Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  Our friends over on the other side of the thoroughfare couldn’t do anything to help us. They didn’t have any cover except the angle they were at, which was effectively a blind spot from the perspective of the people who were shooting at us. On top of that, they just didn’t have the right weapons to do much damage, except for the occasional potshot when the opportunity arose.

  Our situation then became worse and better at exactly the same time. It got worse when a StateSec security officer stepped out from a room on the floor above Bray and the others and handed a grenade launcher to a gangster. That single weapon nullified the protection of our cover and dramatically shifted the odds of the fight. Still, it made our situation better because the officer hadn’t conjured the weapon from thin air. He had come from a room with slatted metal bars over the windows. A security office.

  With the right sort of weapons, we could turn this situation around and make the final push across the border. It was just a matter of getting up there and taking what we needed before they blew us all to pieces.

  Andrea ducked backed down. “Reloading!”

  That meant it was my turn to fire. I leaned out and waited instead, scanning for the gangster with the explosives, hoping he’d make a play in the lull. My bet paid off, and he came out of cover to take the shot. I got him first, and he tumbled through the hole. I saw a tongue of fire leave his weapon as he fell, heard the ring of metal against plasticrete, and immediately threw myself to the floor as I called out “Grenade!”

  I heard it go off and felt something like needles across the back of my neck and the side of my face. Unidentifiable pieces of viscera covered the floor around us. I felt my neck for wounds and touched something small and sharp that was lodged into my skin. I pulled it free and found a quarter-inch shard—not of metal, but bone. The grenade had bounced and burst in the air. If not for the falling body taking the brunt of the explosion, Andrea, Thomas, and I would have been showered with lethal shrapnel.

  I needed to access that security room. I didn’t know if I’d be able to get into it, and the weapons locker inside could already be cleaned out, or my skeleton key might not even work in the first place, but it was try something or die.

  “Andrea! There’s a weapons locker up there, above Bray and the others!”

  She nodded, immediately understanding what I wanted to do. “Leapfrog it,” she ordered. “You first.”

  She laid down some suppressing fire, and I ran out into the open five meters then knelt down to do the same for her. She ran out while I fired, then she turned and opened fire so I could run. Crossing the open and totally exposed, our only hope for survival was to throw plenty of lead in their direction. That’s when I remembered the holographic emitter I’d taken off that Kagebushin assassin. It hadn’t helped me with the cyborgs, but there was no reason to think it wouldn’t help now.

  While the gangsters and StateSec up above me ducked their heads to avoid my fire, I reached for the emitter and turned it on. The effect was apparent immediately. A Black Kuei gunman decided to take his chance, but he fired a good foot and a half to my right. I could still see his confused look when my return fire went through the top of his skull. Before his body even hit the floor, a StateSec officer unleashed a long burst three feet to my left. Andrea grouped three shots into his face and he slumped down dead.

  Every casualty we inflicted made the enemy more cautious. The small arms fire stopped, and for a few breaths, the space was quiet until someone decided to try a grenade again. Before I could even dive for cover, Andrea jumped up over my head and caught the thing in midair, then she batted it back toward whoever had thrown it. The explosion freed a weakened section of the damaged ceiling, dropping everything and everyone above it down to our floor in an avalanche of plasticrete and bodies.

  We used the collapse as an opportunity to join Jones and the others on the other side of the thoroughfare. Bray whistled. “Holy shit, chief. You’re really something in the low Gs.”

  She glanced up at the hole in the ceiling. “That’s the idea here, Jonathan. I’m going up. Tycho, you’re coming with me. I’m not sure you can make the jump without prosthetics, so we’ll do it another way. You see that staircase over there?”

  “Yeah, I see it. Flanking action?”

  “You got it. I’ll cover you.”

  “No way,” Bray announced. “You have enough to worry about. I’ll handle the suppressing fire.”

  Without even waiting for her to answer him, he stepped out from the wall and opened fire on the men upstairs with his handgun. He didn’t give me any time to think, so I bolted across the open space and headed straight for the stairway. Somebody did take a shot at me, but thanks to the holographic emitter it wasn’t even close. I reached the staircase in seconds and bounded up the steps.

  If the men we were fighting had had any time to think about it, they probably would have rolled a grenade down that staircase and stopped me from getting anywhere near them. As it was, they didn’t have time for anything of the sort because Andrea jumped straight up through the hole in the ceiling and landed in their midst.

  I took those stairs two at a time, which might not have been the best idea in retrospect. As I was reaching the top, the damaged staircase gave way with a screech and went crashing down, and I had to push off and jump across the gap or I would have gone down with it. Even though I didn’t have the advantage of Andrea’s powerful prosthetics, the lower Martian gravity was still a huge benefit to a born Terran like me. I made the jump, and I made it with enough of a margin that I was able to land on both feet and come up shooting.

  I got the drop on a gangster and hit her twice in the chest, knocking her flat on her back. I put a bullet in her head as I passed. I was about twenty meters and a corner away from Andrea, but I could hear the rattle of a furious gunfight. The whole point of a flanking attack is to come in from the side, so I started shooting again the second I turned the corner.

  That was all it took. StateSec and the syndicates had been holding their own against Andrea by firing from behind cover, but when I came in from the blind side, they broke and ran. Tried to run, anyway. I didn’t want to give them a chance to regroup and rally so I just kept shooting as they stumbled over each other.

  Just three made it out of the killbox, and they died in front of the security office doorway. The others lay either dead or dying, moaning and writhing on the floor as we approached.

  Andrea looked around. “Right. Heavy weapons.”

  “That all depends on whether we can get in the locker.”

  East Hellas didn’t acknowledge the authority of the Sol Federation, and the smart thing for Ares Terrestrial to have done would be to build all their own secure systems from scratch with locally sourced components. That would have prevented me or any other Sol Federation operative from using a skeleton key, because the backdoors the key relies on simply wouldn’t exist. But the corporate mind isn’t always quite as sharp as that. I had already used my skeleton key successfully to take control of one of their trains, meaning it was likely they were importing whatever they needed from off-world, backdoors included. If they’d been as careless about sourcing here as they were with the trains, I’d be in within seconds.

  I turned and walked through the door marked SECURITY OFFICE and reached for my skeleton key, then I stopped short and laughed out loud.

  “What is it?” asked Andrea.

  “They left it unlocked. They just left it completely unlocked.”

  The StateSec officer who’d been handing weapons out was nowhere to be seen, and the weapons locker was wide open. I could hardly believe it was really going to be that easy.

  “Hold back and go slow, Tycho. Check for traps.”

  She was absolutely right—there’s no such thing as a free lunch—but this turned out to be an exception. There was no tripwire or bouncing betty mine waiting for me. The only thing inside the room was a locker and weapons rack full of military-grade arms, the East Hellas answer to any sudden incursio
n from the West.

  Andrea came in behind me. “There’s everything we could possibly want in here. The others can take their pick of whatever they want.”

  “I’m not sure how they’re supposed to get up here,” I pointed out. “The staircase fell while I was climbing it.”

  “Then beggars can’t be choosers. Take what you can carry. Prioritize available ammo and stopping power. I’ll keep watch.” Andrea took up position by the door and cloaked as I turned back to the locker.

  There were a pair of bullpup shotguns, half a dozen machine pistols, half a dozen rifles, five submachine guns, and two grenade launchers. I ruled out the high explosives because they were as likely to kill friend as foe in close quarters, and the practical ammo cap was too low to be much help in a protracted fight. The shotguns had a similar drawback, but if anyone could be a surgeon with a slug, it was Bray. I shouldered one and found a canister of shells.

  That left Veraldi, Jones, and Young. The rifles were the obvious choice, and as expected, it had been the obvious choice of StateSec as well. There was only a single, half-empty canister of rounds with a matching caliber, and not a single magazine. We could loot more ammo from the dead, but until we did we’d be counting every shot. The machine pistols and SMGs on the other hand—

  “On your time, Barrett.”

  Andrea’s not-so-subtle order clinched the decision. In close quarters, the range of a rifle didn’t outweigh the bulk, and ammo in hand was worth more than the possibility of finding it downrange. I slung two submachine guns around my neck and took a machine pistol with my free hand. The syndicates seemed to prefer lighter calibers, so if things got bad we could always take more ammo from any gangsters we ran into.

  “We’re good, chief.”

  Andrea decloaked and we left the security office. She then hopped lightly down and landed gracefully in the thoroughfare, and I jumped down after her and landed with much less grace.

  I handed out the weapons. Johnathan’s face lit up as he loaded his new shotgun, and Andrew gave me an approving nod as he took a submachine gun. Thomas accepted his machine pistol with either mild curiosity or complete indifference. It was hard to tell. I slipped off the other submachine gun and offered it to Vincenzo.

  “Keep it, But thank you, Tycho. I’ve made a knife.”

  “You made a knife?” asked Andrea incredulously.

  “I made a knife. It’s fairly easy. Just a shard of broken glass and a strip of cloth.”

  To each his own, but Vincenzo’s choice made no sense to me. I kept the SMG for myself, deciding to use it until he inevitably changed his mind.

  On the floors above, no one had stirred since our successful counterattack. I should have known better than to think it was over, but we tend to believe what we want to be true. As we turned and started walking west again, I started thinking about the after, of sharing a post-mission beer together in some West Hellas bar. That’s when the shooting started.

  A bullet cut the air about six inches to my right, and I realized that the holographic emitter had just saved my life. I’m not afraid to say that this time I took the attack personally. In my mind, I had already been sitting in allied territory with a drink in my hand, telling exaggerated war stories. Now some shitheel wanted to shoot me in the back?

  I spun around and cut loose on the syndicate gunmen creeping up behind us. The Black Kuei gangsters dove for cover, but not all of them made it, and as they dropped to the floor, I suddenly started screaming for no reason I could really articulate.

  “Come on, Barrett!” yelled Andrea. “Get your ass behind cover!”

  I turned and saw that everyone had already found spots to hide, and all of my enemies had done the same. I took cover behind the smoking wreckage of the train car. Andrew Jones was already there.

  He shook his head. “Panic.”

  I thought he was saying that I had panicked, but then I remembered it was just his nickname for me. “Yeah. That’s me, alright.”

  He started laughing quietly. “Do you have any idea how you looked out there? You were all aaarrrggghhh! I’m such a badass! I’m gonna kill everyone on Mars!!”

  “I’m ready to be done with this shit.”

  Andrew’s smile faded. “I know what you mean. Hey, what the hell is Vincenzo doing?”

  I looked where he was pointing and saw Veraldi slipping through a doorway. “I’m fairly sure he’s not deserting. He must be flanking them to get close enough to use that knife of his.”

  “You mean that shard of glass wrapped in a bloody rag? Well, come on, we’ve got to cover him.”

  He popped up and took a shot to make sure our enemies kept their heads down. A second later, I did the same. I didn’t duck down immediately, though. I was confident that the afterimages generated by the holographic emitter would confuse any sharpshooters on the other side as long as I kept moving, so I spun from side to side and took shots as the opportunities presented themselves. I finally ducked back behind the train wreckage after taking out three shooters.

  “Pleased with yourself?” asked Jones.

  “Absolutely. Yes. One hundred percent.”

  “Okay then.”

  On the other side of the train wreckage, Andrea came out and laid down a ferocious barrage of covering fire for Jonathan Bray, who advanced rapidly across the gap between us and the syndicate shooters with his shotgun roaring. While this was happening, Thomas was trying to tell me something from a few feet behind me. I wasn’t really listening, because I was trying to see where Veraldi had gone.

  “It says here,” Thomas droned, with his head cocked to the side as he interpreted the data coming in over his dataspike. “Tertiary forces are withdrawn from the area...”

  A group of syndicate gunmen burst from the same door Veraldi had disappeared through earlier. Thomas Young, clearly irritated that they had interrupted him while he was speaking, half-turned in their direction and casually gunned them down without even really looking.

  I sometimes forgot that he had the full combat capability of any other Section 9 operative. He not only had the training, but he was also pretty talented. It just didn’t interest him.

  “As I was saying,” he continued as the last of the bodies hit the floor. “It seems that Ares Terrestrial has dispatched something to the area. They’ve called back reinforcements.”

  I stuck my head out, trying to get a glimpse of whatever he was talking about. Up ahead, I saw Vincenzo crouching over a Black Kuei gunman and cutting his throat with that piece of jagged glass. Several feet past that, I saw Bray using his bullpup shotgun to blow another gunman’s head clean off. The scattered survivors were running straight into the path of a vehicle that had to be what Thomas was talking about.

  “Well, shit,” I breathed.

  I ducked back behind cover, and Andrew gave me a concerned look. “What is it, Tycho?”

  “That armored vehicle heading this way. I’ve seen it before. The Erinyes are coming.”

  20

  Jones called out to Andrea. “Capanelli, we need to get out of here! NOW!”

  A message came over our dataspikes.

  What happened?

  I subvocalized an answer. There’s a troop transport headed this way carrying Erinyes. More of the cyborgs from before. We can’t stay here!

  As so often happened, two or three of the words came out garbled and meaningless. She must have understood me though, because she immediately sent out a message to the whole team.

  Section 9, fall back. Push for the bridge.

  I didn’t know what bridge she was talking about, so I checked my schematics of the DMZ. Sure enough, there was a bridge separating East from West at this checkpoint. The schematics marked the space under the bridge with the words Old Hellas. I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to consider what that even meant. I was just thinking of how much of a bottleneck that would be. When we made our run across the bridge, it would be all too easy to gun us down from behind. It was almost suicide, but now that the Erinyes w
ere coming all we could do was run.

  As we fell back, we were slowed by the security turnstiles. Designed to control and restrict traffic through the DMZ, the same thing could have been found almost all the way to the front entrance until we smashed a train through it. Beyond the trail of blood and destruction, the turnstiles and secure corridors leading to them were still in place. We would have to make our way through a glass-walled labyrinth, and we would be under fire the whole time.

  There was nothing else for it, so it just had to be done. I backed into the turnstiles, watching the thoroughfare for shooters. The armored vehicle came to a stop, and like before, the side opened to disgorge the Erinyes inside. Up until that moment, the Black Kuei and StateSec had been working hand in hand to try to finish us off, but the Erinyes apparently had no such alliance. I couldn’t quite see what was happening from where I stood, but there was a blur of a movement and frenzied screaming, then the gangsters and StateSec officers were running back in our direction. Not to chase us, but to escape.

  Of course, I didn’t take that to mean they wouldn’t kill us if they caught up with us. I fled into the turnstile corridors, turning left and right as I ran through the snaking path. Someone screamed behind me, and I heard a wet crunch. I picked up the speed, and after a few more turns I caught up with Andrea. She was behind Ivanovich, walking backward to make sure he was covered.

  “Where are the others?” I asked.

  “Thomas and Andrew are ahead. Vincenzo is running interference, he just sent me a message. I haven’t seen Jonathan. He must still be behind you.”

  “There’s nothing good behind me.”

  “He’ll catch up. Stick to the mission, Tycho!”

  The last time I thought Jonathan was dead, he showed up right when I needed help. The man was unkillable. Unstoppable. But something felt wrong. I had already stepped outside of the mission once and didn’t relish the idea of doing it again, but as soon as I heard that Bray was missing, what I was going to do next was inescapable.