Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  “All done, Tycho,” she said. “Now then, let’s have a chat.”

  Samara took a seat on the chair next to my bed. Raven was a few feet away, standing with her arms crossed and resting one foot up on the wall behind her. Her eyes were closed as she traced her finger through the air, paging through something on her dataspike.

  “Living with prosthetics is a process,” Samara began. “It will take some time to learn. You’ll need to take anti-rejection medication to suppress your body’s immune response to the prosthetics, so be mindful that this means an increased risk of infection. If you ever get off-schedule, your commanding officer can explain the process to catch back up. She’s dealt with prosthetics for some time now.”

  I nodded to let her know that I understood.

  She smiled. “Good. The technology is very advanced, and once we’ve grafted the pleximesh skin onto the prosthetics, you may sometimes forget that they’re artificial, but it is imperative that you do not. Though the materials are very resilient, augments cannot heal. Damaged components will need to be replaced. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “The most challenging part of the process, for many people, is simply accepting the fact that life has changed. But you are willing to, so that’s good. That’s the most important point.”

  Adapting to loss seemed to be the one constant in my life. But what doesn’t kill me—

  “Am I stronger?”

  “Enhanced speed and strength? Yes, you’ll have all the physical advantages augments provide over natural limbs. Some things will take a bit of adaptation before you experience any beneficial functionality. Your right eye, for example. You’re experiencing dizziness, some disorientation, yes?”

  “Yeah. Closing my eyes helps, but it comes and goes.”

  “The ocular prosthesis adapts to light faster than your natural eye. Your visual cortex is processing two sets of dissimilar data, causing the nausea. You’ll acclimate soon, and then you’ll be able to see clearly in almost total darkness or stare into a bright light without blinking.”

  “Well, that seems like some consolation.”

  She nodded. “For many patients, it is. They learn to accept their augments because they do carry certain benefits, and over time they learn to love it.”

  “You mentioned new responsibilities. What does that mean?”

  “Yes, that’s a factor every patient must consider but will often overlook. The intrinsic strength of your augments presents a potential danger. If you move too quickly or thoughtlessly, you could potentially break something or injure someone.”

  She was right, I hadn’t considered that. I remembered how freakishly strong Andrea Capanelli could be when she wanted to. The thought of using that kind of strength unintentionally—

  “So task number one is to learn to control my strength,” I said.

  “Task number one is to learn how to walk. These aren’t first-generation limbs and they’re much better integrated with your nervous system than you probably realize, but you’ll still need to adapt. Your friend can help you walk when we’re finished, and you can see for yourself. Just don’t do anything ambitious until you know what results to expect.”

  “I think I can manage that.”

  “I know you can, Tycho. I’ve seen a number of people in the same situation you’re in right now. Most don’t handle it quite so well as you have. If you keep building on this foundation, you’ll do just fine. A few months from now, maybe less, and you won’t even remember what it was like before you had your prosthetics.”

  “That’s a little hard to believe.”

  She smiled. “And yet, it is true. You’ll see, Tycho.”

  11

  When Samara finally left, Raven sat down next to me again. I stared up at the ceiling, thinking. She just watched me for a few minutes, but when I didn’t say anything, she finally decided to speak up.

  “That was a lot, huh?”

  I turned my eyes from the ceiling tiles and glanced in her direction.

  “I feel exhausted.”

  “I’ll let you rest for a bit. What did you think of the doctor?”

  “She seems to know what she’s doing, I’ll give her that.”

  Raven grinned. “You think?”

  “Okay, so she definitely knows what she’s doing. And she’s good at communicating clearly with the patient.”

  “Listen to you, talking about yourself like you were someone else.”

  “I am, aren’t I? I guess I’d rather think of this as someone else’s problem.”

  “I know you would, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you. That’s how people end up not dealing with what’s happened to them, and not dealing with that shit is how you end up with other problems. It’s better to face it head-on, Tycho.”

  “It’s that easy?”

  “No, I suppose it isn’t. I get it, Tycho, I do. The last thing you want to think about right now is how much has just changed, but you’re not alone.” She placed her hand on my chest.

  I closed my eyes, maybe to get away from the intensely focused look on Raven’s face. It was an unfamiliar thing to have someone so genuinely invested in me. I didn’t know what to do with it.

  “Samara was the favor,” she continued.

  “Huh?” I opened my eyes again. “What favor?”

  “You remember I told you that Andrea had gone off-world to call a favor in?”

  “Yeah...”

  “Well, that’s why Samara is with us. Andrea went out and collected her.”

  “What, she kidnapped her?”

  Raven stifled a laugh but raised her eyebrows in a way that made me think I wasn’t too far off. “No, nothing so dramatic. But Samara wouldn’t be here at all if Andrea hadn’t made it happen, and that was far from easy for her to do.”

  “Why is that?”

  She stood up from the chair, took the glass from the small tray, and poured herself a drink of water from the sink. Leaning against the counter, she sipped thoughtfully. “I’ve known Andrea for a while now,” she said. “We’ve gotten drunk together. We’ve had plenty of late-night conversations. You know the kind I’m talking about, where you wander all over every topic in the world and you end up getting to know each other?”

  I nodded, thinking of Sophie. “It’s been a while, but yeah. I’ve had a few of those myself.”

  “Well, in all those conversations with Andrea, she’s mentioned her birth mother to me maybe twice.” Raven put her glass down on the sink and folded her arms. “I’ve never known her to call her mother. I’ve never known her to take a call from her mother. To put it simply, Andrea acted as if her mother was dead, and for a time, that’s what I’d assumed. I don’t know all the facts, but I think it has something to do with her augments. As a kid, she was badly hurt in the Martian Blackout.”

  “She told me a story about a girl in the Blackout. I assumed it was all about her.”

  “That tracks; she’s very dissociative on the rare occasion she speaks about it. I think she blames her mother for not being there when it happened, or for doing illegal surgeries, or something only she knows. I’m not sure of the details.”

  It took me until just then to grasp what Raven was telling me. I’d seen the similarity in their faces, but the truth of the situation just hadn’t crossed my mind. “Are you telling me Samara Markov is Andrea’s mother?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you, yes. As soon as we saw your injuries, Andrea left and tracked down her mother. The mother she never talks to. The one she obviously hates. And she brought her back here to perform the surgery.”

  It was hard to imagine anyone hating someone as calm and disarming as Dr. Markov. On the other hand, the mother Andrea had described was a black market surgeon, the kind of person who built Augmen for a living. Those two impressions didn’t mesh well, but maybe there was more to the doctor than her bedside manner suggested.

  “I don’t know what to say. I need to thank Andrea.”

&nb
sp; “I don’t think I’d recommend that, personally. I doubt she wants to talk about it at all. I just thought you’d want to know that Andrea did that for you.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Andrea had clearly gone to great lengths for me, but instead of gratitude I was more concerned with why she’d done so much than appreciative of the fact that it happened. I was questioning the motives of a helping hand. That was the kind of paranoia with no end, so I pushed the thought aside and focused on the present moment.

  “Okay, I think I’m ready to try and get up now.”

  “Take it slowly,” Raven said as she walked over to help me up. “You probably won’t feel stable on your new legs for a few days. I’ve got some clothes for you here.” She pointed to a neatly folded pile on the counter.

  “You’re going to make me get dressed?”

  “I’m not walking a half-nude man around the building. People might get the wrong idea about me.”

  “Fair enough.”

  She picked up the pile of clothes and handed it to me. The idea of getting dressed in front of Raven was a little odd, but she seemed to take it so much for granted that I didn’t say anything. I just started the slow and laborious process of figuring out how my fingers worked so I could take off my hospital gown and get my shirt on.

  She must have thought I was struggling too much. “I’ll help if you need me to,” she said, “but it’s better if you can do it yourself.” She’d brought me a dark blue, long-sleeved pull-over. No buttons. Raven had been thoughtful.

  She turned away, giving me the privacy I needed to pull off my hospital gown—however clumsily—and wrestle my shirt on.

  “We found you near the crash site. If you’d landed any closer, you would have been dragged down to the bottom of the ocean with it. As it was, you were lying there unconscious in a shallow crater. Your drop suit was still intact, but getting you up off of there without the recovery vehicle falling through the ice was a bit of an engineering feat.”

  I was busy with the painful procedure of pulling my pants on when she said that, but it still struck me as funny. “I’ll bet it was.”

  “That took a few hours, and we didn’t know if we could get you out of there alive or not. The dropship commander was incredibly helpful, despite the fact that he’d just lost two men on this mission. He wanted to know why the ship crashed, and we didn’t know what to tell him at the time. We’ll have to fabricate something for Section 3 so there’s closure if he checks.”

  “I didn’t have much of a choice when I threw that grenade. She was about to escape.”

  “So you thought, what, I’ll just take out the whole ship and kill all three of us?” She tossed an imaginary grenade and mimed a huge explosion with her hands.

  “No, I figured we would survive because of our drop suits. I’d been through much worse in Arbiter gear and walked away perfectly fine. I just didn’t want her to get away.”

  “Well, I’m afraid that Arbiter was not as lucky as you were.”

  “He was already dead. She shot him with an energy weapon as soon as I threw the grenade. I take it she didn’t make it either?”

  “On the contrary. She intercepted an escape pod in flight and boarded it shortly before the crash.”

  I laughed at that, my laughter becoming a dry cough that made my head hurt. “I can’t believe she made it.”

  “We could say the same for you,” Raven pointed out.

  I pulled the pants up the rest of the way and laid back, somehow exhausted. “It honestly pisses me off that two Arbiters had to die, and she still got away. Not to mention this.”

  I raised both my arms.

  She glanced over in my direction. “You don’t look as bad as all that.”

  She came over and adjusted my shirt, pulling the two sleeves out to cover my wrists. “That’s better. The escape pod’s maximum range limits her possible travel vectors. She couldn’t have left the Jovian system, so I wouldn’t say she’s escaped for good.”

  “Even so, she’s not a careless woman. We’ll be lucky to find her again.”

  “You’re right about that. The fact that you survived an encounter with her is the most impressive thing about this entire story.” I hadn’t realized any part of my story seemed admirable to Raven, but maybe she was just being sarcastic.

  “Any idea of who she might have been?”

  “We know exactly who she is, thanks to the scan from your dataspike, although we hadn’t expected to see her again. We all thought she was dead. Oh, you have some blood on your face.”

  She stood and went back to the counter, where she rifled through the cabinets and pulled out a hand towel. She ran it under the tap to wet it and wrung out the excess.

  “Is she some kind of criminal boss I haven’t heard of, something like that?”

  Raven sat on the edge of the bed and put her hand to my cheek, then she gently turned my head to get a better angle as she cleaned my face. “Her name is Katerina Capanelli,” she answered. “She’s former Section 9.”

  She’d said it so deadpan, I just blinked for a moment, waiting for the punchline to the obvious joke. When she said nothing as if expecting a response on my part, I was at a loss. “Katerina Capanelli,” I repeated.

  “Yes, Andrea’s other mother.”

  I had certainly not expected to get dragged so deep into Andrea’s personal history. “She did remind me of Andrea, actually. Now that I think about it.”

  “They’re not biologically related.”

  “That’s not what I mean. It wasn’t really in how she looked, it was more in how she moved. Like Andrea, but, I don’t know. More practiced? Smoother.”

  “That fits her reputation. Katerina used to be field commander. Flawless martial skills, impeccable strategic instincts, proficient in psy-ops… she had it all. She’s still a bit of a legend around here.”

  “Raven, I had all of my training here when I first joined Section 9. No one said a word about her.”

  “They did, though. You just didn’t know it. She wrote the curriculum for half of those classes. When the instructors gave field scenarios, half of those stories were about her.”

  I didn’t know what to make of this, but it did account for Katerina’s reluctance to kill Section 9 agents. “So what happened to her?”

  “I’m not certain.” Raven shrugged. “Katerina was always somewhat abrasive. I used to interpret her behavior as confidence, but in retrospect I think it was arrogance. She was the best, and she knew it. She had no patience for fools, and in her eyes that was nearly everyone else. Except her daughter Andrea, though there were times when even she failed to meet the standard. Katerina was a hell of an agent, but she wasn’t the easiest woman to work for.”

  “Did she go MIA? You said you thought she was dead.”

  “Yeah, about two years after I joined Section 9, she disappeared on a mission and was presumed dead. I think Andrea suspected something, or maybe she just wanted closure from knowing exactly what happened, but I believe she investigated Katerina’s disappearance on her own. She didn’t seem surprised when Thomas found her on the dock footage.”

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “Nothing. After we brought you back here, Andrea called up the Operator and got Samara Markov cleared to enter the facility. Then she told us she was going to call in a favor and collect a debt. Dr. Markov showed up a day or so later, but there’s been no word from Andrea since then.”

  “So, you think the debt was—”

  “To track down Katerina.”

  I thought back to my first encounter with Katerina, and how effortlessly she had handled us in the ruins of Artorias. “I’m not sure Andrea can handle her alone.”

  “Neither am I, honestly. Katerina taught her everything she knows, and I doubt she’s lost a step. I’m a little worried.”

  Based on what I’d seen of Katerina’s fighting skills, “a little worried” was a bit of an understatement. If Katerina wanted her daughter dead, it was unlikely we
would ever see Andrea again.

  “How did Katerina come to be Andrea’s other mother in the first place,” I asked.

  “I don’t know the complete story. Andrea is not exactly the most communicative person.”

  “That she is not.”

  Andrea would sometimes open up to a degree, but only when she was trying to achieve a specific end. If she shared something personal, it was more of a management tactic than anything else. I considered her a friend, but I really wasn’t sure if she saw me the same way.

  Raven continued. “I know that Katerina brought her back to Earth and adopted her as a teenager. She trained her like any other agent, and when Katerina finally showed up here with her daughter in tow, Section 9 didn’t have much choice. It was either hire Andrea or kill her, at that point.”

  I had never doubted Andrea’s loyalties before, but it occurred to me that she might have more reason to be loyal to her adopted mother than to the Sol Federation. After all, Katerina had shaped her as a Section 9 agent. It was possible—

  “I see you furrowing your brow, Tycho,” Raven announced. “You can cut that out. Andrea is one hundred percent loyal to the Federation, not her mother.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Whatever drove her and Samara apart left a scar, and it carried over. You should hear her when she talks about Katerina. She admires her in a way, but there’s no question she hates her too. Especially for disappearing the way she did.”

  I didn’t find that too convincing. After all, if Andrea had hard feelings about her mother’s disappearance, then she might want nothing more than for Katerina to turn up again and make it alright somehow.

  I almost shrugged, then I remembered that it would hurt if I did. I gestured with my new hands instead. “Well, I just hope she turns up soon.”