Sol Arbiter: A Military Scifi Thriller Read online

  I deployed a utility key in one finger of my suit, and it went to work on hacking the door-locks. It didn’t take long; the colony worlds are legally required to write in backdoors to all their security software for the use of Arbiters and other Sol Federation security personnel. I suppose this could backfire for somebody someday, but the most important thing as far as my bosses are concerned is for colonial autonomy to have clearly defined and reasonable limits. Reasonable as defined by us.

  “I’m in, Gabe.” The airlock opened, and I pulled myself into it.

  “I’m right behind you.” He climbed down the wall, and the massive bulk of his drop-suit floated in through the airlock door like an ungainly balloon. The door closed behind him, but the tower’s washdown system didn’t kick in to blast the acid off us. The security system had been functional, but everything else was still and dead.

  “Pop your suit and climb out,” said Gabe. “But don’t touch the bodywork. Otherwise you can say goodbye to your fingerprints.”

  I popped the suit open, but getting out without letting a hand brush against the outer surface of the exoskeleton took a little doing. I was glad I’d taken the effort though. Both suits were slick, coated with sulfuric acid.

  Gabe shook his head. “That’s an expensive set of hardware to leave behind, but I suppose we can always recover them later. Let’s get it in gear.”

  He checked his weapons, made sure his combat armor was sealed up, then hacked the inner airlock door. Whatever had happened here, it hadn’t affected the door security systems. They could be completely separate from everything else, or someone might have intentionally shut down some of the tower’s systems and not others. August Marcenn perhaps?

  The inner door popped open, and we crawled through into the interior of Tower 7. I half-expected a welcome party—not the kind with balloons and streamers, but the kind with grenades and small-arms fire. There was no one waiting for us, just the silent heaviness of an empty room. A large open space filled with dead machines, everything from robot arms to loading vehicles on yellow tracks.

  It was a spooky sight. Human beings didn’t live down here, and even maintenance crews would visit rarely. The robots and equipment were all self-contained, needing human intervention only in the most extreme circumstances. Even so, this place would usually hum with activity. The silence was ominous, like a warning of something worse to come.

  Gabe looked around. “This place is grim. Like, Coral 13 grim.”

  Coral 13 was a colony, or to be more accurate, a former colony. When the life-support systems were disabled by sabotage, the people who lived there abandoned their work areas. They retreated into a shelter together and waited for help, huddling up against the cold and the dark. When we finally found them, they still had their arms around each other. The body heat hadn’t saved them.

  “That place was cold,” I pointed out. “This place is an oven. And no bodies so far.”

  “We’re far below the living areas. Come on, let’s get moving. We have to climb from here to the clouds. And then climb some more.”

  Of course, we didn’t have to climb in the conventional sense. That would have been impossible, considering just how tall this structure was. The plan was to make our way to the center of the tower, access the elevator shaft, then use our mobility gear to ascend through the elevator shaft. It was still a long way to go.

  Gabriel must have been thinking about the distance too. As we walked through the stillness of the blacked-out mining bay, our senses primed for any hint of an ambush, he pointed up at the ceiling. “Where do you think he’s hiding out?”

  “Who, August Marcenn? I don’t think he’s hiding out at all. I think he’s perched up top, lording over his many minions and cackling quietly to himself.”

  “Top floor then? Figures.” Gabe shook his head, a commentary on the basic unfairness of the universe—especially to hardworking grunts like us. We left the mining bay through two massive doors and came out into a wide corridor that stretched off ahead of us into the distance. The corridor was dark, but the helmet lights on our combat armor provided just enough illumination. The corridor floor was marked 4-G, and according to the schematics on my dataspike it connected the mining production bay to the central hub.

  Gabe pointed down the corridor. “The elevators are that way.”

  I took the lead, scanning for booby traps as I moved slowly forward. I didn’t think there would be any, as no one had attempted to stop us so far. Still, it paid to be careful. More than one of the people I’d been in the Academy with had been killed by improvised devices, including a guy who’d been ripped to pieces by a fragmentation grenade while walking down an empty corridor a lot like this one.

  “Thinking of Zach Novah?” asked Gabriel quietly. I turned and nodded but didn’t say anything.

  He nodded back, letting me know he understood. “There’s nothing here though. I mean literally nothing. This place is dead.”

  It certainly seemed that way. But why?

  I wondered what could possibly have shut off the juice to an entire living tower. These things were designed and built to be self-contained, to stand for a thousand years, and to do all their own repairs. At least in theory, human civilization on Earth could be completely wiped out, and Tower 7 on Venus would go right on humming. The idea that all 520,000 people inside this gargantuan structure could be just a day and a half away from death… it was hard to accept.

  I thought back to the recording, but Marcenn’s words were mostly nonsense. I glanced back at Gabriel. “You know what I’m thinking?”

  “What?”

  “We don’t know that it’s Marcenn. I mean, we don’t know that he’s responsible for any of this.”

  He gave me a quizzical look. “How do you figure? You heard what he was saying. If you don’t do exactly what he says, his androids will find you. That’s a direct threat.”

  “But a lot of what he said was just incoherent. Accepting your destiny and so on. He sounded mentally incompetent. What if something’s affecting everyone in the tower, and the symptoms he was showing are widespread up there. They could even be the new normal.”

  He glanced up, as if pondering the idea of having to fight our way through half a million crazy people to get the lights back on. Then he shrugged.

  “Doesn’t matter anyway. If that happens, we’re dead.”

  The fatalism of a career man. It was weirdly comforting, so I just decided to go with it. I turned around and kept walking. Our boots echoed eerily in the long and empty corridor, and for a long time that was all we heard. One echoing footstep after another, like two ghosts in a ruin.

  When we reached the central hub, we came to a donut-shaped control room that surrounded the elevators to the upper floors. There were banks of computer screens, all of them gray and silent. There were life support control systems, some of which flashed red warning lights from their backup battery packs. The place was shut down just like everything in the mining production bay. There was no sign that anyone had even come down here to see what was wrong.

  Gabriel pointed around the room. “We’re going to see stuff like this all the way up. You saw the picture on the big board—the whole tower has gone dark. The people up there are probably panicking. This could get ugly.”

  He went over to one of the computer banks and tried to boot up the system, but nothing happened. He shrugged both shoulders, as if to say he hadn’t expected it to work in the first place. I went over to the elevators and hit the door button, knowing that wouldn’t work either. The button stayed dark, and there was no answering whine of machinery to indicate that the elevator was on the way. It was totally dead, just like everything else in this haunted place.

  Gabe came up behind me. “Go ahead and blow it, Tycho. We’re going up.”

  2

  When we reached Level 250, we came out hot. For whatever reason, no one had been waiting to ambush us in the lower levels of Tower 7. That didn’t mean there wouldn’t be any hostiles up here whe
re the people were. I blew the doors, and we came out of the elevator shaft with weapons ready, flashing lasers to blind anyone attempting to target us. There was nothing at first, just the pitch black of empty windows on all the silent buildings staring down at us.

  I went right and Gabe went left, though the space we came out into was far too large to clear effectively. Every level of a living tower is like a town in its own right, containing hundreds of buildings and home to thousands of inhabitants. The space in front of the elevator shaft was totally exposed, subject to crossfire from multiple angles. Thermal and backscatter scans showed a handful of people hunkered down in interior rooms, a few by the windows. Potential snipers?

  All we could really do was get behind cover and assess the situation, so that’s what we did. I found a recycling unit and crouched down behind its bulky body. Our helmet lights were off so no one could use them to target us. My night vision goggles showed a few scattered people scurrying quickly from one building to another. As soon as they became aware of our presence, they got back inside. As far as I could tell, the human population of this level was staying out of sight, as close to their loved ones as possible. Just like those doomed colonists from Coral 13.

  Gabe’s voice came in over the dataspike. He was crouching nearby behind a water unit. “I don’t like this, Tycho. What is everyone hiding from?”

  “They could be hiding from us. Arbiters aren’t exactly known for their light touch,” I mused.

  “I know people are scared of us, but this is too much. There’s nobody here, Tycho. It’s creepy.”

  I nodded. “You don’t have to tell me. But there are a few survivors. Most of them are clustered along the edges of this level. According to the schematics, that’s the living quarters.”

  “That makes sense. They’d still get a little light out there, at least during the daytime.”

  I looked around. The buildings near the central hub were mostly administrative. I saw signs for a medical bay, a fire service… and a sign for the Nightwatch station, which still seemed to have a few people in it. “Do you see what I see over there?”

  “Yeah. The Nightwatch. Good guys in theory, but we don’t know who they’re really loyal to. If they’re sticking with Marcenn…”

  I shook my head. “There’s just no way. Even if he’s holed up somewhere with a few deranged loyalists, he can’t possibly have convinced every Nightwatch guardsman in the entire tower to help him commit mass murder.”

  “We don’t know that’s what he’s trying to do in the first place, but I think you’re right. Even if we don’t find any friends up there, we can get a look around. So how do we get there? If there’s anyone waiting in ambush, they have us covered.”

  I looked around. In the stillness and darkness, every building looked like the perfect ambush spot. And there were people watching us, even if only a few.

  “I think we’re good, Gabe… but I’m just not sure.”

  “So we bound forward. I’ll move up while you keep me covered. Then you move up while I cover you.”

  We crossed the open area in a zig-zag pattern, moving from one safe spot to another and covering each other as we went. No one had shown us the slightest hostility, but it still felt like things could kick off at any moment. According to my scanners, a few of the watchers moved away from their windows. A few did not.

  We reached the edge of the nearest buildings and met up again behind a supply bot that was sitting silent in front of the doors of a restaurant. Big Bob’s Bold Breakfast, shuttered and black like everything else. There was a picture on the window of a gigantic chef with hairy arms, shoving an entire hog in his mouth with two huge, meaty hands. In the glow of my night vision goggles it looked outlandish and horrifying, and I caught myself staring at it. As far as I could tell, the artist had never seen an actual pig. The arms and legs were all too long, making it seem disgustingly human-like.

  “Wake up, soldier Tycho,” said Gabriel. “We know colonists are weird, but this is no time to be caught napping.”

  I shook my head. “You’re right. The Nightwatch station is one block up. We could go in through this restaurant and come out the back. Then we’ll just have one more street to cross.”

  Gabriel chuckled. “We can even stop for breakfast if you want. You go first.”

  The door was unlocked, and a moment later we were in Big Bob’s Bold Breakfast. It was set up as a buffet, with trays of eggs and meat and potatoes. Or items that were intended to look like those things.

  Whoever was in charge here had not cleaned up, and the synthetic meat had collapsed into jelly. The eggs had dried out, and the potatoes had crusted over with some gray-green substance. The smell was almost enough to make me throw up in my mouth, although a good part of that was due to the corpse in the corner. I took a look, and it turned out to be a huge man with hairy arms, covering his face with two meaty hands as if to protect himself from being hit in the nose. There was a hole in his forehead and a pool of dried blood on the floor beneath him.

  I pointed at the body. “Big Bob himself.”

  Gabriel agreed. “It sure looks like it. I wonder why.”

  We found out when we got into the back office. The restaurant’s safe had been busted open, and now the front door hung off its hinges.

  I pointed. “Looters. Taking advantage of the situation.”

  “Right in the shadow of the Nightwatch station? Things must really have gone to shit here.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. I took a quick survey around the office, hoping to find some sort of clue. All I saw was a desk, a coffee mug with a grinning pig’s face on it, and other random odds and ends. The walls of the office were lined with shelving units and stacked with pieces of restaurant equipment. Like everything else we’d seen so far in Tower 7, it looked abandoned and forlorn.

  “There’s the back door,” said Gabe, “but be careful.”

  I knew what he meant. If I just threw the door open and stuck my face out, there was every possibility someone would take the opportunity to put a slug through it. As the dead body of Big Bob the breakfast chef had already shown us, Tower 7 was a dangerous place.

  I opened the door just a crack, waited a moment, then edged my way out. Gabriel was right behind me. The door opened on an alley, so we were able to clear it quickly.

  When we reached the street, I marked the Nightwatch station half a block away. Almost in the clear, assuming the local law enforcement was friendly… and we had no real reason to assume otherwise.

  Crossing a street in hostile territory is always dangerous, but less so if you have someone covering. I’d go across first, so if anyone stuck their head up Gabe would see them and respond. Then I’d cover him while he came across.

  Despite my concern about random violence, I no longer expected an ambush. The best time for that had already passed, when we came up out of the elevator shaft. Silhouetted against the door, we would have been easy marks, and they could have hit us with everything they had. Of course, we can hit back pretty hard… and it’s not so easy to kill an Arbiter in the first place. We might be peace keepers, true enough, but we were well trained in combat. The fact that there was no one waiting for us suggested that we wouldn’t have any sort of organized resistance to deal with here.

  Under the circumstances, I wasn’t surprised when I got across the street without any problems. I took up a new position in front of an office window and scanned the surrounding buildings for any sign of movement. It was hard to see anything clearly up there in the dark even with the night vision, but my systems did show that there were people watching.

  Gabriel started his run. I didn’t see anything move or hear the sound of a shot, but a fist-sized hole appeared in the window next to me about two inches away from my head. I was so startled I didn’t react immediately, but Gabe saw it too and spun around to return fire.

  With the triangulation capabilities built into his helmet, he knew exactly where the shot had come from. His gun spat fire, a rapid stre
am of projectiles that glowed a dull orange as they arced out and up, targeting a second-floor window. I opened fire a moment later, but we both stopped again almost as soon as we’d started. The shooter was already on the move, having fired once and then retreated. Whoever this was, they knew better than to stick around.

  You don’t normally continue contact you haven’t sought yourself. By definition, if the enemy wants something then you don’t want it. When we take some fire, we usually peel off and establish a new position before continuing the fight. Having said that, anyone shooting at us must have a reason for it, and the reason would probably tell us what we needed to know here.

  “They’re running for the door,” said Gabe. “We need to get there first.”

  I started to move, but I couldn’t help saying something. The shot had been silent, which meant the shooter was using a coilgun. “They’ve got a Gauss rifle.”

  “Military tech. I know. Just catch them.”

  We crossed the street at a run, taking the risk of a second sniper. The first one had missed, but there was always the chance we’d take a shot in the back. The joys of being a Federation Arbiter—trying to save people while they try to kill you!

  The shooter ran for the stairs and down. I was impressed with their speed. Whoever had just tried to kill me was in excellent shape, which also implied a military background. The colony’s Nightwatch was a kind of militia, half-police and half-military. One of Marcenn’s people?

  When we turned the corner, a door slammed open and a dark shape came flying out of it. I raised my weapon, but Gabriel’s voice came in over the dataspike. “We need them for questioning. Take them alive if you can.”

  The shooter was running, relying on pure speed. No evasive maneuvers, just a blur of arms and legs moving rapidly away from us down the darkened street. There was every possibility they were trying to lead us into the real ambush, as the figures up ahead on my scanners suggested. If this was a surprise party, it was time to decline the invitation.