Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

“Okay, I hear you. I’ll keep my head on straight.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, Tycho. Now let’s go meet with the fam.”

  17

  The whole team was gathered in the living room for the “family meeting,” with the exception of infiltration specialist Andrew Jones, who was off somewhere infiltrating something. I looked around the room as I entered and saw Raven Sommer, who gave me her usual playful smile despite her threat to stop flirting with me. She was sitting on one of the easy chairs in front of the windows.

  A few feet away from her, the massive frame of Jonathan Bray leaned casually against another window. Just seeing him lean on the glass that way made me nervous. I didn’t really understand how it could hold his weight.

  To Jonathan’s right, Vincenzo Veraldi sat on one of the couches with his feet up on a footrest. He looked surprisingly relaxed, considering that we would all be fighting for our lives before the hour was out.

  Thomas Young came in just after I did, barely making the five-minute deadline. He looked a lot less comfortable than Veraldi, no doubt because he was still fuming about having his work interrupted and potentially losing data.

  I sat down on the couch, and Andrea walked to the back wall where she could see all of us at once. “Okay, everyone, here we go. Veraldi’s drone has picked up three approaching vehicles, and we have to assume they contain Augmen and possibly other types of cyborg as well. We’re going to face them and destroy them here, but either way this location is compromised. We don’t know how they found us, but it doesn’t matter. The Grotto is burnt, so we’re moving out to the alternate location.”

  “Standard procedure?” asked Veraldi.

  Andrea nodded. “Destroy all potential kompromat. Destroy the enemy. Then bug out and never come back here. Let some rich guy with bad taste enjoy it.”

  There were slight grins all around the room. So, I wasn’t the only one who noticed the shitty artwork.

  “Jobs?” asked Veraldi.

  “Thomas, I know you’re not going to like this, but destroy the lab. No traces for anyone to work over.”

  He threw his hands up in frustration but didn’t question the wisdom of her decision. It was his destiny to have his brilliant work destroyed again and again by the unpredictable demands of Section 9.

  Andrea turned to Bray. “Jonathan, I need you to get Lucien Klein to the hard car and guard him there. If you can’t hold your position, drive off and get him to safety.”

  A hard car was an armored vehicle, capable of surviving a direct hit from anything that couldn’t take out a StateSec dropship. Bray stuck his hand up like a schoolchild. “Can I set up?”

  Andrea shook her head. “We need to be able to move quickly, and you more than anyone. You’re Klein’s bodyguard till this is over. I can’t have you setting up that artillery piece of yours, not when you might have to drive off at any moment.”

  “I can use the little one. It mounts on the roof of the car.”

  “The little one, as you call it, is not little at all. Make sure you aim it away from the house only. We don’t need any friendly fire.”

  “You’re no fun, but okay.”

  “Vincenzo,” she continued. “I’ll need you to set up our perimeter defense. Arm all our mines, our automatic cannons, everything. If you make enough problems for them at the entrance to the access road, it should buy us some extra time to get the evidence wiped.”

  “Understood.” I knew he preferred to use his knives, but there probably weren’t nearly as many opportunities for that as he would have liked. Knives are no good except in close range and getting in close with these cyborgs was not going to be easy. Setting up perimeter defense devices was probably his secondary specialization.

  “Raven,” said Andrea. “You know what you need to do.”

  Raven smiled. “Get up on the roof and take out the cyborgs from above.”

  “You got it. I’ll get Tycho geared up. He has a serious interest in killing some cyborgs.”

  Bray grimaced. “Really? He doesn’t have our training; he’ll probably just get in the way. No offense, Tycho, you’re a solid guy. If you join the team, I’m sure you’ll be an asset. But… you’re not one of us right now. You ought to be the wheelman.”

  “If I thought Tycho would be better as the wheelman, that’s what I’d use him for.” Andrea’s tone was calm, but it did contain a hint of warning. “I need you with Klein, Jonathan. I won’t say it again.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Thomas perked up. “Look, Andrea, I’m not questioning your authority or whatever you call it, but it won’t take you long to gear Tycho up. If you can spare him for a few minutes first, I’ll need some help with the lab. I can’t clean out something that complicated by myself in only a few minutes.”

  “You could if you used an incendiary grenade,” Bray pointed out helpfully. Thomas glared at him.

  “Alright, Thomas.” Andrea nodded. “You can have Tycho until the lab’s clear; I’ll use the time to wipe the rest of the house. When you’re all done with that, Tycho can come to me to get what he needs.”

  She looked at me to make sure I understood. I nodded in response, and she wrapped up the meeting. “Okay, everyone, we don’t have long. You have your tasks, let’s get them done and get into place. This is going to be a workday!”

  Thomas stood up and gestured rather imperiously for me to follow him. We went to the trapdoor and he pulled it open, then turned back at the last moment and spoke to me in a lowered voice. “You must never tell anyone what you’re about to see. It’s a matter of Sol Federation security.”

  I didn’t know why he felt the need to even say that, considering that the whole existence of Section 9 was top secret on pain of death. If I couldn’t tell anyone about that, how could I tell anyone about his secret laboratory? But when we got downstairs, I was surprised to see what looked like a game on one of the screens. It was a 19x19 grid, with white and block dots scattered here and there.

  “Um… Thomas?”

  “Yes, yes. It’s a baduk gameboard; I was trying to beat the Harimbo A.I. No one’s beaten the damn thing in two hundred years now. It has a weakness, I know it, and I think I’m onto something, but I can’t count on one dataspike to back up anything this important. I need you to back it up to yours before I trash this place.”

  “Hold on a minute, Thomas. Are you trying to tell me that in between analyzing those cyborg bodies, looking up all that info about Misha Orlow, analyzing the spectral signature on that android material, and tracking down the routing IDs on Ornstein’s dataspike, you’ve also been playing a game against an A.I. no one’s beaten in two centuries?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a little embarrassing, I know. I’m usually much more productive than that. But it’s a bit… sensitive. I’m not technically supposed to be playing baduk on company time, so I can’t ask any of my coworkers to help me with this. I need a favor here, Tycho.”

  “So, you didn’t bring me down here because you need my help with anything.You only brought me down here to do an extra backup of your computer game?”

  He looked at me blankly. “Why would I ever need your help with anything?”

  I sighed. “Fine, Thomas. But if I’m doing you a favor, I get to name my terms.”

  “Name away. This is terribly important to me.”

  “No more condescension. I get the same basic respect you show everyone else.”

  He had the gall to look hurt. “But Tycho, I assure you, I see everyone other than myself as exactly equal.”

  “You see them as exactly…? Never mind. I’ll do the damn backup.”

  He grinned, pleased to get exactly what he wanted and to get it so cheaply. When I was done backing his game up, he inserted a key drive into one of the screens and it instantly went haywire, showing a random string of digits. Then it bluescreened. “You can go upstairs now.” He waved me away. “I have no further use for you.”

  I went upstairs and tracked Andrea down. She smiled when she saw
me. “Are you done backing up his game now? Yes, I know. It pays to give a man like Thomas a little breathing room, but you don’t want him to know how much you’re giving him.”

  I laughed. “What a strange little man. But yes, I backed his game to my dataspike. Can he really beat that AI?”

  “No one can, it’s just the windmill he likes to tilt at. Come with me to the armory, I think you’re going to like what I have for you to play with.”

  I wasn’t thinking of this as any kind of play, but a chance to take a little revenge. A small part of what was owed to me—just the interest, really. “Lead the way.”

  She paused and gave me a searching look. “I don’t know what I think about the new Tycho Barrett. I’m glad you’re on our side, but I just don’t know.”

  I didn’t understand the point of what she was saying. “Doesn’t really matter anyway, does it?”

  She gave me a look like what I said might have hurt her feelings somehow. It surprised me, but at the same time I couldn’t make sense of it. Nothing made much sense to me right then.

  She shook her head. “Forget I said anything. Come on.”

  When we got to the Armory—a large walk-in closet filled with weapons and ammunition—Vicenzo Veraldi gave me a knowing smile. “This is going to be fun, Tycho.”

  Andrea turned to go but couldn’t resist a parting comment. “Tycho’s not in a fun mood. He’s the dark, brooding type now.”

  This didn’t seem reasonable, considering everything that had happened in my life in the past 48 hours. Andrea Capanelli was a strange one. She would ask you to talk about your feelings, then throw a Hagakure quote at you, then write you off because you weren’t all better yet. When it came right down to it, I didn’t know whose reactions to the situation were more disturbed, hers or mine.

  “Don’t mind her.” Veraldi handed me a shotgun, and I heard Andrea’s footsteps receding. “She doesn’t have a lot of patience for trauma. Her own, or anyone else’s. I mean, she tries to help, but it’s all so you can get back to work as quickly as possible. I’m not saying she doesn’t care, but—”

  I took the shotgun. “I’m fine. This can’t really do anything to hurt the Augmen though, can it?”

  “Right, you’re fine. Dark and brooding it is, then. To answer your question, you’re making a big assumption here. When most people think of Augmen, they’re thinking augmented human. Right?”

  “Right. I mean, that’s what they are, isn’t it?”

  “Traditionally, yes. But full-body augmentation leaves a lot of room for variation, and some of those variations are like nothing you’ve ever seen before. I take it the ones who attacked you still looked human?”

  I shook my head. “I thought so at first, but not entirely. The guy on the monorail had talons for fingers.”

  “Well, that’s not the only thing that’s out there. Not by a long shot. In fact, it’s pretty mild. You should expect to see things that don’t look human at all. I wouldn’t think of them as Augmen exactly. Just cyborgs.”

  “There’s still a human foundation, though… right?”

  Veraldi shrugged. “I guess.” He reached into the closet and pulled out a bandolier. It held dozens of shotgun shells. Then he pulled out another one and handed them both to me.

  I took them and asked, “What am I, Zapata?” The image of me wearing those bandoliers seemed more comical than intimidating. I felt like a should be wearing a bandana over my face.

  “Just put those on, they’re definitely your best bet. White phosphorus, one of the ugliest weapons known to humanity.”

  I whistled. The thing about white phosphorus is that you can’t put it out once it ignites—not unless you completely deprive it of any trace of oxygen.

  “Now you’re getting it, Tycho. You blast one of those cyborgs with a white phosphorus shotgun shell, it will burn its way right through the fucker’s body. Get the idea?”

  I got the idea. It might not be instant, but if anything out there could kill these things, this was probably it.

  I put on the bandoliers, crossing them over my torso in the classic X shape. With all these shells, I wouldn’t run out of ammo anytime soon. Still, Veraldi wasn’t satisfied. He handed me a pair of strange-looking gloves. Black leather with studs.

  “Electric gloves. If you hit anyone hard with more than two of those studs at the same time, the device will trigger. It’s a hell of a shock, but I doubt it will kill a cyborg. On the other hand…”

  As I wrestled the gloves on, he pulled out a massive black Bowie knife in a black leather sheath. “Here’s a back-up weapon. I’m fairly confident that you can kill a cyborg with a knife, as long as you sever the head completely from the body.”

  I took the knife, but my skepticism about Veraldi’s approach to arming me had returned. “They didn’t teach us anything about headhunting in the Arbiter Force.”

  Channeling Andrew Jones, Veraldi simply replied, “Standards are slipping.”

  I strapped the knife on and had to admit to myself that it did make me feel a little more confident. Any cyborg in close range would eat a white phosphorus shotgun blast, and any cyborg within reach would get an electric punch, followed by a messy and amateurish decapitation.

  “I’m ready. Where do you want me?”

  “Well said, Barrett. Thomas Young will be in the basement; his job is to run our surveillance cameras. That’s our only basis for command and control, so we don’t want anything bursting in there and slaughtering him. Could you take a position down there and just keep him alive if anything gets in?”

  It felt a bit more defensive than I would have preferred, but I could see the strategic logic of it. Plus, with access to the camera screens, I’d have a better picture of the whole battle than I could hope to have anywhere else. Either way, something told me I’d do my share of the fighting. “Okay.”

  “Thanks, Tycho. Happy hunting.”

  I left the room and started straight for the basement, but I ran into Andrea along the way. She stopped in the hallway and put a hand on my arm. “Hey, Tycho… I’m sorry about before. I know you’re going through a lot.”

  I was confused at first. It took me a minute to even realize what she was talking about. When I got it, I nodded. “It’s okay, Andrea.”

  “The truth is, I’m worried about you. But you have to be able to process this in your own way.”

  “Yeah.” In reality I had no notion of even trying to “process” anything. I wanted revenge for Sophie Anderson, and I didn’t much care about anything else.

  “Okay, well… I’m glad we’re on the same page, then.” She still looked perturbed, but it seemed like she couldn’t put her finger on the reason. “I’ll go set up the diffraction jammer.”

  She held up something in her right hand, a piece of tech I’d never seen before.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  She smiled. “This is a neat little piece of tech. A diffraction jammer; works somewhat like going dark but with less hassle. The jammer creates alternating false positives on any nearby thermoptic or backscatter scans. It should be harder for the cyborgs to deal with than a complete blackout. It will basically force them to either chase a bunch of ghosts or disregard their scans and find us the old-fashioned way.”

  “That ought to help. I’m heading down to the basement to guard Thomas and the surveillance cameras.”

  “Yeah, Veraldi and I discussed that a few minutes ago. I’m cutting the power to everything else, but those cameras are hardwired separately. You should still be able to see.”

  “Okay. Good luck, Andrea.”

  “Good luck, Tycho.”

  I went to the trapdoor and crawled down to the basement, where Thomas was now crouched over a single monitor. Everything else had already been wiped clean; the only thing left was this single monitor. It showed a split-screen image—the driveway out front, the car with Klein in it and Bray attaching a small cannon to the top, the empty living room, and Veraldi skulking around in one of the bed
rooms. I wondered where Andrea was, then realized I wouldn’t be able to see her for most of the fight. Wherever she was right now, she’d spend the battle for the house in thermoptic camouflage.

  “If you’re going to be in here, I would appreciate it if you didn’t spend the whole time looking over my shoulder,” said Thomas Young.

  “Sorry, Thomas. If you want me to guard you effectively, I need a good spot to fight from. And the best spot I can see happens to be right here behind you.”

  He scoffed but made no further attempt to argue with me. I closed the trapdoor and went back to my position, with my shotgun cradled in my arms and ready. The power went out, leaving the basement in total darkness except for the blue glow of the monitor. By watching the screen, I’d be able to follow the progress of the whole fight from beginning to end and, more importantly, I’d know when it was time to get ready to fight.

  The wait was hard, but we didn’t have long by that point. I got in position, with my shotgun covering the basement steps. I saw a flash on one of the screens and realized it must be one of the perimeter mines exploding in the distance. That meant they were close, though whether the mine had caused them any casualties I had no way of knowing. There was another flash, and then another. Then nothing after that.

  The last few minutes passed slowly, marked by nothing other than stillness and the sound of breathing. I tried to think—to remember Sophie and my last conversation with her, to conjure her ghost up out of my memories—but it didn’t seem to work. I couldn’t remember a thing she’d said, a thing we’d ever said to each other.

  I put her from my mind, knowing it wouldn’t do me any good to think about her anyway. A car pulled up in the driveway, and a cyborg stepped out. I’d call him an Augman—in fact, I was used to calling all of them Augmen, no matter what Veraldi said—but this one was especially manlike.

  It had the same neat beard, the same facial features as the one on the monorail. The only difference was the hands, which didn’t seem to be like talons at all. It checked its weapons, two arm attachments that looked like high-tech nunchaku, then it staggered once as a bullet from Raven’s rifle hit it straight in the forehead. The shot should have killed it, if it was anything that still resembled a human. But it just seemed irritated and reached up as if to pull the bullet out.