Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  I don’t think he wasn’t actually trying to save Sasha’s life, even if that was officially our mission. He was trying to save Veraldi by using Ivanovich as bait. Sasha was startled when Jones yelled, presumably thinking that he must be in immediate danger. He bolted and ran toward Jones, but the clawed Erinys didn’t react.

  Andrew’s plan did end up helping, though. When Sasha ran, the primate turned away from me. It saw the scientist and moved right toward him, raising a hand to swat him down. I rolled over and rose onto one knee, trying to get my bearings. My head was spinning wildly, and I felt like I was going to puke. As the others did what they could to drive the primate away from Sasha, I slipped off my shotgun and racked my SMG. It didn’t have the stopping power of the shotgun, but we were up against the wall and had to make do with what we had.

  As Thomas and Andrew reloaded, Andrea went back into close range. The primate had Sasha in its hands and was lifting him up, while he screamed something unintelligible. Andrea led with a wicked hook to the ape’s ribs before wheeling around and driving a kick into the cyborg’s jaw. The creature was stunned with the first hit, and it dropped Ivanovich with the second.

  I don’t know if he ever realized that Jones had used him to save Veraldi, but Sasha Ivanovich had had enough. He scrambled to his feet and bolted away, running for the West Hellas border as fast as his legs could carry him. As far as our mission was concerned, this wasn’t really such a bad thing for him to do. If he made it across the border safely, then this would have been a success by definition.

  Andrew called “Clear!” and Andrea dove out of the field of fire. Andrew opened, and as she shouldered her weapon and joined him, I saw the torn pleximesh skin on her hands and the exposed, scarred metal beneath. Her prosthetics gave her enough strength to stand face-to-face against the Erinyes, but they couldn’t last. Graphene and silica were no match for nanosuit plating and, unlike the nanosuit, her prosthetics couldn’t self-repair.

  I spun in Veraldi’s direction and fired a burst at the clawed Erinys, causing it to pause for just a moment and turn in my direction. Vincenzo took that opportunity to go on the offensive, slashing with his trophy talons. His attacks were precise. Far more precise than I would have considered possible under combat conditions.

  I spun again and shot the primate in the back as it went after Sasha Ivanovich. Our overlapping fire forced it into a clumsy hobble, and it eventually stumbled, falling to one knee. I ran a few steps to get closer, planning to level my weapon at its head and shoot it from point-blank range.

  Unfortunately, the primate wasn’t anywhere near as badly hurt as I had hoped. It spun around as I got in close, knocking my SMG to the side. Now it was my turn to trip, and Iost my balance with the force of impact. The Erinys grabbed my leg and tossed me through the air as if I weighed nothing. I flew across the bridge, losing all sense of where I was in space. I hit something hard and realized it was Vincenzo and the clawed Erinys as we all three went over the edge.

  The fall felt like it took days, a drop I would have expected to be fatal if I’d been in any condition to think at all. We hit the edge of a roof, and the centuries-old brickwork gave way beneath us. We smashed through some tile, then a terrace of some kind, then construction scaffolding.

  Not surprisingly, it’s all fairly vague to me now. I can’t really say for sure exactly what we hit, but I’m fairly sure that’s what kept us alive. As every tier broke and crumbled beneath us, the speed of our drop decreased. When we hit the street, all three of us lay there stunned for a moment.

  Things were dark down there in “Old Hellas.” We were lying in one of the derelict streets in the ruins of an earlier stage of the city. They’d built the modern city right over the top, and the bridge that connected East and West was one of the only ways to get into the old ruins.

  The clawed Erinys shook itself off and jumped to its feet with sickening speed. I grabbed up the submachine gun, ignored the fact that the shoulder strap was now twisted alarmingly around my neck, and shot at the thing in its center mass. In the dim light, accuracy would have to concede to precision.

  It ducked sideways, dodging my shot just like on the train. As the Erinys skulked back and slowly circled, I had the unpleasant thought that it was waiting until I was out of ammunition. Veraldi pulled himself to his feet somehow. He looked around for his blades, but both talons had been knocked clear as we fell through the ruins of the old city.

  “Any ideas?” I asked him. “She’s not a dumb animal.”

  “That was already clear on the train.”

  “If we aren’t smart about this, we’re dead. Do you have a weapon?”

  He stood and picked up a reinforcing bar from the collapsed construction site. He held it in front of himself like a spear. “I do now.”

  Keeping my weapon trained on the Erinys, I stepped to the right as Veraldi went left. Giving each other space meant it would have to choose a target and couldn’t attack the both of us at once. It must have realized that, because it held back.

  “How many rounds do you have?” Veraldi asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Last mag, twelve or sixteen shots left.”

  “Twelve or sixteen?”

  “I’m not sure. I swapped weapons.”

  He tightened his grip around the makeshift spear. “Single-round bursts. Time your fire to my attacks.”

  Veraldi left no time for response. He rushed toward the Erinys with careful, practiced strikes. He thrust the reinforcement bar with his right hand, guiding it with his left, then fluidly used that left hand as a fulcrum to slice the bar horizontally through the air. This wasn’t improvised technique, this was years of training. I realized then that Vincenzo Veraldi wasn’t simply obsessed with knives, he was a master of all edged weapons. In his hands, that twisted length of construction material was a deadly polearm, against which the Erinys could only defend by slipping between the strikes of his relentless assault.

  It was impressive, and against a lesser class of opponent it would have been more than enough, but the Erinys avoided every hit. Veraldi was keeping her on the defensive, but he’d tire out before long.

  “Do it, Tycho!”

  I raised my weapon and took aim. Veraldi’s plan was never to actually hit the Erinys, but to put it off-balance. Dodging his attacks meant it couldn’t dodge mine. I spotted an opening as the clawed Erinys twisted away from a strike, and fired.

  The round struck the back of the cyborg’s knee. It stumbled to the ground and, in that brief moment, Vincenzo pressed the advantage. He swung the reinforcement bar in a wicked arc, catching the Erinys across its featureless face. I fired two more rounds into the cyborg’s center mass and Veraldi followed up with another blow across her face, knocking the Erinys flat onto it’s back.

  Veraldi smoothly carried the movement through, bringing the bar behind his back and up above his head as he jumped into the air. He landed on the Erinys’s chest and drove the makeshift weapon through the base of the cyborg’s neck and out its back, pinning it to the ground. The Erinys flailed and kicked against the ground, grabbing at its neck and straining against the metal piercing its body. Vincenzo jumped back to get clear of its claws as they swung wildly.

  With my gun still trained on it, I walked closer to get a better shot and end the fight. Blood bubbled through the fractures in the nanosuit, but the damage was already closing around the reinforcement bar. Watching it bleed and struggle on the ground, I felt sorry for it in a way. The creature was smarter than some wild beast, I was certain of that much. Did it have the capacity to understand what it was doing? Did it ever have a choice?

  Veraldi walked up from behind me. “Fire a close grouping near that wound,” he said. I turned and saw that he’d found one of his missing blades. “Once you’ve broken the plating, I can end it with this.”

  I took aim, and the Erinys did something neither of us expected.

  The creature screamed, all rending metal and thunder, a sound both inhuman and familiar
at the same time. It was a piercing cry from the dawn of history, a primal sound that reached into the most basic, reflexive part of the human mind and gripped it tight with fear. The Erinys dragged itself off of the ground, sliding the impaled metal through its body until it could find its footing and pry the reinforcement bar from the ground.

  Vincenzo and I stared at the bloody, enraged figure standing in front of us. Its crowned head lolled to the side as the metal impaled through its neck forced it’s chin up. The other end dragged across the ground, punctuating every step with the rasp of metal across plasticrete. I cursed inwardly at my earlier hesitation and was determined not to make that mistake again.

  I fired twice at the Erinys, fully expecting it to dodge, not knowing anything else I could do. To my surprise, the rounds hit as the cyborg struggled for balance. Emboldened, I fired two more, striking its chest. I aimed more carefully and fired at its neck, and the shot bathed the area in an amber glow as it trailed burning pyrotechnic powder.

  Vincenzo knew that tracer round meant I was down to my final four shots. He reversed his grip on the blade in his hand and rushed the Erinys. It slashed weakly at him and Vincenzo was able to close in. The cyborg brought up its strong arm to stab him in the gut, but he parried the claws with his blade as he grabbed a hold of the bar protruding from its neck. He wrestled it to the ground and held it down as I closed in to make each shot count. I pressed the gun to the Erinys’s throat and Veraldi turned his head to avoid the muzzle flare.

  “End this!’

  I fired four even, controlled rounds into the cyborg’s neck. The nanosuit plating shattered with the final shot. I knelt and stepped on the Erinys’s clawed hand, freeing Vincenzo’s blade. He raised the knife, but before he could bring it down on the creature’s exposed flesh, the reinforcement bar snapped.

  Veraldi’s weight had been mostly on that bar, and it accounted for most of the leverage keeping the Erinys down. When it broke, he fell forward, and the Erinys bucked. We were both thrown. Vincenzo rolled over his shoulders into a kneel and I scrambled backward on my ass to get clear of the cyborg’s reach.

  The Erinys rolled over into a three-point stance and stared eyelessly at the two of us. For a second, I thought I knew how this was going to play out. Being the least armed, in a hilariously indefensible position, I was going to be attacked first. Once it killed me, it would focus on Veraldi and wear him down until he made a mistake. We’d both die here in the dark, forgotten ruins of Mars.

  But again, the Erinys did something I didn’t expect. It shrunk back, eying us both—as much as something without visible eyes can, anyway—then turned and ran into the dark of the old city.

  Vincenzo was already on his feet and running after it. “We can’t let it get away.”

  He was right, of course. We might have hurt it, but it wasn’t dead and the last thing we needed was a wounded predator skulking through the dark as we tried to climb out of Old Hellas. My gun was little more than a glorified club, not entirely useless, but it would force me closer to those claws than I’d want to be.

  I looked around for anything I could use, ruling out the reinforcement bar I had no chance of using with anywhere near the expertise of my teammate. A length of chain caught my eye, and I decided that would have to work.

  I ran off towards Vincenzo’s marker on my schematic and before long I could hear the sounds of combat. I saw movement in what looked like a courtyard beneath the skeletal facade of an unfinished building, and as I drew closer, I could make out the shapes of Veraldi and the Erinys trading slashes inside.

  I dangled a meter of chain from my hand then wrapped the rest around my wrist as I entered the building. Vincenzo was bleeding, but I couldn’t tell how badly he was hurt. It didn’t seem to have affected him much—he was warily circling the Erinys to put himself in the path of any way out it might have had.

  “Is it bad?” I asked him, as I moved to cut off the Erinys from his right.

  “A lucky hit, nothing serious. The beast’s left arm isn’t completely useless.”

  “Got it.”

  The Erinys was backed against a wall, so it wasn’t a surprise when it sprang forward and lashed out a clawed hand at Vincenzo. It must have gauged him to be the more immediate threat, and that made perfect sense to me. He was, after all, the one responsible for the length of metal jutting through its back.

  He dodged and parried the cyborg’s renewed assault, but he was being driven back all the same. Even with those horrific injuries, the Erinys was still a frightening force in combat. We only did as well as we’d done because of sheer luck and circumstance. Had this fight remained contained to the bridge, things might have gone very differently, and Ares Terrestrial would have won the day. Not to imply that things were inevitable by that point. They were far from it, in fact.

  I swung my chain and let loose with a lash across the cyborg’s back. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t for the thing to ignore the blow and remain focused on Veraldi. Nanosuits are designed to counteract ballistic, high-speed impacts with concentrated force across a small area. Blunt impact should still have some effect. I reeled back and whipped the Erinys again, and again, until my hands stung and the Erinys had finally had enough.

  It stopped attacking Vincenzo and wheeled around with a wild slash at me. I stumbled back in surprise just in time to avoid its deadly claws.

  “We need to get those blades under control.” I let out a little more slack on the chain.

  “My thoughts as well,” Vincenzo replied. “You take point.”

  I swung the length of chain around to draw the Erinys’s attention. I needed to be sure it would block the attack instead of slipping it. When I felt confident it anticipated my attack, I lashed at it, and sure enough, it took the bait. The Erinys grabbed at the chain as it wrapped around its wrist and tried to pull me closer. I let out a bit of slack to compensate then snapped the chain with a whip of my arm. It smacked the Erinys across the face—certainly nowhere near hard enough to hurt, but enough to distract.

  That was when Veraldi came in from behind and kicked in the cyborg’s knee. Its leg buckled and it fell to a kneel, giving me the opening I needed. I rushed in, pulled the chain over and around its head, then stomped on the slack between that and my wrist. The cyborg was pulled to the ground facedown, with its strong arm pinned beneath its body.

  As I said, the Erinys was a force to be reckoned with, even injured. Wounded, and with no leverage to speak of, I was struggling to keep it down with all of my weight centered on that chain beneath my heel. It was incomprehensibly strong, but I suppose being born and bred as a weapon would mean nothing less.

  Vincenzo grabbed the reinforcement bar still impaled through its body and pushed it back through the wound until it hit the ground on the other side.

  “On my mark, Tycho, pull as hard as you can.”

  I nodded.

  “Pull!”

  It started to scream again. That horrifying, heartbreaking sound was so loud it was less heard than felt. I pulled that chain for all my tired, spent body was worth while Vincenzo pushed with all of his strength on that bar. The Erinys’s nanite armor shredded apart, exposing the soft flesh buried deep beneath. Its head and right shoulder came free as its ribs cracked and its chest bifurcated. The chain slipped free, no longer moored by the base of the creature’s neck, and raked across its head, stripping away it’s faceplate. The scream lost its metallic tinge and became something much more familiar as the clawed Erinys was ripped in two.

  I fell to the ground, thrown off balance and too tired to stop it. Veraldi fell to his knees, breathing heavily. The Erinys’s head was twisted around and staring into the sky atop broken, exposed vertebrae, but despite the grizzly carnage, what I saw in that creature’s face made my blood run cold.

  It was human.

  A child, with the unmistakable hair and facial features of a Cavadora.

  22

  It took me some time to get my head together after I saw what
it was we’d been fighting. What we’d ripped apart. It was all I could do to just sit and stare out at the silent streets.

  Old Hellas was empty. A forgotten place for things that used to be. Like I’ve said before, the Martian colony was old, old enough to have real history—and here that history was laid bare. Silent buildings filled with ghosts.

  Was everything as horrible back then as it was right now? Or was it a better time, a time when nobody would even think of doing what Sasha Ivanovich and Ares Terrestrial had done to that child?

  Veraldi walked over, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Are you ready to go?”

  I wasn’t. Not at all. But there was no point in staying where we were. I got to my feet without a word, and Vincenzo sent a message by subvocalization.

  Clawed Erinys neutralized. Requesting extraction route.

  I glanced over at him sharply, but he wouldn’t look at me. His use of neutralized suggested that he wasn’t much happier about what had happened than I was. He was just a bit better at not showing it.

  Thomas Young was the one who answered us. One minute. The schematics to the old city are in a separate system.

  Thirty seconds later, he was back with the answers we needed. There should be a large building at the end of the block you’re standing in. That’s an old banking center. It reaches nearly all the way up to the bridge.

  Understood, replied Veraldi. Do you have any way to get us from the roof back to the bridge?

  You should be able to make that jump, Thomas replied. As long as you get all the way to the top, it’s just a bit more than three meters. In Martian gravity—

  I’m aware. Thank you, Thomas.

  Veraldi turned to me. “I’m sure the elevators aren’t working. We’ll have to go up the staircase.” I shook my head and laughed quietly, though without much humor. “Sure. Fall off a bridge, murder a child, then climb a skyscraper and jump three meters straight up.”

  “Just a bit more than three meters,” said Veraldi drily. “I’m surprised he didn’t give it to us in centimeters.”