I’m going to have to ask you to step back, sir. Sir, step back.”
He put a hand on Byron’s chest. My partner turned, swiped the hand away with his right arm, and tossed the guard to the floor in a joint lock so quickly and easily I didn’t even see how it was done. The man’s face went a white, and he started tapping Byron’s arm with his free hand in an absurd attempt to admit defeat. Byron waited for the message to sink in before letting him go, and the guard curled into himself with a look of shock and pain. Ngyuen frowned. No promotion for you.
A corporate campus is like another world. The guards are used to being obeyed, but as far as we were concerned, they had no authority. That was the theory at least, but authority is nothing more than superior force. Taken all together, did the guards have enough force to assert their authority? They seemed to think they might. The only thing holding them back so far was their orders. They looked to their boss for some kind of guidance, but he wasn’t about to tell them to start a war.
The executive turned to us, and his smug little smile became even more self-assured. “Unnecessary brutality? Well. This will all be resolved in court eventually. May I have your names and badge numbers?”
Byron simply ignored the man, and the three men we were there to arrest came strolling down the corridor with even more security in tow. Anton Slotin and Stefan Graves both held back upon seeing us, but Lucien Klein came barreling forward.
He was a large man, with a broad and somewhat fleshy face. Neither fat nor muscular, he gave the impression of someone who frequently yelled at waiters for not getting his food just right. His skin was flushed, and his eyes flashed angrily with what he probably thought of as a dominant look.
“What’s going on here? I have a call with… Oh.”
Nguyen gave the man his creepy smile. “They have a warrant. Something about weapons trafficking. Is there something you need me to tell the Board?”
From the look on his face, Lucein Klein had seen this coming—but only in his nightmares, where the consequences he had never experienced before in his entire life somehow caught up with him. He sputtered for a few seconds, then turned away suddenly as if to bolt. I shifted my weight and bent slightly at the knees. If he tried to run, we would have to put him down on the ground one way or another, but Nguyen caught him just under his arm.
“Come on now, Lucien. You know you need to do this. We’ll send the lawyers, and you’ll be
back in time to make your two o'clock.”
It was 12:15.
Byron had apparently had enough, because he spun Lucien Klein around and manacled him before he could say another word. Byron’s teeth were clenched, and his eyes glared fiercely as if daring the guards. They wanted to do something, but Nguyen wasn’t giving the order. If they made a wrong move, I could easily have seen Byron shooting a few of them just to make a point.
Why is he doing this? He wasn’t there with me in Tower 7, and he didn’t lose anyone to Marcenn’s androids. This was just an arrest, one part of a larger investigation. Why all this anger?
I thought of saying something but decided it should wait for later. Instead I stepped forward and manacled Anton Slotin and Stefan Graves over their loud and indignant objections. Phrases like “Do you know who I am?” were thrown around, along with a few classic variations like “You’ll be checking ship registrations somewhere in the Oort Cloud.”
I wouldn’t have manacled them, because it isn’t exactly standard procedure on the rare occasion we arrest a corporate executive, but in this scenario I couldn’t avoid it. Byron had already manacled Lucien Klein. If it was necessary for one of them it was necessary for all of them, or our justification for restraining Klein went out the window.
As for Nguyen, he kept on smiling, probably just as happy to see a few power rivals get taken away by Arbiters as he would be when the company won its lawsuit against us.
“Don’t worry about a thing.” He smiled, but there wasn’t a hint of sincerity or even sympathy for his colleagues in that soulless grin. “You’ll be out in an hour or less. Hang tight for the lawyers. None of this will change a thing.”
I wanted to hit him, irritated with his lack of respect for the law. For any kind of broader society. For anything but the bottom line, and his own swift climb to the top of the corporate ladder. I could have driven my knuckles into his teeth and it would have done no good, so I didn’t do anything. I just turned away, nudging my prisoners into the elevator ahead of me.
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 25