Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  Despite Section 9’s attempts to stop him, and despite the deaths of his three conspirators, this man was still determined to kill Jovani Pang.

  And the only man in any position to stop him was me.

  I dropped my bike, I raised my weapon, and fired as he pulled the trigger on his. Shooting on the move is always difficult, even with prosthetics and no heartbeat to throw off your aim. My shots went wide, but it made a difference.

  As often happens, the sound of my gun going off behind him was enough to spoil the hitman’s aim. Not entirely, but he missed the weak point that would have delivered up Jovani Pang to him. His grenade hit one of the armored plates instead and dented it badly, but it failed to penetrate.

  He glanced back over his shoulder in my direction, and instead of turning to deal with me, he pulled the trigger four more times. Powerful explosions rocked the vehicle and echoed through the dark tunnel. I had ruined the precision of his aim, and he had no choice but to do something about it. On the other hand, he had done a lot of damage to his target vehicle and had quite possibly killed the man he was trying to kill.

  His grenade launcher empty, he dropped it to the ground and drew his sidearm. Whoever this gunman was, he was completely dedicated to his mission. I couldn’t imagine an ordinary hitman taking the kind of chances he was taking here. If it was only a matter of money, after all, then surely the death of all his friends would have been enough to convince him to drop the job and get out while he still could.

  Instead of doing so, he was fiercely determined to keep going until the job was done. If there wasn’t any hope of running him off, then my only realistic option was to shoot him dead. The only problem with that, of course, was that he had the exact same goal as I did.

  We both took cover behind the bodies of our motorcycles, trading bursts of blind gunfire. Just like my brief journey through the tunnel to this point, this whole exchange probably didn’t take anywhere near as long as it felt.

  But getting shot at always tends to feel that way. Time practically seems to stop, and you feel like you’re spending an eternity dodging bullets. The cars in the tunnel were frantically trying to get away from the gunfight, so the road in front of Raven must not have taken her more than a few seconds to travel.

  During those few everlasting seconds, we managed to do two or three exchanges of shots. Then Raven’s car pulled up behind me, and I heard her voice. “Help Jovani! I’ll cover you!”

  She started shooting, and her first shot hit the attacker in the body. He slumped over a little and stopped shooting, though he was still trying to bring his gun up so he could resume firing. I jumped up and sprinted past him, but he kept trying to do everything he could to get a second shot. Raven hit him again, and he broke off his attack and tried to crawl away.

  Meanwhile, I was climbing up the side of the burning car to try to get to the door and pull Jovani out to safety. The whole idea of using him as human bait had seemed like common sense, but now that his car was burning right in front of me, I couldn’t take it quite so casually.

  He might not be a good example of a human being, but he was a human being. As another human being, the idea of burning alive in an overturned car was absolutely horrifying, and I wanted to spare him that awful fate if possible.

  As I tried to climb up the side of the burning vehicle, the gunman struggled to crawl away from Raven and abandon the gunfight. He had held out as long as he could, but we had finally created more trouble than he could handle. I wasn’t watching him really, because I was climbing the car, but I did see him do something out of the corner of my eye. It almost looked like he was putting his hand up to his mouth.

  I made it to the top of the burning vehicle, or more accurately the side of the vehicle if it had not flipped over. There were flames all around me, but they were the low flames of a fire that smolders rather than rages. I felt the heat from below my body, but I reached down and grabbed the door handle, then tried to yank it open.

  When I touched the handle, the only reason I didn’t smell burning flesh immediately was that I had prosthetic limbs. As it was, I felt a strange sensation—not pain exactly, but the feeling that something just wasn’t right.

  I pulled my hand away from the handle just as quickly as I’d grabbed it, but I soon realized that I would have to grab it again. Jovani was still inside, and the car was still burning. If I couldn’t manage to get that door open, he would burn alive.

  I pulled on the handle again, and this time I pulled so hard I practically ripped the door off its hinges. My prosthetic limbs are powerful, and this time I was using my full strength. The door sprung open, and I almost went flying off the side of the car.

  It was only at that point that I realized why it had been so hard to pull the door open on my first attempt. The door had been locked, of course, because Jovani was our prisoner. The lock had refused to disengage when I yanked on it the first time—as any good lock will do—and that had forced me to push my augments, using their full strength in a way I rarely did.

  That’s why the door had ripped open so violently, and why I had practically pulled it completely off the car. Now that the door had been forced open, I was able to lean in and look for Jovani Pang. I found him lying back against the seat he’d been sitting in, his eyes wide open and staring blankly at the ceiling.

  The man was dead, and it was clear from the look on his face that he had died choking for fresh air as smoke filled the vehicle. He must have felt how fast his car was going, and he must have recognized the vehicle’s evasive actions for what they were even without a screen to show him what was happening outside.

  This man had spent the final few minutes of his life in the dark, before finally choking to death.

  The armor plating on the car had been damaged badly enough to allow smoke to fill the vehicle. I could still smell the acrid stench of it, and my sight was hazy as it drifted up from inside the car.

  I reached under his armpits and pulled him up from the seat, calling out to Raven at the same time. “Jovani’s dead!”

  It hadn’t been our plan for him to die, but it hadn’t exactly been against our plan either. He was simply a pawn, allowing us to dispose of several of the enemy’s assassins and expose another person who was in on the conspiracy.

  Raven had stepped out of the car and leaned down over the assassin’s body. Now she straightened up and looked at me.

  “So’s the assassin,” she told me, her voice flat and cold. That’s how Raven was when it came to death, or at least the deaths she was personally responsible for. “I think he took an L-pill. None of his gunshot wounds would have killed him so quickly.”

  I was once again struck by the man’s total determination. Having achieved his task to the best of his ability—having fully succeeded in fact, although he didn’t know it—he had consciously chosen to put an end to his own life, rather than risk surviving his bullet wounds and being questioned by us.

  What could give a person that level of inner strength? Not money, surely. Money’s a serious motivator, but it doesn’t produce that kind of certitude. Only a cause can do that, and I knew what cause that was. The cause of the Eleven, who claimed they were the guardians of peace throughout the solar system.

  MetSec vehicles pulled up a moment later, as tardy as usual. They yelled and pointed weapons at us, and demanded that we put our hands on our heads. We did what they said, but when they pulled up our IDs they were both surprised and apologetic.

  “Who was the victim?” one of the officers asked me, gesturing at the frightened eyes of Jovani Pang. He was speaking to me as if I really was an Inspector General, a conclusion I could not afford to discourage.

  “A high-value informant,” I replied. “Organized crime case.”

  That’s the version of the story that made the news that night, along with a highly falsified account of how the assassination attempt had been made and who had made it. I got the impression the officer who interviewed us was truly angry at the death of our su
pposed informant, and that he would even have attempted to solve the case for us… if he only could have.

  When we finally got back to the Inspector General’s Office, we had to listen to a long and multi-faceted lecture about our cowboy behavior, and how our field commander was going to tear us a new one just as soon as she returned to the office. Is that the case? I thought. Well, she’ll have to come home first, won’t she?

  When the lecture from Andrea’s commanding officer was over, we were finally able to go in and meet with Vincenzo Veraldi, supposedly so he could give us a lecture even longer and more terrifying. Instead he greeted us soberly and gestured in the direction of a row of coffee cups.

  No donuts, though. I guess it wasn’t that kind of meeting.

  “So, Jovani Pang is dead?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Yeah. I’m afraid he is. We had to deal with a whole squad of motorcycle hitmen. One of them ended up getting through.”

  He nodded solemnly. “Okay. It’s unfortunate that Pang is dead, and even more unfortunate that he died so… publicly. But keeping Jovani alive was never our primary concern.”

  He was right, it wasn’t. And although I wanted to say something, I just didn’t dare to say a word. The plan had been largely my idea, after all.

  “Are you saying it worked?” I asked him.

  “Yes, it did.” He nodded. “Everyone we warned about the transfer sent me a warning about it this morning… except for one.”

  “So, who was the one?” asked Raven. “Don’t leave us hanging!”

  “The one was a man named Oliver Worth, Speaker of the House of Commons. We must now consider him a person of interest.”

  “What exactly did you find?” asked Andrew.

  “I intercepted a communication from Oliver Worth’s personal dataspike to an unknown recipient shortly after the information about the prisoner transfer reached his staff.”

  “Isn’t that really just circumstantial?” Raven asked.

  “Perhaps,” said Veraldi, “but I don’t think so. Since we were in his dataspike, I had Thomas review his message history. Thomas, are you there?”

  Thomas was still at the safehouse with Edward Yeun, but he was hooked into the meeting through a dataspike call. “Yes, Vincenzo. Of course, I’m here. What can I do for you?”

  “I need you to tell them what you found out about Oliver Worth.”

  There was a slight pause. “Excuse me, but just to clarify… do you want everything I found out about Oliver Worth, or just the bits that are relevant immediately?”

  “You can write us a full report when you have the free time, but right now we only want the relevant bits.”

  “Okay, Veraldi. Well, the relevant bits are just a single bit. That bit does seem to be highly significant, though. Shortly before the attempt on the life of Edward Yeun, Mr. Worth made a call to the same unknown party. In this call, he shared information about Mr. Yeun’s personal schedule.”

  If Edward Yeun had been there to hear that, I had little doubt he would have killed the Speaker of the House of Commons himself. After all, the man’s involvement in this situation had almost cost him his life.

  “Okay. That’s more than a coincidence,” Raven conceded. “So, what do we do with this information?”

  “What do we do with it?” asked Thomas haughtily. “We don’t do anything, because we includes you. Unless you’re claiming to have hacking skills equal to my own?”

  Raven shook her head. “I never claimed that. I never even implied it.”

  “Okay, then. Well, what do I do with it? As in Thomas Young, the only expert hacker employed by Section 9?”

  Andrew coughed quietly, but everyone ignored him.

  “Yes, Thomas,” replied Raven. “What do you do with it?”

  “The UUID of this contact isn’t registered, so under normal conditions I couldn’t really do anything.”

  Raven bit her lip, her facial expression one of barely controlled irritation. “Then what was that all about?!”

  “It’s all perfectly logical, you just have to give me a moment to explain. The UUID of this contact isn’t registered, no, but the dataspike is still in use. In practical terms, that means that I am able to triangulate the location of the user. Approximately at least.”

  “You’re able to do it?” asked Veraldi. “Or you’ve already done it?”

  “Yes, I’ve already done it. This mysterious individual is located somewhere in Norwich.”

  “You know what, Thomas?” Raven’s voice was tense, like a whip that has flexed but has yet to crack. “You are the most long-winded, performative—”

  “Enough of that,” Veraldi interrupted. He did his best to get the conversation back on track. “So, the man Oliver Worth was speaking with is located someplace in Norwich. Very well. What exactly can we do with that information, Thomas?”

  “Like any other piece of information, it’s really just a piece to be fit into the puzzle. I’ve spent much of today reviewing the feed from surveillance cameras, filtering the results to find any individuals who have appeared in both Norwich and London. As soon as I find such an individual, I filter it further, hoping to find those who also appeared in London in the places and times coinciding with the attacks.”

  “And there you have it,” Veraldi commented. “If Thomas’s search produces any results, we may soon know the identity of yet another suspect. In this case, I suppose you could define him as some kind of middleman.”

  He turned to Andrew. “I need you to get access to the bodies of the attackers in the MetSec morgue and retrieve their biometrics. We need to know who these people are in order to get some sense of what's going on.”

  Andrew nodded. “I’m on it.”

  Veralid turned to me next. “If you ask me, Oliver Worth is the most important new development. He’s much higher placed than the person who merely facilitated the various failed assassinations… whoever that may be.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” replied Raven. “The way this whole plot has been structured so far, Cabinet Ministers are used as pawns, and gangsters in the RST have been the ones moving all the pieces. If Worth is calling someone whose identity we don’t know, I think we have to assume that person may be central to the plot.”

  “Maybe so,” conceded Veraldi. “But at the moment, the essential point is the one you just made. We don’t know who this person from Norwich really is, so Oliver Worth is our most important candidate right now. I think it’s time he got a visit from Section 9.”

  “Won’t that draw even more public attention?” I asked.

  “Not if you handle it discreetly.” I’d like to say Veraldi was glaring at me, but it was worse than that. What Vincenzo was really doing was looking at me like I was too stupid to understand what he’d just said. “I’m not asking you to strongarm the man like a couple of cheap gangsters. I just want you to install a mimic device in his house. Well, several mimics, actually.”

  A mimic device was a piece of surveillance equipment designed to perfectly imitate a known and common object that would arouse no suspicion. That wasn’t what I was focused on at the moment, though.

  “What do you mean by a couple of cheap gangsters?” I asked. “Are you sending someone in there with me?”

  “I’m sending Raven. After the success you two had infiltrating Minister Lindelt’s home and retrieving the information from his hard drive, I’m confident you can install a few mimic devices into Oliver Worth’s home successfully.”

  “Shouldn’t we get his office, too?” I asked. “He might feel safer doing his scheming there…”

  “Yes, he might. But I’ll be hitting Worth’s office myself, so that leaves his home for you and Raven.”

  “Hey, I don’t mind,” Raven suddenly announced. “Tycho and I work well together.”

  Andrew seemed to smirk a little, but he wasn’t dumb enough to say anything. When you work with a sniper, it’s usually better not to tease them too openly.

  19

  Oliver
Worth didn’t have money. He had wealth.

  With that wealth came power and all the trappings of a life lived in places where decisions had impacts well beyond those of little people. His home wasn’t a house, it was a property, built so long ago that the history was murky, but the value was not.

  That age was a good thing as far as we were concerned, because it meant that all the security systems were installed long after the construction of the building itself. Adding tech to an elegant pile of bricks was always dodgy—the wiring never fit, and the tech was always a little off, meaning compromises were made.

  And compromises meant Thomas could get us into the home faster, quieter, and with less effort. We liked that.

  “Alright, Tycho,” he told me over the dataspike. “I haven’t shut off the security system, but I made a few changes for you. First, the security cameras are playing a three-hour loop of whatever they saw before you got there—it’s a rock-n-roll that won’t end until we say it does. To anyone who checks the screens, you’ll be invisible. Second, the androids he uses for staff have been programmed to recognize you as having permission to be there. You’re one of them, as of now, so do remember to wipe your feet. Not only will they ignore whatever you get up to, they’ll even bring you a mixed drink if you ask them to. I’d recommend something with the bourbon. Heard his collection is stellar.”

  “I doubt we’ll be asking them for any mixed drinks,” Raven replied, “but we do appreciate all the extra bells and whistles.”

  “Only an animal would mix bourbon,” I said, earning a snort from Raven, who was in the process of stroking Thomas to make their disagreement fade into memory.

  “Indeed,” Thomas said, preening. Her flattery was working.

  We were sitting on a park bench, watching the house from across the street. There was no one else around—it was a quiet neighborhood, the kind where you pay extra for the quiet, and even more for living trees—and we were waiting for the go-ahead. When the place was empty, Thomas would tell us, and we would make our entry.