Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5

by Chaney, J. N.

  “I think he made it out. He kept pulling me back in, trying to drown me or strangle me or just beat me to death underwater.”

  “Wait, he did all that while you were under the water?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. He didn’t seem to care about the water much. He just wanted to kill me. Preferably three different ways at once.”

  “So how did you lose him?”

  “I came up under a dock to grab a breath of air. I was expecting him to just grab my ankles and pull me under again, but he didn’t do it. I think he just kept drifting away downstream.”

  “Maybe you wounded him too badly to continue.”

  Her voice sounded doubtful, though. It was far-fetched to think I had even hurt the Augman at all.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s equally possible he just ran out of air.” I reached back into my bag and picked out a selection of hand grenades, then I clipped them to my belt. “If I see him again, I’m just arming one of these and sticking it right down his throat.”

  “If that doesn’t do it, I don’t know what would.” She nodded. “Remember not to just go running in as soon as we get there, though. They won’t know who you are, and they could easily mistake you for an assassin and open fire.”

  “If we worry about that, there isn’t much we’ll be able to do.”

  “Well what else can we do, Tycho? We’re a covert unit. This type of overt scenario is not so ideal for us.”

  “Fair point. Still, they’ll be loading up the planes as soon as they get there, I imagine. If the assassins want to make a move at all, they’ll have to do it right away. If that’s the case, we can just engage as soon as we see them.”

  “I honestly hope that’s how it plays out. I haven’t done anything all day, and I’d love the chance to put a bullet in these wankers.”

  “You seem to be taking it a little personally.” I smiled to take the edge off, but she glared at me anyway.

  “Of course, I’m taking it personally. That Augman tried to kill you.”

  “Doesn’t everyone try to kill me?”

  She burst out laughing. “They never succeed, though, do they?”

  I shrugged. “Not yet, anyway. I’m unkillable until I’m not.”

  I reached into my bag and took out my submachine gun. I checked the magazine and chambered a round before slinging the weapon across my chest.

  “The Secretary-General’s security retinue will already be in place,” I thought out loud. “We’ll have to be off on the periphery somewhere from the time we arrive.”

  “You may be right, but the same security team was in the Federation Building, and in the end it was you who stopped the attempt.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I’d fought the assassin, but it hadn’t really seemed like the Augman was all that focused on the Secretary-General. It had seemed like I was his target.

  “That was just a distraction,” I muttered, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “Eyes up, we’re six kilometers out.” She tapped to wake the interior display, and the screens lit up. In the distance, we could already see the airport’s control tower rising up from the flat countryside. Our street view had been off for the entire ride to the airport, and she turned them on just in time for us to see what happened.

  As we stared out the window at a sky that had turned gray and cloudy, a black military drone streaked by overhead. We watched helplessly as it became a shadowy pinpoint over the airport before a bright flash lit up the sky. A fireball climbed up from the horizon, followed by a low rumble like a peal of distant thunder.

  “What the fuck,” Raven said quietly, staring at the scene ahead in disbelief.

  Veraldi’s message on the shared channel was all that needed to be said. Abort mission. The Secretary-General is dead.

  25

  “Please state your name and affiliation for the record. True and complete answers only.”

  The man speaking was Director Melikar, the head of Sol Federation Intelligence Section 1. He was sitting across a black graphene table from me, next to Director Jaspa of Section 3 and Director Bisaria of Section 5. I didn’t see the Operator, the mysterious man in charge of Section 9.

  “My name is Tycho Barrett,” I said. “Section 9.”

  “And your commanding officer?” Director Melikar asked.

  “Field commander Andrea Capanelli. Acting field commander Vincenzo Veraldi.”

  “Mr. Barrett, were you in Bruges last Saturday when Secretary-General Claudette de Beauvoir was assassinated?”

  “Yes, I was there.”

  He nodded. “Why?”

  “Section 9 deployed to Bruges in an attempt to prevent the assassination.”

  “That’s exactly the issue, isn’t it?” interjected Director Jaspa. Her eyes narrowed as she stared across the table at me. Director Melikar raised his hand, then he looked across the table at me. “Why don’t you tell us what happened in your own words.”

  “I was approached by a man named Edward Yeun—”

  “We’ll get to that in a moment. Right now, I’m only asking about the events in Bruges.”

  I nodded. “In Bruges, our objective was to operate undercover and identify any hostile actors before they could threaten the Secretary-General. I was assigned to monitor the area of the Sol Federation building between the entryway and the observation hall. While patrolling the observation hall, I identified a man resembling a suspect we had in custody. Realizing that he must be an illegal Augman, I moved to confront him. He attacked me, and in the struggle we fell through the window on the north side of the hall. We landed in the canal, where he was carried downstream. I rendezvoused with agent Raven Sommer and proceeded to the airport. We’d heard about the evacuation plan and wanted to provide support.”

  “So far, so good,” replied Director Melikar. I took this to mean that my account matched the information he already had.

  Director Jaspa leaned forward. “We need to understand why the case was handled in the way you handled it. I am particularly interested in the details of the investigation that led Section 9 to deploy to Bruges in the first place.”

  I replied bluntly. “We were misdirected, although the details of how are a bit complicated.”

  “Take your time,” she replied.

  “As I said, I was approached by Section 5 analyst Edward Yeun. In the course of his duties, he’d discovered what he believed to be a plot against the Secretary-General. His materials suggested the plot involved several cabinet ministers of the North Atlantic States. He approached me because he believed me to be an Inspector General and thought I was the sort of person who would act in good faith to prevent the plot from being carried out.”

  “That was…fortuitous,” replied Director Jaspa. I had no idea what she was trying to imply. I ignored her and kept going.

  “We looked into the ministers for him—”

  “By we, you mean yourself and the other members of your Section 9 field team?” Director Jaspa interrupted. She was looking at me skeptically, like there was something questionable about my entire story.

  The funny thing about facts is that they’re true regardless of how one feels about them.

  “Yes, we were operating under deep cover as Inspectors General, but everyone who knew anything about Yeun’s research was in Section 9.”

  “Understood. So how did you proceed?” asked Director Jaspa.

  “The first step was to ensure Yeun’s safety. We were attacked outside his home by an Augman assassin designed to resemble a man I once knew. We survived the attack, but the assassin escaped.”

  “And you believed this Augman to be Byron Harewood?” asked Director Melikar.

  I nodded. “Yes. It’s obviously too much to be interpreted as coincidence, so we believed that it might be evidence of involvement by the Eleven.”

  Jaspa scoffed but didn’t say anything. I went on.

  “We found evidence that the ministers were being blackmailed by a woman named Maria Valeryevna. We traced the woman’s han
dlers to a penthouse in the city of Xi’an. They were a Bratva cell including three additional suspects: Jovani Pang, Lihua Federova, and Sergei Li. We staged a raid on Xi’an and recovered the three suspects, but they proved resistant to questioning. Further research demonstrated that Jovani Pang was the son of Ivan Solovyov, a confirmed member of the Eleven.”

  Jaspa shook her head, but Melikar raised his hand again. “Please go on.”

  “We tried to draw the conspirators out by staging a prisoner transfer and leaking the details to different channels within the NAS. This approach proved effective, as it exposed Speaker of the House Oliver Worth as the leader of the conspiracy. However, Jovani Pang was killed in the process.”

  “This was a singularly ill-conceived operation,” replied Director Jaspa. “I’m particularly displeased that Section 3 agents were tasked to assist, and that Section 3 resources were used for any part of it. How do you justify the use of a suspect as human bait at all, let alone when it resulted in the death of the suspect?”

  “I justify it by the results,” I told her. “Jovani Pang was a Russian mobster and was heavily involved in the plot against the Secretary-General. His death was a direct consequence of his own decisions, and it exposed the involvement of Oliver Worth.”

  “It’s a muddled story,” Director Jaspa insisted. “First you were trying to draw in Ivan Solovyov; now you’re saying it was Oliver Worth.”

  “The extent of the Eleven’s influence would be hard to overstate,” I said. “I see no contradiction there.”

  She shook her head and sighed, but Director Melikar seemed interested.

  “Please continue,” he said to me.

  “We determined the whereabouts of Byron Harewood, so the decision was made to take him into custody. That same day, we intercepted a message to him from Oliver Worth. This message contained the Secretary-General’s Bruges itinerary, so we believed that we had successfully determined the time and place of the assassination attempt.”

  “And that’s when you decided to deploy to Bruges?” asked Jaspa.

  “That is when we decided to deploy to Bruges. What we didn’t know at the time was that we were being deceived and manipulated all along. From the use of an Augman designed to resemble Byron Harewood, to the elaborate conspiracy we were trying to unravel, pretty much every aspect of what happened was intended only to distract us, preventing us from seeing the Eleven’s real intentions.”

  “That’s nothing but an excuse wrapped in a ridiculous conspiracy theory,” snapped Director Jaspa. “Is it not true that Section 9’s involvement allowed for the assassination to happen in the first place?”

  I looked at her silently for a moment, then calmly said, “I don’t understand the question.”

  “Section 9 is accountable to no one and operates outside the law. The other sections of Federation Intelligence are required to assist it, even on operations of dubious purpose. Essentially, you are licensed rogues who are not required to follow the established procedures the other sections rely on. In light of these facts, is it not obvious that your lawless methods, particularly your inexplicable focus on combating individual villains, caused your failure to uncover the real, much more obvious conspiracy?”

  I took a deep breath. “We made an error. I won’t argue with that. Was it because of our methods? I see that as speculation, and Section 9 does not engage in empty speculation. Oliver Worth’s Augman assassin proved to be a frameup to draw our attention, but the fact still remains that Oliver Worth did orchestrate the plot, likely at the behest of Ivan Solovyov and possibly others.”

  “Frankly,” said Director Jaspa, “I find the notion of the dead Solovyov acting as part of some mysterious organization to be so absurd that it hardly warrants discussion.”

  Director Bisaria hadn’t said a word so far, but she sat up suddenly and contradicted Jaspa. “I wouldn’t go that far. I think the opposite, in fact. When you consider the material evidence Section 9 has collected over the past two years, there’s far too much smoke for there to be no fire.”

  “Are you serious?” snapped Jaspa. “I’ve read those files. Agent Barrett says he hasn’t been trained to speculate, but that entire investigation is nothing but speculation. To be frank, I’d describe it less as speculation and more as complete fantasy. My patience has run thin after being asked to loan my agents, my safe houses, and my aircraft to this so-called investigation.”

  “Is that really what your objection is all about?” asked Director Bisaria. Her gray eyes glittered with an emotion that looked like a mix of anger and amusement. “I believe it is plausible that this Eleven does exist in some capacity as Section 9 suspects. Consider what we’ve learned from the Marcenn experiments.”

  I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I could guess. On Venus, we’d succeeded in taking prisoner one of Marcenn’s copies. He was out of our hands from that point on, and I had never heard anything more about what might have happened to him. Director Bisaria’s reference gave me some context but also convinced me I didn’t want to find out.

  “Yes, but those results were inconclusive,” Director Jaspa shot back. “Those experiments are more of the same. Wild-eyed speculation, unreliable methods, and results that continually fail to justify the investment.”

  I was genuinely angry. I gave myself time to pause, then responded without raising my voice. “Section 9 is the most highly skilled group of professional intelligence agents in the solar system. The idea that our methods are unreliable, or that our conclusions are mere speculation is not supported by our service record. We have repeatedly and successfully carried out the most sensitive missions possible on behalf of the Federation.”

  “Except the mission to prevent the assassination of its most senior official,” replied Jaspa venomously.

  There was nothing I could say about that. We’d failed, and the consequences had been disastrous. I considered my response and spoke with deliberate calm. “Despite our ultimate failure to prevent the assassination, we did succeed in establishing who was involved. The assassination was planned by Oliver Worth, with the assistance of Ivan Solovyov.”

  Jaspa waved her hand as if to dismiss my claim. “Regardless of the veracity of this…claim of yours, the Federation has lost Claudette de Beauvoir. The Sol-6 treaty is now likely to remain unratified. This is the single greatest intelligence failure in the history of the Federation, and it will doubtless have consequences that can only be described as catastrophic. That cannot be argued away.”

  “I have no intention of arguing it away,” I replied. “We failed to protect the Secretary-General. I don’t dispute that.”

  This seemed to mollify her, even if only a little. “Well, then. It seems we agree on something, Mr. Barrett. Section 9 has demonstrated itself to be not only unnecessary, but ineffective.”

  “Unnecessary?” I frowned.

  “I won’t mince words with you, agent Barrett. In the face of an uncertain future, the Federation cannot afford to have an intelligence service with the sort of unilateral authority that Section 9 has.”

  Since the beginning of the mission to protect Claudette de Beauvoir, we had to repeatedly rely on the resources of Section 3 to operate. That had only been a necessity because our own infrastructure had been compromised as a result of Katerina Capanelli’s betrayal. Looking at it with hindsight, the chain of cause and effect was all too direct to be accidental.

  “So, what are you suggesting?” asked Director Melikar. “Do you really believe we don’t need a black ops unit? That seems a little naïve.”

  “Even if there is a need, that unit simply must be accountable for its actions. The way Section 9 has been operating for the past few years goes well beyond plausible deniability. Look at what happened on Mars.”

  I winced at that. It was hard to justify it to anyone who wasn’t there.

  “You see?” insisted Jaspa. “He has nothing to say because he knows as well I do that Section 9 is out of control. I’ll say it again: the Federation cannot
afford to have an intelligence service that answers to no one.”

  “That isn’t true,” I interjected. “We answer to the Operator.”

  “Yes, Director Saklas.” Jaspa pursed her lips. “The one member of this Directorate who answers to no one.”

  Director Bisaria intervened. “Given that our future is so uncertain, you could make the case that this is exactly the time when we need an organization like Section 9. We still don’t know whether this assassination will lead to war or not, and we may have a need for a service capable of carrying out deniable operations.”

  “And if there is a war?” asked Director Jaspa.

  “Then we would still need a service capable of performing high-risk missions behind enemy lines.”

  Jaspa was unconvinced. “The other eight sections are not without skilled agents, men and women who can complete objectives without commiting reckless acts of spectacular violence.”

  “In an all-out war,” countered Director Bisaria, “I should think there would be a place for quite a few acts of spectacular violence. I’m not convinced that we can do without Section 9, whatever mistakes they may have made.”

  “Nor am I,” replied Director Melikar. “I’m also not convinced Section 9 has been run well or utilized effectively. This young man has made the best case he can, but even he cannot deny that his service completely failed in its last mission. It seems clear that the one thing we can’t do is leave Section 9 unchanged, operating without oversight at the whims of the Operator and its field commanders. We’ve tried that approach, and it clearly didn’t work.”

  Director Bisara steepled her fingers and sat forward. “Should they really be crucified over what happened to the Secretary-General?” They may not have stopped the assassination, but they did alert us well in advance. It wasn’t Section 9 that failed to prepare an adequate perimeter defense capable of stopping a drone strike. That failure belongs to other agencies.”

  “Are you really claiming they didn’t make any mistakes?” asked Jaspa incredulously.

  Bisaria pondered that. “Hmmm. The only error I can see was in the timeliness of their information-sharing. They didn’t keep the other Intelligence branches up to date, even when making extensive use of Section 3’s resources. I can understand why you’re upset about that, Director Jaspa.”