Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  “Doesn’t he always?”

  I stood up. It’s not that I felt better. I hardly felt anything, except a dark combination of numbness and rage. It’s just that I wasn’t stuck anymore. I could move again, and I could take steps toward getting justice for Sophie.

  Andrea nodded slightly, like a little bow. “Good man. Come on.”

  We went downstairs, where Thomas was tinkering with all the things he tinkered with. He looked up when we came in and smiled benevolently. Thomas Young wasn’t always irritated or condescending; when he wanted to show off, he could be downright charming.

  “Barrett and Capanelli! Just the people I wanted to see!”

  “Sorry we were delayed.” Andrea knew how to handle Thomas, which is to say with extreme caution.

  “Think nothing of it. I have things to show you.”

  He beckoned Andrea over to a screen that showed an image of what he had under his microscope. It was the fragment of pleximesh skin I’d recovered from Misha Orlow’s apartment. On another screen, I could see the metallic composite I’d collected at the same time.

  Andrea leaned in toward the screen. “What am I looking at here?”

  “Well, pleximesh skin, of course. And silica fiber joint lining.”

  “So, an android?”

  “That’s what I was trying to tell Raven when you called us.” I looked closer, but I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. What was Thomas so excited about? “I think the person staying with Misha Orlow wasn’t a person at all, but an android. Which raises the question of why a rent-by-the-week slumlord in the shittiest city on Earth would have an android of his own.”

  “I suppose it does,” said Thomas. “But that’s not all. Don’t tell me you aren’t seeing it. I mean, it’s right in front of you.”

  “Don’t tell you I’m not seeing what? If you tell me what I’m not supposed to tell you I don’t see, then I’ll tell you I see it.”

  Andrea glanced at me, perhaps wondering whether my dry sense of humor was coming back or whether I was just having a nervous breakdown. “We’re going to need you to help us out here, Thomas.”

  Although he smiled, I have no doubt that Thomas was simply overjoyed. He got to show us the thing we should have been able to see for ourselves. For a guy like him, it doesn’t get much better than that.

  “First, it should be obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of android design that both the pleximesh and the composite are identical to the materials used by Huxley Industries.”

  “Um… okay.” Andrea frowned. There was nothing I could see in either image that could possibly have given me that information, and Andrea was obviously just as baffled. It looked like neither of us had “a passing knowledge of android design.”

  “Second, there’s the little matter of this number right here.”

  He pointed at the screen, where a series of numbers tracked different facts about the samples. “Do you see what I’m saying now? That’s the spectral signature.”

  “Wait, you mean the radiation exposure?” Andrea was starting to get excited.

  Thomas nodded enthusiastically. “That’s right. Just collecting that sample probably took a year off our good Mr. Barrett’s life. I’m joking, Mr. Barrett, it’s not as bad as that.”

  “I don’t know why you insist on calling me Mr. Barrett.”

  “Because you insist on calling me Thomas.”

  That was an awkward moment, but I handled it by just not saying anything at all. He held my gaze until he knew I wasn’t going to say anything, then went back to his rant.

  “This is where things start to get intriguing. There aren’t many places you can get an exposure like that. Not many at all. In fact, I’d be willing to bet my next paycheck that the android this sample came from spent at least a year in the ruins of Artorias.”

  Artorias. The lost city, people called it. Artorias was ground zero of a large exclusion zone that was flooded with radiation following a containment failure during the early years of boson aperture development. The Artorias Disaster had claimed a thousand lives in the immediate aftermath, and maybe ten thousand more in the years that followed. The city was evacuated, but a lot of those people didn’t really get away. They had already received the dose that would eventually kill them, they just didn’t know it yet.

  Now Artorias was a ruin, and it was technically illegal to even enter the zone. The radiation there had been decaying for decades now, but it still wouldn’t be safe for several hundred years. Human nature being what it is, that didn’t mean that no one lived there.

  Although the city was still essentially abandoned, a handful of diehard locals, dissident utopians, and desperate fugitives made their homes among the ruins. So did a great many animals, unconcerned with the invisible radiation that still permeated the entire zone.

  A few years before, there had been a brief fad for VR docu-gaming set in the exclusion zone. There were people who claimed to find a special beauty in the eerie fusion of human technology and resurgent nature there, although few of them were stupid enough to want to go there in person.

  I could finally see what Thomas was so worked up about. “If that android was in Artorias, then so are the answers we’re looking for.”

  Andrea gave me a questioning look. “What makes you say that?”

  “It just doesn’t make any sense for the Augmen to have hunted down and killed a random man in Sif. We’re talking about a man who takes rent payments in fish, right? Misha Orlow might have been a big deal as a civil engineer, but that was all a long time ago. On the day he died, he was a marginal character. A burnout. But there was something about him we still don’t know, and it has to be connected to our case. The cyborgs tracked him down just like they tracked down Slotin and Graves.”

  Thomas nodded slowly. “Yes. That’s not a bad deduction, Tycho.” Why he suddenly switched to my first name I really don’t know, unless he was just being passive-aggressive in some subtle way. From his tone of voice, he was impressed that I could string two thoughts together at all, as he had assumed that to be beyond my meager abilities. “And don’t forget the others.”

  “Others?” asked Andrea.

  “Yes. When you were all in Sif, Tycho here insisted I identify the dead man for him immediately. So, I identified him, and did a basic check on his known connections. In the 48 hours before Misha Orlow was killed, his son Quentin Orlow was murdered in an apparent armed robbery and his daughter Lara Orlow died with her entire family in a house fire. From the look of it, someone decided to wipe out the entire Orlow family line.”

  “That’s some ruthless business,” said Andrea. “So, what do we have here? A washed-up civil engineer with a radioactive android fresh from the ruins of Artorias somehow manages to anger someone powerful and murderous enough to erase his lineage from the Earth. We’re definitely missing some important puzzle pieces.”

  “And that brings me back to my point.” I was sure of this, even though I couldn’t prove it yet. “The same cyborgs that tried to kill me, the same ones that attacked your convoy and tried to kill Klein, the same ones that did kill Slotin and Graves, are the ones who murdered Orlow’s entire family and then tracked him down to Sif and put two bullets in him. What’s more likely, that there are two totally separate reasons for all this craziness or only one?”

  I didn’t mention Sophie Anderson. For all I knew, Byron had killed her himself.

  Thomas was even more condescendingly impressed. “Occam’s razor. Yes.”

  “Okay, Tycho, I think you’re right.” Andrea was smiling. “The android is the missing piece. I’d bet two paychecks on that. But where is the android now?”

  “Artorias is a place to hide,” I pointed out. “That’s where it came from, and it just tangled with a cyborg hit team and somehow managed to escape. If it was going to go to ground, what better place could it possibly pick?”

  Thomas frowned. He’d brought us down here to show off, but now the attention was mostly on me. He turned to his s
creen and switched to a different display. “All right, enough of that. Tycho Barrett is capable of basic deduction and we’re all quite happy for him. Now it’s time for Exhibit Two.”

  The new screen showed a list of numbers. An extremely long list of numbers. It was nothing but gibberish as far as I was concerned, but the man’s condescension was starting to get to me. I leaned in for a look, racking my brain for any information that might tell me what these numbers were. I could hardly believe it, but I came up with something.

  As Andrew Jones had taken great delight in pointing out, they don’t really teach hacking skills at the Arbiter Academy. They mostly just show us how to use a skeleton key, a little device that gives us access to all the backdoors tech companies are legally required to leave for us. Still, they do give us a basic explanation of how the whole thing works. Buried in my memory somewhere was the knowledge that these numbers were routing IDs. Thinking like a detective, I looked for a pattern in the gibberish… and sure enough, there was one.

  “This routing ID appears over and over.” I pointed at the screen, indicating several spots on the list where the same number repeated.

  The look Thomas gave me then was simply priceless. If his pet dog had suddenly started talking to him, he could not have looked more surprised. “Yes, Tycho. That’s correct!”

  “But where are these routing IDs from in the first place?” asked Andrea.

  Thomas leaned back in his chair and cupped his hands behind his head. “If you would think back to Constable Ornstein, the sadly corruptible StateSec officer who tried to kill Mr. Barrett, you might recall that she had a replacement dataspike for him. Yes?”

  Andrea looked to me. “Yes,” I answered.

  “Well, that dataspike was simply rife with spyware. I mean it was crawling with it. That was the whole point of giving it to him in the first place, from her perspective. So that her masters could spy on him if she somehow failed in her mission to eliminate him. As, of course, she did.”

  Patient though she was, Andrea was clearly growing annoyed. “The routing IDs, Thomas. Stay focused, please!”

  “I’m absolutely focused, I just want to provide all the necessary context and present my conclusions step by step so I don’t get a blank stare and a confused sublinguistic vocalization in response. Yes?”

  She cut to the point. “No. Just tell us what you’re talking about!”

  “Well. The destination address of the software all leads to different networks, but one routing ID appears multiple times. As Mr. Barrett so correctly pointed out.”

  Andrea sighed. “Okay. So, these routing IDs come from Ornstein’s dataspike. You could have just said that. We would have understood.”

  “My dear Andrea, I never have any way of knowing what you will understand and what you won’t. It gets quite bewildering.”

  Andrea gave him a look that would have made me more than slightly nervous, but the genius didn’t look concerned at all. “One more question, Thomas. Please answer it briefly. Have you identified the source of that routing ID?”

  “Yes.”

  She blinked at him a few times, then sighed. “Okay, fair enough. That was a brief answer, which is what I asked for. But it implies another question.”

  “It certainly does. If you’ll allow me to expand, the source of the routing ID is a building owned by Ares Terrestrial. And the same routing ID appears on Ornstein’s own dataspike, which I have of course been snooping on.”

  “Ares Terrestrial?” I asked.

  Andrea filled me in. “It’s an interplanetary conglomerate headquartered on Mars.”

  “On Mars? Why would a Martian company have anything to do with this?” All along, I’d been assuming that Huxley Industries—or at least a faction within Huxley Industries—was responsible for everything that had happened. After all, they were the ones who’d been caught selling illegal weaponry to August Marcenn, and they were the ones who stood to be harmed if Slotin, Graves, or Klein ever got the chance to testify.

  “The thing about Occam’s razor is that it cuts both ways,” said Thomas. He was referring to my earlier comment about all the killings. It stood to reason that there was one explanation for it all rather than multiple explanations, especially considering that the same hit team seemed to be carrying out all the assassinations.

  I didn’t reply to him, but he expanded on what he was saying anyway. “What Occam originally said was not the simpler of two explanations is more likely to be correct, but we should not multiply entities beyond necessity. Sometimes there’s a necessity.”

  Andrea frowned. “Thomas, is there anything else linking Sasha Ivanovich to this case? Anything at all?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing else so far. More missing puzzle pieces, I’m afraid. Still, it does stand to reason that this mysterious android of ours may have the answers.”

  Now that I thought about it, I had heard of Ares Terrestrial before. At some point on one of my Arbiter missions with Gabriel Anderson I had come across the name, probably in some inconsequential way like talking to one of their employees or something. However, I couldn’t recall ever having heard the name Sasha Ivanovich. “Who is that?” I asked.

  Andrea looked at me like she was about to tell me, then made a dismissive gesture. “Just another case.”

  In other words, it was yet another need to know situation and I didn’t need to know. I wondered whether it would still be like this if I took the job with Section 9, or if joining the club meant open access. It would be kind of frustrating if I did sign up, only to constantly be told I didn’t need to know anything.

  The trapdoor above us opened, and Vincenzo Veraldi stuck his head down. “We have a situation.”

  Andrea looked up at him. “Report.”

  “That drone of mine has spotted something. A convoy headed this way. Three cars.”

  I didn’t know where we were in the first place, but it must be well off the highway system if three cars headed in our direction was enough to constitute a red flag.

  “What else can you tell me?” she asked.

  “The approaching vehicles are all the same make and model. A match for what the cyborgs in Sif were using.”

  “ETA?”

  “About forty-five minutes.”

  “Family meeting in the living room in five.”

  “You got it.”

  Andrea turned to me. “We have to assume this is a hit team. You’ve fought these things before. What can you tell me?”

  “I didn’t exactly fight them so much as run from them. Like I said before, they’re bullet-dodgers. The one time I managed to hit one, he just absorbed it.”

  “We have what we need to kill them here, but it isn’t going to be an easy fight. If I get you geared up properly, are you willing to take them on?”

  I felt the rage again, like a cold fire somewhere deep inside me. “I’d walk a thousand miles with no shoes for the chance to kill one of these things.”

  “Great. You won’t need to do that, though. They’re coming to us.”

  She turned to Thomas next, but he spoke before she could.

  “Please tell me you’re not about to ask me to destroy everything I’ve been working on for the past several days.”

  “Okay, I won’t. I won’t ask you anything. I’ll just give you your orders a few minutes from now in the living room. Before that happens, you might want to take the opportunity to back up anything you can to your dataspike.”

  “Have I told you how much I hate you, Andrea?”

  “I don’t know, I wasn’t listening. You have three minutes.”

  Now that the anger had surfaced again, I felt a narrowing of my attention. A laser focus. I didn’t know how yet, but I was going to kill one of these Augmen if it was literally the last thing I did in this life.

  Andrea noticed the look on my face. “Come with me, Tycho. I need to talk to you for a second.”

  I followed her, and she took me aside into the same room we’d used for a private conversation
before we went to Sif. She closed the door and turned to face me.

  “I need you to tell me what you’re thinking right now. You need to check in.”

  “Me?” I laughed. “Oh, I’m just thinking about the Hagakure.”

  “What about it? I told you that quote because I thought it might help you.”

  “And it did, to the extent that anything can help me right now. But I’ve glanced at it before, it’s on the Arbiter Top Five list of Bullshit Warrior Wisdom. Gabriel was never into it, but so many Arbiters were that I had a look at it now and then. And there was one passage that kind of got my attention.”

  “Yes?” She didn’t seem to like where this was going.

  “It was something about not worrying whether you can achieve your mission or not. Like, some people believe that it’s a dog’s death if you can’t accomplish what you set out to do and you just get killed, but to our badass super-samurai author that’s nothing but the frivolous way of sophisticated city people. He says you don’t have to worry about whether you win or lose, you just move straight ahead. Whenever you have a choice between life and death… you choose death.”

  She sighed. “Your friend was right, Tycho. That book is dangerous, especially for guys that don’t read a lot of other books. It’s like letting a teenager read Nietzche, or maybe Simkin. They get all worked up about it and forget to take it in context. I know you’re upset right now, but that whole samurai warrior thing was just a death cult. Yeah, the Hagakure has some wisdom in it, that’s why I shared that with you. But don’t go all Bull-shido on me or I’ll have to clip your wings. The idea is for all of us to survive this.”

  That got through to me, at least to some extent. She wasn’t technically my commanding officer, but for all intents and purposes that’s what she was. When you’re an officer, the last thing you want is for a member of your team to develop a death wish. That sort of thing can get everyone killed, and the last thing I wanted was to have any more ghosts on my conscience.

  The ghosts of friends, I mean.