Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  Seeing but unseen, I slipped through the afternoon crowd as Rosenstein made his way back toward his power base in midtown. I planned to take him once when he left the busy market district and was in an area with fewer witnesses. Section 9 does tend to be a bit loud sometimes, so for this solo job I was going to do it my way and minimize collateral damage.

  Up ahead of me, Rosenstein ran into someone he must have felt was important enough to talk to. They stopped and chattered in the street for a few minutes while his three guards stood like blind statues and failed to see me. I was in front of a rug shop pretending to admire the merchandise, angled so that my body was mostly hidden by an air purifier. When they started moving again, I gave it a minute and then followed them. Whoever he had been talking to was already gone.

  They wandered through the busy streets, not hurrying at all, letting Mr. Rosenstein be seen. It’s important for minor royalty to do that sometimes; you can’t claim to be a king if you don’t maintain a presence. Then they turned down Tharsis Street and made their way toward Lowerback, the warren of narrow streets he called his own. It would be better to take him before he reached that neighborhood, though not impossible to take him after.

  The job would be harder at that point. I could follow them on Tharsis Street, but there was a lot less foot traffic and an increased risk they would make me. I slipped across Tharsis instead and found a smaller street that ran parallel to it. If I attacked them from behind, the guards would be able to engage me while Rosenstein escaped in another direction. If I attacked them from the front—blocking the way back home—my odds of actually talking to Rosenstein would be a bit better.

  When I reached a cross street, I returned to Tharsis and spotted them behind me by about a block and a half. We had left the downtown area, but we were not yet in Lowerback. There were fewer witnesses to spot me or what I was doing, and fewer allies to come to Rosenstein’s aid unexpectedly. It was time to pick a spot.

  The area was mostly empty, the security shutters of long-vacant storefronts lining the street. Red dust hung heavy in the air. I walked rapidly, like I had somewhere important I needed to be. I knew they could see me now, a lone figure on the otherwise clear street, but they had no reason to suspect anything. Once they were just beyond arm’s reach, I spoke.

  “Hello, Geoffrey.” My voice was quiet, but he stopped dead in his tracks. “We need to talk.”

  He looked at me for a second like he didn’t quite know what I was supposed to be. I didn’t blame him. People do say I have a baby face. “Do I know you?” he managed at last.

  That struck me as kind of funny because I knew everything there was to know about him: his age, his weight, where he was born, his brothers and sisters. How he got that little scar above his left eyebrow. Where he got his beard trimmed so nicely.

  “No.” I said, and he gestured to the three hulking bodyguards. He didn’t try to run, which in retrospect seemed like a stupid decision. But from his perspective, why would he? I was just one guy with an innocent face. They were three hard killers with submachine guns.

  Two of the bodyguards flanked me, one to the right and one to the left. The third one came straight in at me but didn’t raise his submachine gun. He probably thought this would just be a simple beating.

  I didn’t move on him. Instead I took the one on the left. Anytime you’re being flanked like that, they’ll expect you to go after the guy in the middle, at which point you will inevitably get sucker punched by the guy on either side. As a right-handed fighter, it made the most sense to me to move them all to my right. So I shuffled sideways, jammed my thumbs into the eyes of the man on the left, swept his feet out from under him, and guided his skull into the pavement.

  That definitely surprised the others.

  The man in the middle—probably their lead—had to jump out of the way to avoid the man falling in front of him. When he jumped back the other man had to also, so both of them were already off their rhythm before the first was out.

  From that point on it was a straight-up fight of two against one. I drove my left fist into the face of the man in the middle, and to his credit he ate the punch and came back swinging. I dropped my right elbow to block the counterpunch, then pivoted and kicked the man on the right. He blocked it successfully but staggered back from the blow.

  The man in the middle kept punching, either forgetting all about his weapon or thinking he had something to prove now. I caught a punch and wrapped my arm around his, locked the joint with upward pressure, then spun him around to block the other guy’s line of fire. That one hadn’t forgotten he had a gun, and I wanted to make him think twice about using it.

  My faith was proven misplaced with a rattle of submachine gun fire. The man in my grip went slack as he became an unintended human shield. I shoved his dying body away, and he stumbled a few feet before falling onto the shooter. I came in behind the dead man as the shooter shoved the body out of his way and leveled his weapon again. I caught his wrist and stripped the weapon out of his hands in the same movement.

  To my surprise, he rallied. I saw something flash and realized that he had drawn a knife. I threw my head back and dodged his first slash, then caught his arm. He probably thought I meant to wrestle him for the weapon, but I only wanted to stop it from moving. I kicked the man’s heel out from under him and dropped him hard on the street. He tried to twist out from under me, but a single blow to the back of his head knocked him out as well.

  One dead, two concussions. Not bad, considering the situation at the start of the fight.

  I turned and saw that Geoffrey Rosenstein was finally giving an appropriate level of thought to the possibility of just running away. I drew a pistol from under my shirt and advised him of the realities of his situation. “I wouldn’t do that, Geoffrey. I shoot better than I box.”

  He had already half-turned, but these words did seem to give him pause. He looked down at his bodyguards. “You didn’t have to do that to them.”

  “You didn’t have to sic them on me either.”

  He swallowed nervously and tried to size me up. “You’re not an assassin, are you? What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to come with me. Somewhere we can talk in private.”

  He looked up and down the street, probably hoping some ally of his would suddenly show up. “I’ll follow you behind that warehouse.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you don’t assume I’m that dumb. I’ll follow you.”

  “If you’re planning to kill me—”

  I gestured with my pistol and he went ahead. He kept looking around, peering at the loading devices and trash compactors behind the warehouse as if help was hiding in the shadows. The building and all its machinery sat empty and idle, a thin layer of red dust on every surface. The warehouse, like much of Chryse, seemed to have run into hard times.

  “Okay.” He swallowed. “What do you want with me?”

  “I happen to know that you were the contact for the human trafficking network that supplies Ares Terrestrial.”

  He didn’t say anything. He just stared at me, then nervously put both hands in his pockets.

  “Take your hands out of your pockets. Slowly.” I kept my gun trained on his head while he pulled his hands out and spread them to show me how empty they were.

  “Look, man. Calm down. I’m sure we can work this out, yeah?”

  “I need to know who they are. How you contacted them. Names.”

  He suddenly grinned, showing pure relief. A clue as to how scared he really was.

  “That’s it? You’re just interested in doing business? That’s good to hear, sir. Absolutely wonderful. Though I must say—”

  I pressed the gun to his forehead, which seemed to help him focus his thoughts a little.

  “Look, I don’t really know who these people are! That’s not the sort of thing they would want me to know, okay? I’m serious, please!”

  “Then I guess there’s no reason for us to continue this conversation,” I replied ca
lmly.

  When he took my meaning, he started to babble. “No, no, hold on! Wait! Wait! I just don’t want to be cut out of the loop. Is that so wrong?”

  “It’s either that, or you die right here, right now.”

  He seemed to be struggling to accept this fact. As I stood there quietly with my gun against his forehead, he wrestled with the implications of being completely powerless. It seemed to shrink the man. He kept crouching lower and lower by tiny increments as if trying to melt away from the gun, until he was finally bent over ludicrously with his hands in the air, his face a portrait of absolute misery. I almost felt bad for him.

  “Okay. Okay!” He sighed, but it sounded almost like a dog whining. “They work for David Kote.”

  That wasn’t an answer I was expecting. “David Kote the industrialist? Mining, Water extraction?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. Look, these are bad men, you understand me? Not like me! I play the big man here in Chryse, but I’m only a middleman. I’ve never been anything more than that. And if you’re here to take over my business, I’ll never even be that again. I’m just trying to make a living. But these guys? They’re fucking evil.”

  That was how he saw himself, an innocent entrepreneur. A victim. A poor man who had the rotten luck of doing business with monsters. I asked myself if a facilitator was responsible for the crimes he enabled. I thought about the Cavadoran child I’d seen inside that dead cyborg in East Hellas. Then I finished what I’d come here to do.

  * * *

  Aboard a Martian train winding toward the Chryse spaceport, I looked out the window and thought about how my life had changed over the past few years. How I had changed. I had started as an Arbiter, a member of the solar system’s most elite law enforcement agency. In that role I’d gone to Venus, in the company of my friend and mentor, Gabriel Anderson. We’d been assigned to resolve a mystery, why the power had gone out in Tower 7, and what any of it had to do with August Marcenn, the commander of the local police. Of course, it turned out to be a much bigger issue than it had originally appeared to be. When it was all over, Gabriel Anderson was dead, I had killed August Marcenn, and I’d been drawn into the world of Section 9.

  But I never really fit in there. Watching the narrow and maze-like Martian streets go by below me, I thought about the strange, lost feeling I’d lived with ever since Gabe’s death. I thought about his widow, Sophie, another friend who had died too young. Killed for no better reason than having known me. I thought about how I’d been framed for her murder, forced into killing an Arbiter, and left with essentially no choice but to join this unit. I thought of how the members of my Section 9 team were the only family or friends I had left.

  But it was time to let all that go.

  It was time to stop brooding, time to stop thinking too much about where life had brought me. There was nothing left for me to do except embrace that future and let it take me wherever it led.

  2

  “Tycho Barrett! You’re back from Mars!”

  Raven Sommer, our dark-skinned young sniper with long black hair, came running across the living room of our Terran safehouse and threw herself into my arms. I didn’t take the gesture all that personally. Raven was the demonstrative type.

  “Hi, Raven. Yeah, I’m back.”

  She drew back and looked me in the eyes, half-playfully analyzing whatever she saw there. “So, mission accomplished then?”

  “Mission accomplished.”

  I looked around at the safehouse. Like any of the others we often used, this one was roomy, bright, and almost tastelessly clean—high ceilings and spotless shelving and expensive art devoid of any personality.

  “Nice place,” I commented dryly. Thomas Young, our computer expert, happened to be walking by.

  He stopped dead in his tracks. “Yes. Yes, it is.” He was a somewhat eccentric man, and something about him seemed even stranger today. His long hair hung down to his shoulders, and his eyes seemed weirdly enthusiastic yet almost despairing.

  I didn’t want to know about it. “Hello, Thomas. I’m back.”

  “You were gone somewhere?”

  That’s the thing about Thomas. He always likes to make the point that he doesn’t really see you. Before I could give my sarcastic reply, Thomas wandered back out of the room, obviously still lost wherever his thoughts had taken him.

  I shook my head, threw my bag down on a couch, and took a seat. Andrew Jones came walking by, sharply dressed and as irritatingly irreverent as ever. “Don’t get too comfortable there, Panic. The boss called a meeting as soon as she heard you were on your way over.”

  Panic was Jones’s nickname for me. It’s a long story. “Good to see you too, Andrew.” I leaned back on the couch, put my feet up on an ottoman, and closed my eyes. A moment later, someone picked up my feet and dropped them on the floor. I opened my eyes again. “Oh. Hello, Veraldi.”

  Vincenzo Veraldi was our team’s second in-command and resident knife-fighting expert. I couldn’t see any blades concealed beneath his expensive white shirt, which probably meant he was only wearing two or three of them. He was glaring at me in a not-overly-friendly way. “Feet off the furniture, Barrett. This stuff is rented, not owned.”

  “Now, let’s be reasonable,” I replied. “We both know that this safehouse will eventually be destroyed by rampaging cyborgs, and everything in it will be destroyed along with it. That includes this ottoman, so why not just make use of it?”

  “That only happened to one safehouse, Tycho,” Raven pointed out.

  Veraldi didn’t bother to try to reason with me. “Feet off the furniture,” was all he said, and all he apparently meant to say.

  “Is that Tycho’s voice I hear in there?” called Andrea Capanelli, our commanding officer and my sometime friend.

  “It’s me, Andrea.”

  She walked into the room, brushing her now shoulder-length blonde hair out of her eyes. “Welcome back. How did it go?”

  “I located Rosenstein, got him alone, and had a talk.”

  “Uh-huh.” She was watching me skeptically, uncertain of how to take my mood. “Elaborate.”

  “He said the trafficking crew he worked with were employed by David Kote.”

  I didn’t think she necessarily needed to hear about the encounter with the bodyguards, or how I had left Rosenstein.

  “David Kote?” asked Andrew Jones. “Astrochemical Technology Group, David Kote?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Rosenstein explained to me that those were genuinely evil people who set no value on human life. Unlike him, of course.”

  “He probably believes that,” Andrea replied. “Everyone’s the hero of their own story.”

  “She’s absolutely right,” Jones quipped. “I have no idea how evil I actually am.” He was lying halfway down on another couch, playing with a puzzle box.

  “Oh, please,” said Raven. “Unless you’ve switched combat roles and become a sniper, I don’t even want to hear about it.”

  The funny thing was, Raven was easily the most caring individual in our entire crew. She was the only one I could consistently count on to show human emotional responses like sympathy or concern.

  “David Kote…” mused Andrea Capanelli. “We’ll have to find out everything we can about him—who he’s talked to, where he’s been, finances, friends, all of it. Can you handle that, Andrew?”

  “Sure thing,” he replied. “Full dossier on your desk.”

  He didn’t mean that literally, of course. The dossier would actually be sent from his dataspike to hers, the usual method of sharing information.

  Thomas Young came back into the room. “Are we starting the meeting yet?”

  Capanelli replied, “Tycho was telling us what he got from Geoffrey Rosenstein. Seems like the human trafficking network is run by the industrialist David Kote.”

  Thomas frowned. “David Kote? Hmmm. That does seem to match some of the rumors about the man.”

  “Rumors? Like what?” she asked.


  “That he’s got some interesting tendencies,” Jones added.

  Capanelli turned in his direction. “What do you mean by that?”

  “It’ll all be in my report,” he replied. “I don’t remember the details without checking, but that’s the gist of it. It’s dark stuff.”

  Capanelli turned back to Thomas. “Does that match what you have?”

  Thomas shrugged. “I don’t have anything other than hearsay myself. But yes, the man has a nefarious reputation.”

  “Nefarious.” I chuckled.

  “It’s an apt term,” was Thomas’s reply. “I’m sure we’re all extremely interested in what Tycho was doing while he was back on Mars, but wasn’t the actual purpose of this meeting to discuss what I’ve been up to?”

  Thomas Young was an egoist, a narcissist, and an all-around genius.

  “Yes, of course, Thomas,” Andrea soothed him. She sat on the back of the same couch I was sitting on. “Please tell us all about it.”

  “Oh, one moment. I’ve forgotten my notes in my room.” He disappeared, although we could all hear the sounds of boxes being moved, if not thrown aside, and of paper being crumpled.

  “Is he actually working from paper notes?” I asked, confused.

  Raven grinned at me. “He says it’s the best way to memorize complex topics.”

  Thomas came back out with a large stack of loose papers as well as a black and white notebook. His eyes looked half-mad, like he had just been forced to do something no one in their right mind would ever volunteer for. “I am ready.”

  “Okay,” said Andrea. “Everyone listen up. Apparently, there is quite a lot of it.”

  He looked confused for a moment, then he glanced down at the huge supply of seemingly random papers in his hand. “Hmm? Oh, did you mean this?”

  Then he methodically shuffled through the stack of papers, threw all but two sheaves on a nearby coffee table, and turned back to us. He proceeded to scan through the papers in his hands rapidly while muttering to himself in a distracted voice, then he looked up and said, “The process of recovering data from Julian Huxley’s body is a complicated one.”