Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  They were methodically executing all witnesses.

  Almost frantically, I crawled up behind the burning car and brought up my dataspike menu. StateSec could decide who was responsible for this fuck up when they conducted their investigation, but right now the important thing was for them to get on the scene and do it.

  I opened a call channel, but all I got was a blinking red logo for StateSec and a friendly message. No network detected. If you have an emergency, please shelter in place until help arrives.

  No network detected? That was simply unheard of. StateSec are the police, they have a dedicated network all their own, and they do whatever it takes to keep it up and functioning. If a mile-wide asteroid was about to hit the planet, the thing they would keep running until the fiery end would be the StateSec network.

  I didn’t have long to think about it. When I booted up my dataspike, the men on the bridge turned as if in response and started scanning the bank with their eyes. I didn’t make the connection, but by the time I got the No Network message, one of them was pointing in my direction. Then the shooting started.

  The burning car was good cover, but what was left of the body inside rattled and shook as the bullets hit it. With my submachine gun—a weapon that uses pistol ammunition—I couldn’t hope to hit them at range, so all I could do was crouch down behind the flaming wreck and wait.

  One of the men took out a grenade, fitted it to his weapon, and aimed slightly upward. They were going to blow me up, and unarmored as I was, they wouldn’t even have to be all that accurate.

  I jumped up and ran, firing controlled bursts of cover fire. I knew it was useless, but it might cause them to duck or pause for a moment. Then again, it might not.

  The grenade arced up, came down again behind the car, and exploded in a fireball of jagged metal shrapnel. If I hadn’t run, I would have bled out from a hundred wounds. I ran back up the river, hoping to put the cantilevers of the bridge between us. I needed them close to me, or there was nothing I could do against their armor and firepower. As things stood right now, I was a mouse trying to bite a cat to death.

  They were running toward me, moving with a speed that seemed almost inhuman. I leveled my weapon at the leading man’s face, aimed as carefully as I could, and squeezed the trigger. He twitched his head to the side just before I fired, and my bullets missed him and flew off into nothing.

  So much for the game and so much for bonus points. If I died today, it didn’t seem likely I would take anyone with me. I turned and ran again, legs pounding the pavement with desperate speed. I had a head start on them, but they were closing so fast it hardly mattered. As I raced along, I passed more bodies on the blood-slick street. Some had died in the accident, some had died not long afterward, shot through the head to keep them from talking.

  I got off the sidewalk and slipped down the embankment, getting myself out of their line of fire. I didn’t have a plan, or even the vaguest idea of how to escape this situation. All I knew was to run, and to make myself a difficult target.

  As I ran down the slope, I tripped and skidded a little. I lost my balance and went down on my hands and knees. From the top of the bank, my three pursuers started shooting at me again. With a burst of water, the fourth man came up from the river. He saw me kneeling there and leveled his weapon at me.

  I threw myself to the side, swung my own weapon up, and fired a burst. As I’d expected, the bullets just bounced off his armored torso. He grinned fiercely and turned, but I aimed my weapon straight at his face and he was forced to duck. Instead of opening fire, I stumbled to my feet and started running again.

  Bullets struck all around me. One grazed my leg. I half-stumbled but didn’t stop. To slow or stop was death. Movement was life. On the bank above me, I heard the snap of a grenade being loaded. Aiming up the slope, I fired a long burst to drive my enemies back.

  The man behind me called out to them. “Hold fire, I’m down here with him!”

  I turned and shot at him too, despite the fact that he had probably just saved me from having a grenade dropped on my head. He ducked behind a tree, and I charged straight up that muddy slope.

  They must have been too confident they had me trapped, because I came out between two of them and bolted off despite slipping once in the mud and almost going down face first. I made the other side of the street just before a passing car came shooting past, and heard their bullets riddling the vehicle’s side.

  Now that I was off the river, my options for escape and evasion had greatly improved. On the other hand, my magazine must be at or near empty. Never mind that my weapon was all but useless anyway. I had to keep on running, trusting in luck to save me.

  Someone near me staggered, and a spray of blood burst out the back of his neck. He fell down dead, and I wondered what the hell he was still doing on the street when a firefight was obviously going on all around him. Glass exploded from breaking windows and plasticrete burst from building facades.

  I rounded a corner and came out into a little pedestrian plaza with trendy clothing stores and outdoor restaurants. To my shock and horror, there were people crouching down behind several of the nearby windows. Rather than flee the area when the shooting started, they had all decided to shelter in place. As I ran past them, a bullet shattered a plate-glass window. I saw a blur of screaming faces and open mouths and pouring blood.

  The only thing I could do for them was to draw the fight away, so I jumped up to a fire escape and clambered up until I reached the roof, using the same strategy Gabriel and I had used for a while to evade the android proxies in Tower 7. I ran straight across one rooftop and then jumped to the next, using the free-running skills I’d been taught at the Academy. I crossed three rooftops this way before they got me in their sights again, but soon enough they were right behind me.

  These men were so agile in jumping from roof to roof, they reminded me of some of the prototype tech we had to deal with on Tower 7, or the custom androids at Julian Huxley’s estate. But they didn’t look like androids. In the glimpses I caught of them they looked like men.

  Two of them were closing in behind me and two were flanking me from either side, but all four were taking the occasional shot when they had the opportunity. The only reason they weren’t hitting me was my extensive training in escape and evasion, like how to move in unpredictable rhythms too complex and chaotic to be easily targeted.

  Of course, none of those chaotic movement patterns are as fast as simply running flat-out, so my lead was decreasing steadily. Not only that, but my lungs started to burn like acid, and there was a stabbing pain in my lower right side.

  I felt fingers brush my back just as I made another jump, and one of the men fell off the building behind me. He called out as he fell, but the man next to him made the jump successfully.

  On the building to my left, one of the killers was taking aim. I shot at his face, taking care to use only a single bullet. Of course, I missed, but he ducked to evade and I kept on running.

  The killer on the building to my right loaded a grenade. He aimed it ahead of me, hoping that I would run right into it. Instead I ducked, and it sailed past me into the street below. The explosion shattered all the street-side windows in the nearby buildings at once.

  I heard a sound, identified it as an approaching monorail, and tried to figure out where it was coming from. The act of looking for it delayed me just long enough that the man behind me was able to grab at me. I stumbled for a few steps and then collapsed.

  I threw him off me as I fell, and I kicked at him. He staggered backward and I shoved him, then ran and jumped for the next building as he went sprawling.

  This turned out to be the building to my right, where the man on that side was just about to load another grenade. When I landed next to him, he dropped the grenade and it went bouncing off to become the property of some neighborhood gang member.

  “I’ve got you!” he sneered and made a grab at me. I raised my gun and fired a shot, then ran and jumped off th
e edge of the building without even checking what was on the other side.

  It turned out there was nothing, because the street was too wide for it. I sailed out into empty air, realized my basic mistake, then gasped in terror. All the life I had left was the few seconds it would take me to sail across the open space, arc down toward the ground, then burst apart on the street. I had made the single biggest error you can make in free running, to jump without looking. There is no coming back from that.

  A blur of noise and color came screeching by below me. I didn’t recognize it as the maglev train I had just been looking for. I had no idea what it was except a flash of movement. When I felt the impact, I latched onto something out of sheer desperation even though all the air had been knocked out of my body as if by a giant metallic fist. Something flew by a moment after me, landed on the roof of the car behind the one I was holding onto, and fell straight through. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t have time to think about it.

  My hands scrabbled desperately as I started to slide off, and I was vaguely aware of pointing fingers and screaming. I held on somehow and managed to pull myself up on the top of the maglev.

  I had no idea why I was still alive. All I know is that I was on the roof of a speeding train, gasping for air and trying to collect my thoughts. I had survived the car crash, escaped the river, survived the gunfight, evaded my pursuers, and jumped from a building onto a passing monorail.

  Having been through all that, you might think I was in the clear. And I really should have been; I don’t know how many other people have ever survived so many deadly threats in such a short span of time. But it wasn’t over.

  As I lay there gasping, holding onto the monorail with all my strength, something burst up through the roof.

  I rolled backward, nearly falling to my death off the moving train. I kept myself steady somehow but didn’t even think about aiming my weapon. I was close to panic, not understanding what the hell had just happened. Then I saw the face, the neatly trimmed beard, and I knew what I was looking at.

  It was one of my attackers. He had made the same jump I had just made onto the maglev, but where my jump had been an outlandish piece of luck, he seemed to have made his intentionally. From that fact alone, I knew that he was not normal. With all my skills, I would never have attempted a jump like that if I had known what I was doing. But that wasn’t the only thing off about him.

  He had plummeted straight through the roof of the train into the cab below, which made no sense unless he was ridiculously heavy—yet he had then run across the cab in a matter of seconds to burst up right in front of me. So, he was far stronger than he should have been, far heavier than he should have been, and much faster too.

  Seeing the man up close for the first time, I had the impression of power. A reckless, destructive kind of power. He was lean but muscled, and his whole body looked somehow dense. The kind of body that would sink to the bottom of a river like a falling rock, or smash right through the roof of a monorail.

  As I stumbled away from him, he bared his teeth, an expression halfway between a sneer and a snarl. I couldn’t see his eyes behind his tinted shades, but from the expression on his face he looked more animal than human.

  As the train sped along, I took a step backward to brace my weight. Hudson Bay was coming up ahead of us, and by the time we hit the bridge I needed to be down there in that cab or risk being thrown off on the bend. I raised my submachine gun, then the killer took a step forward and stretched his left hand out as if to reach for me.

  My eyes went to his fingers. They didn’t look natural, something about them was wrong.

  He gave an ugly grin. I think he wanted me to see, because he spread his fingers as he reached out for me. They were long and tapered, more like talons than human fingers. The sight was repulsive, and I raised my gun to aim at his face.

  From where I was standing, I could shoot him clean through the head with almost no chance of missing. Even though I knew he could move quickly, he didn’t try to rush me. He just kept grinning, right up to the moment when I pulled the trigger. Then he opened his outstretched hand just as my finger tightened, timing it perfectly as if to block the bullet.

  That kind of timing is impossible, at least for anyone I’d feel comfortable describing as a human being. He did it anyway, catching my shot in his outstretched left hand. There was no blood at all, just the telltale puckering of synthetic muscle and pleximesh skin. His hand absorbed the force and stopped the bullet, which jutted out of his palm until he reached over contemptuously with his other hand and yanked it out, then he tossed it off the side of the train.

  His grin got huge, like a hungry wolf in a bedtime story. He took another step forward, and I finally realized what I was really dealing with. Illegal prosthetics, a nightmare I’d heard of but had never actually seen. The killer in front of me was an Augman.

  Human augmentation wasn’t a new technology, but it had always been highly controversial. Some people believed it made you more than human; others thought it made you something less. Some people accepted a prosthetic limb if it was medically necessary but drew the line at full-body prosthesis. People who were augmented to the point where there was hardly anything human left in them were known as Augmen, and they were hated and feared across the solar system.

  When the whole thing started, there was a time when it looked like everyone on Earth might get them. Athletes and entertainers couldn’t do without their augmentations, using them to run faster, jump farther, or hit harder. Wealthy playboys used them. Politicians used them.

  But it all started going bad. Organized crime syndicates adopted weaponized prosthetics as way to bring weapons into any space without raising suspicion. That was enough of a problem, but then unaffiliated criminals off the street started using them too. At the height of the fad, a few people much worse than simple criminals took full advantage of them.

  Anyone with a full-body prosthesis could take a lot of damage before going down, and there were some who were less interested in using them to get away with things and more interested in doing as much damage as possible before anyone could stop them.

  The first few rampage incidents really scared people, especially the people who already hated augmentations and feared those who had them. There was a lot of public talk about rounding up the augmented, quarantining them so they couldn’t hurt “tru-humans” ever again. A lot of other people thought that was wrong and argued that it was just an irrational prejudice like any other. Then the Reykjavik Massacre happened. A man with weaponized prosthetic limbs killed 49 people in a crowded nightclub and just walked away, impervious to repeated attempts to gun him down. They never caught the man. He walked all the way to the sea and kept going, and he disappeared beneath the waves in what he must have thought was a poetic death.

  That wasn’t even the most deadly rampage involving Augmen, but something about it just made people’s skin crawl. Maybe it was the way he just ignored all the bullets hitting him, or the way you could still see him walking under the water for a few minutes on the video of the incident before he finally disappeared into the dark beneath the surface.

  Prosthetics were heavily regulated after that, driving several major prosthetic companies under. The last few that were still in business all had contracts with the Sol Federation, so of course there were people who complained about “preferential legislation” and “capitalizing on tragedy.” You could get prosthetics if you were an injured soldier, or if you needed them for some specialized task the Federation had a use for, but that was about it.

  If I’d spent more time on Earth, I would probably have run into one of the Augmen before now. Most of my missions were out there among the colonies, where the maintenance and anti-rejection medical regimen made prosthetics impractical unless strictly necessary. Even decades after their initial development, it was still uncommon to see prosthetics off-world

  So a full-body prosthesis like the one I was looking at now? It was straight-up illegal,
banned by the Sol Federation and all Earth member states.

  I kept backing up, and the Augman kept creeping forward. He could just as easily have caught up with me in a blur and snapped my neck, or ripped my head clean off if he was so inclined. I think he just wanted to show off his power, to terrify me before he killed me. Banned and persecuted wherever they went, the Augmen still saw themselves as a kind of elite. He just couldn’t resist the chance to try to put fear in me. The monster is coming, and even though he’s moving slowly you can neither hurt him nor escape.

  We hit the bridge over the Bay, and the cold blue waters sparkled far below me under the moonlight. I couldn’t win. I couldn’t even keep fighting; if I went on trying, the odds that more innocent people would die went up with every passing second.

  I looked at the killer’s face, and he saw what I was thinking of doing. His grin disappeared, and he came in at me with terrifying speed. I almost didn’t make it, but he still had a wide gap to cover and all I had to do was fall.

  He darted forward as I jumped. I felt his hands on me, but I slipped through his fingers. He screamed with rage as I dropped away, falling toward almost-certain death.

  7

  I don’t have clear memories of what happened next. I know I fell, and I can still vividly remember the sensation, but that’s all. I can’t remember what I saw or heard in that plummet from the train, just the feeling in my stomach as I dropped. I don’t recall hitting the water, though the temperature should have been cold enough to shock me awake even if I’d been knocked unconscious. I don’t remember swimming, and I don’t really understand how I could have done so.

  I only remember a green like dark emerald, and a sensation like fire. In that green I drifted, unaware of what was happening around me. I’m not even sure if I remembered who I was or gave any thought to my situation. It was Fiddler’s Green, the place where people go when they drown, and it was strangely comforting. I could have sunk down into it, drifted down to the bottom, and never been seen by another human being. The way I felt right then, I wouldn’t have objected. Drowning doesn’t always feel like dying. It can feel like rest.