Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  Of course, I didn’t drown. Every now and then, disturbed by a random sound like a seagull’s screech or a distant ship passing in the night, I became aware of the world around me with a disorienting feeling of confusion and nausea. Sometimes I remember kicking or spitting water like a breaching whale, rolling between the waves.

  These are disconnected images, not coherent thoughts. They’re little flashes of consciousness, soon replaced by the same contented nothingness. It almost swallowed me, and if I had ever fallen completely asleep it would have.

  Something was burning, and that feeling kept me awake.

  I kept drifting down into that peaceful green, only to be jolted awake. The bay felt nice, a good place to rest, but then the burn would flare, excruciating. I would open my eyes and see the waters and the sky, uncomprehending. My memories of the water are just those three things—the green, and the burning, and the disconnected moments of terror.

  After some time had passed, a span that could just as easily have been ten years or ten minutes, I became aware that I’d stopped moving.

  Something hard was against my shoulder, and I kept bumping into it over and over. Every time I did, it sent a white-hot spear of pain stabbing through neck and chest.

  I was alive and conscious, despite having jumped from the top of a maglev train into the Hudson Bay.

  And it was freezing now. I had to get out of this water, or I would close my eyes and just sink down to the bottom as I so nearly had already.

  I turned and looked up and saw that whatever was bumping into me was made of plasticrete. It took me a little while, several minutes probably as the onset of hypothermia makes a man dull, but I remembered eventually. The northern end of the bay had plasticrete tetrapods to reduce erosion and reinforce the seawall. I’d bumped into one of those, and if I could climb on top of it, I could get out of the water and eventually to shore.

  That was not a small “if,” because how do you climb up anything with a broken collarbone? I had somehow swum with one, if you can call it swimming, but I was semi-conscious at best while it was happening and didn’t understand that what I was feeling was extreme pain. I understood it now, and it didn’t seem likely that I could force myself up there.

  On the other hand, I had made it this far. It occurred to me in a vague way that I had one hell of a will to live, which filled me with a perverse pride. Is anything strong enough to kill Tycho Barrett? Maybe so, but nothing I’ve seen so far.

  Fuck it, I thought. Fuck them all!

  With a surge of anger, in a moment worthy of its own motivational poster, I got an arm around the tetrapod and began the horrifically laborious process of dragging my body up it while screaming loud enough to frighten away every bird and beast within a kilometer of the sound.

  I blacked out twice, coming to after intervals of flashing whiteness to scream again. When strength wears out and you have nothing left, you can still keep going on ego alone. Having decided I intended to live I was taking it quite literally to the wall. I don’t know how I did it, but I found myself on the top of the tetrapod at last. I lay there gasping, resting my head on the tetrapod behind it. It was hardly the most comfortable bed I had ever been in, but it was a big improvement over the water of the bay. I retched up saltwater and spit out something green and slimy, marveling at the fact that I was still somehow alive.

  Then I checked behind my ear, found that my dataspike was still firmly attached, and keyed it up. It was long past time to call this in and find out what was taking the proper authorities so damn long to get here.

  When I tried to reach StateSec, I got the same blinking logo as last time, and the same message. No network detected. If you have an emergency, please shelter in place until help arrives.

  So what the hell was going on here? An armed attack by Augmen had already claimed several civilian lives and damaged a maglev in the process. StateSec should have been all over that, and I should have been pulled out of the bay by a search team as soon as they figured out that I had gone into the water.

  I looked across the bay, but all I could see was the gray of the sea and the gray of the sky. No emerald green like in my dreamlike memories. No sign of StateSec, or any kind of emergency response at all.

  It didn’t make sense, not unless all the dataspikes in the area were somehow being jammed by the killers and StateSec still had no idea what was going on.

  Even if StateSec’s connection was down for some reason, the Arbiter network ought to be up and running. Within range of headquarters, those connections are hardened against almost all forms of jamming. At least in theory, I should be able to connect to the internal network even if the whole region had been reduced to a nuclear wasteland.

  I tried to make the connection, but I drifted off into unconsciousness for who knows how long. I only woke up because I was shivering violently. The message that came into focus in front of my eyes said connection attempt timed out. Try again?

  I tried again and forced myself to stay awake this time. I got the exact same message, connection timed out, along with an error code. I started to drift off. In all likelihood, I would have died of hypothermia while I was lying there soaking wet and bleeding on the tetrapod. The only thing that got me moving was a paranoid thought, a memory of the Augmen killers turning to look at me all at once the moment I keyed up my dataspike behind that burning car.

  It was like they knew. Like they were hooked in.

  I sat straight up, grabbing at my dataspike with numb fingers. If it was compromised, they could easily block it from accessing anything they didn’t want it to access. As long as they owned it, they might as well be right inside my head.

  They would know where I was.

  I was in such a panic that I didn’t even think of just powering it down and getting it dealt with later. I needed them to think I was at the bottom of the bay, not sitting here shivering at the edge of the seawall. I wrapped my fingers around it, yanked it from the side of my head, and threw it as far away from me as I could.

  It sailed into the water with a quiet splash, leaving nothing but ripples behind. With any luck, they would think I had drifted against the seawall briefly before finally sinking and go collect their bounty from whoever had contracted them. Even if they did, they would come by and check on me first. I had to get out of here, and I had to do it quickly, no matter how much it hurt.

  I had done so much, survived so much already. The thought of having to do anything else made me sick to my stomach. But it was that or die, and dying would only mean letting them win. I turned and saw that there was a rusting access ladder not far away. If I could crawl across the tetrapods, I could drag myself one-handed up that ladder and onto the seawall. If I did it fast enough, I might even make it to the shore before the hit team arrived.

  Slipping and sliding along the plasticrete, screaming every time I took a wrong step, I made my way. I have no idea how long it took, except that I was acutely conscious that I had given my position away and that my enemies would be here as soon as they could manage it. It felt like hours, but if it had been anything close to that they would have caught me there. For all my desperate frustration, it could only have taken me a few minutes to get across the tetrapod pile and reach that ladder.

  I glanced back the way I had come and groaned with despair. It wasn’t much, but there was a visible blood slick along the route I had taken. When the killers arrived, all they had to do was glance down over the seawall, notice the blood, and they would no longer believe I had drowned.

  I hooked my left arm over the ladder and pulled myself up one step. The sound that came out of my mouth was deeper than a shriek, but too high-pitched to be a moan. Anyone who happened to hear it would think they’d heard a ghost, which was close enough to being true. I stood against the ladder, using pressure to hold myself in place, and hooked my arm over another rung. By this awful method, I somehow managed in time to climb the seawall.

  When I reached the top, I collapsed and did nothing but bleed
for a minute. Then I heard a car, convinced myself it must be the killers, and got myself on my feet. I don’t know who it was, but whoever they were, they had nothing to do with me. The sound faded away, and I dragged myself along the top of the seawall with glassy eyes and a determined stare.

  It would not surprise me in the least to find out that the locals still tell stories about the thing that dragged itself out of the water that day. I only saw one person, an old man out for a walk with his dog. Instead of doing anything useful he yelled in fright when he saw me, then turned and ran like he hadn’t run in decades. I still wonder what he thought I was, because the idea that I was simply a man who had been through a hell of a lot didn’t seem to occur to him.

  I reached a footpath, probably the same path the old man liked to use for his daily walks. It took me past a row of trees, a low wall covered in colorful graffiti, and into a parking lot. This led to an access road, which finally led up into the city streets. As I hobbled along, I ran over what had just happened and what I knew so far.

  When could my dataspike have been tampered with, and who could have done it? It might have happened during our raid on Huxley Industries. The company would certainly have had hackers on staff, and probably at least a few who were capable of such an exploit. They could even have done it when I used my skeleton key to bypass their gate security, using the connection to insert their own code and start poking around.

  But if that was true, what did they find out about me that made them decide I was worth all this?

  Whoever the killers were, they were expensive professionals, with heavy augmentations and a lot of firepower. They had found me on the road away from my home, which meant they had either been following me for some time or they knew exactly where I was going to be and when I was going to be there. The timing of their attack suggested psychological warfare. They left my car with no choice but to either crash into a train at high speed or let them hit me—recreating the moment of Daphne’s death, right down to ending up at the bottom of the river. It was like they were trying to mess with my head, using my trauma to paralyze me.

  So, their attack wasn’t opportunistic. Every detail was planned, and part of the plan seemed to have been to stage a cover story. A freak collision and a tragic drowning, so ironic as to suggest a possible suicide. When they picked up signs of life through my compromised dataspike it must have ruined their plan, and they decided to kill all the witnesses who had survived the crash before sending one of their men into the water to either confirm my death or finish me off.

  From there on out, things had only gone worse and worse for them. There were plenty of witnesses now, and there must be StateSec video footage too. A monorail had been damaged, and grenades had gone off in a residential neighborhood. There were multiple casualties, and clear evidence of killers with illegal prosthetics. That was probably the only reason they hadn’t tracked me down at the seawall, because they knew they needed to lie low and wait for another chance or they’d be picked up by StateSec. Not that StateSec would have an easy time taking these guys in…

  I couldn’t know for a fact that Huxley Industries was behind all this, but I did know that someone wanted me dead badly enough to pay a fortune for it. There aren’t many killers out there with such extensive augmentations, and there aren’t many hackers who can compromise an Arbiter’s dataspike without being detected.

  Whoever it was, they had a lot of resources. But one thing they no longer had was their own little spy device attached to my head, which meant they could no longer find me as easily as they wanted to. I tried to put myself on the other side. What would I do if I’d lost my access? I would try something else, like going after friends and family. Anyone from the dataspike’s contacts database.

  Sophie Anderson.

  They knew where she lived, or they could never have picked up my trail on my way home from visiting her. They would know from my travel log how often I saw her, far more often than I saw anyone else. If they wanted to get at me, Gabe’s widow was the logical choice. And I no longer had a vehicle, or even a dataspike I could use to call her.

  Forgetting my wounds, forgetting the pain in every part of my body, I started to run.

  8

  The desk sergeant looked up at me as I came through the door, blinked like he couldn’t quite believe what he was looking at, then shook his head. The door had almost finished closing, but it paused suddenly before finally slamming shut all the way. Then he blinked again and frowned at the door, before turning his eyes in my direction.

  “You’ve been in the bay.” His face looked mournful if not slightly irritated. People were going in the bay all the time. There was nothing he could do about it. Not many of them came back out though, at least not alive, and he wasn’t sure he appreciated it.

  I nodded wearily and placed my hands on his desk, bracing myself against its solid mass. Finding a station had taken some time, perhaps too much. All around me, StateSec officers were coming and going, filing reports, or dragging in people they’d collared. This was real police work, the daily business of law enforcement. Someone was yelling.

  “You goddamn WHORES! I didn’t stab nobody! He thinks I stabbed him?! I’LL SHOW HIM WHAT STABBING IS ALL ABOUT!”

  Two StateSec officers dragged the shouting man past us, seemingly unconcerned with whether he had stabbed anyone or not. “I didn’t stab anyone, but I definitely plan to” didn’t seem like the strongest defense to me, but what do I know?

  The desk sergeant looked me up and down. “You wouldn’t be the guy who jumped off the maglev, would you? Please tell me you’re not. I’ve got enough to deal with.”

  “Arbiter Tycho Barrett, 783-547-D. I need a welfare check on an individual, and I need to be issued a new dataspike. This is a formal request for interagency cooperation, forms to follow.”

  “Shit. What was that number again?”

  “783-547-D. This is high priority. I need that welfare check now.”

  “Shit. Name and address?”

  “Sophie Anderson, widow of Senior Arbiter Gabriel Anderson.” I gave him the address too, but the fact that she was an arbiter’s widow meant she’d be in the system and they would make her a priority. At least in theory.

  The desk sergeant keyed it in. “We’re a little short-handed. Something about a massacre, people chasing each other across rooftops, and someone jumping off a monorail. Think you can shed some light on any of this?”

  So, they did know what had happened after all. I still couldn’t understand why they hadn’t intervened, but maybe I was giving them too much credit. Maybe the standard response time for a firefight in the middle of the city was more than an hour. It didn’t matter. Even if StateSec was totally incompetent, they were still my best bet.

  “I’ll answer any questions you want to ask me, just get me that welfare check.”

  “I just sent a car. Listen, this might take a while. You guys usually work off-world, right?”

  His implication was clear. StateSec didn’t appreciate me causing problems on their turf and would kindly prefer for me to fuck off. After answering a lot of questions, of course, and filling out a lot of forms.

  My voice was less than friendly, just barely professional. “I’m off duty. I was attacked on the road.”

  “No kidding. Looks like you made some enemies.” From his tone of voice, he saw me as the sort of person who made enemies almost every day. Now that I think about it, that wasn’t completely inaccurate. He was looking at what appeared to be nothing, which meant he was accessing information on his dataspike. “I’m just verifying your badge number, then we can get you in to talk with someone.”

  “Thank you, sergeant.”

  “Okay, here we go. Constable Smough has been assigned to this case. He’ll debrief you in Room 3.”

  Just as he was saying this, a woman in a StateSec uniform came walking by. “Is this the guy that jumped off the train? He’s getting that chair wet.”

  “This is him. Why, do you want his
autograph?”

  “Very funny. I’m on the same case. Let me have this one.”

  The desk sergeant shrugged, then called out to a man who was walking up from behind. “Cancel that one, Smough. Ornstein wants him.”

  “Ornstein can have him.” Smough retreated, obviously glad to have nothing to do with me. Compared to whatever he normally dealt with in his life with StateSec—like a stabbing that may not have happened but was definitely going to happen—the story I had to tell was probably a bit much for Constable Smough. He had no idea. Whatever these guys thought might have happened out there, a team of Augmen killers was probably not on their list of working theories.

  Ornstein turned to me. “Interview Room 3. Let’s do this.”

  I stood up and followed her, but I had no intention of letting this turn into an interrogation. You’ll never find a StateSec officer willing to admit this, but the Arbiter Force is on another level. We don’t answer to them, and it’s usually best not to let them forget that.

  She held the door open and I went in, but I didn’t sit down at the table. Instead, I leaned against a wall, hurting everywhere and dripping on the floor, doing my level best to project strength.

  It was around this time that being soaking wet really started to feel uncomfortable. I hadn’t given it much thought before, because I was fighting just to stay alive. Luckily for me, they seemed to have the heat on. I could even see the slight distortion in the air from the hot air spilling from the ventilation. I wanted to stick my hands in the heat and warm up, but under the circumstances I thought it was important to keep my dignity as much as possible. A shivering, wet dog doesn’t have much authority.