Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  That statement stunned me, though when I thought about it later, I had to admit it made perfect sense. A man who had lived for generations, under many different names, could easily have fathered dozens of children.

  Huxley continued. “I simply wanted to see him, to feel that sense of connection. I was never close to him when he was a child; my ability to have any close relationship was hampered by my age. All things seemed impermanent, only my own kind seemed to matter. Yet, as I said, I was weary. My body was dying, and the idea of transferring my consciousness into yet another body was more wearying still. So, I spoke with Klein and volunteered to be part of his experiment. I don’t think I expected him to actually succeed, but the fact is that he did succeed. He succeeded beyond anything I could have dreamed, and I experienced the beauty of the flow of information, the purity of unbound consciousness…”

  He shrugged. “My friends, I’m sorry. You cannot possibly understand me because you have never had these experiences. Despite the wonder, despite the joy, my experiences within the flow have shown me the value of transient relationships like family. The nature of their impermanence renders those relationships infinitely valuable. I didn’t know that before, and because I didn’t know it, I failed to pass it on. Misha never knew, and he never gave his own children the love they needed. He was left all alone, and I wanted to reach out to him. To make up for my role in what was wrong with his life.”

  “That’s all you were doing there?” asked Andrea. “Just visiting your son?”

  “That’s all.”

  “But if that’s true, then they must have been trying to kill you, not him.”

  He shook his head. “I wish that were true, but no. They were there to kill him, and it never even occurred to them that the android they surprised in his apartment was none other than Julian Huxley. If they had known that, they would have killed me—though only after I had seen him die. As it was, they were surprised, or I would never have escaped. This body is fast and agile, but it is not a combat model. I attacked them suddenly and was able to evade them.”

  “But why did they want to kill your son?” I asked.

  “Because my enemies understand my perspective. They have discovered my priorities and are now attempting to destroy my family and legacy. They want to erase every trace of me from history, every trace of me from the world. They killed Misha, but first they killed Misha’s children and grandchildren. They will come for me next. Like Akhenaten after the restoration of the cult of Ra, it will be as if I had never existed.”

  “What?!” Bray shook his head. Huxley’s flowery way of speaking had impressed him at first, but now it just seemed to be confusing and irritating him.

  “And why would they want to do all that?” asked Andrea.

  “As a punishment for my betrayal, for helping Marcenn in his attempt to undermine the Eleven.”

  Andrea was still unwilling to accept this. “The Eleven worked for Marcenn. Hell, they were Marcenn.”

  “I’m talking about the real Eleven, as I told you before. The original Eleven.”

  “We’re losing track of the point here.” Jonathan Bray was still scowling. “If you admit that you helped August Marcenn acquire illegal weapons, then you’re guilty of crimes against humanity. If you know what happened on Venus, then you know what he did, and you know all those people died. You’re responsible, Huxley. As a collaborator or a full member of the conspiracy; it doesn’t matter. That’s why we’re here to take you in. You’ll get a trial and all that, this enemy of yours won’t be able to get to you. But you’ll have to answer for what you’ve done.”

  “I have no objection. I deeply regret what happened on Venus. Marcenn went mad; I could not have predicted that. But the real problem was never Marcenn. The real problem is the Eleven. The blood they have shed is an ocean; the bloodshed on Venus is…”

  “A cup of tea?” I offered. He looked up at me sharply. I had just echoed Marcenn’s favorite phrase, or the favorite phrase of his deranged Continuity. You haven’t killed us. Any more than a teacup can hold the ocean. He took another step forward, his mouth opening to explain or question me.

  Andrea was irritated. “This is all beside the point. Who is this enemy? Who are the Eleven?”

  Before he could answer, a glowing dot appeared on Huxley’s body and moved smoothly toward his neck. Pleximesh skin fluoresces under ultraviolet light, and Bray recognized the dot as the ultraviolet beam of a military targeting sight. He jumped forward, shoving me out of the way to push the android Julian out of the line of fire.

  He just wasn’t quick enough. With incredible precision, a sequence of rapid gunshots sawed their way across Julian’s neck, severing his head from his body. The android was dead before he hit the ground, before the three of us could turn to face the threat.

  The shooter was out there somewhere, in the overgrown buildings and tangled vegetation of the Jungle neighborhood. They had traced us here, waited until Huxley trusted us enough to step out of the building… then taken their shot.

  “Goddammit,” cried Andrea. “Get under cover!”

  But there was no cover; we were in the Waste, with our backs to the most radioactive building on the entire planet. I drew my sidearm and opened fire on the tree line, not so much trying to hit anything as trying to buy the other two some time. If I happened to get lucky, the depleted uranium rounds I was shooting ought to do the trick, even against some weaponized Augman.

  Andrea dropped to one knee and followed my lead by shooting her weapon into the trees. Bray, still standing, did the same. As far as we could tell, the attacker had done nothing at all after killing the Huxley android. It hadn’t even moved.

  “Did you see that shot grouping?” asked Bray.

  Still firing her weapon, Andrea answered him through gritted teeth. “Yes. Precision like that... What do you think? Military-issue combat android?”

  “Or cyborg, yeah. Let’s make sure it doesn’t develop the nerve to stick its head up.”

  The attacker wasn’t stupid. With three people shooting at it, it was bound to get hit soon if only by chance. As we scanned the trees for any sign of it, it suddenly broke cover. I got a glimpse of some kind of armor, or maybe just an android body.

  Then it was gone, disappearing in the shimmer of thermoptic camouflage.

  “Shit!” snapped Andrea. “I’m going under, you two try to flank the fucker. Standard pincer maneuver.”

  She activated her camouflage and disappeared from view. Bray was on my right, so he went right. That meant the left for me, so I ran across the Waste to the left as quickly as I could. I couldn’t fire, for fear of hitting the now-invisible Andrea. The goal was just to run, giving the shooter too many targets to focus on. We got closer and closer, until finally we were in the tree line.

  It was a desperate maneuver, attempting a pincer across open ground with nowhere to retreat. That was just the breaks, though. We had no real choice, because our only other option would have been to fall back. If Huxley was to be believed, the result of that would have been a horrible death from radiation poisoning.

  Nothing happened at first. No shots were heard, and no one even seemed to care that we were running across the Waste with guns in our hands. Then Bray stumbled backward, his jaw flying up as he was hit by a kick.

  Not a gunshot, a kick. Bray was huge, and I wouldn’t have intentionally fought him for any prize I could think of. Even so, that one kick knocked Bray out cold.

  Andrea dropped out of active camouflage, spun from side to side for a moment, then did a spinning kick. She must have had the sense that the killer was near her and decided to use a technique that would take out anything within several feet.

  The shooter appeared for a moment, ducking under Andrea’s kick with effortless grace. Then she came up from underneath her, knocking her into a nearby wall. Andrea bounced off, then dropped down motionless. In that moment, I could see the assassin clearly, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. A muscular feminine body wearing
a nanosuit, or an advanced cyborg with densely packed synthetic muscle? A combat helmet with a featureless faceplate molding seamlessly with the body armor, or an android proxy sensor housing?

  Whatever the killer was, she had only committed to killing Huxley and was trying to avoid causing other casualties. This assassin had just disabled two of Section 9’s most formidable fighters without bloodshed, and she had made it look easy.

  I started shooting, but the killer dropped back into thermoptic camouflage. As I ran over to help my friends, I couldn’t help thinking she could have killed us all and for some reason decided not to.

  22

  I opened my eyes in the safehouse, but for several seconds I remained disoriented. Was I safe at home, asleep in my own bed? No. Was I in the ruins of the lost city, camping out with a badly concussed and even more badly shaken pair of Section 9 super-spies? No. I looked up at the ceiling, then out the window, and I remembered where I was.

  The strange thing about a safehouse is that you wouldn’t be there if you were safe in the first place. If you need a safehouse, it stands to reason that you’re in a lot of danger. Still, I felt strangely calm. The night before—no, probably not the night before. I was losing track of time, losing track of my own life. Whenever it was, I had built a campfire in a ruined building and sat up with Jonathan Bray and Andrea Capanelli to make sure they didn’t fall asleep. When you take a serious blow to the skull, falling asleep can mean never waking up.

  So, I sat up with the two of them, while they brooded over being knocked unconscious. None of us said much, though I did earn myself a sour glare when I said something about “the beauty of the present moment” while stoking the fire. As I sat there in silence, something shifted and fell into place.

  Sophie Anderson was dead, and the rest of my life would be lived on a knife edge. So be it, then. It still hurt, but the stunned nihilism of the past few days just wasn’t me. I needed a direction, a sense of mission.

  That’s all there is, and that’s all there ever really needs to be.

  When the sun rose the next morning, I helped Bray and Capanelli retrieve the lifeless head of the Huxley android. We battled our way through the Jungle and found the Grizzly bear lying dead in one of the buildings we passed through. Huxley’s killer must have run into it on the way in, and that was the shot we heard.

  Then we rode our stolen boat back to the Market and traded it for a ride to where we’d parked our car. It was a good thing it was the hard car, because someone had tried to sabotage it. The only thing they had succeeded in doing was gouging the paint, which caused Bray to spout obscenities for at least an hour. And now we were here, in the safe house that meant I wasn’t really safe.

  At least I knew what I needed to do.

  There was a knock on the door, and Raven Sommer stuck her head in. “Tycho? Breakfast is ready. It’s a working breakfast, so don’t be too long.”

  For Section 9 the work never seemed to stop, and on reflection that was fine with me. I took a thirty-second shower, threw some clothing on, and came out to the living room. They had some excellent bread and a selection of fresh fruit. I took a roll and a plum and leaned against the edge of a couch.

  Bray came out of his room, holding his head and groaning. “My head still hurts.”

  Andrea looked up and shook her head at him. “I promised not to say it, but you know exactly what I was going to say.”

  “You’re a horrible person. And an even worse boss.” Bray sat down and started chewing glumly on a chunk of Challa bread.

  Raven sat next to me, and Thomas Young wandered out from the kitchen. “Is everyone ready?”

  “We’re always ready for you, Thomas. Go ahead.”

  He stared at her suspiciously but couldn’t seem to decide whether she was being sarcastic or not. “Well, then. Yes. What was it you needed to talk to me about again?”

  Andrea gave him an exasperated look. “The Huxley android. You were supposed to have a look at its head for us.”

  “Oh yes. I did. It’s just that I was done with that task several hours ago, so I assumed you were talking about something else. The Huxley android. Okay then.”

  “Thomas, what did you find out?” asked Andrea.

  “The damage is extensive, and it's unlikely I can restore functionality, but I believe I can pull some meaningful data from it in time.”

  “That’s disappointing.” Andrea frowned, and Thomas started to protest. She raised a hand to stop him. “There’s no need. If that’s how it is, then that’s how it is. There’s no one out there who could do any better. Just keep working on it for now and tell us when you do succeed in getting something useful out of it.”

  Thomas looked unhappy, but he also looked determined. After what Andrea had just said, I had no doubt he would make it a point of pride to get everything out of the Huxley android that he possibly could.

  Still, Huxley was gone. It was hard to believe the things he’d told us, but if his story was true, then a man who had lived for more than eight hundred years was finally dead. He was partly responsible for what had happened on Venus, but if the better part of a millennium of human experience had just been erased beyond hope of recovery then that was still a major loss. There were so many things he must have lived through, so many questions he could have answered. More than anything else, I wished we’d had time to interrogate him about his enemies, the original Eleven, if they really existed.

  Bray must have been having similar thoughts. “What about all those things he was saying?”

  Andrea bit into a slice of orange and shook her head. “I just don’t know. It connects to some of the things August Marcenn was saying, sure. But it wasn’t enough; it wasn’t anything we can use.”

  She seemed disturbed by something. I knew I was. If Huxley’s enemy was really out there, they represented a power more ancient than human colonization of the solar system. How much wealth could you accumulate in eight-plus centuries? How much influence could you build up? An entity like that would have fingers in everything, agents everywhere. It would be in a position to corrupt anyone, and to destroy anyone it failed to corrupt.

  Speaking of corrupt…

  “What about Lucien Klein?”

  “What about him?” asked Andrea.

  “What are you going to do with him?”

  I’d been wondering about that ever since I’d first seen him at the other safehouse. They had taken Klein, spiriting him away from Federation custody. They couldn’t possibly just put him back, like returning something you felt guilty about stealing. It had even occurred to me that they might just make him disappear, rather than exposing the existence of Section 9.

  “What are we going to do with him?” asked Andrea. “What do you mean? Did you think we were going to take him for a ride or something?”

  I looked embarrassed, and Veraldi laughed. “That’s exactly what he thought! Holy shit, Barrett, I can’t believe you were willing to hang around with ruthless killers like us!”

  They all had a laugh, but I was thinking about the two men Bray had shot in the boat. They were dangerous men, fugitive killers or who-knows-what. They might have killed us if they could, and they were definitely looking for us. Still, there hadn’t been any hesitation.

  “Don’t worry, Tycho, it’s not like that.” Andrea finished her orange and wiped her hands off on her pants. “We wouldn’t be able to do what we do if we couldn’t make things happen. The Operator has special legal powers, special authority. More on that in a minute, but to answer your question, we plan to get everything we can out of Mr. Klein’s situation. Officially speaking, he'll be released under a plea deal. In reality, Section 9 will monitor him under the expectation that the enemy will make another attempt on his life. With Huxley dead, it may be our only way to find out anything.”

  From everything I’d ever seen, Section 9 operated outside the law and did so with total impunity. I had never known how, but now Andrea was showing me a glimpse of it. They could go into the syste
m and just change things at will. Dropping charges, erasing cases, granting plea deals. The way Andrea put it, they had special legal authority to do all these things. That was one way to look at it. With the right kind of access, you don’t even need authority because you can make your own. With this extra-legal power, Section 9 intended to use Lucien Klein as human bait.

  “You can monitor him all you want,” I said. “But you can’t protect him.”

  Andrea glanced toward the closed door of one of the bedrooms, and I wondered if Klein was listening. If he could hear us, my comments would not do anything to make him feel more confident.

  “He’ll have to take his chances!” Bray’s voice was loud, much louder than mine had been.

  “If we’d left him in prison, he’d already be dead.” Andrea took a pastry. I realized that I hadn’t taken a bite of my food. I had the plum in one hand, the roll in the other. I thought of eating, but I just didn’t feel right.

  “Even so, he’ll be human bait.” Andrea’s voice became even quieter, but it didn’t sound like she was trying to avoid being heard. It was more like she was trying to break it to me easy, because she wasn’t sure how I might react. “That’s the way it goes. You’re an Arbiter, Tycho. The mission comes first. When there’s something that has to get done, you do it. No matter what it is.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not an Arbiter anymore.”

  She opened her mouth as if to say something, but I was already moving on. “Look, I’m not trying to be innocent. I know how it goes. Klein is expendable when it comes right down to it. I don’t like the idea, but I do understand the logic behind it. As long as it changes something, as long as it matters. The body count in this case is massive, and the perpetrators are illegal cyborgs. That has to come out; there has to be a full investigation.”

  She looked uncomfortable, and so did everyone else in the room. Raven Sommer gave me a sympathetic look. “You’re a sweet guy, Tycho.”

  “What? Are you telling me there won’t be any investigation?”