Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  That brought him up short. He stood there staring at me for a moment, confused and frightened. When we’d taken him in, everyone else connected to his case had already been killed. Even Julian Huxley, if you don’t count his android reincarnation. The first thought in Lucien’s head when he heard “Mr. Klein” must have been that I was there to kill him. Then recognition dawned on his face.

  “You.” He pointed at me, an accusing jab of the finger. “No, you can’t do this. You know, you really can’t do this. Luca—”

  “I wouldn’t call anyone if I were you, Mr. Klein.”

  Luca, the secretary, stuck his head in the door. “Yes, Mr. Michael?”

  Klein looked back and forth at Luca and me for several seconds with a panicky expression on his face.

  “Should I call security, sir?” asked Luca.

  Klein swallowed. “No. No, don’t call for security, Luca. Cancel everything I have for the next hour. I really need to get this connectivity issue dealt with.”

  “Of course, sir,” Luca replied, then backed out through the closing door.

  “Good choice,” I told Klein. “We need to talk.”

  I sat down across from him, but he just stood there staring at me for a moment with a wild look on his face. Then he sat down heavily and shook his head.

  “I thought I was done with you people.”

  “No disrespect intended, Lucien, but that was a little naïve of you. Don’t you think?”

  “I do now. I sure as hell do now. What do you want with me? Are you here to kidnap me again?”

  “We didn’t kidnap you the first time,” I pointed out. “We removed you from a situation in which you would almost certainly have been killed. Then we kept you in protective custody until you could be safely released.”

  I’m aware that I just described us as having kidnapped him even as I was denying it to his face. This is a complicated job.

  “That is one hell of a euphemistic way to describe what happened.” He snapped his fingers, and a shelf opened on the wall behind him. A drone flew out, carrying a bottle of expensive vodka and a selection of glasses. “Do you drink?”

  “I wouldn’t turn one down.”

  “Good. I hate drinking alone. It makes me feel like an alcoholic.”

  The drone hovered in front of him. He pulled two glasses out of slots in the side and set them down in front of him. He took the vodka bottle out of the drone’s grasp, poured two generous glasses, then replaced the bottle. A little door opened on the top of the drone, revealing a small trough of ice cubes. The drone actually seemed to have been designed for nothing other than serving vodka. Not too unusual but perhaps a little extravagant.

  Once the ice was in our drinks and the drone had returned to its little dock in the wall, Klein handed me my vodka. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to be drinking it in the first place while I was on a job, but there were a lot of exceptions, depending on the circumstances, and I decided this was probably one of them.

  “Please tell me you were the ones behind my connectivity problem. I don’t want to have to deal with that bullshit after I’m done with this bullshit.”

  “Your connectivity will be restored in due time,” I said, though I was only guessing. Flavio had implied he was behind the problem, but he hadn’t actually said so.

  “Alright, then.” Klein took a large sip of vodka and regarded me with as much patience as he could muster up. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need a few parts from you.”

  “Parts?” He looked confused. “Do you mean components?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid I don’t know the technical terms for these pieces, but I can send you some blueprint images.”

  “No,” he pointed out. “You can’t. Remember, I can’t connect to anything.”

  Sometimes we’re too clever for our own damn good. On the other hand, there was at least a chance the monitor had thought to address this little problem. “Check your network now.”

  He stared at me for a moment, then shrugged and said, “Okay.” He closed his eyes and sighed contentedly. “You know, even if you people did fuck with my connection just so you could get in here, it still makes me happy to see that I’m back up. I have a lot to do today. Send me what you’ve got.”

  I sent over the file Thomas had given me. Klein looked it over and then frowned a little. “What the hell did you people do to him?”

  “We didn’t do anything. He got himself shot.”

  Klein shook his head. “If you think I’m giving you these components, you’re out of your mind.”

  “And why is that?”

  “These are proprietary to Huxley Industries. Even if I wasn’t living under a new identity, I’m under multiple NDAs. Do you have any idea how much trouble I would be in for sharing that kind of material with you?”

  Klein’s big weakness was his own arrogance. I grinned.

  “About the same amount of trouble you would be in for just having it in the first place. I mean, you lost your job with Huxley after you got arrested, right? Well, I doubt their non-competition contract included anything about keeping any of their old tech around, so—”

  “Exactly! Wait… what makes you think I do have any of it?”

  “You could have told me you didn’t have any of it. I might even have believed you. Instead you’re telling me you’re not allowed to share. You can’t share something you don’t have. So, you do have it. Right?”

  He was so mad at me for catching him out—or maybe mad at himself, I’m not really sure—that he couldn’t even force himself to form words for several seconds. At last he smiled, but it was a shark’s grin. All teeth.

  “Alright, you’ve got me. But what are you going to do about it? It’s not like you can say anything. Keeping me prisoner the way you did before wasn’t in any way legal. It was a kidnapping.”

  I like to think of it as involuntary protective custody, but I didn’t say that.

  “Be reasonable, Lucien. I know something about you, and you know something about me. It’s not in your best interest for any of it to become public information, frankly. You might want to tell yourself that I would get in big trouble if my own actions became public. You might want to believe it. But are you really sure?”

  He bit his lip and thought about it for a long minute. “Let’s make a deal. I get you these components you want, and you go away and never come back. I mean, never, ever come back. Agreed?”

  I wasn’t in a position to make the man any promises, but on the other hand I had no reason to think I would need to talk to him again either. “I know of no reason why I would ever be asked to contact you again. Although you might want to consider how easy it was for me to get in here.”

  “Why don’t you let me worry about my own security.” He said this as confidently as he could manage to say it, but I saw a shade of worry flit across his face. He spoke into his dataspike. “Luca, could you come in here for a minute?”

  Luca came in the room, making sure not to react at all when he saw me sitting across from his boss like a business partner rather than a maintenance worker. “What can I do for you, sir?”

  “I’m going over to the lab for the next few hours. Cancel all my appointments, and put off anyone who tries to call me. Understood?”

  Luca’s composure slipped a little, and he glanced in my direction. “Understood, sir.”

  “Don’t worry about this man,” Klein told his assistant. “In fact, you never even saw him in here this morning. Got it?”

  “Got it, sir.”

  I could have kicked him. He was a fool if he thought his assistant was actually going to keep his mouth shut. If the guy had a girlfriend, she’d be sure to hear about the boss’s weird maintenance worker meeting by dinnertime. On the other hand, I was the one who had chosen to sit down.

  “Alright, then. Come with me.” Klein stood up, and I followed him out into the hallway. He walked like he owned the place, which was exactly how he had walked around Huxley Industries on th
e day I arrested him. Hell, he kept walking around like he owned the place even after I arrested him. Maybe that was enough, because no one seemed to question his right to lead a maintenance worker through the office. No one even looked up as he walked by.

  “I didn’t index the components. I’ll have to find them,” he said at the door, then led me into a small lab filled with random android parts and humming computer systems. One desk had an android head on it, and I wasn’t sure, but I got the impression it was watching me. It didn’t look much like a corporate lab, more like a tech guy’s playroom. On the other hand, that kind of fit. This was only a think tank, after all. He went to a cabinet and opened the door, then he closed it again and opened a desk.

  “Ah, yes. That’s right.” He went to a table in the back of the room, rummaged around in one of the drawers, and pulled out a package. “Hold this.” He handed it over and then searched a few more drawers before pulling out a second package. “This is what you need. Although I have to say, I hate the thought of you people poking around in Huxley’s mind. He was a smart man.”

  The clear implication of this was that we were not, and I had no problem at all accepting that this was true in my case. For some strange reason, I felt defensive about Thomas Young, though. “We have people that can handle it.”

  “No, you don’t.” He shook his head. “Despite what you might think, you really don’t. Julian Huxley was one for the ages.”

  4

  Raven didn’t run over and hug me when I got back, although to be fair I had remained on the planet this time. When I came into the safehouse, she waved to me with her fingers from the couch and continued with her project of stripping her sniper rifle down and cleaning every part with a greasy rag.

  “Do you have any other hobbies, Raven?”

  “It’s not a hobby.” She didn’t look up. A piece of her rifle was getting its wipe-down. “It’s necessary maintenance.”

  Andrew Jones walked by. “Hey, Barrett. Did you find the asshole?”

  “I found him. And he is an asshole.”

  “Well, that stands to reason. It would almost be a little upsetting if his personality had changed since the last time we’d seen him.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  It was a weird thought, and a weird thing to take comfort from. Lucien Klein is still an asshole, and all's right with the world.

  “You’re thinking, Tycho.”

  “You’re right. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  Andrea came into the room. “Tycho, you’re back! Did you get those components Thomas needed?”

  “Right here.” I opened my bag and pulled out the two packages. “Klein was using these illegally. He’s conducting some kind of experiment at The 3000 Initiative, but I wasn’t able to find out what it was.”

  “And you call yourself a spy?” teased Andrew.

  Andrea frowned. “I didn’t ask him to figure out what he was doing. Just to get these parts from Klein.”

  Jones poured himself a glass of water. “Never hurts to do a little extra, right?”

  She shrugged. “It does if it compromises other tasks. Good work, Tycho. Now we can put Thomas on the Huxley project for real and find out what that strange man actually knew about the Eleven. Assuming there’s anything to that story.”

  I knew exactly what she meant. Ever since I’d hit Tower 7, I’d been chasing this elusive legend of the Eleven. Who were they, really? The way Huxley had spoken of them, I had the impression that they were near-immortals like Huxley himself had claimed to be. And that did tie in with what had happened to August Marcenn—

  Andrew walked back by. “Tycho, you’re thinking again.”

  I sighed. “Would you rather I not?”

  Andrea frowned. “I don’t mind you thinking, it’s your habit of brooding about the evils of the world I find slightly troublesome.”

  “Yeah, Tycho here is a regular Don Quixote,” commented Andrew.

  “Then I guess that makes you Sancho Panza,” I replied.

  “Just because you’ve read a book doesn’t mean you understand the characters.” He went back in his room, sparing me from having to admit that I hadn’t actually read the book.

  “What’s up with him?” I asked Andrea.

  “Jones? Oh, nothing really. He’s just in a pissy mood because I denied his vacation request.”

  “That reminds me—”

  “Not right now, Tycho. I don’t want to hear the word vacation until we run out the truth about the Eleven.”

  I wondered why it was so important to her but decided not to ask. I wasn’t sure why, but everyone had seemed slightly tense since I got back from Mars. Not that I’d spent more than an hour or two at home since then.

  Raven looked up from her sniper rifle. “Hey, boss.”

  Andrea turned to her. “Yes?”

  “If you don’t need to send Tycho to Jupiter or Pluto or somewhere by the end of the day, how about giving us the night off? I want to have a drink and catch up with him.”

  “What is it with everyone and time off? You’d think this was a day job.”

  Raven just stared at her, waiting for a reply. Andrea threw her hands up. “Alright. You two go and get drunk. I’ll stay here and save the Federation myself.”

  “Thanks, boss.” Raven smiled sweetly and went back to cleaning her rifle. Apparently it was not necessary to ask me whether I would be interested in going out for drinks together. It was just assumed.

  “Come with me, Tycho.” Andrea started for Thomas’s door. “You can at least get one thing done before you go out for the evening.”

  I followed her without a word, carrying the two packages. Andrea knocked on the door, but Thomas didn’t answer her at first.

  “Come on, Thomas,” Andrea called. “I told you I wouldn’t bother you until Tycho got back, so if I’m bothering you now, that obviously means he’s back.”

  The door opened, and Thomas stuck his head out. “You mean Klein actually had the components?”

  “Yes, Thomas.” Andrea’s voice was somehow soothing and sarcastic at the same time. “He had them before. Tycho has them now. And in just a moment, you will have them.”

  “Well, hand them over.” He stuck his hands out, clearly not inviting me or Andrea into his room and workspace.

  “We’ve talked about this, Thomas.” Andrea’s voice was stern.

  “Please hand them over, Tycho. Thank you. Is that better?”

  “That wasn’t so difficult was it?” I handed the packages over, and the door to Thomas’s room closed once again.

  Andrea looked slightly worried. “I’m not sure he’s been out of that room at all since you left for Italy.”

  “I’m sure he’ll come out when he gets hungry.” I wasn’t worried about Thomas Young. The man might be a bit strange, but I was sure he knew better than to starve himself to death.

  I went back out to the living room and sat down.

  “Aren’t you going to have a shower before we go out?” asked Raven, fitting the last piece of her sniper rifle back together.

  “I suppose I’d better.”

  She put the rifle down and turned to look at me, her eyebrows raised. Apparently she wanted her drink and she didn’t want to wait for it.

  “Alright, alright. I’m going now.”

  “Thank you, Tycho,” was her singsong reply, and she started stripping her backup gun.

  Not that we went out all that soon after my shower, because Raven apparently had quite an elaborate procedure for getting ready to go out. I was waiting for her for something like forty-five minutes. By the time she was ready, I had drifted off on the couch.

  “Tycho.” I heard my name, opened my eyes, and saw her standing there.

  I blinked a few times to get the sleep out of my eyes, got a good look at her at last, and said, “Whoa.”

  Her curly hair hung down loosely around her shoulders, and she wore diamond earrings, a black jacket, and a leather skirt. She smiled. “You’re sweet. B
ut don’t get any ideas, mister. I always dress up nice when I’m going out.”

  “Hey, I’m not saying anything. Just whoa.”

  “Uh-huh. Get your ass off that couch. We have some drinking to do.”

  I swung my feet over onto the floor and stood. “So, where are we going?”

  “A place called the Emerald City a few blocks from here. Nice bar.”

  “Works for me.”

  We took the elevator downstairs and left through the main entrance. Raven slipped an arm through mine as we walked. I couldn’t tell what she was trying to do here, but her warning not to get any ideas was already lost on me. She was watching the night life of the city, and everything about her seemed so alive and vibrant. It was easy to forget that she killed people for a living. Then again, so did I.

  “You’re not saying much,” she commented.

  “I’m just thinking. It’s a strange sort of job we have.”

  “That’s for sure. Anyone else would be in prison for doing what we do. Turn left up here.”

  We turned at the corner, and she pointed up at the buildings as we walked past. “I’ve been doing this for so long now, I can’t walk past a building and just see a building. You know what I mean? All I can see are the good vantage points, the fields of fire. This job changes you. It turns you into a different person.”

  I knew exactly what she was talking about. For me, it wasn’t sniper nests though. “Whenever I look at a building, I imagine running the rooftop. Jumping to the next building. Fighting on the move.”

  “That’s how it is. How do you feel about it?”

  “It’s funny you should ask that, because I was just thinking about that when I was back on Mars.”

  “We’ll turn up here.”

  We turned right and came to a street with a row of nightclubs. About a block down the street, I spotted the glowing green sign for Emerald City. “I think I’m getting used to it. I think I’m embracing it.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. That’s what happens. You resist it at first, but it rewrites your character.” The words she said were almost melancholy, but her tone didn’t sound sad at all. Her voice was perfectly joyful. Like she had figured out who she was here, and she was fine with that.