What do you say to that? I’m kind of bad, but I’ll never be as bad as you?
I closed my eyes, more to get out of the conversation than anything else.
10
When I opened my eyes again, I was surprised at the time. We’d been driving for over nine hours, and I had no idea in what direction. When I glanced at the GPS, I found the app offline. I immediately assumed that Andrea had some device to keep it from connecting. I wasn’t just going to a safehouse. I was being taken to a secret location.
“Where are we?” I asked, just to be obnoxious.
Andrea chuckled. “We’re almost there. I’m glad you’re up, though. You were asleep so long, I was starting to get a little worried about you.”
“Almost there is not a location, Andrea.”
“You really took a hell of a beating there. I wouldn’t have thought Ornstein could have done that to you.”
“It wasn’t just Ornstein. It was four Augmen, a river, a maglev, and the Bay. I’m not immortal. And we’ve already been over this.”
“Well, you must be damn close to it. I think your candle was flickering there a little bit.”
“You’re just buttering me up, so I won’t keep asking you where we are.”
“You’ll see where we are in just a few minutes. Would your old friend Andrea steer you wrong?”
Andrea wasn’t exactly an old friend, or a new friend, or even someone I’d known for a long time. She was someone I’d been through Tower 7 with. That wasn’t nothing—we had a connection—but I didn’t think it was solid enough to put any weight on. I didn’t really believe she’d steer me wrong unless her mission depended on it.
I tried to put all of that into a pithy little reply, but what came out was, “I don’t know, Andrea, would you?”
She pursed her lips. “If you need to make a call, you’d better do it. We keep radio silence at the Grotto.”
“The Grotto, huh?”
“It’s just a codename.”
“Okay.” I called Byron, crossing my fingers that he had checked on Sophie by now. After nine hours on the road, the killers had had plenty of time to get to her if they were planning to. He didn’t answer right away, and I found myself drumming on the dashboard with my fingers in impatience and anxiety.
His face appeared in my vision. “Harewood here.”
“Did you get the chance to check on Sophie Anderson?”
He nodded. “Sure. I said I would, didn’t I?”
“Well, what did you find?”
“I didn’t find anything. No signs of trouble, nothing weird going on. If anything was wrong, I would have called you.”
“You didn’t see anyone suspicious in the neighborhood?”
His brow furrowed. “Suspicious how?”
“Anyone watching the house, lurking around outside? A man with a short beard, maybe?”
“No. That would have been something weird going on. What is this, Tycho? Are you in some kind of trouble?”
Andrea shook her head and raised a finger to her lips.
“No. Look, I’m out of town. If you could check in on her again, I’d appreciate it.”
I dropped the call, not giving him a chance to respond. Then I turned to Andrea. “So you don’t trust Byron now?”
“I don’t trust anyone.”
The car rolled to a stop, and the doors popped open. All I saw was a pine forest, so deep and dark we might as well have been in Siberia. When I stepped out and looked around, I saw that we had parked in front of a large house with huge glass windows, elegant lighting, and even tasteful landscaping. It was a rich man’s getaway, a summer retreat for some corporate overlord like Julian Huxley.
“So… where are we?” I asked, and Andrea laughed.
“We’re here, obviously.” She opened a panel on the side of the car, pulled out the charging cable, and plugged it into the side of the house.
“No garage?” I asked.
“It’s full.”
I sighed as the knowledge that Sophie was alright finally sank in.
Andrea looked concerned. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay now. I was worried about Sophie.”
“I get it. When you have someone you care about, it makes everything complicated. You look more relaxed now that you’ve had a chance to check on her.”
She was right, I did feel more relaxed. After nine long hours, it seemed a lot less likely that anyone was going to go looking for her. It was me they wanted, not the widow of a dead Arbiter who could no longer hurt them. I sighed again, much longer this time. I was letting the tension out, but the act of doing so did something to my injured collarbone. I winced in pain, and Andrea frowned with concern.
“What’s going on there, Tycho? Let me have a look.”
She took my arm and pulled it closer, and I gritted my teeth against the sudden agony. “Jesus Christ, Andrea!”
“You’d better believe it. Without divine intervention, I don’t think you’d be standing here right now. How long has your clavicle been broken?”
I thought back to the day before—was it the day before? Yes, it must have been. In a car with the screen off, you can lose track of time altogether. In several hours of dreamless sleep, I must have passed through an entire night like it was nothing. “Uh… eleven hours?”
“We need to get you inside, see what we can do about this. And your other wounds too. Come on.”
I couldn’t argue with that, although I didn’t exactly think of Andrea as the caregiver type. Field medic when she had to be, maybe—which is what this was. She led me up to the front door, where an automated cannon tracked her movements from the roof. She looked straight up at it and it powered down, satisfied that she was who she was supposed to be.
I glanced up at it too, wondering what the A.I. made of Tycho Barrett. “Strange choice for a safehouse, isn’t it?”
“Not for a location this remote. If we went with something smaller, it wouldn’t make any sense for it to be out here. On the other hand, this is exactly the sort of place a rich guy would have for a getaway.”
“And the cannon?”
“He’d have that too.”
The door slid open, and we went through into a large and comfortable living room with several plush couches and piles of pillows. There was a working fireplace against one wall, a private bar, and a billiards table. The whole place was flooded with natural light from the windows, but the branches of the pine trees cast broken shadows across everything.
“I’m back,” called Andrea. “Look who I brought.”
I heard a kettle whistling—an actual kettle, something I’d seen maybe once in my entire life. “Hold on,” called a voice. “The tea’s ready.”
“Lemon and two sugars,” Andrea replied. Then she turned to me. “You?”
“Ummm… black, I guess?”
“Predictable. One black, Raven.”
Raven Sommer, Andrea’s expert sniper. Like all the others on Andrea’s team, I hadn’t seen her since I left Venus. Not that I’d spent much time with her then either, as she was usually skulking somewhere looking for her next shot. From our brief interactions, I remembered her as a black-haired woman with light brown skin, and a mischievous attitude that seemed mildly disturbing for someone of her profession.
“One lemon with two sugars, one black,” she called. “Coming up.”
Andrea touched my arm gently. “Come over here and sit down, Tycho. This isn’t going to be easy.”
She led me over to one of the couches, and Raven came in with three china teacups. She set two of them down on the little table in front of the couch and took her own to a leather easy chair across from us. She flipped her dark hair out of her face.
“Oh, look.” She smiled. “It’s Tycho Barrett! Welcome to the Grotto, Tycho. Are you part of the family now?”
Her smile was so sweet, I almost forgot for a minute that her specialty was killing from a distance. “I… um…”
Andrea’s voice was vaguely amused. “Besides bein
g tongue-tied whenever a woman smiles at him, Tycho is currently in a transitional state.”
“A transitional state?” I frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means she’s still hoping you’ll join Section 9.” Raven sipped her tea. “Try the tea, Tycho, it’s oolong. You look like you could use something soothing.”
It wasn’t easy to try the tea, since Andrea was already starting to work my sleeve off so she could do whatever she was planning to do to me. I picked the cup up awkwardly, managed to taste it, then spilled a large swallow down my chin. Raven put a hand over her mouth to cover up the fact that she was laughing at me, but I could see it in her eyes.
I put the cup down. “That was… hot.”
This time, both women laughed.
“Give the tea a break for a minute,” said Andrea. “It needs to cool down anyway, and we need to get your shirt off.”
“I’ll take care of it.” I tried, but the shirt turned out to be crusted with blood and soaked with sweat. When I tried to wrestle it off me, I ended up yelling.
Raven was horrified. “What are you doing? Stop hurting yourself, Tycho, you need some help.”
She put her tea down and hurried over, moving so quickly and fluidly that it was easy to imagine that she was about to perform a mercy killing. Instead, she wiggled my shirt off me and pulled it away, leaving my broken clavicle exposed.
“This is really fucked up, Andrea. Look at this.”
Andrea leaned in for a closer look. Her eyes got big. “You mean you won a fight like that? Holy shit, Tycho. You are one hell of a hard ass!”
“I don’t feel like one. I feel like a dog on the way to its last vet appointment.”
“Well, I’d put you to sleep if I could, because this is going to hurt. We probably don’t want to put you under completely with the facilities we have here, though. I can keep the pain to a minimum, but it will still hurt.”
“If I’m such a hard ass, I guess I’ll just have to grit my teeth and deal with it.”
“That’s a big boy. Hold on, I’ll get my stuff.”
I shook my head at the condescending comment. I guess she just figured she couldn’t compliment me if she didn’t make fun of me a little too. Raven sat down beside me as Andrea went into another room.
“Is everyone here?” I asked.
Raven shook her head. “Not quite. Andrew Jones is off world chasing down a lead for us. Everyone else is here, though. Even you!”
I was mildly disappointed to hear that Jones was not around, which surprised me because I found the man extremely unlikeable. He was an infiltration specialist, and the first member of Section 9 I had met on Venus. He had spent most of our opening conversation making fun of the Arbiter Force and implying that our training was not up to standard.
I had seriously considered punching the man, but in the end, we had spent several hours fighting side by side against androids and Nightwatch officers. Apparently, that was enough to make up for his personality, because I wouldn’t mind having a beer with him. On the other hand, having tea with Raven wasn’t bad either. At least she wasn’t making fun of my training.
I smiled a little. “It feels weird to see you here.”
“Why is that?”
“I guess I just think of you as this force of vengeance, hovering somewhere in the background on some Venusian rooftop.”
“It’s not always a rooftop, and it’s not always on Venus. But a force of vengeance? Yeah, that’s me. Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy a cup of oolong.”
She winked.
I didn’t know whether she was flirting with me or not, so I looked down at my feet.
Raven shook her head and called out to Andrea. “Tycho is one shy little guy.”
“He’s not that little,” Andrea replied, coming back in the room with her gear. “But yeah, he’s a shy one. I’ve got my med-kit and my hypospray. Raven, you know what’s about to happen.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice. See you later, Tycho.” Raven stood up, retrieved her tea as quickly as possible, and hurried out of the room like there was a mean dog after her.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“Hold on a sec, here’s the anesthetic.” Andrea injected the hypospray somewhere on my neck, and I was suddenly aware of a huge improvement in my situation.
“Wow. I didn’t realize how much pain I was in until it stopped.”
“It’s about to start up again, but it won’t be as bad.”
She fished around in her med-kit and came out with a small but extremely sharp-looking surgical knife.
“Now, you asked a question.” She started working, and she was right, it hurt. It felt like a rabid animal chewing on my collarbone. But it felt strangely distant, like it was all happening to someone else.
“I did. What was that with Raven? She ran out of here like something was after her.”
“She has aichmophobia.”
“Aichmophobia… a fear of knives?!”
“Knives, needles, sharp corners… you name it. She can’t handle sharp things. It’s probably why she’s a sniper.”
It seemed kind of strange that an elite paramilitary intelligence unit would hire someone who couldn’t handle sharp things. Especially considering that Andrea’s second in command, Vincenzo Veraldi, was an expert knife fighter. “How does she get along with Veraldi?”
“Things are sometimes tense. But that’s probably more to do with… well, I’ll leave it at that.”
I didn’t ask. The pain in my collar was getting too intense for me to think of anything else. I was starting to see black around the edges of my vision.
“Hang in there, Tycho. You didn’t just break this, you fucked it up nine ways to Sunday. Who told you to get in the fight of your life with a broken clavicle?”
“You did? When you told me not to trust her and then slipped out the door?”
“If I hadn’t done that, you would never have made it out of that StateSec station. Here comes the hard part.”
I had definitely been under the impression we were already in the hard part. Whatever the hard part was, it hurt a lot more than what I had thought was the hard part.
“What the hell are you doing in there?!”
“I’m setting and bracing the bone with a nanomesh film, then injecting you with another hypo—this one filled with nanites. They’ll fill in the gaps until the bone grows back. I’ll get you back as a working team member. No need to replace you or retire you early.”
“Retire me?!”
“No need to worry about that. Put it from your mind.”
I heard the laughter in her voice, but that didn’t mean for sure that she was only joking.
“Andrea, I…”
“Hush. I need to focus.”
I’ll give her this—as much as it hurt for her to perform surgery on me while I was still awake, she knew what she was doing. Her movements were quick and accurate, and I wasn’t nervous. Other than her little reference to retiring me.
She pulled back to look at her work for a second. “Okay, you can talk again. Hopefully not just to complain. I’m doing the best I can here.”
“No complaints. You seem to be on top of it. Did you used to be a doctor?”
“Wouldn’t that be something, if they’d recruited me straight out of medical school into a top-secret team of elite spies? No. I have my skills, but not that many. My talents have always been more about breaking things than fixing them.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“I’m not a reassuring kind of girl.” This wasn’t true. She could be reassuring when she wanted to be, but it was more of a leadership skill than an interpersonal one. “Anyway, you already said I was doing a good job, so you can stop your complaining! No, I’m not a doctor, but my mother was. Back on Mars.”
“Yeah?”
The way she said this, it seemed kind of significant. Then I realized what she was hinting at. Judging from her age, she must have been just a kid during the Gr
eat Martian Blackout.
“Andrea—”
“Hush again and let me work. I’ll tell you a story if you’ll be quiet.”
I closed my mouth. When she was satisfied that I would hold my silence, she continued.
“This is a story about a little girl who was born on Mars about… well, never mind how many years ago. This girl had a mom, and her mom was a brilliant surgeon. A specialist in prosthetics, which is unusual off-Earth.”
It was more than unusual; it was almost unheard of. How could a prosthetic surgeon even make a living on Mars?
“The girl loved her mom, though she might have been just a bit resentful at how little time they got to spend together. What with all those flights off-world to perform secret surgeries and all.”
Oh. Her mother was a black-market prosthetic surgeon. The kind of doctor that made Augmen.
“There were always dust storms, and some of them were bad enough to cover the entire planet. During a particularly bad dust storm while her mother was away one year, the sand buried a reactor complex and it had to be shut down. The other reactors couldn’t keep up with the heavier load from all the colonies, so that one emergency triggered a cascading chain of system failures. Backups and fail-safes went down one by one, and the planet was without power for nineteen days. The Great Martian Blackout.”
When I was wandering around through the empty buildings in Tower 7, Gabriel and I found a lot of bodies. Some of them had been killed by the androids and Nightwatch, but some of them had clearly been killed by other civilians. I remembered a dance club where the staff had been lined up in the middle of the floor and executed at point-blank range—probably over drug territory.
The Blackout on Mars was a lot like that. Gangs settled scores with each other, people looted all the shops, rapists and robbers and killers roamed free. No one even knows how many people were killed before order was restored. There were so many bodies they used construction suits to bury them.
“Now, the little girl had a nanny. Her mom made a lot of money, and a nanny was just a necessity since her mom was away so much. But the girl was mad; she missed her mom and wanted to find her. And she didn’t really understand what it meant to go off-world, so she thought if she went around and called out for her mom that maybe she could find her. She wandered off, and the nanny went frantic looking for her. That’s when the lights went down.”
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 34