Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  The second shot hit it in exactly the same spot as the first one. It took a step back and frowned at no one and nothing. I guess it frowned at the world, this strange place where it kept getting shot in the head. And then the third shot hit it, and this time it gave the world a ferocious grimace. It aimed an arm up at the roof and fired something out of one of its arm attachments—a stream of gunfire, dozens of bullets aimed at nothing in particular.

  It was then I realized that the impact of the first shot had damaged its mental functions, and it was no longer able to aim effectively even though two further shots in the exact same spot had yet to kill it. That was probably why it never attempted to take cover, but still the sight of it getting shot again and again was downright eerie. It looked like a man, a man with a shitty little beard. Why didn’t it seem to care about being shot in the forehead until it was too late?

  Well, it cared now. It was firing wild, taking off roof shingles and blasting out windows. Raven plugged it yet again. This time it bent over at the waist with the most pathetic expression of confusion and then sat down on the hood of its own vehicle. Raven shot it two more times, and it was only after that final shot that the thing finally died. It toppled off the hood, collapsed into the driveway, and lay completely still.

  Thomas messaged us all. Multiple shots required to pierce braincase.

  Andrea followed this up with a command. Don’t rely on headshot unless no other choice. Or incapacitate first. Raven, move. Position may be exposed.

  Two more cars pulled up, and Andrea turned out to be absolutely right. A shape stepped out, and a grenade arced up toward the roof of the Grotto. It went off with a flash but was followed immediately by several others. I couldn’t see what was going on, because one grenade after another was exploding on the rooftop and the flashes were interfering with the surveillance camera. Thomas seemed to be undisturbed as he sent us another message a moment later.

  Cyborgs have breached the building. Bray, one on you.

  I looked at the screens, and sure enough a cyborg was attempting to breach the garage door to cut off our escape route. As Veraldi had warned, this one was not like the others. It looked immensely muscular, noticeably larger than Bray himself. But that wasn’t all.

  As I watched in amazement, the cyborg’s arms split in some way I couldn’t quite see, tearing apart like unfolding tentacles. Two seconds later, the cyborg had four arms where it had previously had only two. With the added purchase this gave him, he was able to get ahold of the garage door in four places and simply rip it from its hinges and toss it aside.

  I couldn’t remember ever seeing a display of raw power like that from something that looked even vaguely human, but Bray didn’t waste any time being intimidated. The cannon he’d mounted to the roof of the car blazed into life as soon as the door was tossed aside, and the cyborg staggered backward under the impact of the shots.

  It staggered but it didn’t fall. Instead it pressed forward, like a man trying to make headway against a hailstorm. I could see the huge holes the gun was making in the cyborg, but none of them seemed to penetrate far into its body. On the garage camera, I saw Bray’s cannon adjusting upward slightly. He must have decided there was no other choice than to target the head, but the gun just couldn’t aim upward far enough.

  The vehicle suddenly lurched forward, smashing directly into the four-armed cyborg. It pushed him forward several feet, and I saw his body stumble backward and fall over on the driveway camera. Bray pulled back a little and then came in again, a process he repeated several times, crushing and mangling the cyborg’s legs. It was a good thing Bray had a hard car, because anything less than that would have crumpled at the repeated impacts with the cyborg’s dense body. At some point in this awful process, a little hole appeared in the middle of the thing’s head and I realized Raven had found a new position to hunt from.

  Two cyborgs down, but how many had already entered the house?

  On the living room camera, I saw one of the most uncanny sights I had ever seen. In point position, a bearded Augman stepped into view. He raised a hand, and in the infrared light of the security camera I saw the talons I recognized from the monorail.

  A few steps behind him, I saw a cyborg with three-digited hands and feet, and legs that resembled a rabbit's. It moved with a strange agility that made the hair on my arms stand up. Behind the rabbit man, there was a cyborg composed of floating, I assumed magnetically connected slices of body parts that moved together like the pieces of a child’s toy as it crept along on furtive feet.

  Bringing up the rear was something that didn’t look like it could ever have been a human being. It went on all fours, and its rear legs and hips were like those of a dog… no, not a dog. What it really looked like was a giant wolf with a rotating black ball for a head, a black cord for a tail, and a small cannon mounted on its back.

  I could hardly believe what I was looking at, but I’d be getting a closer look at these things soon enough. When the Augman pointed, they fanned out across the house on their search and destroy mission.

  They found Veraldi first. The rabbit man came into the room he was in, and Vincenzo went to work with his beloved knives. I’d seen him do this before, but never against an opponent as agile as this one. He attacked from ambush, but the thing dodged his slice as if it was the easiest thing it had ever done. On all three fingers of its right hand, knife blades appeared suddenly. Veraldi dodged as it slashed, but three lines appeared across his shirt.

  He sliced again, and the creature dodged just as easily as it had the first time. Its left hand lashed out, knocking Vincenzo’s knife, which went flying across the room. He must have decided to flee, because he dove for the window with a sudden, desperate movement. The rabbit man jumped and got there a half second before he did. It slashed at him again, but it had jumped so close to him this time that he was able to throw his arms up. I couldn’t quite see what had happened, but the next thing I knew Veraldi had the cyborg’s arm in some kind of lock.

  His right arm pumped again and again into the thing’s torso, and I realized he must have accessed his backup knife. Unfortunately for him, there was nothing much he could do with the blade from where he was. The rabbit man pulled its left arm back, and the blades in its left hand gleamed as it prepared to stab him directly in the face.

  Then it slumped down stupidly and stopped resisting as Andrea’s shot took it in the head. She was only visible for a second or less, but that was all the time the wolf cyborg needed. It dove in from the hallway and knocked her sprawling, then opened up with the cannon on its back as Veraldi turned to face it.

  The rabbit man was fast, but Veraldi’s speed in the next second was something I wouldn’t have believed if I hadn’t seen it myself. He twitched to the side just before the wolf fired, and the cannon shot hit the rabbit man in the face just as it was starting to move again, finishing it off.

  Then Andrea did something from underneath, something that made the wolf cyborg roll over to the side in an attempt to escape. Veraldi started to stab at it, but it blasted out the window with its cannon before jumping out and escaping.

  Andrea stood up with Veraldi’s help, then dropped back into thermoptic camouflage. The knife fighter slumped, resting for a moment against the back wall. I checked the screens, realizing in a sudden panic that I had no idea where the other two cyborgs were.

  Above my head, the trapdoor rattled.

  18

  To his credit, Thomas Young didn’t seem to be fazed at all. He heard the rattle, checked the screens, then sent a message. Position compromised. Request assistance.

  Then he pushed his chair back, plucked something from his belt, and moved further back into the basement. He clearly expected me to protect him, but other than that he was the perfect stoic.

  I aimed up at the trapdoor, and it creaked open. Something drifted down the stairs, and I caught a glimpse of it in the light from the monitor. It was the magnetic man, a creature made up of discrete parts that floated
and moved together like an eerie puppet. The way he moved was so alien, I almost didn’t react at all. It just didn’t look like anything I was used to, anything that made sense to me.

  When it raised an arm, my training and combat experience saved my life. I pulled the trigger, and the noise and light in that dark basement might as well have been a nuclear explosion. The white phosphorus shell arced across the room, hit one of the magnetic slices of which the creature was made… and bounced away, landing on the basement floor. It lay there smoking and sparking, filling the room with an angry red glow.

  The cyborg looked down at its torso as if curious about what exactly had just happened. In its right hand, it was holding the grenade it had been about to prime. It had a mannequin head, a featureless oval that looked as alien as the rest of it. I aimed directly at its face, pulled the trigger again, and watched it stagger back.

  The white phosphorus must have burned it, even though it couldn’t seem to pierce the thing’s metallic body. This time the shell skipped off its head, leaving an ugly scorch mark, and buried itself in the wall at the top of the staircase. The wall, predictably, started smoking.

  Thomas yelled “get down!” although I could hardly hear him—shotgun blasts in an enclosed space will do that to you—and threw whatever he’d been holding. I flung myself under the desk when I realized what it probably was. I was right. When the grenade went off, the blast was so loud I didn’t even hear it. I just stopped hearing anything at all.

  In total silence, I poked my head out from under the table to see what had happened. The blast had ripped a jagged gash in one of the cyborg’s metallic pieces, causing it to flip to one side and knocking all the other pieces that depended on it out of joint. One leg had already collapsed completely.

  As I watched, the cyborg tumbled slowly down the basement staircase. Realizing the creature’s fundamental weakness, I scrambled out from under the table and stumbled over to it before it could attempt to rise. Its head was attached to its torso by a metallic spinal cord, but its limbs were all made of those magnetic slices. If I could pull them apart, it wouldn’t be able to do a thing.

  I grabbed a piece of its right arm, put a foot on its shoulder to brace myself, and did my best to yank the damn thing completely off. Bolts of electricity burned and arced from my electric gloves, but it wouldn’t budge.

  As I was pulling on the cyborg’s arm, my shotgun jumped off my chest and stuck to its body. Worse than that, it punched me in the face with its left hand and time seemed to skip. I saw a burst of tiny lights, had a vague sense that I was falling, then opened my eyes and saw Andrea staring down at me.

  “He’s back. Come on, we don’t have time to fuck around.”

  She helped me up, but I could hardly see. I no longer had my shotgun. The walls were in flames, and if I didn’t get moving immediately, I had no chance. On the floor at my feet, the magnetic man lay with a hole in his head. Thomas Young’s call for assistance had not gone unanswered.

  I let Andrea help me till I was on the staircase, but then I shook my head and said, “Go. I’m right behind you.”

  She checked my eyes, then nodded. We ran up the stairs, but the flames blazing from the walls above us were already too fierce for us to try to get through. Andrea sent a message.

  Bray, we’re trapped in the basement. Extraction needed.

  To my shock and horror, a shape peered down from the flames above us. I couldn’t see it clearly, but I thought it might be the one with the talons. Then it spoke, and there was no longer any doubt.

  “If you were wondering, it wasn’t quick. She died screaming.”

  The trapdoor closed, and Sophie’s murderer slipped away.

  From behind my shoulder, Thomas spoke. His voice was as clinical as ever, or near enough. There might have been a hint of a tremor. “We have thirty seconds, give or take.”

  It was hard for me to tell what he was basing this on, but I didn’t doubt him. Of all the ways you can die, being burned alive is probably the most horrific I can think of. Still, I didn’t feel scared, or not as scared as I should have felt. Bray was coming for us; I was sure of it. The competence of Section 9 was something I had learned to count on.

  Still, that confidence was badly shaken by the time we reached the twenty second mark. Where the hell was Bray? If Thomas said we didn’t have long to live, I couldn’t really doubt that he knew what he was talking about. Heat rises, so as far as I could tell we should be safer down here than if we were stuck upstairs. Regardless, the flames were blazing ferociously right above us. I could feel the heat, a crawling and prickling sensation all over my face.

  There was a violent crash from upstairs, and I wondered if the house was already collapsing. The trapdoor flew open, and Veraldi stuck his head down. “MOVE!”

  I heard the smug voice of Thomas Young immediately behind me. “Thirty seconds exactly.”

  He hadn’t been talking about how long we had to live, he’d been taking a guess on how quickly Bray could get to us. I made a mental note to smack him later and followed Andrea up the staircase on the double. The car was there, but in a precarious position. Bray had driven it right through the burning front wall of the Grotto, and now half the house was poised to fall on it. Something was shooting at us, and I gasped when I realized that some of the shots were actually denting the body of the vehicle. If one of those hit me, it wouldn’t just pass through my body and out the other side. Instead, it would pulverize whatever it came in contact with—bones, muscles, organs, and anything else.

  Andrea piled in the door, then swung around to pull me in.

  Something hit me from behind, slamming me hard into the side of the car, and then dropped back into the basement with me. I was stunned at first, thinking maybe I’d been hit by one of those powerful rounds that had been smashing into the hard car. If that had been true, my internal organs would have been sprayed out the front of my body as something much like soup. It wasn’t a bullet, but the thing that had been taking shots at the car—the wolf cyborg.

  It landed beside me but jumped on top of me before I could move. The thing was heavy, and all the air had already been knocked out of me. I struggled to breathe, and the red glowing light in the center of its spherical head swiveled to shine directly in my eyes. It reared back for power, and I flung myself sideways violently in an attempt to escape. Its head smashed into the basement floor, cracking the concrete. It reared back again.

  I was close to dying, but that isn’t how I felt. I heard those words again, the last taunt of the taloned Augman before he closed the trapdoor. “If you were wondering, it wasn’t quick.”

  With all the rage inside me, feeling like I would just as happily do the same thing to the whole world at once, I clapped both hands on the wolf’s head and set off an electrical storm. The bolts blazed between my hands, and the wolf cyborg shuddered and writhed. Then I reached a hand down, drew the Bowie knife, and wedged the tip into the joint between its head and its neck.

  I pushed in viciously, and dark red blood came oozing out. Human blood? Who knows? I’m not even sure what that would mean in this context. All I know is this: the thing could bleed, and it bled when I stabbed it. Then its body fell off me as something huge knocked it aside, and Bray’s massive hand grabbed mine. “Tycho Barrett. Holy shit, buddy.”

  He yanked on my wrist and dragged me back up the now-burning staircase. When I was finally in the car, everyone was looking at me like I had just stuck my hand up from the dirt in front of my own gravestone. The doors closed, and the hard car reversed and sped off.

  We were in a pile, crowded into a space that couldn’t fit us all. I was half on top Raven and half on top of Thomas. I tried to adjust, but every attempt to move seemed to make things worse.

  “Settle down, Tycho.” Andrea was on the floor, with both her feet up on Klein’s legs. “We have a way to go, and you should consider yourself lucky to be alive at all.”

  “We all should,” said Raven. “But Tycho was incredible. Did y
ou see what he did to that wolf thing?”

  “We’re all in love with you, Tycho,” said Bray. “That was some crazy shit down there. You wedged that knife into its neck like you were trying to pop the lid off a can.”

  “I’m pretty sure we can all tell Tycho how infatuated we are with him later over a few dozen beers,” said Andrea. “We need to debrief.”

  “I need to change my briefs, if you take my meaning,” said Lucien Klein, who had obviously never experienced a fight to the death with cyborgs in a burning house before.

  “Shut up, you,” said Bray. “You only speak when you’re being interrogated.”

  Veraldi was pressed up against one of the doors at a funny angle, but he managed to get the debriefing going. “So, how did they find us?”

  “It sounds like you have some ideas about that,” said Andrea.

  “I do. Our cover may have been blown when Thomas accessed the recovered dataspike.”

  Thomas stiffened. “I highly doubt that. That dataspike should have been brought to me in a Faraday bag, like the dead cyborgs were. Failing to do so was an error, and it probably means that they knew our location before I even attempted to access the dataspike.”

  “I wasn’t saying you had made a mistake.” Veraldi’s tone was mild, but Thomas was having none of it.

  “Then what were you saying? Deflecting blame is a basic instinct, only a mind specifically trained—”

  Veraldi broke in. “I’m saying they may have decided to attack now because you accessed the dataspike.”

  “That does make sense,” Andrea said. “We didn’t have any idea Ares Terrestrial was involved. Now we do. Easiest way to deal with that is just to kill us all.”

  Raven spoke up. “I’m not a tech person, but how would they even know that Thomas knew that? I mean, it’s not like just anyone could have figured it out.”