Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  There was a cacophony of voices, all shouting something different. The only thing I heard clearly was an officer yelling, “Arrêtez! Arrêtez!”

  It was probably for the best that I was only armed with a blunt weapon. If I’d had a firearm, I’m sure StateSec would have opened fire as soon as they had a clear shot. As it was, they were only trying to arrest me. I could outrun the officers behind me, but there were others closing in from the other side. The only real chance I had was to elude them without losing Katerina. With two uniformed officers up ahead of me, there was a solid chance that I could still get past them. I bent deep at the knees, took a breath, and jumped.

  I sailed over the heads of the two officers, landed on my shoulder, and popped up into a sprint. Up ahead, I saw Katerina running on foot. The traffic had come to a standstill just as I thought it would. As long as I didn’t lose sight of her, I could still—

  No. Two more StateSec vehicles pulled up on the street ahead between us, and officers piled out. This was no longer a question of catching Katerina, but of avoiding capture myself. I slowed and took stock of the threat surrounding me. I counted twelve officers approaching, armed with shock knuckles and metal alloy batons. Four officers on the periphery acting as interference and overwatch had guns out, held at low ready.

  The advancing twelve all stopped just beyond arm’s reach. There always seems to be a moment just before a fight where everyone involved hesitates and must commit themselves to this thing that will almost certainly bring them harm. That moment usually ends when courage overcomes reason, and so it was that the bravest of the officers acted first and swung his baton at the back of my head.

  I moved into the attack and wheeled around with a spinning elbow, hitting him square in the face. I felt the bridge of his nose give way. He went limp and folded over himself onto the ground. Another rushed me on the right, swinging an uppercut to catch me with his shock knuckles. I slipped the punch and parried the follow-up, then countered by stepping in with an elbow to his neck. The man choked and stumbled back as two others came charging in. I kicked the first in the stomach, and he doubled over, vomiting onto the street. The second one barreled into me and knocked me sideways a few steps. I raised the pipe in my hand to take a swing, but someone grabbed hold of it from behind. Rather than wrestle for control, I let it go and focused on the man with his arms wrapped around my ribs.

  I clapped his ears with open palms, and I was surprised to see blood run from his nose and an eye flood with red. I grabbed him by the neck and arm, then threw him into the officers to my left. In the space that cleared, I found the footing to turn my hips over and back kick another officer in the chest. I heard ribs snap like dry brush even above the din of combat.

  The attacks slowed, and the uninjured officers broke off. I knew this meant the tactics were shifting to lethal force, so I found an opening and took off running again. I weaved between the stopped cars on the road, knowing it would force StateSec to hold their fire.

  I ran down an alley to break line of sight, then climbed up the side of a building until I reached the roof. Moments later, I saw three officers running down the same alley. They never even looked up. Still, I knew I’d be found soon if I didn’t move, so I ran along the roof and jumped to the next building. I crossed a few more rooftops until I reached an apartment building at the end of the block, then I broke the stairwell lock to gain access inside. As quietly and quickly as I could, I made my way down the staircase to the basement and hid down there.

  Andrea finally messaged me. Tycho, sitrep.

  I messaged back. Katerina escaped. I was confronted by StateSec officers and had to fight my way out. They’re still looking for me now. Currently in hiding.

  There was a short pause. Understood. Make your way back when safe.

  I lay back against the wall, knowing that I’d be down here for quite a while. I closed my eyes and reviewed the events of the day in my mind. With such a major assault on our headquarters, we were lucky to be alive at all—assuming all of us were in fact alive. I had no way to know.

  My mind went to an image of Raven Sommer with a bullet wound in her forehead, but I shied away from the thought. I knew it could happen—Jonathan Bray had died in combat on our mission to East Hellas, and if it could happen to him it could happen to anyone—but it just didn’t bear thinking about.

  Katerina would probably try to get off-world. The surveillance networks were too pervasive for her to risk staying on Earth. Better for her to disappear into the outer worlds or hide among the Pallas Flotilla. If I flagged her biometrics, it would at least make it harder for her to pass through spaceport security. I closed my eyes and tried connecting to the system but couldn’t do it. Our network was still as isolated as it had been since the attack began.

  The sun eventually set, and the basement became totally dark to my left eye. I closed it and stared at the ceiling with my right, watching faint shadows play across the brickwork. I waited down there for a few more hours, wanting to give StateSec as much time to give up on the search as I possibly could. They wouldn’t forget, of course, and in all likelihood it would make the news. Once I started moving, every person I passed could be a possible informant. That meant I had to make my move when there were as few people as possible on the streets of Bruges.

  I waited until after midnight and then decided my odds were about as good as they were going to get. I went up the basement staircase and listened at the door, decided there was no one out there, and slipped out into the hallway. A moment later I was back out on the street.

  I’d have to circle around, avoiding the main roads as much as possible. In many ways, it reminded me of Tower 7. I held back in the shadows as a car drove by. I passed through an alleyway where a prostitute was meeting up with a well-dressed businessman. I crossed through a small park where ragged-looking street kids built a makeshift camp. It took some time, but I reached the Hotel du Lac and returned to the nest just before dawn.

  20

  Headquarters was a ruin. I smelled a hint of smoke and wondered what might have caught on fire. I passed a dead technician lying face-up in the standing water just outside of the stairwell on level 2. I couldn’t remember her name, but I recognized her. She had helped me with a scheduling problem once when I was still in training. She had a Welsh accent she tried to hide, but it came through when she laughed. Someone had shot her in the head, and now she was lying here with her face frozen in fear and confusion.

  I wasn’t sure if we could recover from the staff we’d lost, let alone any of the field team. No one ever spoke of it, but we felt Bray’s absence every day. Losing anyone else was almost unthinkable. I looked around in amazement, wondering how the hell this had happened to us. From the physical damage alone, it would be months at a minimum before this complex was whole again.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t sure Andrea would want to stay. We’d been attacked once, and it stood to reason that it would happen again. Katerina knew everything about this place. She could strike where it hurt most.

  As I walked through the bullet-scarred halls in ankle-deep water, I tried connecting to the network again. Flagging her on the no-fly database wouldn’t present an insurmountable challenge, but I wanted to give her at least some resistance. Katerina may have already escaped into space, but on the chance that was still on Earth, I wanted to make her work for it. I entered in my security key and got the exact same message as before.

  CONNECTION TIMED OUT.

  I wanted a change of clothes, a shower, and sleep, but for our network to still be unavailable seemed odd to me. I was already on the floor, so I decided to find Thomas and ask him what was up. It occurred to me that I had yet to see another living member of Section 9. I sent him a message to make sure I wasn’t alone.

  Thomas, are you in here somewhere?

  He answered right away. In my lab.

  I felt a sense of relief when I saw that the lights were on in Thomas’s laboratory. I pushed the door open and went in, only t
o find him in the midst of methodically disassembling the Warwick node.

  “So, they didn’t get it.”

  “They did not. We did have to kill quite a few of them to make it so.”

  He removed a panel and placed it carefully in an armored packing case.

  “Katerina escaped,” I told him.

  Thomas shrugged and removed a section of circuit boards. “I’m aware. I never expected you to catch her. Her skill level is far beyond yours.”

  I thought I had done a reasonable job in the chase despite its eventual failure. Thomas was never the sort of guy to coddle anyone else’s ego, though.

  “Our system is still network isolated, so I can’t flag Katerina’s biometrics with spaceport security. Do you have any way to do it?”

  He paused and looked at me with a raised eyebrow, like he was trying to decide if I was really as stupid as I seemed or if I was intentionally messing with his head. He must have decided it was the former because he finally replied, “I’ve already done that, Tycho. I did it as soon as she escaped.”

  “Oh. I guess that makes sense, I just assumed it was something I would have to do.”

  “Why, because you’re the one who let her escape?”

  “I didn’t let her do anything, Young. She had to fight her way through me!”

  “Right. And were you physically capable of stopping her in a one-on-one fight?”

  “It was close, that’s why she shot Dr. Markov.”

  He nodded. “If it was close, then you weren’t able to stop her. That’s not surprising, because Katerina Capanelli is highly skilled. So if you did everything you could to keep her from escaping, then how could it be your fault that she escaped?”

  He was standing there staring at me, holding a piece of the Warwick node in his hand. Knowing how much it irritated Thomas to have his work interrupted, I could only assume this was somehow important to him.

  “I never said it was my fault.”

  “No, you didn’t say it. You’re just behaving as if you blame yourself for what happened. You are not responsible for Katerina’s escape, and flagging her biometrics is not your sole responsibility. Now come here and assist me, since you seem to be determined to waste my time tonight.”

  He was trying to help, in his own esoteric and unfriendly way. I went over to him and held my hand out, and he handed me the piece he was holding.

  “Just hold on to that for a moment. Do not attempt to pack it yourself.”

  “How much have you been able to figure out about this device so far?”

  “Quite a bit.” He was gently tugging on a silicate wafer inside the device, carefully detaching it so it could be packed away. “It’s essentially a device for linking one consciousness to another, then stimulating neuroplasticity in the object of the procedure.”

  “The object of the procedure? You mean the person…” I searched for the right word. “The one receiving the other person’s mind?”

  “Yes.” He placed the wafer in the case. When it was packed away, he turned and reached his hand out. I handed him the piece I’d been holding, and he packed that as well. “With their neuroplasticity highly stimulated, they become receptive to having their consciousness rewritten. It can be done the hard way, of course—a forced reprogramming via dataspike, like what August Marcenn attempted on Venus.”

  Thomas removed another panel from the Warwick node, then he handed it to me and went on talking. “In theory, you could create a working device of this type with much more primitive components than this one. This device is the product of centuries of development.”

  “More primitive? In what way?”

  “Much of what this device does is suppress external stimuli prior to the transfer. The same could be done with a sensory deprivation pool and a proper environment.”

  He took the panel from my hands and packed it in the case, then he closed the lid and set a security key. “Would you carry that over to the other cases and bring back an empty one?”

  I looked over where he was pointing and saw that he had already stacked up several of the armored packing cases in the corner of the room. “Yeah, sure.” I picked it up and found it to be much lighter than I expected. I carried it across the room and stacked it in the pile with the others. He was already removing another panel when I returned with an empty case.

  “Take this. So, once the device stimulates neuroplasticity in the object, a subsystem performs the task of matching the brainwaves of the object with those of the subject. It then rewrites the neural pathways of the object, matching the subject’s pathways as closely as possible. The end result is a qualitative copy of the original mind.”

  “A qualitative copy?”

  “Yes. Biology is inherently noisy. There is always some measure of error, but the Warwick node appears to perform a sort of error-correction to the data it transcribes.”

  “How could that work in principle? If you change something, by definition it’s not a copy.”

  Thomas whistled a melody. I recognized it after the second measure.

  “That’s Jieshi Diao Youlan.”

  He stopped and asked, “How did you know that?”

  “It’s a unique melody.”

  “Yes, and you recognized it despite the subtle differences in key and tempo. The same holds true for the copy of a consciousness imprinted on the object. Four plus three or five plus two, the end result is identical. Given everything we’ve encountered, it clearly seems to have worked for centuries.”

  When I thought about what Thomas was saying, I felt a vague sense of terror. For eight hundred years, the ones who controlled this technology had stolen bodies and erased lives. People with friends and family, their own history and dreams for the future completely gone. Every use of the Warwick node meant eliminating a person’s existence in the purest sense.

  “What do you think would have led Katerina to work for these people?” I asked. “Is it money?”

  “No. Katerina enjoys her comforts as much as the next person, but she’s not motivated by wealth. She’s an idealist.” He said the word with some distaste.

  “What do you mean? How could any idealist possibly work for these… vampires?”

  He pursed his lips disapprovingly. “That’s hardly an apt analogy. If you insist on using a folklore analogy, this is much closer to demonic possession than vampirism. To your question, I don’t ever claim to know what another person is thinking. People don’t make enough sense for that. All I can really say is that based on Katerina’s personality, if she has decided to work for the Eleven, it’s because she has convinced herself that they are somehow acting for the benefit of the entire human race.”

  “I don’t see how a murder to prolong their own lifespan benefits the species.”

  He waved one hand dismissively. “How many people is that really? A hundred and fifty or so over a few centuries? The first day of the Eight Year War killed ten thousand times that.”

  “That doesn’t justify it. Whether you kill one or a million, it’s still ethically the same.”

  “I’m not trying to justify it, I’m merely saying that’s the perspective that makes it possible. Individual lives mean almost nothing when weighed on the scale of eons.”

  “If that’s what you mean by Katerina’s idealism, I’m glad I don’t have it.”

  “Make no mistake, Tycho, you’re an idealist as well. Nearly as dangerous as Katerina, in a different way.”

  I didn’t particularly want to hear where he was going with that one, so I changed the topic. “Speaking of, how the hell did she escape? That room was secure, and she was tethered.”

  “Ah, yes. That.” He wiggled another silica wafer free and stared at it for a second, muttering in a distracted way. Then he went on. “I’ve been down to Interrogation 01, and it seems she had a dead drop in the room itself. The space is barely thirty cubic centimeters, but that’s more than enough to accommodate a lockpicking kit. A panel on the floor acted as the gesture lock and was fed by an is
olated circuit connected to a ten-year fuel cell. It does not appear on any record and was likely added by Katerina herself years ago.”

  “She had that installed before she disappeared?”

  “So it would seem, yes.” He nodded.

  “I had a closer look at our network endpoints once I realized what she’d done.” Thomas disconnected a large section of the Warwick Node’s central wheel and pulled it out to have a closer look. “It appears we had a number of endpoints I cannot account for.”

  “Our system was compromised even before the attack?” The thought was troubling. What if our enemies had owned our system all along? What had Katerina been up to?

  “I can’t be sure, honestly. It would take a detailed, long-term analysis of our system just to establish the full extent of the damage. This is a classic insider threat situation, and the most difficult to counter.”

  “So this facility is compromised both physically and electronically.”

  He frowned slightly. “Well, yes. But that hardly matters. No one was supposed to know we were here in the first place.”

  “So what are we doing about it?”

  “We’re already doing it. We’re abandoning this facility and destroying any evidence that we were ever here. That’s why I’m dismantling this Warwick node, Tycho.”

  “Okay. So what are my orders?”

  “That’s the single most relevant question you’ve asked me since you walked into this laboratory. Andrea has ordered a full relocation. As soon as I have this node disassembled, I’ll be making my way to a rendezvous point in Zeebrugge. You’ll report to another location, though you’ll need to speak with Andrea to find out where.”