Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  Andrea rolled her eyes. “You’re being dense! Of course, they could get to them. They could find someone somewhere, maybe with a payoff or maybe with kompromat. It wouldn’t take much. They really just need someone willing to help them insert some malicious code. Doesn’t take a second and gets them in the system. You’re not a bunch of saints, you know.”

  “You’re right.” I sighed. “I’m being ridiculous. It’s been a hell of a day, and I’m really feeling the rivalry thing right now. They tried to kill me.”

  “From the look of your face, they almost succeeded. If I knew she could do that I would have stayed in there with you, but I figured you could handle her yourself as long as you had a warning.”

  That was the first thing Andrea had said so far to even suggest she could have been a bit more helpful.

  “Well, I did eventually. Handle her, I mean. But she has one vicious hammer-fist.”

  “I’m surprised you let her live.”

  “I had to. Tensions between the Sol Federation and the North Atlantic States are already high. I couldn’t exactly kill a StateSec officer.”

  “She didn’t extend that courtesy to you. Anyway, as I was saying, it’s better to stay out of the Arbiter network. At least for now. Any information you submit to Arbitration Command could tell your enemies how much you know, maybe even what you plan to do. StateSec obviously has complicit elements, so it stands to reason that the Arbiters may as well.”

  I didn’t like her analysis, but I didn’t feel like I could contradict it either. Then I remembered something else. I had requested a welfare check on Sophie Anderson, but what if the people they sent to check on her were in on the conspiracy?

  “Oh, shit.”

  “What?” asked Andrea.

  “Oh, shit! We have to get to Sophie!”

  “Gabriel Anderson’s widow? Your platonic girlfriend?”

  How much did Andrea know about my life?

  “Gabe’s widow, yes. I was on my way back from her house when the hit team found me. They could try to get to me through her!”

  “We can’t go there right now.”

  “The hell we can’t, Andrea! This is Sophie; I can’t just run away when she’s in danger!”

  “You don’t really know that she’s in danger. And if she isn’t, then going there now will put her in danger. Ever since that attack, you’re playing for much higher stakes. You need to understand that. Anyone you reach out to from this point forward becomes a target.”

  I must have seemed half crazy, but Andrea just looked me straight in the eyes and didn’t look away. She wasn’t going to budge. This car was going wherever she had already told it to go, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  “I’m calling Byron.”

  “Tycho, I—”

  I didn’t listen to her. I called up Byron on my dataspike, closed my eyes, and leaned back in my seat. The image of his face appeared in front of me, with that slightly judgmental frown I had come to expect.

  “Barrett. What can I do for you?”

  “I need to ask a favor.”

  “Okay.”

  Not anything you need, buddy. Not I’ve got your back. Just okay. He was a far cry from Gabriel, but he was all I had.

  “Do you remember my old partner, Gabriel Anderson?”

  “Of course.” He was looking at me like I was stupid. Why would he forget Gabe? He’d read the file.

  “I need you to swing by and check on his widow, Sophie.”

  His frown deepened, and the subtle but real sense that he was judging me deepened with it. “And this is something you can’t do because…?”

  “I just need you to trust me, Byron. I can’t get there right now, and I’m worried about her, okay?” The tough thing about trust is that you can never just assume it, and I was drawing on an account that we had never really deposited into. We had only been working together for a short while, and we didn’t get along all that well in the first place.

  “You could call StateSec and ask them to do a wellness check. They’d extend you that courtesy.”

  “Byron, please. I need another Arbiter on this one.”

  “That isn’t really what we do, but if you need it done then I guess I can swing by. Call me up in a few hours. I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “Thank you. I really appreciate it.”

  “Harewood out.”

  I opened my eyes again to find Andrea looking at me. “That sounded awkward.”

  “My new partner is a little… straitlaced. He likes to do everything by the book.”

  “There’s doing everything by the book and then there’s walking around with a stick up your ass. And then there’s walking around with a stick up your ass while quoting from the book. He seems to be somewhere around there.”

  I sighed. “Yeah. But at least he agreed to go check on her. Hey, listen, I have a question.”

  Her eyes narrowed a little. Ask a spy a question, and they’ll just start skimming through their favorite lies to pick the one they think you want to hear. “Yes?”

  I thought for a moment how to best phrase it but gave up and said it straight. “How long have you been watching me?”

  She looked away. “If I hadn’t been watching you, do you think you would have made it out of that StateSec station alive today?”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “You aren’t cleared for the answer. And while I could just as easily lie to you, I have... a certain respect for how you handled yourself up there on Venus. I’d rather treat you as a colleague and just not tell you anything when I can’t really tell you anything.”

  I didn’t know how to take that. Had she been there in Sophie Anderson’s house when I spilled my guts about Daphne? Had she been in my home without me knowing it? I remembered the way the door at the station had paused just briefly, catching the attention of the desk sergeant. That must have been Andrea, slipping in discreetly behind me with her thermoptic camo on.

  “I’ve been haunted by a woman before, Andrea, but this is ridiculous.”

  “That’s a cheesy joke. I’m not your personal ghost, there’s just a lot going on. Things that concern Section 9.”

  In theory, Sol Federation Intelligence has eight working sections. Internal Security, Counterterrorism, Interstellar Crime, Interplanetary Conflict, North Atlantic States, and so on. Section 9 is beyond top secret, tasked with doing things the Federation can’t be seen doing. On Venus, they’d been given the task of assassinating August Marcenn. I got to him first, which gave me a certain amount of cachet with them. They’d even offered me a job, although I had blown them off.

  “You’re working on this… conspiracy?” I asked.

  “You know I can’t tell you much, not without permission. But our current mission does have some overlap with your investigation.”

  “Okay. So, what can you tell me about the men who attacked me? You must have picked up something.”

  “Section 9 doesn’t have a complete picture yet. We can’t ID them, but they seem to be a team of fully prosthetic enforcers working for an unknown party.”

  For the most elite intelligence network in the entire solar system, they didn’t seem to know much more than I did. Unless she was still holding out on me. “Really? I could have told you that much. I mean, they all look the same, they dodge bullets, and when they can’t dodge them, they act like they don’t particularly care about them.”

  “If they didn’t care about them, they wouldn’t dodge them. Not that they really dodge them, that’s impossible.”

  “Okay, so they see when I’m about to pull the trigger and then move just before I do it. What’s the difference?”

  “There’s a big difference. Remember Raven?”

  Raven Sommer was a sniper, a member of Andrea’s Section 9 field team. In Tower 7, she’d plugged a few enemies from ambush right before they could finish me. They would never see her, so they wouldn’t be able to pull their bullet-dodging trick. “Okay, so Raven could probably shoot the
m. But wouldn’t they just shrug it off? That’s what the guy I shot in the hand did. He pulled the bullet out and tossed it away.”

  “What were you using?”

  “A submachine gun.”

  She spread her hands. “Well, there you have it, Tycho. That’s just a back-up weapon. It’s pretty much the same as using a pistol. Raven will be using something much more powerful.”

  “Okay. That’s hopeful. But you’re still dodging the question. You’ve got to know more about these guys than I do. I know you can’t tell me everything, but so far you haven’t told me anything I didn’t already know.”

  “You know how it is. Some things are classified, some are need to know, but you can get in a lot of trouble for being wrong about whether someone needed to know something. You know?”

  She grinned, but I wasn’t going to let her off the hook that easily. “Now you’re just trying to make me laugh to throw me off the scent. If it’s need to know, I need to know. I’m the one they’re trying to kill. They’ll probably succeed, and then it won’t matter that you told me because I’ll just be dead.”

  She sighed. “Alright. We think they’re probably connected to the murders of Anton Slotin and Stefan Graves.”

  I just stared at her for a minute. She stared back at me.

  “What?” she said.

  “The murders of… who did you say?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t remember them. You arrested them yourself.”

  “Just repeat the names, Andrea!”

  “Anton Slotin and Stefan Graves.”

  “They can’t have been murdered. They were in Federation custody. We handed them over for prosecution just yesterday.”

  “They aren’t officially listed as having been murdered, but we’re pretty sure that’s what must have happened. Slotin was found dead by hanging in an apparent suicide nine hours ago. Video footage shows one of the four guys who ran you off the road talking to a guard on the same cellblock just before his shift.”

  “And Stefan Graves?”

  “Graves’ body was discovered next to two other detainees after a fight. This was about six hours ago. One of the dead men had a visitor two hours before that, and he seems to have been one of your guys.”

  “So they’re going around eliminating anyone linked to the Marcenn weapons transfers.”

  “That’s what it looks like, although we can’t prove any of it. We have the audio from the prisoner visit and it’s just a mundane conversation. Stay out of trouble, keep your head down, the lawyers are working on it. That sort of thing.”

  “They could have been using word code.”

  “Sure.” She nodded. “In which case the real message was probably pick a fight with the target and make sure he dies, or we’re cutting you loose.”

  They would have needed some other way to tell the prisoner who the target was, but there are a dozen different ways to do that. It tracked for the most part, although they had shown a lot more subtlety in taking out the two corporate guys than when they were chasing me across the rooftops shooting grenades.

  “What about Klein? The third man we arrested. They didn’t get him too?”

  She shook her head. “Not yet, although it can only be a matter of time. But don’t worry, we’re on it. I was suspicious when Slotin died, but men who are facing criminal charges do kill themselves sometimes. When Graves turned up dead too, I ordered an extraction. One death could be chance, but two within such a short time… it felt like a pattern. Before we even found the evidence linking the Augmen to the two deaths, my team was on its way.”

  “That’s good, but what can you really do here? Assuming your team even makes it to Klein before they do.”

  “Oh, they’ll make it. We have leverage on the warden, so he’s taking steps to make sure Klein is safe until my people get there.”

  “But what are you doing with him? He’s facing Federation charges, and your outfit doesn’t even officially exist. You can’t just pull him out of a holding facility and spirit him away.”

  “Of course we can. In case you hadn’t noticed, Tycho, we can do almost anything we want. He’s being taken to a safehouse, a place so remote they’ll never find it. That’s where I’m taking you right now.”

  This was a lot to process. When I met the man who called himself the Operator on Sedna Station, I had asked him for some time to think about his job offer. He had given me a contact number, but I had never used it and never intended to. I thought that was it, and I would never hear anything about Section 9 again.

  Now I knew they’d been spying on me, and that they were heavily involved in the same investigation I was currently pursuing. Not only that, but I was on the way to their hidden safehouse—where they would also be holding a Federation prisoner, a man they could not possibly have any legal authority to hold. Andrea called it an extraction, but it was close to a kidnapping. And if Klein was their kidnap victim, then what did that make me?

  “You look anxious,” said Andrea. “I can give you something for that, too.”

  “I don’t need any more pills. All I need is an explanation.”

  “An explanation for what?”

  “For your interest in me.”

  She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Come on now, Tycho. What makes you think I have any interest in you? Goodness, you men are all alike.”

  I almost blushed, even though I could see perfectly well that she was only messing with me. “I don’t mean you, Andrea. I mean Section 9. Why are you bringing me to your safehouse?”

  “I thought it was obvious. You’ll die if we don’t. I mean, if we’re being honest, you got incredibly lucky today.”

  I thought back over my day. I had survived a car crash, retrieved my weapon, escaped a flooded car, fought my way past four killer Augmen, jumped on a passing maglev train, survived a fall into freezing water, and won a hand-to-hand fight with a killer StateSec officer.

  “It wasn’t all luck.”

  She put a hand on my arm. “I know it wasn’t. You’re a genuine tough guy. Happy?”

  I shook my head and laughed. It took a hell of a lot to impress Andrea Capanelli, and I wasn’t there yet. “I just don’t understand what this has to do with me. I never said yes when The Operator asked me to join Section 9. I’m not one of your people.”

  “Okay, you never said yes.” She shrugged. “But you never said no. I decided to extract you. Call me sentimental.”

  “Sentimental?” That wasn’t exactly the first word I would have used to describe her.

  But she was grinning again. She had a weird sense of humor. “Yeah, you know. An old comrade in arms, gets himself in over his head, he’s marked for death… how could I not do something about it?”

  “Marked for death. I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “You get used to it.” Unfazed as ever.

  “But why me?” I asked. “I just arrested some corporate types. Surely the Huxley Industries people aren’t stupid enough to take that personally.”

  “They probably wouldn’t have if you’d just arrested them. Your partner Byron Harewood hasn’t had any trouble at all as far as we can tell. It’s not just that you arrested them, but that you’ve shown interest in the case since then. That’s what we think anyway.”

  “Hmmm. Those three were probably meant to be scapegoats. Pin the blame on them, make sure they die before going to trial, then ride out the storm. But if anyone looked too closely…”

  She nodded. “There’s a trail of some kind, even if we can’t see where it is yet. I agree. You were marked for death not because you were one of the arresting Arbiters but because you showed an interest in the details of the case. Byron, being Byron, didn’t look any closer. They probably just consider him harmless.”

  “Could you please stop using the phrase marked for death?”

  She pouted. “For a potential recruit, you’re awfully sensitive. I hope the Operator knows what he’s doing.”

  I ignored that. “It’s true t
hat I accessed the case files just a few minutes before being hit on the road.”

  “If they were in your dataspike, they saw everything you were doing. They might even have put in the kill order then and there.”

  “I don’t know. It seemed more planned out than that.” I thought about the maglev train, and the meticulously cruel reconstruction of Daphne’s last few minutes.

  “Well, either way. We still see you as a prospect. Section 9 could use someone like you: you’re careful, you’re well-trained (no matter what Jones used to tell you), and most importantly you’re empathetic.”

  Andrea herself was such a hardcase, I was half inclined to take this as an insult. “Empathetic? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “I’m really not. Intelligence work requires hard choices, and some of those choices would break a weaker man. Emotional coldness is a type of brittleness. We need someone strong enough to feel things, when appropriate.”

  I thought back to Venus, and the thousands of people who died without anyone to help them, without anyone to fight for them, even though Section 9 was there all along. They didn’t intervene, not until it furthered their mission. And then they went to war, proving they could easily have done so all along. That was the main reason I hadn’t taken the job offer.

  Andrea was looking at me. “You’re still mad about Tower 7, aren’t you.”

  “I’m not… mad,” I said. “I don’t know what I am exactly. But it doesn’t sit well with me.”

  “I understand. We would have moved quicker if we could have, but we had a job to do.”

  “Then maybe it’s a job I’m just not suited for.”

  “You might be right, but on the other hand the sort of person unaffected by those hard choices isn’t right for the job either. What we do is sometimes harsh. Maybe even evil, if that’s the word you want to use. But it must be done. That’s what Section 9 is for, to do the things that must be done.”

  I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t. The Arbiter Force wasn’t all that different; our job was to solve problems for the Sol Federation by any means necessary. It’s just that we were on one side of an invisible line, and she was on the other, beckoning to me to cross.