Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  A fit of coughing overcame him, and he made a deliberate effort to stifle it. He took another deep breath, then continued.

  “I digress. The obvious conclusion after Thanatos was to settle the cosmos. Not in half-measures on Luna but with permanent, sustainable colonies across the solar system. Yet this inarguable truth was met with resistance. Some believed humanity’s efforts should instead focus entirely on terran affairs. Though willing to acknowledge the danger posed by another impact event, they believed observatories and deep space imaging would be enough. That another Eight Year War could never happen again. Hardly a plurality, and yet these individuals were enough to prove detrimental.”

  His voice was bitter, as if those events from so many centuries ago had happened just yesterday. Julian Huxley had said he could no longer clearly remember events from the distant past. That they felt as if they had happened to a different person entirely. Clearly Ivan Solovyov was a different sort of man.

  “The year of night ended, and before long the new war began,” he said wearily. “I studied philosophy, religion, biology, anything that might give me some insight into what had happened. Why it had happened. The conclusion I reached then still holds true today. Simply, that when given the freedom to choose, many will invariably choose poorly.”

  I’d heard that same sentiment from other narcissists. “You’re saying you know what’s best for people more than they do.”

  “Precisely. Yet even knowing this, some sought their own destruction rather than accept that simple truth. They acted, not out of reason, but out of emotion.”

  “Some people hate to be told what to do.”

  “Yes, unfortunately,” replied Solovyov. “It wasn’t until nearly the end of my first life that I devised a solution to that problem. I simply needed to change my perspective. I had to recognize that contrarians will always rise to oppose the currents of history, but that opposition can be controlled. The effects of resistance ameliorated.”

  It was a strategy Federation Intelligence occasionally used. Placing loyal assets in leadership roles within insurgent groups had allowed the Sol Federation to dismantle the Medina rebellion from the inside without firing a shot. Gradually shifting a group’s values over time was enough to make people think the idea was theirs from the start, even if it was the antithesis of what they originally stood for. Solovyov was implying the Eleven had done this on an interplanetary scale for nearly a thousand years.

  “Why are you telling me all of this?”

  He was silent for a moment, but his mouth opened and closed like he was trying to say something. Katerina knelt to check the devices at his temples. The old man inhaled sharply and blinked. His eyes darted around the room before fixing on me once again.

  “What’s wrong with him,” I asked Katerina.

  “He’s dying,” she answered plainly. “I’m sure the experience is very unpleasant. A proper Warwick node would have been ideal, but this is an old process and there are ways to improvise.”

  “You’re saying that this is—”

  “Yes. Very few people ever witness a Continuity event, Tycho. You should be honored.”

  If this pool was part of a Warwick node, then there was another somewhere with a person in it. Someone I could save. I started toward the door at the far end of the room. Katerina put up a hand to stop me.

  “It’s too late to stop it, Tycho. If you try to go in there, we’d just have to fight again. I’d kill you, and you would have only delayed me from giving Solovyov the help he needs.”

  The old man had been relaxed as he floated in the water, but there had been a passive tension as he held his head level. Now he was dead weight, his face turned and half-submerged. He’d stopped breathing, his body still except for the slight motion on the water’s surface.

  “Solovyov is dead,” I said.

  “He is. And he isn’t. Stay right there and you’ll see.”

  Katerina took the folded linen and robe and walked back to the far door. She slowly pushed it open, calling out as she did so.

  “I have your towel.”

  A girl stepped out and took the cloth. She was Cavadora, no older than the boy in the portrait in the foyer. She didn’t take the robe, seemingly unconcerned with her nakedness. She turned to me as she dried her long black hair.

  Her eyes had a weary, burdened look that belied her youthful features. “To answer your question,” she said, “I tell you these things because I want your help, Mr. Barrett.”

  The evidence was there in front of me, and I’d seen it with my own eyes. Marcenn had warned us, in his own way. Huxley too, until Katerina shot him dead. Rationally, objectively, I knew the truth. Though my eyes saw a slender girl and my ears heard a light and airy voice, my mind understood that the person before me had eight centuries of memories behind those intense, dark eyes.

  “Ivan Solovyov,” I said. Not a question, but a statement.

  The girl shook her head. “New life, new name.”

  “It’s not your life, is it? This girl, her life. Her family, her future. You stole that.”

  “I assure you, Mr. Barrett, this is better than the life she had. This girl was taken from a brothel in the Flotilla. She may have died young, but it spared her many years of suffering.”

  “You could have just as easily saved her from that life and given her something better.”

  She shrugged. “Could I do that for every Cavadora? For every poor, starving girl across the solar system?”

  I stepped around the pool and came closer. “It doesn’t matter,” I said, aware but unable to stop the anger creeping into my voice. “Whether you save one or a thousand, you do whatever you can.”

  Katerina moved between us.

  The girl dropped her towel and took the robe from Katerina. “Not yet, my dear,” she said. “He hasn’t decided. You know his temperament. This shouldn’t come as a surprise.”

  Katerina stepped aside but never broke eye contact. I let her have her small victory and looked away first, turning to Solovyov.

  “You wanted my help,” I said. “My help with what? I’m not betraying Section 9 for you.”

  “That’s beside the point.” she replied, tying the robe closed. She tugged her hair from beneath the collar as she continued. “When you joined the Arbiters, you didn’t know that Section 9 existed. How could you? Yet the unit’s actions may have undermined or even run contrary to your own objectives as an Arbiter, as I’m sure you now understand.”

  She was right about that. Andrea was prepared to let me run headlong into my death on Venus because warning any Arbiters on site of the real danger wasn’t part of her mission. One year later I’d done the same.

  Solovyov continued. “Section 9 has access to information the Arbiters do not, and because of that the former can draw conclusions the latter would never reach. Actions the Arbiters would not, or could not, undertake. The gulf of contextual understanding between the two is staggering, wouldn’t you agree? Now consider an organization with an even greater reach, with access to even more data, such that the difference between Section 9 and the Arbiters is rendered inconsequential by comparison. That is what I represent. That is what I invite you to be a part of.”

  “You keep hinting at it, but you still haven’t told me what that really is. What do the Eleven want?”

  She knitted her brow and looked down as if lost in thought, then she nodded and walked to the stand in front of the windows. She looked out at the city as she replied. “Of all the agents with Section 9—of the billions of people in the solar system—you alone present a rare intersectionality. A former Arbiter, you are now part of an organization with nearly boundless authority and limited only by cursory oversight.”

  She turned back to face me. “Mr. Barrett, I truly believe that your deepest values are more similar to my own than you realize. The only difference between us is vantage. You are limited by your own mortality, unable to see beyond the horizon of your lifetime. You have the perspective of a man tethered in
history, able to see only so far into the past and future. But if you could live the lives I have, if you could see the universe as I do, I have no doubt we would be of the same mind.”

  “Vague platitudes don’t tell me anything,” I said. “If you want me to join you, you need to speak plainly.”

  The Cavadora girl walked to the shallow pool in the center of the room. She sat down on the floor and turned her former body’s head to stare up at the ceiling. She shook the water from her hands and gestured at the corpse.

  “Death is what gives life structure and purpose. Because a life is finite, this gives meaning to each day. Yet this also gives rise to the eternal recurrence of human folly. Children repeat the mistakes of their elders. They grow and have children of their own, only for those children to repeat the cycle. Over and over, for eternity.”

  She stood and slowly circled the shallow pool. “The Eleven are an escape from this madness; a group outside the host of mankind. Each of us sacrificing our personal desires for the Great Work. Despite what you may think, Mr. Barrett, we are not your enemy. The singular purpose of the Eleven has always been to prevent another self-imposed extinction-level event like the Eight Year War from ever happening again.”

  That wasn’t what I expected her to say. I suppose I expected something about mankind fulfilling its destiny in the stars, creating a galaxy-spanning empire. The kind of grandiose vision the powerful tend to indulge in. Instead Solovyov was trying to convince me that the Eleven were peacekeepers, and everything they had done was solely to prevent another apocalyptic war from ending the human race.

  If the Warwick node had been created by survivors of the Eight Year War, it was plausible that they could have made a pact and kept the technology for themselves, working in secret to prevent the horrors they’d witnessed from repeating.

  They’d succeeded in a sense. In the centuries that followed, the human race had recovered from the 6th mass extinction, established agriculture and sustainable cities across a radically altered Earth, and settled the entire solar system. Could that have been the work of the Eleven?

  “I see you’re thinking about it,” said Solovyov. “I admire that, Mr. Barrett. The ability to pause, to simply stop and consider before acting or speaking. An understated skill, indeed.” She’d walked all the way around the shallow pool and had returned to where she started. She stood there, hands clasped behind her back and watching me with her head tilted inquisitively.

  I had to admit, it was a reasonable vision. If Solovyov was telling me the truth.

  “August Marcenn’s Eleven,” I said.

  “What of them,” asked Solovyov, with a faintly disdainful curl of her lip.

  “They spoke of Insidious powers, old and dispassionate. Those were their exact words. They said their goal was the unification of all mankind. If that’s what they wanted, what are your Eleven working for?”

  “His actions speak for themselves, do they not? I’m sure you understand that I can’t detail every nuance of our efforts, but rest assured, Mr. Barrett, August Marcenn was a madman—the consequence of misplaced trust in an unworthy ally. It would be an error to place any faith in his words.”

  She took a few steps toward me and offered her hand. “Will you join us?”

  24

  “No,” I replied.

  Solovyov sighed and dropped her hand. She stepped back and looked past me.

  “Make it painless,” she said. “He deserves that much.”

  I turned to see a blur rushing toward me, then I saw a flash of light as she swung her fist at my gut. The attack looked odd, her arm angled wrong for a punch. I caught her wrist rather than block the hit, and it proved to be the wise choice. She was holding a hooked blade nearly the size of my hand. She raised her other arm, unsurprisingly holding a similar blade, and stabbed down at my neck.

  Against a knife, the safest thing you can do is close in. The natural urge to back off only gives the opponent space and opportunity, meaning the best place to be is paradoxically as close as you can get. I turned into the attack and pressed myself against her cheek-to-cheek. I hooked my free arm around the small of her back, lifted with my knees, and leaned backward. Inertia took care of the rest, and Katerina tumbled over my head as we fell to the floor.

  On Earth, that might have been the end of it. Katerina’s skull would have smashed against the marble tile and she would either die or be rendered unconscious from brain trauma. But Callisto’s gravity undercut the throw, and she had ample time to prepare a breakfall. She instead landed three meters away on the flat of her back, her feet absorbing what little impact there was. She was back up and ready to fight in a fraction of a second.

  Solovyov was still standing by his body in the pool, placidly watching us fight with her hands clasped behind her back. Despite the intelligence behind those dark eyes, it was still the frail body of a young girl. There was every possibility Solovyov could get hurt if this continued, whether through accident or Katerina’s intentional malice. If I wanted to end this cleanly, I needed a weapon. The men in the kitchen were my best option.

  As I started to back toward the door, Katerina mockingly warned, “Don’t make me chase you, Tycho.”

  She was fast, but so was I.

  I spun and kicked off into a sprint. Taking my eyes off of her was a risk, but he who dares, wins, as they say. If any of the men outside had recovered, my plan would become magnitudes more complicated, but now that I knew the stakes we were playing for I wasn’t so concerned with avoiding casualties. Everything was on the table, and I was fully prepared for me and Solovyov to be the only people walking out of this alive.

  Katerina caught up to me as I entered the living room. The patter of her feet against the wooden flooring gave her away, and I was able to parry what would have been a backstab. She went with the momentum and turned her back to me, bringing a knife around in an overhand slash. It came slow and obvious, and I stopped it with a high block. Katerina then followed up with a low overhand stab with her other arm that was much faster and far more subtle. I responded with a clumsy knee block more on instinct than thought. If not for my prosthetics, that would have meant a potentially lethal wound.

  Instead her blade cut through my clothing, punched through my pleximesh skin, and skipped across the graphene shell of my augmented leg. I’d felt none of it. Her wrist twisted as the knife bounced off and she nearly lost her grip. She hopped forward into a low roll rather than press the attack and came back up two meters away in a fighting stance.

  “How much of you did they need to rebuild after Europa,” she asked. “If I cut that handsome face off, will I find an android staring back at me?”

  When she came in for the attack this time, it was with a rapid series of double slashes—left high and right low at the exact same moment, or right high and left low, or one stabbing and the other slashing. It was all I could do to defend, taking cuts across my arms but feeling nothing. I wasn’t gaining any momentum in the fight, but then neither was she. At best, she was dulling her weapons as they struck against my augments.

  Frowning, she changed her strategy. Instead of launching two attacks at the same time, she reverted to her pattern of attacking with one knife and then the other. She’d seen it provoke a response to her first attack and leave me exposed for an opportunistic follow up with her second. Why she would think I was so easy was a mystery, but if she was willing to underestimate me, I was willing to take advantage of it.

  I only missed my block once, but this time it cost her the knife in her off hand. She stabbed at my chest with her left hand and I went to block it, but instead of landing on her wrist as I’d intended, I caught the blade hard with my forearm. Her hand slipped down the handle on impact and, with no guard or quillon to stop it, ran across the blade.

  She half-gasped, half-growled, and her eyes went wide as she dropped the knife and pulled her hand back. I used the pause in the fight to clear some space. Looking back, that was probably the one choice that led to everythin
g that followed. If I’d pressed the attack instead and ended it then, maybe things would have gone differently. That’s the trouble with hindsight: it’s only easy to be wise in the after.

  Her hand bled freely from the deep cut, and in the seconds that followed she stared straight at me and did nothing to stop it. When she finally moved, it was slower than I’d expected from Katerina.

  Slower, but that’s not to say it was slow.

  She whipped her hand toward me and her blood spattered across my face. I shut my eyes and turned away before I could even think of what a mistake that was. I tried to blink my vision clear, but only my right eye would stay open. I saw Katerina within arm’s reach, her left hand pulled back for a punch, and was too late to do anything about it.

  Her knuckles sank into the bridge of my nose. I smelled water and saw lighting. I felt myself fall backward and tried to take a step to catch my balance, but as I did my stomach exploded in pain. White-hot fire welled up from just below my ribs and my knees gave way. Then I felt it again, just to the left of the first. And again.

  I fell to my knees on the floor. Katerina stood over me, saying something that didn’t register over the searing pain of the stab wounds in my gut. She kicked me in the face, and the world went dark for an instant. It came back when my back hit the floor, and as I looked up at the ceiling the lights were suddenly almost blinding.

  “We found the part of you still human after all,” she said, stepping over to straddle me. She got on her knees and pressed the tip of her knife against my chest, then placed her still bleeding left hand on the end of the handle. “I want to thank you. You made me work for it, Tycho. Service to the Eleven is usually less...interesting.”

  She was sure it was over, and all that was left was to push the blade through my heart, but she still had to get the last word in. That arrogance is what gave me the opening I needed. I cupped both hands and clapped her sides as hard as I could. I heard a muffled, wet pop and felt her body give way like water. She screamed, fell to the right, and lay on her back on the floor, clutching her chest.