“That’s a lot of territory to lose,” Andrew was saying as he moved a black stone into place on the board. Then he turned and looked at me. “Jean-Paul. I take it you’re here to relieve me?”
“I’m afraid not. I’m here to tell you that we have a lead, and the Chief wants you to hang tight and keep Edward safe while we follow it up.”
He thought about that for a moment, then said, “If that’s the case, I’m going to have to teach our man to be a better Go player. Seriously, Edward, you have no idea what you’re doing.”
Edward spread his hands. “I said I knew how to play. I never said I was good.”
Andrew looked at him skeptically. “Where I come from, saying you know how to play means a bit more than just having the rules memorized. But don’t worry, you’ll learn. By the time someone relieves me you’ll be…well, not twice as good. Anything multiplied by zero is still zero, but you’ll be better.”
Andrew’s abrasive humour didn’t seem to bother Edward at all. He laughed it off as Andrew turned back to me. “So where are you headed?”
“Xi’an.”
Edward looked surprised. “In Shaanxi province?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
Edward shook his head. “I don’t envy you, going into the RST. Sol Federation agents don’t tend to do so well there.”
“This is just a meet and greet for fact-finding,” I lied. “We should be in and out in a few hours.”
“I hope so. Xi’an is an interesting place, though, if you have some time while you’re there. It was the capital of the T’ang Dynasty.”
I wasn’t exactly an expert on Chinese history, but the name was familiar. “Were they the ones with those terracotta soldiers?”
“No, that’s the Qin. The T’ang were known for their poetry mostly. It’s a fascinating place. Lots of rich history there.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Stay safe, gentlemen. I’ll see you when I get back.”
“If you get back,” replied Andrew cheerfully, clearing the board for another match.
I wasn’t really sure why Andrea had sent me to the safehouse in person rather than simply contacting Andrew by dataspike. I thought about it as I walked to the train station and reasoned that she probably wanted someone to see how Andrew and Edward were getting along.
Andrew’s constant sarcasm did tend to rub people the wrong way, and if there had been any tension in the house, I would have seen it. It looked like they were getting along just fine, though. It was clever leadership on Andrea’s part. She was always juggling personnel and the mission so smoothly it seemed effortless.
I didn’t spend long at my apartment, just a few minutes slimming down my go-bag. It didn’t amount to all that much. I replaced the automatic rifle inside with a compact submachine gun, reasoning that we’d be fighting in close quarters. It was the same caliber as my sidearm and would save me from having to carry two different sets. That also meant less overall stopping power, but I had a total of 400 rounds of high velocity ammunition, more than enough for anything less than a nanosuit at close range.
As an Arbiter, I would have never gone into a mission like this without the most powerful armor available in the solar system. Under Federation law, most legally available weapons were too weak to penetrate an Arbiter’s armor. The intent was to guarantee no other fighters in the solar system could stand up to an Arbiter drop team. That didn’t mean there weren’t black-market weapons that could do the job, but the law was why Arbiters were confident enough to drop into any scenario. We could literally just walk into battle with no fear at all.
It was different in Section 9. More often than not, we went into combat with nothing more than the clothes on our back. The nature of the job demanded it, and it was rare to have circumstances line up so well in our favor that we could use everything we were capable of.
I took the field case with my thermoptic camo from under the bed and added it to the go-bag. I considered also taking the holographic emitter I’d kept since Mars, but I decided against it. The best thing in close combat is to not be seen, rather than to distract. The thermoptics would be enough.
I shouldered the bag and walked back toward the door to leave, then stopped as I remembered what Andrea had said to me this afternoon. I went back to my bedroom for my meds and added them to the go-bag.
When I got back to the Inspector General’s Office, Andrea and Thomas were waiting in the parking lot. Andrea was sitting on the hood of her red Altezza, while Thomas paced absently nearby on his dataspike.
“I’ve booked us a ride,” she said as I approached. “The others have already gone ahead to the rendezvous. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready,” I said. “Where are we taking off from?”
“The PK airbase in Lakenheath.”
She stood up and tapped the door open for me. “Have you ever been to the RST before?” she asked me.
“Twice, as an Arbiter. The RST can’t challenge the Arbiter Force directly without showing their hand, but they moved in a lot of StateSec for observation while we did what we went there to do.”
“It’ll be different this time if StateSec sees us. Their goal will be to kill us outright or hand us over to their secret police.”
I climbed in and pushed my gear to the back next to the two bags already loaded. “So, how do we keep that from happening?” I asked, taking a seat in the middle of the cabin.
Andrea sat across from me. “We go in fast and hard, then we get out before the authorities can respond. I don’t think the people we’re hitting are the type to call for help, so we should have a little window of opportunity.”
“Say we do run into StateSec, then what?”
Thomas opened the door to my right and climbed in. “Then we shoot our way out,” he said.
Andrea nodded, grimly adding, “We don’t want to get taken alive.”
The car pulled out onto the streets of London. We didn’t talk after that. It had been a long day, and everyone was tired. We didn’t know when this assassination plot was supposed to be carried out, so we couldn’t afford to waste any time.
I decided to try to get some sleep on the drive. Lakenheath was an hour away by the M24, essentially a straight line through the dark. I closed my eyes and leaned against the interior display. The thrum of the tires against the road and the gentle sway of the car put me out almost immediately. It seemed like I’d only been asleep for a few minutes when the car rolled to a halt. I heard the door open and felt cold air, followed by Andrea’s voice.
“Tycho.”
I opened my eyes, saw where we were, and stepped stiffly out into the parking lot. Raven and Veraldi were waiting nearby, all suited up and ready for war. On the tarmac twenty meters away, I saw the sleek contours of an unlit spy plane.
We walked over to it in silence, each of us lost in our private thoughts. When we got close, the pilot stepped out of the shadows and approached Andrea. His voice was quiet, like he was worried that he might be overheard. “Is this everyone?”
She nodded. “This is it.”
“The extraction system can only take three additional people. There’s one balloon for the pickup, and a backup if something goes wrong. But we’ll only have one pass for recovery, so make sure it reaches altitude before you call it in.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem. Do we have the proxies?”
“They’re already loaded, but I want to stress how important it is that you recover the blackboxes. The chassis will self-destruct thirty seconds after separation, but those boxes are FCM-0. My ground crew doesn’t even have the clearance to look at them. We’re being very generous here. Don’t make us regret it.”
“You won’t regret it,” Andrea assured him. “You have my word.”
We crowded into the plane’s narrow belly, where the androids were waiting silently, already fitted into their parachutes. One had a gold stripe across it’s chest, and the other had a silver one. As the rest of us strapped in, they stared at us with unblink
ing eyes.
On Venus, I’d seen an army of android proxies slaughter hundreds without the slightest hesitation. Thomas Young reprogrammed them to fight for us, and they killed the Nightwatch guards just as willingly as they had the civilian population of Tower 7. It was a clear demonstration of a simple principle: androids will do what they are told. Ethics and nuance were the domain of biological life.
“What are you thinking, Tycho?” Raven asked as the plane taxied onto the runway.
“I’m thinking about androids,” I answered. “I don’t really like them.”
The proxies continued to stare in motionless silence.
“Get some sleep, everyone,” Andrea told us. “It’s a long way to China.”
10
I was back on Mars, at the bottom of an access shaft beneath the city. Black graphene surrounded me on all sides. Above, somewhere so high up it was little more than a pinpoint of light, the airlock aperture was slowly closing. I clawed at the walls and tried desperately to climb out, but for every meter of progress I made, the airlock stretched further and further away. Behind me, I could hear the metallic screams of Ivanovich’s chimeras.
I reached for my sidearm and found only an empty holster, so I doubled my effort to climb. My hands began to bleed neurorelay as the jagged metal walls shredded the fleximesh skin. I reached up and pulled the airlock release, and my right arm separated from my body at the prosthetic interface.
My foot slipped, and I dangled over the open air by my left arm. I tried to find a foothold, but my legs crumbled away like ash under my weight. Below, the Clawed Erinyes scrambled up the shaft toward me with incredible speed, still screaming with fury and hate. The airlock aperture finally winked shut less than a meter above me, and I was trapped in the dark.
Resigned, I let go and fell.
“Wake up, Tycho, it’s almost time for the drop.” It was Andrea’s voice.
My eyes flew open, and I sat blinking in the dim red light of the drop bay while the androids across from me stared blankly in my direction.
They were much larger than the average combat proxy. Covered with thick ablative plating to shrug off heavy weapons fire, each proxy was basically a walking, mobile combat shield. Waking up to a massive, armored thing staring silently at me was more than a little unnerving.
“How long do we have?” I asked.
“Three minutes,” she replied and pointed up at the ceiling. “The light will change when we enter the drop zone.”
I rubbed my eyes, then started methodically checking my gear one last time. Parachute and extraction harness fitted tight, thermoptic camouflage refractory field compensated for the additional gear, and all weapons loaded and chambered.
The bay was suddenly flooded in green light. “Everyone mask up,” announced Andrea.
I hopped to my feet and the fog of sleep faded, replaced by the clarity that comes with impending combat. I donned my rebreather and tested the seal with quick, short breaths. Veraldi stepped up to the jump pad, followed by Andrea, me, Thomas, and Raven. The two androids came last, falling silently into place.
I could hear the bay depressurize even over the steady burn of the ramjets. I felt the temperature drop as the bay matched the thin air pressure outside the aircraft. The cold was always the worst part of an unsuited combat drop. Going from below freezing conditions to operational weather in three minutes was painful enough to distract, and a distraction at these heights and speeds could easily mean death. The trick was to expect it, to embrace the numbing cold and know that it would pass.
The indicator stopped flashing, and an amber light filled the bay. A high tone sounded, and a moment later the floor split apart at Veraldi’s feet, then he disappeared into the night below. Andrea followed a second later, and then it was my turn. I’d done so many combat drops that it was almost second nature, and I didn’t hesitate to step out into nothing and plummet from the aircraft nearly twelve kilometers above the planet.
It was almost like a planetary drop. The Earth below was a sea of black, punctuated with streaks of glowing color like frozen lightning. At the edge of my vision, I could see the curvature of the planet, a dull pink and golden halo dividing terra and space.
Fifteen seconds into the fall, my drogue chute deployed and I felt the gentle pressure of deceleration. Ahead of me, I could just make out the shapes of Vincenzo and Andrea’s chutes doing the same. For the next two minutes, it was a calm fall at nearly the speed of sound into the rapidly approaching city below.
At twenty thousand feet, our main chutes deployed. This was where training mattered; the deceleration was in excess of seven g’s, more than enough to black out even seasoned operatives in less than three seconds. I gritted my teeth and clenched my stomach. I flexed my chest and stiffened my neck, trying to force as much blood as I could to my head to fight the forces sending it back down. Darkness crept into my vision, but eventually the deceleration faded and I could relax again.
It hadn’t been as bad as I remembered. My first few unsuited jumps were pure torture, but this had been almost easy. Then again, I had more limbs and a heart of flesh back then. Time and again, it seemed like my near death on Europa had been the start of a new, better life.
At ten-thousand feet, I could begin to clearly see the individual buildings of downtown Xi’an. The map on my dataspike showed the target rooftop we were headed for highlighted in green. It had been a while since I had to maneuver a parachute, so I concentrated on not over-correcting. Moving a few degrees off-vector could put me hundreds of meters away, which was tantamount to death under the circumstances.
As I neared the building, I could see Vincenzo and Andrea crouched on the roof and collecting their parachutes. I pulled both control cords to sharpen my descent, but I realized I wasn’t actually going to land on the roof. I’d caught an updraft, maybe reflectance off of the rooftop itself, maybe an unlucky change in the wind, but whatever the reason, I was going to glide right over.
I reached down for the release, intending to cut the chute away. Before I could, Andrea leapt and caught my foot. The added weight made the difference, and I drifted down at the far end of the rooftop.
Thomas and Raven landed as we walked back to join Vincenzo, and the two androids joined us soon after with the mechanical efficiency you’d expect from an android. They stood quietly to the side and awaited instruction, while Andrea looked us over.
“Consider this a free-fire zone. If anyone or anything presents a clear threat, take it down. This is the RST. We aren’t playing games here. Is everyone ready?”
It occurred to me that anyone would present a threat if they saw a group of armed strangers inside their penthouse.
“Ready,” I replied, just like everyone else.
“Tycho, fall on me and cloak up. Proxies, take point,” Andrea ordered. Despite their bulky forms, the androids quickly stepped into position at the front of our line. Andrea faded from view as she subvocalized on our shared channel. Raven, scout it out.
I activated my thermoptic camouflage and watched Raven move in silently. The world faded to a cold blue as the refractive field took shape around me. To anyone who saw me, I would appear as a vague impression of rippling air, if anything at all.
Raven swept her rifle across the rooftop as she carefully observed the backscatter image from her scope.
I see targets of interest, continued Raven. North end of the first floor. Lots of electronics. Something metallic two rooms over.
We were standing on the south end of the second floor rooftop, so we would need to move all the way from one side of the building to the other, while crossing two floors in the process. Of course, I mused to myself, the longest possible path.
I see a glyph lock on that door, Andrea said. Care for a closer look, Thomas?
Thomas walked up to the door with what almost looked like annoyance. He looked at the lock for a few seconds, then removed a small white device from his field kit. He took a step back, put his weight on one foot, and drove his
heel through the glass pad. An alarm sounded immediately, shrill and loud.
Thomas?
I’m on it, he replied. He connected his device to something behind the broken pad. The alarm stopped, and the door swung open.
Eyes up, said Raven.
A tongue of blue and white flame licked out from beyond the doorway, accompanied by a thunderous boom. Whether intentionally or not, Thomas had been in the right place to stand clear of the line of fire.
The shot caught the gold-striped android full-on in the chest. It’s plating held, but the round must have been an absurd caliber and the proxy was knocked back a step. Thomas was already on the move and circling around the roof access. I took aim through the doorway and saw two security androids in the corridor beyond advancing straight toward us. Their right arms were missing, and in their places were the kind of heavy guns I’d expect to see mounted on a vehicle.
Andrea took the initiative and opened fire with her combat rifle. Vincenzo followed up with his, and for a moment it seemed like that would be enough. Instead, another huge round blew through the wall and took the security door completely off its hinges. The silver-striped proxy caught the round with its shield and advanced on the doorway.
Andrea followed behind the gold android and fired between its legs. Her shots were tightly grouped, but she only had an angle to its head, which was often one of the most heavily armored parts of a combat proxy. I took aim at the joints of its legs, reasoning that their heavy weapons were stressing the frame beyond its design tolerances.
My guess was spot-on, and the proxy collapsed to its knees after the first burst of gunfire hit. Vincenzo caught on to what I was doing and adjusted his aim. The other proxy went down as our androids reached the doorway, but the first proxy to fall had already reoriented itself and managed to fire again. Using its shield, the silver android blocked the shot, then pulled back and slammed it into the downed proxy.
The impact knocked the android flat onto its back, so the silver android quickly raised its shield and brought the edge down onto its chest. The proxy was cut in two, and the marble floor beneath it shattered like glass.
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 102