“It isn’t that.” Andrea sighed. “I’m sorry, Tycho. You saw a little of this after the Tower 7 disaster, but we deal with the reality of it every single day. You think of Section 9 as this shadowy organization, but we’re a tiny little part of it. The big companies, the national governments, it’s nothing but shadows, and it isn’t our role to shine a light on anything.”
“It isn’t your… well, I guess it wouldn’t be. But you’ve been gathering information. I’m sure you can pass it on to whoever’s investigating. I mean, there has to be someone.”
“There will be an investigation, yes. And it will be massive, they can’t sweep something like this out of sight completely. More than a few people will take the fall for their creation and maintenance. It just won’t change anything.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean?”
“They’ll stage manage the whole thing. They won’t protect everyone—they can’t—but they’ll protect the right people. A few years from now, there will still be just as many illegal cyborgs in operation as there are right now. And there will still be just as many rich people willing to hire them.”
That did seem likely. In all my work for the Arbiters, the only time I felt that justice had been done and done completely was the moment I shot August Marcenn, the man directly responsible. And just a few seconds later, his Nightwatch bodyguards had come running after me, repeating their weird mantra: you haven’t killed us, anymore than a teacup can hold the ocean.
Those words had upset me so much that I started pulling the trigger every time I heard them, which only meant killing Marcenn’s mind-controlled creatures. There’s no final justice, or none that’s accessible to mere mortals anyway.
Andrea continued. “The more I think about it, the more I think you probably made the right decision for you. At least in the Arbiter Force, it’s generally clear when you’ve completed your mission. In Section 9, it’s not so obvious. Things just tend to keep going and going. One thread leads to another.”
Everyone was nodding, so I could tell this was something they had all experienced. Still, it seemed like they just refused to understand. “I’m not an Arbiter anymore. Andrea, I shot my partner. I killed his new partner. There’s no going back.”
“That might be true for most people, if they found themselves in the same situation,” Andrea insisted. “It isn’t true for you. As a friend of Section 9, everything but everything can be undone.”
Raven looked right at me and mouthed the words not everything. That’s probably the only thing that kept me from losing my temper with Andrea right then. No matter how many strings she pulled, there was nothing she could do to bring Sophie back. It was like she had already forgotten her. But Raven hadn’t. At least one person in Section 9 didn’t just think of her like Lucien Klein, an asset to be used and then forgotten.
I composed myself, then turned to Andrea. “What do you mean?”
“It’s like I told you a few minutes ago. The Operator has special legal authority, and he’s willing to use it on your behalf. We can clear all your charges—the death of Byron Harewood's junior Arbiter, the death of Sophie Anderson, resisting arrest, and whatever else they have on you. It will take a few weeks, but you can even return to your life as an Arbiter. It will be like none of it ever happened.”
She was trying to help me, to give me what she thought I wanted. She just didn’t get it. Who knows how many years she’d been working for Section 9, living in a world where the law was malleable? But it could never happen, not even if I hadn’t decided what I had already decided.
She could clear my charges, but she couldn’t do anything about the black hatred every Arbiter in the solar system would have for me. From that moment in Sif, when I decided to fight back against the people responsible for Sophie’s death, I had become a rogue Arbiter. If they ever caught up with me, they would kill me just like I had killed Byron’s new partner, law or no law. If I tried to go back to my old job, I’d be dead within the week.
“It isn’t going to happen.” I took a bite of the plum and was surprised to find that it tasted delightful. I hadn’t expected it to taste like anything, not the way I’d been feeling since Sophie’s death. But the skin was tart and the flesh was sweet, and the juice ran down my chin.
“You’re not going back to your old job?” Andrea frowned a little. “That’s okay, we’ll still clear your record. You can always go back to your original career. Didn’t you used to design cars or something?”
I tossed the plum in a waste disposal and took a bite of my roll. “What was that you said a few minutes ago? It’s all shadows? Well, I think you’re right. There are layers and layers, a whole world beneath the world I thought I knew. And maybe it’s a dark world, and maybe it isn’t the role of Section 9 to cast a light on whatever’s down there. But you’re down there fighting it, and as far as I know there’s no one else. I want to fight it with you. I want to join Section 9.”
From the looks on their faces, no one was expecting me to take this step. At first there was silence, the kind of silence that means no one has any idea what to say or do. For a second or two I thought the offer had been withdrawn, and I had just made everything awkward. I tried to think of something to smooth things over, but I didn’t know where I would even start.
Then Thomas Young broke the tension. “Andrew Jones isn’t here, so I’ll say this for him. You’re going to get some incredible training. Far beyond anything available in the Arbiter Force.”
Everyone started laughing. That was when I first felt like I was one of them.
Epilogue
The street was busy, but the waves of chatter and other random noises couldn’t distract me from my target. In fact, they helped. I’d dip in and out of them, checking in on the mood of the crowd. A woman bought a designer handbag. A man was looking for an engagement ring. A pair of friends debated their dating prospects. No one was anxious, and no one was asking, “what’s going on?”
If my target saw me, if he even suspected my presence behind him, he was not yet reacting.
The cyborg was up about a block from me, moving discreetly toward his usual rendezvous. Both of his hands were in his pockets that were specially tailored and deep enough to hold them. To all these people, he was nothing more than a bearded man wearing a long coat and expensive sunglasses. When they saw him, they didn’t see a ruthless killer. They didn’t see an Augman.
And they didn’t see me at all. As it turns out, Thomas and Andrew were absolutely right. The training available in Section 9 is the best in the solar system, and beyond anything available to any Arbiter. The course in tracking, for instance—how to look like no one, how to go gray, so if witnesses were later asked about every person on the block, you’d still be the one person no one thought to mention. How to stay on your target, even if your target has been trained to spot a tail. How to become another person, so you look like you belong no matter where you are. How to gauge the crowd, so you can get a sense for when the tension is rising.
Those cyborgs are tough, but their toughness has been built into them. They don’t learn it from life, and there’s something about them that stays strangely innocent. Compared to normal humans, they tend to act like nothing can hurt them. I can hardly blame them. There aren’t many things that can hurt them.
So, I drifted after it, wandering aimlessly along. I was window shopping for a present, even though I knew I couldn’t afford anything in this neighborhood. I was screwing up the courage to go apply for a job, even though my one qualification was my subservient little smile. I was just a loser, someone nobody needed to notice.
It never noticed. It just went straight to its rendezvous, sitting down at an outdoor table in front of a little café. It ordered a mineral water from the waiter, without any intention of ever drinking it. It scanned the crowd with its eyes, looking for a threat or a familiar face and seeing neither, even though I was near and closing.
When I sat down across from it, its first r
eaction was honest confusion. I wasn’t the person it expected to meet, and I wasn’t anyone it recognized. The disguise was that good, and I still wasn’t showing anything.
It just stared at me stupidly, then growled. “Clear off.”
I shot it once underneath the table, and it shuddered at the impact of the uranium round. The sound was loud, but no one could tell where it might have come from. I was sticking to character, a faceless nobody with an obsequious grin.
Someone yelled, “What’s that?” and someone else said, “a gun!” A third person disagreed, insisting that the sound was something else. An illegal firecracker?
I reached across the table and pulled off the cyborg’s expensive sunglasses. In its all-to-human eyes, I could see that it knew. I could see the pain, and the fear of being hurt for the first time ever. I could see it recognize me, and I could see that it knew why I was about to kill it.
“In case you’re wondering if this will be quick, it will.”
I pulled out my gun, put it directly against her killer’s head, and pulled the trigger.
* * *
Continue reading for DIGITAL CHIMERA.
1
Are you on him, Tycho?
The message was from Andrea Capanelli, my old friend from Sol Federation Intelligence Section 9 and now my commanding officer. She wasn’t far, no more than a few meters, but in the crush and chaos of a Martian street it was easier to communicate by text. Her message showed up in front of my eyes in glowing green letters, a personal augmented reality view courtesy of my dataspike. Using the subvocalization-to-text feature, I sent my reply.
Yeah, I see him. He’s up there in front of that noodle shop.
On either side of him were his Martian bodyguards, lithe and arrogant but as alert as they were supposed to be. Dressed in head-to-toe black, with their faces masked against the dust, they looked like hungry panthers. Syndicate gunmen on the steps of a nearby bank were watching them closely, vaguely offended by their existence but not yet motivated to do anything about it.
East Hellas was a dangerous place. Separated from West Hellas by the cynically misnamed Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, the eastern city is not only a closed world, but a cluster of closed worlds nested inside each other like Matryoshka dolls.
Don’t lose sight of him, we’re almost at the station.
I’m on him, Andrea.
There was a long pause. Chain of command, Barrett.
Ignoring the fact that she had just called me by my first name, “Tycho,” a few short seconds ago, I responded properly with my commanding officer’s surname. Sorry, Capanelli.
According to our intelligence, Sasha Ivanovich was heading for the train station on his way to work at the Ares Terrestrial Medical Labs. The best spot to take him would be at the station, where crowds funneling through the tight spaces would make it all but impossible for his bodyguards to keep people from getting near. The whole plan depended on me being much closer to him than I currently was before he reached the station, but that wasn’t going to be easy.
The brutalist architecture of apartment buildings loomed down from either side of me–floor after floor after floor of Martian families crowded close together, countless windows offering a clear vantage of the neighborhood. Peering through many of those windows would be informants, people who watched the streets for the local syndicate. Anything out of place, anything suspicious, and the gunmen lounging around on the streets below would get a call on their dataspikes. When that happened, they would drop the pretense of casual laziness and converge on me like predators moving in on a wounded animal at a watering hole.
In that event, hope for getting to safety would rest on Vincenzo Veraldi and Jonathan Bray, the two Section 9 agents assigned to act as overwatch on this particular mission. Veraldi and Bray were monitoring our progress from vantage points somewhere on the block, ready to bring more trouble than the locals could handle if it came to that, but it was my job to make sure it didn’t. A mistake on my part at this critical point would blow Section 9’s cover and cause us no end of problems.
I sped up the pace and slipped as discreetly as possible around a small knot of arguing locals, avoiding a street musician with hauntingly traumatized eyes and a stringed instrument that made an uncanny warbling sound, and finally taking advantage of a delay caused by an overturned cart of cumin and turmeric. I successfully caught up with Sasha and his bodyguards without drawing attention. Pleased with my spycraft, I sent a message to Andrea.
In range.
Our mission was to assassinate Ivanovich as he boarded the train. In my right hand, I held a single-shot splinter gun, the tiny dart of which was tipped with a slow-acting nanite poison. This was my first official kill order from Section 9, so I was “making my bones” as a new member—although that was a bit of a misnomer, as I had assassinated August Marcenn on Venus before Section 9 ever got the chance to. As impressed as they had all seemed then, none of them seemed to think it counted. Neither did my successful assassination of the cyborg that had murdered Sophie Anderson. As a Section 9 agent, I was still “dry,” and I would remain so until I became “wet” by completing this mission.
The assassination had to appear as if any of the local syndicates could have carried it out. Section 9 needed to avoid exposure at all costs, thus the use of poison rather than more conventional tools. I’d close in on the man when he was delayed at the turnstiles or in some other convenient spot and put the splinter in him without being seen. Ivanovich probably wouldn’t even feel it, but if he did, he wouldn’t know what it was. He’d succumb to the effects of the poison shortly after disembarking, at which point we would already be well on our way across the wall and back in West Hellas.
That was the plan anyway, but whether it would really turn out like that was anyone’s guess. Andrea knew I was in range and could give the kill order if she wanted to, but I thought she would probably hold off and I was right.
Wait for the Jason.
She meant “wait for the station”—subvocalization to text is an inexact process, sometimes embarrassingly so.
Understood.
I could see the station now. The glowing sign read UNDERBELT 2. It was one of thousands in the city, and one of three for the different levels of the Underbelt neighborhood. Hellas was sectioned like a honeycomb to safeguard against catastrophic depressurization, and no personal vehicles of any kind were permitted. The only way to get around was by train or on foot, likely the main cause of the city’s stifling tribalism. Despite the tendency of Hellans to define themselves solely by birth section and the syndicate controlling it, people still had to get around. The train station was always crowded.
Near the platform, I saw two armored StateSec officers. Having recently been a wanted fugitive, I tensed up a little when I saw them but then I relaxed, knowing that Section 9 had cleared all my charges anyway. I shouldn’t have worried in the first place; StateSec funding in East Hellas is provided entirely by Ares Terrestrial. They were hardly interested in keeping order anywhere except in the few areas the company directly controlled, such as the public transit stations. They wouldn’t waste two seconds of paperwork on a warrant from Earth.
Of course, I was planning to commit a murder right under their noses within the next few minutes, but one thing at a time.
Despite the StateSec presence, Sasha’s bodyguards became noticeably more aggressive and arrogant when they stepped out of syndicate territory and into the station. They shoved people aggressively aside, knocking one man to the floor. They made a big point of waving their guns around, looking in all directions for a potential threat—and not taking any notice of me when they did so.
At first, I interpreted all of this as a sign of the company’s weakness. They had lost control of East Hellas, and the corporate totalitarianism they had attempted to create had devolved instead into gangster feudalism. Since they’d cut the security budget to maintain their profit margin, they no longer had the resources available to challenge the syn
dicates for control of the city. Charismatic preachers like Bensouda Hafidi could wave the torch all they wanted, but if Ares Terrestrial couldn’t even control public transit then what could they hope to do about the syndicates?
I soon realized it was worse than that. Sasha Ivanovich was an Ares Terrestrial VIP, in charge of a major research project, yet his bodyguards were back-alley gunmen rather than suited corporate security. As contractors for a company bigwig, they outranked the StateSec officers on the platform, and that’s why they could get away with acting so arrogant. The StateSec guys just looked away, knowing that they had no enforceable authority in this situation.
This planet is fucked, I commented over text.
Andrea responded immediately. Focus!
Amazed at the fact that they still hadn’t spotted me as a potential threat, I took the opportunity to get a few feet closer as the first of the guards went through the turnstile and onto the train platform. That left Sasha and the other guard on my side of the turnstile. The rear guard was scanning the room left and right, making a big show of his professionalism. I wasn’t too close, from his perspective—but I was close enough to use the splinter gun. All I needed him to do was to look away for a single second, just as Sasha was using his pass-card.
The card reader stopped working. Sasha smacked it, and the rear guard turned to face him. “What is it, boss?”
Sasha’s voice was gravelly. “It’s this fucking card reader. It won’t let me through!”
I bent my elbow and slowly raised the splinter gun to shoot from the hip, aiming at the back of Sasha’s neck. I would have taken him right then, if not for the green letters flashing in front of my eyes.
ABORT ABORT ABORT.
I lowered the splinter gun, though not entirely without being noticed.
The guard on the other side of the platform saw me lowering my arm and pointed me out to his companion on my side of the turnstile. “Tell that asshole to back off!”
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 48