Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  We both kept like that for what felt like hours. Me, trying to find the strength to stand despite the stabbing, her struggling to breathe through shattered ribs. Eventually, I rolled onto my good side and pushed up onto my knees. I wiped the blood from my left eye with the back of my hand and looked to my right to see Katerina on her hands and knees, vomiting blood and watery bile.

  I stood, holding my side and feeling light-headed, but not in as much pain as I had been. A part of me knew that was not a good sign, but I pushed the thought from my head and staggered toward the kitchen to find a weapon. I could die after Katerina did, not one minute before.

  I was halfway across the room, leaning against a bookshelf to catch my breath, when she called out from behind me. “We’re not done, boy.”

  I turned to face her. She was on her feet again and hugging herself with one arm, no doubt applying pressure to keep her ribcage from moving very much with each breath. She held her other hand up in front of her in a ready stance.

  “You’ve lost. If you keep this up, you’ll die from those injuries.”

  “Victory and defeat are the temporary forces of circumstance.” She choked and coughed, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the floor before continuing. “The way of avoiding shame is different. It lies in death.”

  A moment later she rushed at me, launching one attack after another with a desperate ferocity. The strikes were wild and loose, less precise and controlled than before. Big, arcing slashes and deliberate kicks driven more by rage than technique. To her credit, she was still absurdly fast, but having faced her at her best, I could see the difference. Where I could do nothing but defend before, I now found openings to counter.

  She slashed in an upward swing at my throat that I weaved back to avoid. She countered by bending at the elbow, stepping forward, and hammering down to stab. That might have worked if she were faster—there was no way to shift my balance in time—but her attack seemed so slow that her surprise when I caught her wrist was odd to me. I pushed her arm to my left, stepped back, then pulled it down to the right and twisted.

  Katerina had the presence of mind to know what I was doing, and instead of fighting it, she went with the movement. She was already kicking off into a standing frontflip by the time I twisted her wrist. She had a tortured expression when she landed, but the movement had saved her from a broken arm.

  Still, the pain had distracted her, and that split second of delay was more than enough. I pulled her wrist up over her head. Our difference in height meant she was essentially hanging by the wrist, her toes barely scraping the floor, too close to kick at me and too injured to knee me. I balled my fist and punched her in the side. She cried out, her face twisting in agony. I pulled back and hit her again. She turned her body to face me, for all the good it would do. I punched again, closer to her armpit, then again in the kidney, each blow eliciting another shriek.

  She managed to fight through the pain and reached out with her bloody hand to claw at my face. I brought my elbow down to block, keeping a tight grip on her wrist, and realized too late what she was doing. Lowering my arm had allowed her to get her footing back. She kicked off the floor and drove both heels into my face.

  The blow drove me back and I stumbled into a bookshelf. It toppled and I went with it, the glass shattering as it hit the floor. The pressure in my sinuses told me my nose was bleeding long before the blood trailing down my shirt did. I inhaled through my mouth and blew my nose clear as I stood. The room was spinning, but I could see that Katerina had vanished.

  I knew it wasn’t in her to walk away. Wherever she was, she was doing something to tip the fight in her favor. That was enough to give me the strength to get across the room to the kitchen. The men I’d taken down were still where I’d left them. I turned the storyteller over and opened his coat. The straps of a holster were visible around his left shoulder, so I turned him onto the other side to get at his weapon. That was when I noticed he wasn’t breathing.

  I took his sidearm with a mixture of regret and indifference. I ejected the magazine to find it topped off with all twenty-one rounds and press checked the chamber to discover a round ready to be fired. The storyteller had been the cautious, overprepared type. Now he was dead without having fired a single round when it mattered. More proof that fate had a sense of humor.

  I loaded the magazine into the gun and started to back away from the body. No sooner had I taken my first steps than the corpse was shredded by a single blast of gunfire. I scrambled behind the kitchen island as another shot tore through the countertop. My expensive coat hung in tatters above my head.

  From the damage inflicted by those gunshots, it was obviously a shotgun of some kind, but the pause between shots meant it was probably pump-action. That was rare luck; an automatic would have meant my death.

  “Come out, Tycho,” Katerina called out. Her voice was strained and broke as she said my name. “You’re pinned, and you know that.”

  The door was down a narrow hall and beyond a foyer. The entire path was a killbox, and even past that there was only the elevator to get off of the level. Any attempt to run would mean getting shot in the back, but staying where I was meant getting gunned down at point-blank range. She was right; I was pinned.

  “Come out so we...can get this...over with.” She was raspy. “I’ll shoot you in the head and blow your goddamn brain out all over this nice pinewood.”

  Her calm demeanor had fallen away. The lectures, the esoteric references to philosophers, and quotes from ancient texts were gone. Beneath her cultured veneer was the same narcissistic sadist as Solovyov and Marcenn. That was why they were drawn to each other. They reveled in their own sense of superiority and only found value in the artificial constructs that made them different.

  I couldn’t hear footsteps, but she had to be moving. I needed to keep her talking. “I’d ask you to do the same,” I said, “but we both know that won’t happen. The fox that can never be caught, chased by the dog that never fails.”

  “The Teumessian fox? That’s more...than I’d expected from you, Tycho.”

  I slowly pulled my tattered coat down from the countertop. “Yeah, I get that a lot. People think Arbiters are dumb machines.”

  “And they’re right. You’re not...an Arbiter. You never really were.”

  “Yet you keep underestimating me,” I said. She was somewhere to my left, maybe five meters away. I balled the coat with one hand.

  Katerina coughed. “Because you’re an idealist. You can’t see...what’s in front of you.”

  I took a breath and steadied my footing. “Yeah, you could be right.” I threw the coat to my right and dove left, bringing my gun up even before I could see her. Katerina fired at the first sign of movement, her shot tearing through the remnants of my expensive, tailored coat. She didn’t have the chance to even register her mistake.

  I fired six rounds before I hit the floor. Three hit Katerina in the head. Her blonde hair twisted into spirals tracing the bullets’ path as they exited her skull in the Callistan gravity. She fell to her knees and her head slumped forward, before finally toppling softly to the white tile.

  I stood and fired nine more rounds into her back; not out of spite, but because I had to be sure she was dead. I approached her body in a wide, curving path to keep myself behind her as much as possible. Once close enough, I kicked away her shotgun and rolled her over with my foot.

  Her right eye was missing and her nose had collapsed into her skull, but her mouth was still turned up in the same faintly amused smile. The exposed bone of her cheek peeked out from beneath lacerated skin and torn muscle, shining slick beneath the dim accent lighting. Her left eye stared up at me accusingly.

  I reached into her pocket and took back my dataspike. I felt behind her ears with my fingers but couldn’t find hers. I checked her collar and ran my fingers through her hair, but it seemed like she simply didn’t have one. It made a certain kind of sense; the old spy had made sure whatever secrets she carried went with h
er to the grave.

  I still had to capture Ivan Solovyov. Getting her out of Windsor on Highfall was going to be difficult—I doubted she would go willingly—and I couldn’t think of any scenario where it didn’t look like a kidnapping. Then again, that’s exactly what it would be, so why fight the impression? Solovyov’s new body was small. I could subdue her and put her in a travel bag. First thing was first, though, and I returned to Solovyov’s bedroom.

  There was no sign of her anywhere. Solovyov’s old body was still floating in the center of the room. The devices at his temples were smoking, and I plucked one from his head. Its casing crumbled like ash in my hand, and the internal components had burned away to a lump of blackened metal and graphene.

  I entered the hidden room behind the far wall and saw it was just a bathroom. All I found was a bathtub filled with lukewarm salt water and two more of the devices Katerina had placed on Solovyov’s head, also destroyed. I did a perfunctory search of the rest of the penthouse and verified what I already knew. The young girl hosting an ancient consciousness was already out there somewhere in the streets of Valhalla.

  Epilogue

  A light rain was falling on Calais when I arrived at the train station. I closed my umbrella and shook the water from it before heading inside the ticket office. I bought my pass and sat on a bench by the platform to wait for my contact.

  The holo overhead was streaming the regional news. Like most dispatches in the last day, the stream was dominated by news of the shocking murder of retired diplomat Ivan Solovyov in his home on Callisto. For some reason StateSec couldn’t understand, all the surveillance video from within the building seemed to have been erased, and the receptionist who had seen the killer wasn’t cooperating with the authorities. I wondered if that was Section 9 or Solovyov’s doing.

  “You know, that really wasn’t what I would call discreet.” Andrew Jones was standing next to me, dressed like a businessman in a plain blue suit. I hadn’t heard him approach.

  “I ran into complications,” I replied.

  “You don’t say. Did you really kill her?”

  “If she were here, she’d have half a mind to tell you.”

  He sat down next to me. “You got lucky, right?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  We sat there in silence for a minute, watching the rain fall.

  “I’m sending you a dataspike transfer,” he said.

  “What is it?” I asked as the file was coming through.

  “It’s a decryption cypher. For this.”

  He opened up his briefcase and pulled out a book. “Light reading for the trip.”

  I followed Andrew back to his car and started leafing through the pages as soon as I was sitting inside. It was all garbled nonsense, page after page of glyphs and shapes.

  “What language is this?” I asked.

  “Keep looking at it. Sometimes it takes a minute.”

  I looked at a page, searching for something I might have missed. The shapes suddenly cleared in my vision and formed into legible text. As I flipped through the pages, I noticed multiple references to Whitehall and the North Atlantic States Interior Office.

  “That’s interesting,” I commented. “I’ve never seen it done that way before.”

  “Fun, isn’t it? The book is useless without the app, and the app is useless without the book. Thank the R and D people.”

  As our car pulled into a train carriage for the trip beneath the English Channel, Andrew turned off the screens so we couldn’t see what was going on outside the car. “Going through the Chunnel makes me nervous, honestly. I’d rather not see it.”

  “Where are we headed?” I asked.

  “London. After the attack on our HQ, Andrea threw out everything.”

  I found this a little hard to wrap my head around. “What do you mean she threw out everything?”

  “I mean exactly everything—all bug-out protocols, all safehouses, our entire infrastructure. Katerina may have compromised any or all of it, so all we can do is burn it down and start over.”

  “It’s incredible how much damage she did. What do we have left?”

  “Nothing at all.” He didn’t seem too worried. In fact, Andrew Jones seemed positively cheerful. He was drumming his fingers on his leg as if making music.

  “So what is there in England for us?”

  “You really worry too much, Tycho. It’s all been arranged, and the only thing we need to do is turn up where and when they tell us to turn up.”

  “So you do know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Andrew, could you just answer my question? As a favor?”

  “Alright, sure, why not? Anything legacy had to be scrapped, so while the groundwork for new infrastructure is being built, Section 9 are going to be guests of the North Atlantic States.”

  “What kind of sense does that make?” I asked. “Aren’t there bad feelings between the NAS and the Sol Federation?”

  In my experience, the North Atlantic States was far from friendly to the Sol Federation, which logically implied they would be even less friendly to its intelligence agencies. There had been rumors of war for a long time now, although no one in the North Atlantic States government seemed to want to provoke it. Were we heading straight into the lion’s mouth here?

  “Like I said, you worry too much. Anything they’re sending us into has been set up ahead of time, and we won’t have any more trouble than we usually have.”

  “Andrew, the amount of trouble we usually have is a lot.”

  He shrugged. “So nothing to worry about then. It’s just a day at the office, right?”

  * * *

  Continue reading for NOCICEPTOR.

  1

  Light afternoon rain pattered on our car as we waited, parked in a charging station across the street from the restaurant where our targets were having drinks. I adjusted the cropping on the interior display and set it to record. Documenting an arrest was more useful than not in my experience.

  Andrea Capanelli sat to my left. She had her blonde hair in a less practical style than I’d ever seen. The bangs were cut straight just above her eyebrows, the rest shoulder-length with subtle curls that she must have deliberately set in her naturally straight hair. She gave off the impression of an ingenue, looking more like the kind of young professional you’d meet in a classy nightclub after work than a seasoned field operative trained in espionage. Her tailored, charcoal gray suit, black tie, and Marcus Guo heels only added to the idea.

  Across from us sat Andrew Jones. He wore a similar suit but tended to dress well as a habit, so it didn’t seem as uncharacteristic to me. His was a darker gray, and with a silver tie. His hair was short on the sides and a bit longer on top, and it swept to the left in the intentionally tousled style that was becoming popular again. He had the look of a man you might notice in a room but would just as easily forget. A gray man. Fitting for an infiltration specialist.

  “You ready, Tycho?” he asked me.

  “Absolutely. This is my kind of work.”

  It’d felt like decades since we first met. I was an Arbiter then, an officer of the most elite law enforcement organization in the Sol system. I’d jumped down from orbit to infiltrate a Venusian living tower and prevent a mass murder orchestrated by Nightwatch commander August Marcenn. That single mission would lead me from one revelation to another, one life-changing event after another, until I became a spy for a unit that didn’t exist, fighting monsters nearly a thousand years old.

  The sheer magnitude of what lay hidden beneath the surface of everything I thought I knew was almost incomprehensible. Maybe that’s why I was so thankful for days like this. Days with a simple, tractable problem to solve.

  Andrea chambered a round into her sidearm. “I guess police work is your area of expertise, isn’t it?” she commented and slipped the weapon into the holster under her coat.

  “Well, Inspectors General are hardly Arbiters,” I replied with a shrug. “But they do make arrests, so ye
ah. This is something I’m definitely familiar with.”

  Jones smirked a little. “You sound excited.”

  “I’m relieved we aren’t going up against black ops cyborgs or offworld special forces this time.”

  “What, you didn’t enjoy any of that?”

  “Not every day, no.”

  “Well, a smart lady once said, ‘Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.’”

  “To that lady I would say doing the same thing over and over is to be controlled by, rather than to control, what one does.”

  “In any case,” Andrea said, “we need time to rebuild Section 9. We also need cover, and to maintain that cover as Inspectors General, we have to do everything Inspectors General would normally do. That includes low-level arrests of white collar suspects.”

  I nodded. “You don’t have to convince me. Like you said, it’s just like police work.”

  A voice came in over our dataspikes. “They’re all in place now. Pierce just went in.”

  “Understood,” replied Andrea. “Get your team in place and be ready to move.”

  The arrest team were exactly what they seemed to be—local MetSec believing that they were serving an arrest warrant under the supervision of the North Atlantic States Inspector General office. Factually true, if not the complete story.

  “Stay sharp,” she said to Andrew and me. “We’re heading in.”

  I tapped the release and the car doors popped open. We stepped out and crossed the street. The holo in the restaurant’s window showed rolling hills of wheat in the Russo-Sino countryside that were backlit by the setting sun. Above us, recessed speakers built into the facade projected a tasteful interpretation of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony Number 2.