Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  The front door opened, and a woman stepped out and walked down the staircase without even glancing at us, serene in the confidence of the truly wealthy. If anyone asked her later, she wouldn’t remember having seen two people across the street, because her thoughts were on herself, and the next task, and her day.

  “That’s the wife,” Thomas told us. “She’s usually out for several hours, so you ought to be able to work uninterrupted. The house is completely empty.”

  “We’re going in,” I said, standing and smoothing the front of my uniform. I might be a fake pest exterminator, but I didn’t have to be sloppy. “How do I look?”

  “Lethal,” Raven said. “At least to insects.”

  “Good.”

  We got up from the park bench and walked across the street, and I opened the front door as if it wasn’t even locked—which it wasn’t, thanks to Thomas and his smooth hack.

  I took my work bag off my shoulder and began the process of installing a series of mimic devices in every room where anyone seemed likely to have a conversation. I pulled a control panel interface from my work bag to replace the one on the wall. It was a simple matter to swap it with ours, which was wired with a mic and transceiver.

  There was no tension in the air because we had Thomas, and we had our hack in place.

  “You know, sneaking into someone’s home makes me nostalgic,” Raven said, dropping a fake paperweight on Worth’s desk. It was an exact replica, except for the mic. Worth and his family wouldn’t be able to breathe without us hearing it.

  “Nostalgic?” I laughed. “A childhood memory of breaking and entering?”

  “Well, no. I don’t have any happy childhood memories. Nostalgia isn’t really the right word for it, but it makes me feel something. Something good. Or close to it.”

  “Did you use to bug your father’s conversations or something?”

  She tensed, and I exhaled, watching her from the corner of my eye.

  “No, but I did have to sneak around a lot to avoid running into him. That’s the whole history of my childhood, really. Going out of my way not to run into Dad. My life was constant avoidance. That’s it.”

  That sounded terrible to me, so I asked a question that was bland enough to work. “Are you still in touch with him?”

  There was a pause, then she turned to look me in the eyes.

  “Not possible, at least not in this universe.” She grinned strangely and stood up, then moved on into the next room to install the next device. As she was walking through the hallway, her words drifted back to me, light and casual. “I can’t, because I killed him.”

  I knew Raven was a killer, of course. That was really her specialty in Section 9. Even so, her delivery was blasé.

  “He deserved it,” she said into the growing silence.

  “Naturally,” I said, lifting a chair to place a bug.

  She went into a door on the left that led to a child’s bedroom and immediately began installing another device, this time a camera disguised in a lamp. She placed the original in our work bag, part of a growing pile of Worth’s possessions we were accumulating as we gradually replaced them with our mimics. Room by room, we took hold in his house, a forest of eyes and ears all designed to pry his life apart, one image and sound at a time.

  “I grew up in Battersea,” Raven told me. “In all the years since I left, I don’t think I’ve been back there to visit. Not even once.”

  “That must have been a hard way to start your adult life.”

  “Everything’s hard, Tycho. The quicker you accept that, the easier life gets. You know this.”

  “I do.”

  An android walked into the room and waited silently for an order. “Dismissed,” I said, watching as it turned without a sound and methodically padded away down the long hallway.

  “I’m sorry about your dad,” I offered, unsure if she was done speaking to me. Her tone was casual, but her eyes were bright with memory—I could see that even in the dim light of the home.

  She shook her head, but not in anger. “Don’t be. I’m not. It’s just something I don’t usually talk about much.”

  Her words were a generosity, then. “Thanks for telling me.”

  She finished planting a device under the bed and stood up again, saying, “The next one is yours to do.”

  I fished around in the bag as we went into the living room, and replaced a smoke alarm with our identical version. It had a naturally high vantage point by design, and no one ever thought to check those unless they needed changing. It’s incredible how many things just disappear into the periphery of life.

  “What ended up happening after that?” I asked her. “I mean, I assume you didn’t get caught?”

  “Long story. After my father died, I didn’t just leave Battersea. I left the country and lived abroad for a few years surviving on my wits, like any street kid. I knew violence. I knew shame, let’s say. I definitely knew pain. But all of that made me what I am today, and I’m not sorry. My skills were honed. Earned. Hell, burglary was second nature to me by the time I was an adult, even if I’ve lost some of my touch.”

  She shrugged, grinning. “Got to keep your fingers busy to stop them from rusting. And I didn’t have a Thomas with me out there to shut off systems and let me walk through houses like I owned them.”

  “I take it you got arrested?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Caught red-handed in some rich guy’s house, trying to decide which of the antiques was really worth something. I got cuffed and hauled out of there, but they decided they didn’t want to waste the time and money it would have taken to convict me. I was from the North Atlantic States, after all, so they could save a fair bit of taxpayer money by deporting me. Quick and easy, just another street rat with a dirty face and dirtier heart.”

  “And you were wanted for murder back here?”

  “I thought so, but I wasn’t. They didn’t even suspect me, or else they didn’t care enough about my father’s death to even look into it now that a few years had passed. I kept my mouth shut, and when they didn’t ask me any serious questions about my father, I knew I was in the clear.”

  “So what did they end up doing with you?”

  “They made me a ward of the state until I reached the age of majority. It wasn’t the best outcome, but—” She shrugged, and I had the sense that she was keeping something to herself. I couldn’t tell if she wanted to keep going, so I gave her the choice. I asked.

  “What happened next?”

  She gave me a smile, and it looked weirdly sweet and vulnerable. “I think I’ve done all the sharing I can handle for right now. What about you, Mr. Barrett? Do you have any horrible childhood traumas you’d care to discuss with me?”

  “My childhood would bore you,” I replied. “I had a pretty normal life, right up until the day my wife died. Average family, average home, average career as an engineer. Average marriage with an average divorce, and the average self-immolating hatred that goes with that little paper that says you failed as a spouse. As a human.”

  “You’re right, that does sound boring.” She was smiling when she said it, though, which took the sting out. “So it was your wife’s death? That, um, built you? Into this?”

  “In a roundabout way, yeah.” I finished configuring the device I was working on, and we moved on to still another room, this one even more tastefully exhausting, every wall ripe with things that cost more than my life.

  “I joined the Arbiter Force to try to get myself killed,” I said matter-of-factly. “Not that I was conscious of that at the time. I had an interesting conversation with the guy who ended up becoming my Senior Arbiter, and he told me this long story about what his life was like. It sounded dangerous, but kind of noble in a way. I thought I could be noble too, do something good, and die with a clear conscience.”

  “You must have really loved her,” she said, her voice gentle.

  “I did, but that wasn’t really why. It was more that I blamed myself for how she died.
She’d been driving a car I had custom-built for her, and she would never have died if not for the modifications I’d made to it. I tinkered, she died, and I was left with the ashes. I didn’t know what to do after that. All I knew was that I was somehow wrong.”

  “Yes, I remember you told me that before. But you wanted her to be safe, not dead. You weren’t malicious.”

  She put a hand on my back to comfort me, and I felt a wave of... shame? Maybe. An echo, at least, of who I’d been back then, and it wasn’t a man I wanted to be. Raven felt it in my body, and her hand went very still.

  “Tycho,” she said quietly.

  She pulled on my arm to turn me around and our arms slipped around each other, as natural as gravity, and just as strong. My breath grew short, and she was close enough for me to catch the sweet smell of her hair. Her eyes were wide, her lips, parted.

  I started to say her name, but she cut me off.

  “Less talking,” she said, pulling me closer. Our lips touched, and the room fell away, just like my memories, and then there was only her.

  20

  I found myself wanting to deepen the kiss and cupped my hand behind Raven’s head to pull her closer. She let me and, for just a moment, I let myself get lost in her. Then Raven put a palm gently on my chest and drew back.

  “We can’t,” she managed to say, though the words didn’t hold much conviction. I started to say that she was right, but she shook her head and kept going. “We can’t right now.”

  Oh. That made sense. The kiss had thrown me off enough that I had all but forgotten where we were and what we were doing.

  “The last device is set,” I told her. “Let’s move out and report back.”

  Silent understanding passed between us, and we slipped out of Oliver Worth’s house and blended into the local foot traffic. We traveled back to the Inspector General’s Office in a companionable silence that neither of us felt the need to break.

  Vincenzo glanced up at us as we came in, then straightened in his chair with an expectant look. “How did it go at Worth’s place?”

  “No issues,” I assured him. “The mission was a success.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Now all that’s left to do is wait.”

  That was the worst part about surveillance. While Section 9 had access to next gen gear like we’d installed in Oliver Worth’s house, we couldn’t make someone incriminate themselves.

  When you plant a listening device, it’s mostly about luck and patience. It can be hours, days, or weeks before you catch anything at all. And even when you do hear something, it isn’t usually all that useful—a man listening to his wife talk about her day at work, or two children arguing about what game to play. Or worse—hours of reality programming on the holo.

  The quality of our mimic devices was good enough that we would have heard every last detail of any conversation, right down to a person clearing his throat or passing gas. We didn’t hear any of that, though, because there was no one home.

  I sat with the others listening to the dead air of an empty house for a couple of hours until Worth finally arrived home. When the equipment picked up the sound of the front door opening, everyone went still.

  At first Worth did nothing out of the ordinary, just a man going about his usual business after a long day. I perked up when his phone rang, but it was only his wife telling him she was bringing home dinner.

  They spent the next few hours talking the way married couples did, then retired to the bedroom. I gave up and decided to take a break when the giggling started. Vincenzo shot me a knowing look, then waved me off.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was back and the fireworks seemed to be over. Veraldi put a finger to his lips, indicating I should stay quiet. Andrew Jones was in the office too, pointing at his ear to tell me to listen.

  I connected my opticals to our bugs and immediately heard Worth’s voice on the other end. “So, that’s our current progress. As you can see, we’ve been getting a lot of interference. They know something about this project and are doing everything they can to sabotage it.”

  A clipped, arrogant voice replied. “Do we know what they know? It seems to me that’s the essential point…”

  “They’ve been all over the place, which makes it hard to be sure. They may be mostly ignorant, but they make up for that with their sheer flair for destruction.”

  “Yes, I had observed that quality in them,” the voice commented drily. “Of course, some of your associates are largely the same. I must say, rocket launchers on the highway?”

  “Yes, that was a miscalculation.” Worth seemed pained by the topic. “Even so, I see no reason to think they know anything about the Sol-6 Treaty.”

  We do now, I thought. Veraldi shot me a quick grin, and I nodded in response. Andrew’s face registered surprise, and I could see him looking something up on his dataspike, no doubt refreshing his memory on the subject.

  “Worth, are we even sure that this project will actually result in the defeat of the Treaty?”

  “I’m confident it will. Secretary-General de Beauvoir is the architect and driving force behind Sol-6. When she is gone, there’s no one else with the charisma or the connections to push the Treaty through.”

  So, the Cabinet Ministers were being blackmailed, but Oliver Worth was not. The Speaker of the House of Commons of the North Atlantic States was behind the plan to assassinate Claudette de Beauvoir.

  Listening to Worth talk to the unsub, I couldn’t help but feel that their thinking was somewhat flawed. Yes, it was possible that assassinating de Beauvoir would kill the Treaty she was pushing for. It was also possible that her murder would have the exact opposite effect. She could end up as a kind of martyr, a selfless patriot who had done everything she could for the solar system. Her supporters would certainly be likely to push that interpretation, and it could be enough to get the Treaty to pass. Why would anyone adopt a potentially self-defeating strategy?

  Then again, the Eleven certainly knew enough about strategy. They’d been playing the long game for eight hundred years now. Of course, I didn’t really know why they had chosen to involve themselves, and their reasons could well be different from those of Oliver Worth. Still, if they supported this plot for whatever reason, then it must have some merit.

  The new treaty was designed to supersede the Treaty of Settlement, the agreement that regulated the relations between the six major governments of the solar system. The signatories to the Treaty of Settlement included the Sol Federation, along with Venus, the United Martian States, the Jovian Alliance, the Saturn Union, and The Pallas Flotilla.

  “Are you so sure the treaty has no other major supporters?” asked the man on the phone.

  “None who could push it through to ratification,” Worth replied with a scoff. “What effect does it have for a politician from The Pallas Flotilla to support Sol-6? It alienates another politician from the Jovian Alliance, who distrusts and fears The Pallas Flotilla. Without a convincing leader from the Sol Federation itself, this treaty will be seen as an attempt by one of the other nations to seize control at the expense of the others.”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” the other man replied, his tone growing thoughtful. “Even so, there are those who remain attached to the proposed treaty.”

  Worth’s reply was biting. “That treaty is bullshit. Except for those who seek to finalize their theft of our sovereignty!”

  The existing treaty was a little vague and left the issue of the Sol Federation’s degree of authority less than entirely clear. Just like the Federation’s relationship with the North Atlantic States, this vagueness had given the Sol Federation room to claim steadily more authority over time. The Sol-6 Treaty was intended to resolve the issue once and for all, by clarifying exactly what the legal status of all the new signatories would end up being.

  Of course, this clarification would basically make the status quo into formal law, ratifying every expansion of the Sol Federation’s effective authority that had occurred since the signi
ng of the Treaty of Settlement. To any political leader who valued the sovereignty of his own independent nation, this could only be seen as a major disaster.

  Instead of being able to claim that they were separate nations, the various governments of the solar system would be forced to acknowledge the authority of the Sol Federation as an established fact. Rather than being national governments as most of them claimed, they would be relegated officially to the status of regional governments.

  In reality, not all the citizens of the various nations saw the issue as one of nationalism. For many of the solar system’s inhabitants, no matter what nation they actually belonged to, humanity’s destiny was as a unified people. These Federationists were the ones pushing the treaty, and Claudette de Beauvoir was their golden ticket to getting that done.

  There were many different provisions to the Sol-6 Treaty, but the most essential was the clarification of the role of the Sol Federation military. Sol-6 would grant the Sol Federation the official right to military interdiction in off-world conflict, in exchange for granting equal legislative power to all signatories. This would have a certain advantage for whichever governments signed the Treaty, as it would give them some influence over Federation policy.

  On the other hand, it would effectively unite the entire system under a single government. This seemed to be the main point that Worth and his friend objected to.

  “It is undignified,” Worth was saying. “When I hear these Federationists ranting about all the advantages of the treaty, all I can hear is the braying of traitors. Don’t they have any loyalty to their own nations, their own peoples? Why would everyone want us all to be the same?”

  “We all know how you feel,” came the curt reply. “And you’re not alone. I feel the same way myself, but there’s no point in ranting to each other about it. We need to take action, and we need to do it soon. If we wait too long, de Beauvoir’s movement could build too much momentum for us to stop this treaty.”