Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  The other guard spun around and stuck his gun under my nose. “Give us three feet, fuckwit!”

  I put my hands up and stepped back as far as the crowd would let me. It wasn’t nearly three feet, but it turned out to be enough to satisfy them. The card reader suddenly started working again, and Sasha Ivanovich stepped through onto the train platform. I followed after him, but the bodyguards were now alert to me. As the train pulled in, one of them turned his head in my direction.

  “Take a different car. Or die in this one.” His voice was cold, although it did sound a bit like he practiced his tough-guy act in front of the mirror.

  I did as he said and boarded the next car down. There was nothing more to be done until I had new orders. Sasha Ivanovich wouldn’t die today.

  * * *

  The ride to the hotel took almost two hours, due solely to the necessity of maintaining mission security. We were on the 250-H, which could have reached our hotel with a single transfer to the 250-V. As a spy, things are rarely allowed to be that simple. If you’re noticed at all on a job like this one, standard protocol is a minimum of four transfers, including one complete change of direction. So I took the 250-H to the 253-H, then the 253-H over to the 253-V, then the 253-V up to the 157-H, then back to the 250-H on the 157-H, then the 250-V to the hotel. By the time I was done, I was ready for a hot shower and a cool Old Fashioned. Instead, I had to listen to a patronizing lecture from my colleague Andrew Jones.

  “Don’t worry about being spotted, Tycho. For a dry guy like you, I can’t really say you did too bad. The training’s starting to show.”

  Andrew was my first contact with Section 9, back when I was on Tower 7 during the 2/77 Incident on Venus. When I sought him out, I was acting under the impression that he was a cybersecurity expert. He did have a few skills in that department, but his real specialty was infiltration. This made no sense to me and never had, because the man was so irritating I couldn’t imagine him doing anything at all without being noticed and remembered.

  “I did manage to kill August Marcenn.” I pointed out, walking right past Andrew to stand at the window of our hotel suite. As the infiltration expert, he had come to Hellas before anyone else and established a base here. His chosen location was the Aphrodite Arms, a hotel of more than questionable reputation. From our window on the fifth floor, I looked down on the tangled streets of the Overbelt section.

  Andrew somehow managed to sound genuinely confused. “August Marcenn? Did we ever assign you to kill August Marcenn?”

  A few meters away, the huge, muscular frame of Jonathan Bray appeared in one of the bedroom doorways. “Jones, are you ever going to get sick of yanking Tycho’s chain?”

  “Tycho could use a tighter chain in my opinion.” This was Vincenzo Veraldi, the outfit’s knife-fighting expert and second in command. He was also by far our most stylish member, with his tailored three-piece suit, perpetual stubble, and shoulder-length brown hair.

  I turned in his direction. “A tighter chain? I would have gotten the job done. Andrea aborted it.”

  “She probably aborted it because you’d been spotted.” Andrew’s voice was mournful, like it made him personally sad that I had fucked up the mission. The first time I met the guy, I wanted to punch him. When we were back on Earth during the Huxley case and he wasn’t there, I had actually asked after him. I don’t know why. Now I was back to wanting to punch him again.

  “I was spotted after the abort, not before.”

  Veraldi frowned. “I wonder what’s up, then. She ought to be back by now.”

  “I am.” Andrea dropped out of thermoptic camouflage, which made her seem to materialize right in front of us. She must have slipped in behind me. “I doubled back to make sure Tycho wasn’t followed. Is everyone here?”

  Bray gestured back into the room behind him. “Thomas is fucking around with the computers.”

  Andrea nodded. “Call him out here.”

  An attractive and commanding woman with curly blonde hair and four prosthetic limbs, Andrea was in charge of the whole crew. She liked to use her thermoptic gear to make dramatic entrances, especially when she could listen in for a few minutes first.

  “I knew you were here,” said Andrew. It was technically possible, since active camouflage leaves a visible distortion if you know what to look for.

  Andrea didn’t bother to challenge him on it. Instead she turned to me. “You weren’t quite as focused as you should have been out there.”

  “Like the man says, I’m still dry.” Of course, when it suited them, they could choose to decide that I wasn’t.

  “Hardly,” Andrea replied. “An experienced operator like you knows better than to joke around while you’re stalking someone.”

  Veraldi nodded. “A shorter chain. So, you pulled out because they spotted him?”

  “No, it’s like Tycho said. They only spotted him after I’d already given the abort command. He would have completed the mission.”

  Thomas Young came out of the bedroom and pushed his way past Jonathan Bray as if the big man wasn’t even there. It wasn’t because Thomas was bigger. He was just that rude, or socially clueless if you prefer. Our in-house tech expert, Thomas was not so expert when it came to human beings.

  “I was hardly, as Bray puts it, fucking around on the computer. I was erasing my tracks, making sure the hack of the card reader goes undetected. I’m still in the system, so we can use the same exploit on our next attempt if we need to.”

  “There won’t be another attempt,” said Andrea. “The hit has been called off.”

  Everyone but Veraldi seemed surprised by this. He raised an eyebrow. “Of course. If the cyborg unit we encountered during the Huxley case is any indication, Ivanovich’s work could dramatically shift the balance of power across the system.”

  “Did I miss something?” asked Bray, who liked to play dumb.

  “As usual,” said Thomas, who liked to let him. “Let me guess. Sasha Ivanovich has agreed to defect, offering information on Ares Terrestrial and his work in exchange for immunity and safe harbor.”

  “Exactly.” Andrea ran her fingers through her hair. “Tycho, I know this must be a bit dizzying, but this is how it goes sometimes. One minute, we’re supposed to kill a man, the next minute we’re his new best friends.”

  Bray groaned. “So, it’s an extraction now?”

  She nodded. “You’ve got it. Our orders are now to make contact with Ivanovich and escort him to the West.”

  Access to Hellas is only possible through either the eastern or western spaceports. Ares Terrestrial is so paranoid about the Sol Federation that travel through the eastern port is all but impossible—even for Section 9. It’s actually easier to sneak over the Wall, the so-called Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart, despite the fact that the Wall was designed to keep people in, not out. All propaganda about “West Hellas imperialism” notwithstanding, of course.

  Andrew leaned back against a couch. “I don’t know, Andrea. It will take some time to produce documentation for Ivanovich to cross the border, and I don’t know if we have that much time. I’ve been here for a while, so take my word for it: the unrest is growing out there. It’s getting bad.”

  “What, the street preachers?” I said. “We passed one of them while we were tracking Ivanovich. The crowd seemed pretty calm.”

  He nodded. “Exactly. A Hellan neighborhood is never calm. When the crowd gets quiet, that’s the most ominous thing that could possibly happen. I’m telling you—this city is about to burn.”

  “Riots?” asked Bray.

  “No, no. More like civil war. Do you have any idea how many weapons there are out there? How many people are used to using them? The syndicates shoot at each other every single day, fighting for control of sex traffic and illicit trade. The violence spills over to the average citizen. Some of the neighborhoods have already started to organize their own militias to drive the syndicates out. Money is tight for the little guy, and Martian Sclerosis is killing people. The
Ares Terrestrial board governs to increase corporate profits at the expense of its workers, ignoring everything that’s wrong with the city. It’s all magnesium waiting for a flame.”

  Bray laughed. “Never knew you were such a dissident, Jones.”

  “Dissident my ass. It’s all fact.”

  This was a side of Jones I hadn’t seen. Bray was right, it did sound like the man had some radical sympathies, or at least that he could see things from their perspective.

  Andrea gave him a look that was a little hard to read. “You’re not from here, Andrew. Don’t assume you know everything just because you researched it.” I happened to know that our commander was from Mars, but I had no idea where her own sympathies lay. As a Section 9 agent, she wasn’t supposed to have any. Then she turned to Thomas. “Can you intercept the Border Patrol’s datastream as we cross? Feed them false info in real time?”

  He smiled disdainfully. “Of course I can.”

  “Then our next steps are clear. We make contact with Ivanovich, pick him up, and escort him safely across the Wall.”

  “And if a civil war does break out?” asked Andrew.

  “We shoot our way out of it.”

  2

  “This morning we were going to kill Ivanovich; this evening we’re going to save him. Standard practice for Section 9.” Vincenzo Veraldi gave a little smile. “The mission was easier this morning, frankly. Unless he’s coming to us?”

  Andrea shook her head. “He is not. Jones is right about the situation here. The city’s unstable, and we have no way of knowing when something might kick off. He reached out through the embassy, so he doesn’t know where or even who we are. We have to go to him.”

  “Well, shit.” Bray looked glum. “Why didn’t we just grab him this morning? Barrett here was right behind the guy.”

  “Uh-huh. And if we had done that, how do you think his bodyguards would have reacted? How would StateSec have reacted?”

  From her tone of voice, you would have thought she was talking to an eight-year-old, and not an especially bright eight-year-old at that.

  Bray was unfazed. “You don’t want any drama down here. I get that. But is there really a plan where we can get in and out without making some noise? You just said he wasn’t coming to us. I assume that means we’re going to him.”

  “Some of us are, yes. We’re not declaring war; we’re slipping in and slipping out again. Team of two, thermoptic camouflage.”

  Veraldi nodded. “It’s been a while…”

  “I wasn’t talking about you, Vincenzo. I was talking about Tycho.”

  Jones raised an eyebrow. “Tycho? I mean, yeah, he’s trained in it. No field experience, though.”

  “And how am I supposed to get field experience?” I pointed out.

  “I don’t know.” Jones shrugged. “A beer run, maybe?”

  In Section 9 slang, a “beer run” meant a low-risk mission. It was an ironic term, because some Section 9 operative had apparently walked into an ambush while picking up beer for the safehouse once, resulting in an extended firefight. A mission was considered a beer run if there were no known risks, but you could never rule out unknown risks.

  “When was the last time we even did a beer run?” asked Bray.

  He might have said this because he wanted beer, but that wasn’t how Andrea took it. “The last time we did a beer run was before Venus, and there’s a reason for that. Tycho needs to pay his dues, and that will never happen if we babysit him. He’s coming with me.”

  She turned to me. “Ivanovich has a history of remaining at Ares Terrestrial for days at a time, so that’s where we’re going. In this case, speed is worth the risk of exposure. Come with me. We’ll get suited up.”

  Thomas turned to go back to the bedroom but paused in the doorway first. “I’ll run interference from here, yes?”

  Andrea nodded, and he went back to his computers. A few minutes later, I was dressed in the same active camo suit Andrea usually wore. I associated the suit so strongly with Andrea that it felt strange to put it on, like I was playing dress-up.

  She must have seen the uncomfortable look on my face. “You’ll get used to being invisible in no time. In fact, it’s kind of fun.”

  “I take it we’re all on standby?” Bray looked disgusted, not because I was wearing the thermoptic camo but because he couldn’t get out there and have some fun of his own.

  “You’re a smart guy, Jonathan,” she said, and dropped from view. A moment later I did the same, and stepped into the phantom world Andrea spent so much time in.

  One amusing advantage of being invisible is that you don’t have to pay to take the train. We slipped in through the closing doors without anyone noticing—the slight distortion the suits make in the air is only detectable if you know to look for it—and stood out of the way of the crowds coming and going. We went to the Ares Terrestrial Medical Labs by the fastest route but were forced to get out two stops away because the tracks were blocked.

  Andrea sent me a message. This feels like trouble.

  She was right. As we approached on foot, the usual foot traffic of early evening passed back and forth all around us like nothing was wrong. This was a company neighborhood, so many of the people we saw were corporate employees on their night off. People met each other in front of restaurants or joined the lines at trendy nightclubs, and the neon lights all around us looked like a downtown area on any of the primary colonies. It all seemed normal, but it didn’t feel normal. It felt tense, like a finger hovering in the trigger guard while you listen for approaching footsteps.

  As we approached the medical labs, we heard the crowd. They didn’t roar and they didn’t chant, but the presence of that many people in a relatively small space was loud anyway, with an ominous shuffling of expectant feet. I couldn’t see anything beyond the crowd at first, but one thing I could tell as soon as I saw them was that they were ordinary Martians—very different from the corporate employees at the nightclub district we had just passed through.

  They were listening to a speaker, and as we slipped along the fringes of the crowd, I finally caught a glimpse of him. He was standing on a makeshift platform in front of the Ares Terrestrial Medical Labs. In his green tunic, with his neat gray beard, he looked cultured and almost elegant—but his words were fire.

  “How many of us have seen it in our own families? The early signs, so easy to mistake for something else, so easy to convince yourself it’s something else, because you don’t want to believe it’s happened to the ones you love. He’s always been clumsy, we tell ourselves. She’s just tired. But then it gets worse. And in the end, you have no choice except to admit the truth. The one you love has Chandra’s disease!”

  Andrea filled me in, although she wasn’t telling me anything I hadn’t read in the briefing.

  That’s Bensouda Hafidi. He’s talking about MS.

  MS was short for “Martian Sclerosis,” colloquially known as “Chandra’s disease.” It was incurable, one hundred percent fatal, and increasingly common. Bensouda Hafidi was an imam, a well-known spiritual leader in one of the East Hellas temple networks. I couldn’t say which one; Martian religious groups hate each other as much as religious groups anywhere, but I’ve never been able to figure out what the differences between them are supposed to be.

  Hafidi continued. “And we could accept this. It’s the will of God that sickness and suffering should come to all of us. This is not unusual; it isn’t anything to shake your fist at God about. Ah, but God commands! Does he not command us?”

  In that silent crowd, three thousand fists raised all at once.

  This is going to get bad. Get moving, Tycho.

  I wanted to get moving, but it wasn’t going to be easy to get any closer than we already were. The crowd occupied the entire space in front of the Medical Labs, and silent men with raised fists were packed so densely in front of me that I could no longer make any progress, even by skirting the edges of the crowd. Just past the platform on which Hafidi was
standing, I could see the helmets of StateSec’s armed guards. This situation had every potential to become a massacre—the only question was who was going to massacre whom.

  “God commands us…” cried Hafidi, and the crowd waited on him like an avalanche waiting for a loud noise. If he had told them that God commanded them to storm the medical labs and rip apart every human being they found inside, I’m sure they would have done exactly that. “God commands us to love our neighbor, to help our ailing brother. Have they done so? Has Ares Terrestrial helped its neighbor?”

  Then the roar came, the wave of suppressed rage that had been building up in every throat. It didn’t sound like a crowd of angry people. It sounded like the ocean, gathering its force to roll in as a tsunami.

  Hafidi wasn’t done. “Ares Terrestrial is like the rich man of scripture, who would not give one coin to aid the poor and the imprisoned, and who God caused to be swallowed up by a sandstorm so that even the memory of his name was erased from the world! My Sisters! My Brothers! Hellas, you are that sandstorm!”

  That’s when StateSec finally acted. From the roof of the lab, a small squadron of drones came gliding out. They spread out through the square then started firing into the angry crowd—non-lethal munitions, although that can be something of a misnomer.

  Someone grabbed the speaker, whisking him to safety before StateSec could snatch him. The crowd was panicking, people running in all directions to escape the drones. A path cleared in front of me, and I noticed the faint shimmer in the air as Andrea took her opportunity.

  Move, Tycho!

  I sprinted forward through the gap, narrowly dodging a StateSec officer who was raising his weapon menacingly and pointing it directly at the crowd. Something hit the plasticrete pillar beside me and broke free a fist-sized chip—a “nonlethal” munition at work. Something else hit the wall in front of me and flared up into flame for a brief moment. It took me a second, but I realized it was an improvised firebomb thrown by someone in the crowd.