Raven had aimed her weapon progressively lower and further off to one side with every shot, and I realized later that she was correcting her aim on the spot. At the time it just seemed like divine intervention. It was an impressive show of marksmanship to take out three androids with exactly three shots under those conditions, but I would have expected it from her.
“Nice work, Robin.” Andrea stood up from hiding, followed by Li Fei and then the rest of us.
Li Fei seconded her words, but with the sarcasm I’d come to expect. “Excellent shooting, for a Section 3 agent.” As a pure intelligence unit, Section 3 is not exactly known for fielding high-level sharpshooters.
“Let’s not waste even more time,” Capanelli began. “We need to get on—”
The ship’s thrusters burned to life and the dock gate began to part. Either someone on the Havisham had managed to hack the system and rescind the lockdown, or someone on Llyr Station had gone up to the bridge while we were fighting the androids.
“Move!” she shouted. “We need to board that ship!”
The mooring arms pulled away and the ship began to drift forward in preparation for takeoff. As I started to run, I heard the Arbiter Commander over our shared channel.
“They’re trying to run, Li!”
Li Fei replied from behind me. “I’m on it, sir!”
I ran for the airlock, knowing that the ship couldn’t develop any real velocity until it cleared the station. Even so, it was a desperate sprint to catch it anyway. The Havisham was eclipsing me and getting faster with every passing second. I came up close enough that I thought I could make the jump, and I took the opportunity. Li Fei followed suit, and both our mag boots gripped the side of the ship at almost the same moment.
I looked back and saw no one else had managed the same. It was just the two of us. I reached the airlock as we cleared the dock platform, then remembered I couldn’t access my skeleton key. Luckily, Li Fei had that covered.
“Move aside, I’ve got this.”
It’s standard Arbiter Force policy to keep your skeleton key loaded in the finger of your drop suit whenever you’re wearing it. Li Fei may have played it fast and loose, but he was certainly a veteran Arbiter. He used the skeleton key to override the door and got the airlock open for us. We crawled inside, and just as I closed the door behind us, I caught a glimpse of open space.
“You move pretty smoothly in that drop suit, Contralvo.”
“We have bigger concerns right now, don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure I do.” He turned away from me and unlocked the inner airlock door. “I’m not sure there is a bigger problem.”
“The fact that we’re currently boarding this ship entirely on our own? The fact that your drop ship can’t even fire on it now that we’re inside?”
The inner door slid open. I was half-expecting a face full of grenade shrapnel, but there was no one on the other side. Just an empty white room with tasteful furniture.
“Cute,” Li Fei commented. “Love the minimalism.”
He was right about that, anyway. The room we were in looked like a Shinto temple, all clean lines and understated elegance.
“Standard search?” I suggested.
He turned and looked at me, and for a minute I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. He could just as easily have shot me as anything else. After all, we were now alone on a potentially hostile spaceship with no one to stop him. It would be easy.
At last he nodded. “Okay. Standard search. I’m Senior.”
“Of course.”
The whole time I was in the Arbiter Force, I never made Senior. It seemed natural to let Li Fei take the lead on this job. As strange as it was, having a Senior Arbiter to back me up made me feel more comfortable about what we were doing.
“You take point.” He gestured for me to go ahead of him. I looked at him for a moment, trying to read him. I could now just as easily get shot from behind as from in front. In the end, I went ahead, knowing there was nothing I could do about it now anyway. If Li Fei wanted me dead, then so be it.
I stepped out and walked past the white table with its two elegant white chairs. I walked to the door on the opposite end of the room and checked the corners. It led out into a slick white corridor. There was no one here, and no sign that anyone had ever been here.
There were doors on either side of the corridor, and I reasoned that it would make sense to head fore instead of aft. We took the first door to the right and entered a comfortable suite, with large holo screens providing a view outside. Europa was below us, and above loomed Jupiter. There was a bed in the room, carefully made. No personal effects of any kind that I could see. We went back out to the white corridor and tried another door. The next room was the same, and the one after that.
“This place is like a hotel,” I commented.
“These must be guest rooms for the people who come here to meet with Kote.”
“That makes sense.”
We passed maybe twenty doors before we came to an exit, leading out into what looked like a dining room. I hugged the left wall while Li Fei went right. We cleared the room and found it as empty and pristine as the rest of the ship so far.
The room was huge, with rich carpeting on the floor and even a real wood table. Several woven tapestries hung from the walls, and I took a closer look at one. The tapestry depicted twelve beautiful, genderless figures with serene faces holding golden crowns. In the background, fires burned across a blackened landscape littered with human bones. The juxtaposition was more than a little unsettling.
“Is there anyone on this ship?” I asked.
“I admit it, this is strange.”
“Should we just head for the bridge?”
“No,” he answered. “We stick to the search, and that means room by room. I don’t want to get cut off from behind because we rushed it and went straight to the bridge without checking everything.”
On the other side of the cafeteria, there was a kind of lounge—an open space with more view screens showing the space outside of the ship. There were small tables and some chairs, but also a lot of nooks with low couches, areas hidden behind curtains, and a full bar. It was like an image from one of those movie posters I’d seen back on Venus, but like everything else we’d seen so far, the lounge was empty and unused.
“Slow down enough to check for traps.”
That made sense. Whoever was in control of this vessel had used a team of military androids with powerful weapons to delay us from boarding. It didn’t make sense to think that they would simply give up now, not when all it would take was a mine behind a door. A ship this size could withstand the blast, but the same couldn’t be said about our drop suits.
I paused at the door to the lounge and looked closely for tripwires or any other sign of a booby trap. There was nothing there, so I went through the door and into the next room. It was a conference room as far as I could tell. There was a long table with chairs along both sides, and a single chair at the head of the table. Like everything else on this ship, the basic design was simple but extremely elegant. White furniture and white walls, a slick space with no frills.
A folded piece of paper on the table caught my eye. It was about property for sale on Venus. On Tower 7, actually. Venusian property was suddenly available for development at cut-rate prices. That made sense, but it still disgusted me. All those deaths on 2/77 reduced to an investment opportunity.
“What is that?” asked Li Fei.
“It’s just a real estate brochure.”
“So far I’m not seeing any sign of a human trafficking operation.”
“Are you saying they sent six combat androids after us with illegal heavy weapons just to keep us from seeing what we’ve seen so far?”
“No.” His voice was as cold as it had been on the station. “I’m saying you’re not really investigating a human trafficking operation at all. This is about something else, and whatever that is, it killed Mitchell.”
I stopp
ed where I was and turned back in his direction. “I’m sorry your partner’s dead. I mean that. I’ve been in the same position.”
“Uh-huh. Where was that? In Section 3?”
I turned back around and started walking again. There was no point in trying to solve this with words. It just wasn’t going to happen.
Leaving the conference room, we entered what we soon recognized as the service areas of the ship. The first door we opened led to a room obviously for the crew, with five bunk beds. There was no one there, and all the beds were neatly made. Behind the second door was a slightly larger briefing room, as spotless and tidy as it was empty.
Where were all the people? And if there weren’t any people, then who was piloting this ship? We cleared three more rooms, all just empty work areas.
“They could have been doing some maintenance,” Li Fei pointed out. “Or even a retrofit.”
“Yeah, I suppose so. It’s just so strange.”
We came to a double door and recognized immediately that this must be the door to the bridge.
“This is it,” I said. “If anyone is on this ship, they’re in here. Are you ready?”
“The sooner we’re done here, the better. I have a man to bury.”
Li Fei took position off to the right and I did the same to the left. He leveled his weapon and signaled. I tapped the access panel and the doors opened onto the bridge of the Havisham.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t a middle-aged blonde woman in a nanosuit. She was looking at us with the faintest hint of a smile on her face, and my first thought was of how much she reminded me of Andrea Capanelli.
“Welcome to the Havisham. What can I do for you gentlemen?”
“Sol Federation Arbiter Force.” Li Fei had switched over to his digitally amplified intimidation voice, a standard tool for Arbiters everywhere. “We have a warrant to search this vessel. You are ordered to cooperate.”
Her smile got bigger when she heard that. “I am ordered to cooperate? By an Arbiter, no less?”
“Comply and this will be much easier,” I told her.
“I’m sure it would be, for you, but I’m afraid you don’t understand the situation here.”
She had the nerve to turn away from us and tap a command into the ship’s console. Something in the way she moved recalled an image to my mind—an assassin in a nanosuit, deftly beating Jonathan and Andrea in hand-to-hand combat.
“It’s you,” I said.
She raised her head slightly and leaned on her palms against the console. “Have we met before? You’ll need to be more specific.”
Li Fei was staring at me. He sent me a dataspike message. What are you talking about?
I chose to ignore him. I needed to buy time to record her facial topography. “How many of those people are in Artorias?”
Back when the boson aperture was first being developed, the city of Artorias was a major research center. Now it was nothing but a radioactive ruin inhabited by outcasts, dissidents, and desperate fugitives. It’s not a place the average person would ever consider visiting, but it was where we finally found Julian Huxley. It was where he was killed by someone with the same nanosuit as this woman.
“Artorias?” She turned to face me. “Isn’t that just an empty ruin?”
I couldn’t be sure she was who I thought she was, but I couldn’t take the risk either.
I messaged Li Fei. We need to arrest this woman.
This time he didn’t bother to use the dataspike. “On what charges? I haven’t seen any evidence of human trafficking.”
“Human trafficking?” She laughed. “Is that what they told you?” She took a step to her left, and I noticed her helmet resting on a seat in front of the console. If she got that on, she would be fully armored. I pointed my gun at her. “Don’t take another step.”
Li Fei didn’t seem to know what to do. To him, I was a traitorous former Arbiter who had murdered a fellow officer and gotten away with it before reemerging under a false name with Section 3. He had no idea about Huxley, the assassin, or the Eleven.
“She attempted to evade arrest,” I pointed out. “That’s reason enough, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I suppose It is. You’ll have some questions to answer when we’re done here.”
“Oh, I’m sure he will,” the woman said. “Starting with how I succeeded in capturing the both of you.”
Like an amateur, I had turned toward Li Fei instead of keeping my focus on her. Now I was staring down the accelerator of an energy weapon pointed straight at my face.
9
I wasn’t going to just drop my weapon and surrender. “You’re making a huge mistake.”
Li Fei’s weapon was still pointed right at the woman, so it wasn’t likely she’d survive long if she pulled the trigger. In fact, the bridge wasn’t big enough for the beam to fully bloom out and lose power. If she fired, it would probably pierce the Havisham’s hull.
“A mistake you say?” Her voice was cool, and still faintly amused. Like she still didn’t understand how much danger she was in.
“Drop your weapon, or you’re going to die.” Li Fei sounded as perplexed as I felt. Her behavior was suicidal.
“Do you fear death, Arbiter?” She took a step to her left. “Living without realizing one’s purpose is cowardice, and that’s where the fear of death comes from. It’s the creeping doubt whispering to you in the quiet moments, reminding you that your life is a study in unfulfilled potential. You fear death because it marks the end of a wasted existence spent desperately clinging to the empty hope of a better tomorrow.”
The arrogance was almost breathtaking.
“If you shoot me with that beam weapon, you’ll pierce the hull,” I told her. “This cabin will decompress, and you will die along with us.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the tension in Li Fei’s body language. He wanted to pull the trigger, but he wasn’t sure he could kill her before she could fire. He might have been thinking about doing it anyway. From his perspective, it wouldn’t be so bad if both this woman and I ended up dead.
If I intended to survive, I was going to have to change this situation myself.
I considered just ducking down, but if this woman was really Huxley’s assassin, her speed was nothing short of transhuman and I wouldn’t get the shot off in time. I wasn’t even sure Li Fei would make it. It was time to do something unexpected.
“I’m not an Arbiter,” I told her. “I’m with Section 9.”
Her reply was smooth, like everything else she did. “I already knew that. Section 9 always uses Section 3 as cover for this sort of mission.”
What the hell is she talking about? asked Li Fei.
“You killed Julian Huxley.”
“I’ve killed too many to remember every name.” She raised both eyebrows, feigning total innocence. “All I want is for you to leave this ship. If you can agree to that, no one has to die.”
For such a cold-blooded killer, she seemed strangely reticent to kill us. “Even if we could do that,” I pointed out, “there’s an Arbiter drop ship trailing you right now. You can’t possibly escape.”
“This is a luxury yacht,” she replied. “It’s a much faster vessel than any Arbiter drop ship. As soon as I break orbit, I’ll disappear like the snow of years gone by.” She took another step to the left.
Li Fei sent me another message. I have to take the shot. We won’t get another chance.
I messaged him back. No, just wait.
He didn’t pull the trigger. Telling her the truth about how I recognized her was just a desperate attempt to mess with her head and change the situation somehow, but she had taken it in stride. What else could I do? Her weapon was still aimed at my face. Her muzzle hadn’t drifted off target even a little since this standoff began. She was still moving slowly toward her helmet, though. If she wanted to get it on, she wouldn’t have any choice but to divert her attention from me for a fraction of a second. That was all I’d need.
>
Let her go for the helmet, I told Li. I’ll drop when she goes for it, and you can take the shot.
Copy that, he answered, which surprised me a little. I’d been assuming all along that he wanted me dead, but he was giving me the chance to survive this encounter. I didn’t understand why, but maybe he was just a decent Arbiter. Maybe we were enemies only through a sequence of events I didn’t choose and couldn’t control.
The woman had sidled to arm’s reach of the seat. When she went for the helmet at last, she was a blur of pure speed. I ducked down as soon as I saw her make a move, but the beam still only missed me by inches. The particle stream cut through the air behind me, grew wider as it interacted with the cabin’s atmosphere, and punched a ragged hole through the hull. In the same moment, Li Fei fired, but the woman spun on her heel and reversed direction entirely. She kicked the helmet out of the chair as she sprang to the right into a shoulder roll. She came up into a kneel and caught the helmet in one hand even as she leveled her weapon with the other.
I couldn’t believe the speed or the ease with which she moved. She slipped the helmet on and faded from view with the telltale ripple of active camouflage. I came up shooting, but a moment later something hit my rifle from the side and plucked it out of my hands. It went flying across the bridge and bounced off a wall. An instant later, my legs were kicked out from under me and I was driven into the floor on my chest. For an instant, I could see the woman as she stood over me before she once again rippled out of view.
I scrambled onto my feet. When I caught my next glimpse of her, she was fighting Li Fei. He was wrestling to hold onto his rifle. This was forcing him to remain in place and would have given her the opportunity to do just about anything she wanted to him if not for the extraordinary protection offered by his drop suit. As it was, she was whipping the weapon from side to side, and he was using all his strength just trying to hold on.
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 79