She had stopped in the corridor, but Bray kept going for a few paces before he realized she wasn’t keeping up with him.
I held up my hands in protest. “I wasn’t risking the mission.”
“You were. You decided that preventing collateral damage was worth risking not only the mission but the entire unit.”
“That just isn’t true. I never expected anyone to follow me. I figured Veraldi and Jones would just keep going, and the consequences would fall on me and me alone. You have to understand—”
“I have to understand what? That you still see yourself as a part-time member of this unit?”
“Those Furies were killing civilians. Firing directly into a crowd of men, women, and children. What did you expect me to do?”
“I expect you to complete your mission. Or at least not to actively endanger it.”
I stopped myself from responding and took a pause to let the momentum reset, for the both of us. I lowered my voice, trying to de-escalate things as much as possible.
“I’m not ignoring you, Andrea. I just don’t understand how it really would have affected anything if I’d gotten killed. It just would have meant one more anonymous body for them to clean up in the aftermath of the riots.”
“Ares Terrestrial knows enough to identify us as operatives, even if they don’t know precisely who we work for.”
Now that I was an agent for Section 9, I’d become something I would previously have described as an urban legend. I was an operative, a “spook,” a mysterious killer working for unknown powers from behind the scenes. When I was still an Arbiter, I would occasionally run across stories of such people, and I had even met a few individuals who seemed to fit the bill. What I never realized was that the stories were true, that the shady characters who flitted around the edges of major crimes and political events were essentially just people doing their jobs. And I was now one of them.
“Okay.” I nodded slowly, considering Andrea’s words. “So they know we’re spooks.”
“Right. And what do you think that would mean if they managed to capture you? If they tortured you into revealing the existence of Section 9?”
“I’ve had the classes in resisting torture.”
“You know as well as I do that’s just about buying time. It's more a question of when you’ll break from interrogation, not if. But let’s say you’re the stuff of legend and you didn't say a word. There’s still the chemical composition of your stomach contents. There’s still the radiation type and exposure levels of your skin and hair tissues. There’s still your biometric markers. It all tells a story.”
“Okay, I can see that. Still—”
“You’re an asset. Losing you would weaken the unit. Do you understand that?”
“I’m supposed to put the unit above everything else?”
“Is there any other way to do it?” interjected Bray, his voice an ominous rumble from behind Andrea’s back.
“Bray’s got it,” she said. “When Ares Terrestrial is done pulling all the information from you they possibly can, it still wouldn’t be over. Your corpse could be used for propaganda—an off-world agent, sent to East Hellas to interfere in its internal affairs. They’d mount your head on a pike for the whole system to see, a warning to the Federation and anyone else trying to change things here. I know you sympathize with these revolutionaries, but nothing could be worse for their cause than that.”
“It’s not that I sympathize with the revolutionaries.”
“Then what is it?”
“The death. The only thing I was thinking about was how they were murdering all those people, how they were actually using the Furies against their own people.”
“These aren’t their people at all as far as they’re concerned. The ones we saw in those restaurants on our way to the Medical Lab, that’s who they see as theirs. And even then, they’d toss any of those people in a recycling unit if it would help their bottom line.”
“Exactly, Andrea. Just think about what you’re saying there. What’s the point? If we can’t stop monsters like that from committing atrocities, then what’s the point?”
“Could we save the ethical debate for the goddamn hotel room?” Bray demanded.
“Sorry, Jonathan.” Andrea turned away from me. “I didn’t mean to make this any harder on you, but Tycho here needs to get his head on straight. Go ahead and keep moving forward. We’ll get this worked out on the way.”
Bray started walking again, and after we’d been shuffling along for a minute or two, Andrea finally spoke again. “The most effective thing we can do to prevent atrocities is to complete our mission. We’re extracting Sasha Ivanovich so he can testify against Ares Terrestrial. They’ll have to pay for what they’ve done, and that will tend to discourage other companies from making the same mistake in the future.”
“The same mistake? That big one fired two shipboard cannons directly into a crowd of people. The air was humid from blood. The smell—”
“Whoever did that, they’ll have to answer for it. Maybe not right away, but they will answer for it in time. That’s the best we can do, Tycho. It’s really all we can do.”
“I don’t believe that. It’s always the same. It’s just like it was on Tower 7.”
“What about Tower 7? We achieved our objectives.”
“Exactly. Your objectives didn’t include saving lives. Section 9 could have intervened sooner and saved thousands, but you held back and those people died. Ophelia Emmet is dead because she wasn’t an objective.”
“We didn’t do anything sooner because it could have jeopardized the mission, and the mission was just too important for us to take that risk. Don’t even try to put all those deaths on us. That was August Marcenn’s work.”
“Intervening wouldn’t have jeopardized the mission. That’s what I’m saying. Your idea of what the mission requires is too narrow. You decided on your timeline and you stuck to it, no matter what was going on around you. It was the same thing on Earth. When I was being hunted by Augmen, you were right there, but you didn’t do anything. Not until the last possible moment. If I’d been unlucky down by the river, I would have died before you even decided to act.”
“Is that what this is about? Are you mad because I didn’t help you sooner when you were getting chased by bad guys?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with me. It’s about Section 9 policy. We could act sooner. We could go further. We could save lives.”
She stopped again, so Bray stopped as well.
“There’s something you need to understand here, Barrett.” Andrea’s voice was angry, but she held it in check. “I know you used to be an Arbiter, but those days are over. You have to stop thinking that way. The Arbiter Force is a blunt tool. Section 9 is a nano scalpel. You can’t save everyone, and it is sisyphean to try.
“Even with the strength and speed of an old god, you couldn’t come close to stopping every needless death around you. That’s not a failure on your part; that’s a failure of humanity. The failure of an imperfect society. What we do is part of the effort to push past that, to get the system to a place where the things we deal with never happen in the first place. Every successful mission moves the needle a little closer. Every failure dials it back. That’s the job. That’s the job. If you want to do well in this unit—if you want to continue—you need to start thinking more like a nano scalpel and less like a blunt instrument.”
With those words, Andrea Capanelli turned away from me and started walking again. I didn’t know what to say. She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead and didn’t speak again until we’d reached the end of the tunnel. I followed in silence, uncertain about whether I would ever really belong in Section 9.
16
The rest of the walk through the smuggling tunnel was made in awkward silence. Andrea was angry with me for putting my own instincts above the success of our mission, but I was equally incensed about Section 9’s hands-off approach. There was nothing more to say, at least for now.
The tension was unresolved, and as far as I could tell the only benefit of the conversation we’d just had was that it got everything out in the open.
“This is it.” Bray stopped at a door, accessed another maintenance panel built into the wall, and keyed in a command. The door slid open, and we emerged single file into an open space inside a larger structure. It was mostly dark, but light filtered in through a few windows somewhere inside. The shadows danced, and I realized the light must be fires burning outside, where the crowds still fought in memory of Bensouda Hafidi.
The white walls of a large dome soared up above my head. “What is this place?”
Andrea looked up. “It’s a Buddhist stupa. They would have kept some relics here, a bodhisattva’s finger or something like that.”
“Would have? They don’t anymore?”
“I’m not sure, but probably not.”
Thomas Young’s voice echoed across the room. “The Martian colony is old enough to have a history. The stupa was abandoned a hundred years ago as the Buddhists left this district and Hafidi’s sect came in.”
How typical of Thomas, to just launch straight into whatever topic he wanted to talk about without any acknowledgement of the fact that we were both still alive somehow. No Hi Tycho, glad to see you made it. Just a few interesting facts about local history.
In the center of the open space there was an enormous graphene statue. It depicted a Buddha seated on some kind of throne, with a flowing tunic and a peaked crown. One hand was raised with the palm open and turned up, the other held up three fingers in front of it in what I presume was some kind of gesture of prayer. I walked up to the statue and read the plaque at its base. It read East Hellas Maitreya.
I couldn’t see where Thomas was at first, so I just played along. “They didn’t knock it down?”
“You surprise me, Tycho. I should think you could see for yourself that they didn’t knock it down, since you are standing inside it. No, they built another structure around it and left it standing as a historical curiosity. Buddhists from other districts still come here on pilgrimage every now and then. It’s a perfect spot for the smugglers, because hardly anyone ever comes in here.”
I looked around, imagining the centuries of Buddhists that had come to this place to pray and meditate. I didn’t know much about Martian Buddhism, except that it had evolved away from any of the traditional Terran sects. As far as I knew, Buddhists didn’t kill each other over accusations of heresy, but it did make for a strained relationship between the temples on Earth and those on Mars. Perhaps that was why they had given up on the old stupa, because it represented an older version of the faith they had left behind.
“Where are you, Thomas?”
“I’m over here.” Distorted by echoes, his voice could have come from anywhere in that enormous structure. I kept walking along the curving wall, and eventually saw the familiar figure of Vincenzo Veraldi peering out a window up ahead.
He glanced in my direction. “Barrett. That was quite a stunt you pulled.”
“I heard all about it from Andrea already. I thought you guys were way above us.”
He shrugged. “We were, but this was the rendezvous point. I’d stay away from Jones if I were you. He’s kind of pissed at you.”
“Everyone in this place is kind of pissed at me.”
“Not Ivanovich. He just thinks you’re funny.”
I walked on past him and found Sasha leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. As he heard me approach, he opened one eye for just a moment to confirm my identity. “Ah, shit.” He closed his eye again. “I guess I lose that bet.”
A few feet past him, I found Thomas Young. He was seated on the floor behind the Maitreya statue, fiddling with a piece of equipment I didn’t recognize. Completely absorbed by the device he was holding, he didn’t even look up at my approach.
I stopped in front of him. “Glad to see you made it, Thomas.”
“Hmm? Why is that?”
I couldn’t think of a response to that one. Why indeed? I turned away and kept walking along the back wall until I reached another window. Andrew Jones was there, staring out at the streets outside. A floodlight lit his face, and he pulled back into the shadows of the stupa. “Barrett. You just won me a bet, otherwise I’d be punching you in the face right now.”
“Yeah, everyone’s mad at me. What can I say?”
“Don’t say a thing, just don’t go running off like that again. Some of us are trying to survive this mission.”
“I have my reasons. You wouldn’t understand.”
“No, I understand you perfectly, Tycho. It’s just that you’re wrong.”
“I’ve heard this song, so let’s change the beat. What’s Thomas doing back there?”
Andrew looked briefly in Thomas’s direction. “He’s hacking their systems. With that device, he can monitor data throughout the entire city. If he needs to, he can even interrupt or alter the stream. I don’t know the specifics of what he’s up to, but if you leave that guy alone for ten minutes, he’ll be in someone’s computer system.”
He looked at me straight on then sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know about you, Tycho. You don’t act like Section 9, but I can’t say you haven’t been an asset. Even back there on Venus, you got things done in your own way. You’re good at what you do, but are you ever going to try to be a team player?”
“I don’t know. I do know I can’t stand by and watch.”
“I get it, but there’s another solution.”
“What’s that?”
“You turn away. You keep moving forward. If we can take down Ares Terrestrial, we’ll save a lot more lives than we could ever do by getting involved in these riots.”
“It’s looking more like a revolution at this point.”
“Even worse. Do you think for one minute that the Sol Federation is going to tolerate the existence of a revolutionary government here in East Hellas? If it came to that, they’d be just as happy to invade and occupy the place. It would be less hassle to them than dealing with revolutionaries. Revolutionaries are people who cannot be reasoned with.”
“Like myself.” I grinned.
“That’s right, like you. So, you fought the Erinyes?”
“I shot at the Erinyes, but all I was really doing was putting little holes in their armor. Until Bray showed up with that massive cannon of his, I wasn’t sure how it was going to go against that ape-cyborg.”
“It does help to have a plan in life. Were you going to have him rip off your head?”
“No, I don’t think so. It was more of a squeezing-me-into-a-pulp situation. Bray smashed the thing’s chest in with a shot from his cannon, then Andrea handed me this squad rifle and I was finally able to really fight.”
Andrew suddenly looked confused, then he glanced back toward the door to the shaft. “Hey, wait a second. You used the smuggler’s shaft?”
“We did.”
He started laughing quietly. “Holy shit. You mean to tell me Bray had to lug that thing through the shaft… by hand?”
“It wasn’t really lugging. It was more like waddling sideways. He was almost hyperventilating.”
“I’ll bet he was. That guy’s claustrophobic! I can’t believe he did that…”
“Yeah I think he just about lost his shit.”
“If he actually had, you wouldn’t be alive to tell the tale. Where is he now?”
I looked around, but I couldn’t see him. The way that place was set up, a person on the other side of the big Maitreya statue couldn’t be seen at all. “I’d better go check on him.”
Jones raised an eyebrow. “Good luck with that. I’m not sure that’s any safer than when you decided to run off and fight all those Erinyes.”
As irritated as he was, it looked like Jones was mostly over it. I walked on until I reached Bray, who was standing in front of the Maitreya and staring up at it grimly. His giant gun was cradled in his arms, and his facial expression was one of belligerent incomprehens
ion.
“You got a problem with the Buddha, Jonathan?”
“Huh?”
He went right on glaring at it, but I didn’t get the opportunity to find out what his issue was with the statue.
Andrea came around from the other side with Veraldi in tow, and Thomas following a few paces behind. “Has anyone seen Andrew?”
“He’s back at the window.” I pointed. “Want me to get him?”
“I’m not back anywhere, I’m right here.” He walked over to join us and was soon staring at Bray and then back at the statue. Then he looked back and forth between the two again. “Did the statue do something to piss you off, Jonathan?”
Bray glanced at him. “Huh?”
Andrea stepped forward. “We’re all in the same place for the first time since that bomb went off. Reports?”
Veraldi went first. “I gathered up everyone I could find, then we made our way through Pretorius toward Great Wall to rendezvous with our Black Kuei contact. Along the way, we were attacked by a hit team from the Geneicide Syndicate but succeeded in recovering their dataspikes. Well, some of their dataspikes. Andrew analyzed the data they contained, and we discovered the existence of a citywide contract on our lives. We sought out Madam Shih to obtain some weapons—”
“And a first-rate memory experience,” added Sasha Ivanovich, who had wandered over to see what we were talking about.
Veraldi ignored him. “When we reached the train, we were attacked by Erinyes, but Tycho came up with an effective escape plan.”
Andrea looked surprised, as I had left this out of our conversation. “Tycho did?”
Veraldi nodded. “He got us to retreat into another train car and then disconnected the one the Erinyes were in. After they fell behind, he hacked the train’s onboard control system with a skeleton key and ordered it to stop. We jumped off onto a rooftop in Fuji Section.”
Bray frowned. “Why didn’t he just, you know, kill all the cyborgs?”
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 64