Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  13

  Nine days went by, and there was still no word from Andrea.

  She could already be dead, her body abandoned in a back alley somewhere out there in the solar system or floating silently through space. I found myself wondering if this was how it had been when Katerina disappeared. Did everyone go on working, waiting for her to come back until it finally became obvious that she was never going to? What if that was exactly the case right now, and Andrea had merely run away from Section 9 to be reunited with her adoptive mother? Had our field commander been killed in action or had she gone rogue?

  With those thoughts running through my head, I was having trouble focusing on Vincenzo Veraldi’s instructions. He had me on a treadmill, while he monitored everything from my breathing to brain waves. He frowned at whatever he saw on his screen.

  “You seem distracted, Tycho. Something on your mind?”

  Veraldi tended to be critical, so I wasn’t too concerned that he had something to say about my performance. “Just thinking.”

  “Mmm. Well, your performance on this test is exceptional. A significant improvement over your baseline. Let’s move on to the strength test.” I would consider going straight into that to be another kind of endurance test, but complaints wouldn’t garner results. I stepped off the treadmill and went over to the weights.

  “Over here?”

  “Yes. I’d like to see if you can lift the big one.”

  I looked down at “the big one,” a barbell loaded with heavy weights on either end. I counted eight 75-kilogram plates. “That’s crazy,” I protested. “Veraldi, this is competition weight.”

  “Just give it a shot.”

  I shrugged. He didn’t need to see me attempt something that wasn’t possible. He could just mark it and move on to a more reasonable set of weights. I squatted down, grabbed the bar with both hands, and stood. It came up with me, and the weight wasn’t even especially challenging.

  “That can’t be right,” I said.

  “You’re underestimating how augmented you are. Try to raise it up to your chest.”

  That was a bit of a challenge, but not as much as I’d expected. We moved on to the next exercise on his list, to much the same effect. He conducted the entire strength battery with the heaviest weights we had available, and I was able to lift all of them with ease. I wasn’t even getting tired.

  “This is incredible, Veraldi. I can hardly believe what these prosthetics can do.” He didn’t look anywhere near as impressed as I felt in that moment, realizing that I was now as strong as a professional weightlifter. He just nodded perfunctorily and checked off some boxes on one of his dataspike forms.

  “They’re performing well on endurance and strength. That was the easy part.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I expected you to do best on those tests. Strength and endurance are the two traits prosthetics are most likely to improve. What comes next is not so simple.”

  Somewhat deflated by his reaction, I followed him into our shooting range. He handed me a pistol, then sent a target out to ten meters. “The rubric for this test doesn’t include speed, so take the time to aim.”

  “Understood,” I answered and raised the weapon. I fired all fifteen rounds consecutively and it went exactly the way it always had before, with every shot grouped inside the center bullseye. Vincenzo nodded and replaced the target as I reloaded. He set it further away than the first and motioned for me to fire once again.

  This time I missed the first shot completely. I readjusted, figured out my correction, and nailed the rest of them, more than a little irritated with myself for missing that one shot. I would have been able to hit it with no problem before the crash. Still, missing just one was not so bad.

  On the third target, I missed two shots, and on the fourth target I missed three. That was a less than twenty percent margin of error, but in the world of espionage that may as well be one hundred.

  Veraldi was frowning thoughtfully, which didn’t seem like a good sign. “These results are roughly what I expected, but I want you to try one more.” He set up a fifth target at fifty meters, the maximum possible distance.

  I fired slowly and deliberately. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy at that range, but it was so far away that I couldn’t see the bullet holes. I didn’t know how I’d done until he brought the target back. I was feeling optimistic, but it turned out I had missed nearly half my shots. Missing so many with a sidearm at that distance is not unusual, but I’d done better in the past.

  Veraldi was still frowning. “As I thought. Slightly better, maybe.”

  I didn’t know what he meant by that, but he wasn’t exactly my biggest fan either, so it didn’t seem good.

  “What were you expecting?”

  “It’s the prosthetics. High-level marksmanship requires fine motor control and a delicate sense of the weapon in your hand. The augments have definitely made you stronger, but your brain hasn’t adapted to them completely yet. Your marksmanship has seen a statistically meaningful decline.”

  “Statistically meaningful? So what does that mean exactly?”

  Veraldi looked at me like he thought I was being deliberately obtuse.

  He shrugged. “Maybe nothing. You’re still better than an untrained civilian, but if you were surrounded, outnumbered, or facing trained soldiers, you might be out of luck. Unfortunately for us, those are not uncommon scenarios for a Section 9 agent.”

  He was right about that. Being desperately outnumbered was more the norm than the exception, and when we weren’t outnumbered it was usually because we were facing far superior opponents like cyborgs or Augmen. A small but “statistically meaningful” decline in my shooting performance could quite easily be fatal. Still…

  “It was hardly any difference at anything other than extreme range.”

  “The difference is more than meaningful, but it’s also not low enough to disqualify you for field duty. If we were recruiting someone with scores like this, we’d just put them down for extra range time to bring their skills up.”

  I found that mildly depressing, but I was determined to do as well as I could on every test, so I did my best to clear my head. “Okay, so I have improvements on strength and endurance, and a minor decline in my marksmanship. If I ace this next test, we should have nothing to worry about, right?”

  Veraldi put on a blandly cheerful expression. “Let’s find out. It’s time for room-clearing.”

  The scenario room was like a maze, with three-meter-tall physical barriers that could be rearranged in different ways to simulate the walls of any arbitrary layout. The Arbiter Academy had something similar. Years ago, I’d learned how to properly clear a space, how to communicate intent to squad members, and how to anticipate potential killboxes. I’d leaned on those skills time and again since, as both an Arbiter and an agent of Section 9. Any difficulty I faced in this wouldn’t come from a lack of training or skill; the only variables were my augments. It was exactly the sort of test to really challenge the “interface between my brain and my body,” as Veraldi would have it.

  Veraldi handed me a bullpup rifle refitted for AR and briefed me on the scenario I would clear. “This will be a residential building with a mix of noncombatants and hostiles. You are to clear the building and inflict no casualties unless fired on. If you kill someone aiming a weapon at you, you don’t lose any points. If you kill someone who isn’t aiming a weapon at you, you lose one point. If you kill someone with his hands up, you lose two points. If you kill a noncombatant, you lose three. As soon as you lose three points, the test is over.”

  “So, how do I win?”

  He pointed across the room. “Clear the building without losing three points and get through the door on the other side. You won’t though.”

  I didn’t understand what he meant by that right away. In fact, I interpreted it as more a put-down than anything else and became even more determined to prove myself.

  “I’ve got this, Veraldi.�
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  He clapped me on the shoulder and then left the room. A few seconds later, my dataspike started running the program he was feeding me. The plasticrete barriers were now covered with gang graffiti, declaring them to be the territory of the Renegades. I found the gang name a little unconvincing, but that was about par for a training sim.

  I saw a man on the floor, clearly drunk and asleep. I stepped over him and cautiously proceeded into the apartment building. A long corridor stretched ahead in front of me with doorways on either side. A woman leaning against the wall noticed me and threw a flirtatious smile. She didn’t seem to be armed, so I assumed she was there as a distraction and scanned the area.

  The nature of the physical barriers supporting the simulation meant that the path to the end would have to be through a series of open doors. Grabbing a doorknob that wasn’t there to push open a heavy barrier wouldn’t make much sense. That meant the open door to my left was the correct way to go.

  I entered the common room of a small apartment. Three members of the Renegades were sitting at a table playing cards. They all wore leather jackets and had black bandanas, which once again struck me as a bit far-fetched. Their overall look, just like their name, was more typical of gang culture from twenty-five or thirty years ago.

  The one facing the door saw me as I came in. He threw his hands up in surrender immediately. The man next to him did nothing but stare at me stupidly from his seat. The third one went for his weapon, and I shot him through the chest before he could get it aimed at me. That was when the gang member who’d been staring at me threw his hands up, a tricky move in that situation because I could so easily have mistaken it for an attempt to draw on me. I didn’t doubt that was an intentional part of the simulation.

  All three men faded away, and I sighed with relief. I had cleared the first room successfully. If the others were similar, I judged my chances of completing the scenario to be fairly high.

  I stepped back out into the hallway and crossed over to the room further down the hall. Someone jumped out at me as I entered and I almost fired, but it turned out to be a small child running to hide behind his mother in a kitchen. Deeper into the apartment were two more civilians sitting on a couch. I turned to leave, but then a gang member burst out of hiding from the bedroom and opened fire on me. I shot him in the head, and he dropped right in front of me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d been too slow.

  When I went back out in the hallway, I nearly took a shot at a woman carrying a bag of groceries as she entered the building. I thought the timing of her entrance was suspect, and sure enough, I turned to see three gang members taking aim from a doorway behind me. They each fired. I took one of them in the chest, but the other two both hit me. The words TEST SUSPENDED appeared in the air in front of my face.

  The AR environment faded until I once again saw the plasticrete barriers of the room. I walked back toward the beginning and found Veraldi looking for me.

  “What happened,” I asked.

  “I stopped the test. You died.”

  “It wasn’t nearly that hard when I did it in training here.”

  “Which test did you take?”

  “It was a hostage scenario, and everyone in the building was either a hostage or a terrorist. I passed with no problem.”

  Veraldi held up two fingers. “Two things are different. First, that was before you had your prosthetics. Second, the difficulty level would have been set at standard. This one was set to advanced.”

  I paused for a moment and just took that in, trying to figure out if Veraldi was deliberately setting me up for failure. I didn’t come up with anything, so I decided to ask outright.

  “Why are you fucking with me, Vincenzo?”

  He gave me a look, then sighed. “I’m not fucking with you, Tycho. I’m trying to save your life, and mine.”

  “Are you telling me you could have passed that test?”

  “I don’t know that I could. It’s difficult, as it would be in the real scenario. Clearing a gang-controlled apartment building without any backup is an impossible task. But that isn’t the point.”

  “So, what is then? If you threw me into a test you knew I couldn’t pass, what did you expect to happen?”

  “It’s more about your reaction speed, and I don’t just mean that in the physical sense.”

  I just stared at him until he continued. He looked a little exasperated, like he didn’t think he should have to explain any of this.

  “In this exercise, you have to think quickly. Gang member or civilian, hostile or not hostile. It’s overwhelming, but the purpose of the test is to see how quickly you make the right decision. Even if you get overwhelmed and killed, you pass this test if you make the right decision quickly enough. And you did technically pass, Tycho.”

  I was a bit taken aback by that. “Technically?”

  “You got a passing score, a score that clears you for field work. You didn’t shoot any civilians, you didn’t shoot anyone who wasn’t trying to shoot at you, and you made your decisions within the required timeframe. You passed the tests.”

  That should have pleased me, but something told me he hadn’t told me everything. “I passed the tests,” I echoed.

  “Technically, yes, you passed. But it’s up to me who gets cleared for field work, and I’m not clearing you. Not yet.”

  “What is that? If I met the requirements—”

  “You came within one point of failing the room-clearing test, and your marksmanship score was lower than average. The composite score clears you for field duty, but only just. I’m not comfortable putting you back on the roster until you’ve had more time to acclimate to the prosthetics.”

  “Vincenzo, that doesn’t even make sense. Why categorize something as a passing score if it isn’t really a passing score? Why not just raise the standards to the level you’d actually be satisfied with?”

  He shook his head.

  “If you’d earned the same scores as a new recruit, I would have cleared you. We expect new recruits to improve over time, and the field is the best way to do it.”

  “So those same standards don’t apply to me because I’m not a new recruit.”

  “Exactly. You could die, and you could get others killed. Are you really willing to take that risk?”

  I handed him the rifle. “No. You’re making the right call.”

  “You just need more time. Once you meet those targets, I’ll clear you for the field again.”

  14

  I fell into a routine of going to bed early and sleeping in late. Sleep didn’t come easy, and when it finally did, I’d wake up throughout the night. The pleximesh skin over the prosthetics—my prosthetics, I reminded myself—was pins and needles at night. The first few days with the graft over my limbs were fine, but an intermittent sensation of equal measures pain and irritation had set in whenever I tried to sleep. Samara assured me it was normal and explained it as something to do with acetylcholine and deep rest, but she could offer nothing except encouragement as treatment.

  Waking for the fifth time since going to bed, I glanced at the clock and saw that it was half past ten in the morning. I felt more tired than I had when I lay down a dozen hours prior, and closed my eyes again. Then I heard the door, followed by Raven’s voice.

  “Tycho, she’s back!”

  I opened my eyes and rolled over. “What?”

  “Andrea just got back. Come on, get up.”

  With eyes wide open, I threw off my blankets and got dressed. Raven was waiting for me just outside the room and grabbed my arm as soon as I walked out. “I’m glad she’s back,” she said. “I was starting to get really worried.”

  “So was I. What was she doing?”

  “I don’t know, I haven’t seen her yet.”

  “So you haven’t heard anything?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I was going to the range and ran into Andrew. He told me that Andrea was back, and she’d called for a meeting. I came up here to get you.�
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  We entered the briefing room and my jaw dropped when I finally saw Andrea. Her face was pale, her cheeks mottled with bruising, her right eye ringed in black and purple. She had an open cut on her forehead, and her lower lip was spilt. She was sitting on the edge of the center table, dressed in uncharacteristically subdued military fatigues. She’d tied the jacket around her waist. Her undershirt was torn from one shoulder, and after a moment I realized she no longer had a left arm.

  I didn’t know what question to ask. “Andrea, are you okay?”

  Her voice was hoarse at first. “Far from, but I’ll deal with it after I get my prisoner where she belongs.” Andrew Jones looked absolutely stunned. His mouth was hanging open, and he just kept shaking his head.

  Andrea turned to face him. “Didn’t you think I could do it, Andrew?”

  “I didn’t think anyone could do it. Andrea, this is goddamn incredible.”

  Vincenzo gave Andrew a look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never doubted her for a second.”

  Thomas Young came in, glanced over at Andrea, and said, “You’re missing an arm.”

  “Thank you, Thomas, I’m aware.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as if trying to cope with either exhaustion or pain.

  “I can’t be the only one,” said Andrew. “Thomas, aren’t you as amazed as I am?”

  “I am rarely amazed by anything. You’ll need to be more specific about whatever has… captured your imagination.”

  “Really? I’m talking about Katerina.”

  “Katerina?” Thomas furrowed his brow.

  “Katerina Capanelli!”

  “Oh, yes. The old commander. What about her?” From the look on his face, anyone would have thought that Thomas was completely unconcerned.

  “Andrea captured her,” Vincenzo clarified. “That’s how she lost her arm.”

  Thomas shrugged. “That only makes sense, as Katerina was always an excellent fighter. Even so, Andrea’s skill set is essentially the same, but Andrea is younger and in her physical prime. Anyone would have guessed she would probably win.”