James Swallow - Fallen Angel

Not that Lower Hengsha ever really slept, Faridah reflected. It was the dark mirror image of the upper city’s opulence and luxury, a bestial and dangerous likeness of its dazzling twin. In the lower city, life was cheaper and times were harder; and up above, while things might have shone a little more brightly, they were just a different kind of dangerous.

***

Evelyn brought the Osprey around in a spiraling descent, and with Faridah’s assistance, she rotated the spinning props on the end of the wings to a vertical mode. The VTOL made a careful touchdown on ArcAir’s south pad. The airfield was part of an artificial reef that had been one of the first things built during the founding of Hengsha, and it extended out into the bay.

Faridah couldn’t help but glance out over the landing apron to where the company’s more modern aircraft were parked. Jai Cheng’s other private planes were sleek models with windowless virtual cockpits and swept-back wings. While they were similar in structural configuration to the tilt-rotor V-22, that was where the resemblance ended. The other VTOLs had advanced axial flow engines at their wingtips, making them highly agile and capable of near-supersonic speeds. It was no secret that Faridah Malik coveted the chance to fly one of them. So far Cheng hadn’t been willing to give her the job.

As if thinking about him summoned the man, Faridah caught sight of Cheng crossing the apron toward them as Evelyn ran through the Osprey’s shutdown checklist. His normally smiling face was set in a grimace, and he had a purposeful manner to his gait that made Faridah worry that he was coming to chew them out about turning the check flight into a joyride. But then she saw the low shape of a six-wheeled robot fuel bowser nosing into place under the Osprey’s wing and guessed that something else was up.

Evelyn saw the fuel truck too. “What’s this? We barely touch down and we’re tanking up again?”

Faridah unstrapped and climbed out of the hatch behind the cockpit to meet her employer as he stepped up. Getting a closer look at him, she had the sense that Cheng was under stress, but she knew that he would never admit that to her.

“Hey, Malik,” he began. “Listen, you need to top off and head back out.” He jerked a thumb at the control hut

across the short runway. “There’s a new flight plan for you.”

She nodded at the sleeker jet VTOLs. “Can’t one of them take it? Maybe Fynn or one of the other pilots? The replacement engine, it ought to have one of the techs give it a look over-”

He cut her off with a shake of the head. “No can do. A timetable has been moved up, and we have a job to do.” Cheng straightened and self-consciously adjusted the floral lapels of his jacket. “It’s a special request from one of our, ah, elite clients,” he added.

Faridah said nothing. It was an open secret among the ArcAir crews that Cheng’s company had an ongoing relationship with the Red Arrow triad, one of many Chinese organized crime groups that operated in dozens of cities around the world. It wasn’t a shocking truth – in Hengsha it was just a fact of life, the price of doing business in a city where criminal gangs kept the peace better than the corporate rent-a-cops ever could. His so-called ‘elite clients’ were usually senior Red Arrow members, who paid him back in influence for no-questions-asked trips that never got logged by city flight control. Faridah and Evelyn had steered clear of such things, though; if she dwelled on it too long, Malik became uncomfortable with the questions such thoughts raised, and she preferred to stay out of Cheng’s shady dealings as much as she could. If ArcAir was a Red Arrow shell company, she didn’t want to know about it, and she damn well wasn’t going to voice such suspicions openly.

“What’s the op?” Evelyn stood in the open hatch, having heard Cheng’s words. “You want us to go pick up some rich kid’s Benz from the mainland?”

Cheng didn’t respond because his attention had been drawn away by a trio of men crossing the landing pad toward the Osprey. The first drops of rain were starting to fall as they came into the glare of the VTOL’s navigation lights, and the first thing Faridah saw were the guns.

Two of the men wore light ballistic flex-armor and full-face helmet rigs, with stubby shotguns mag-locked to their backs. The pilot had seen their type before, usually on patrol through the rougher parts of the Jiu Shichang

district in Lower Hengsha; troopers from Belltower, the big mercenary contractor that handled most of the city’s security. Something about them always set her off, the blunt swagger the troopers put in their walk. The stylized bull-head logo of the PMC appeared on the shoulders of their armor; and it was there on the tactical gear of the third man as well.

Dark skinned, with a cast to his features that suggested Indian or North African extraction, the third man was clearly in charge. He was a head taller than his escorts, clad in high-impact armor plate that looked better suited for a front line combat zone than urban operations. He fairly towered over Cheng, who recovered as best he could at the unexpected arrival.

“Mister Khan,” began Cheng, sweat beading on his forehead. “I’m just finalizing the details with my pilots now. They’ll be departing momentarily.”

Khan gave an airy nod, surveying the Osprey before he glanced at Faridah and Evelyn. “I hope your crew understand we’re dealing with a high-value cargo here. We can’t afford any mistakes.”

Evelyn shot Faridah a look that communicated a shared disquiet, and disappeared back into the aircraft. “I’ll check the fuel levels.”

The big man held out a data pad to Faridah, and she took it, frowning as she read the flight plan details displayed there. “You want us to go here? These co-ordinates are out across the Yangtze river delta. That’s the edge of the East China Sea, there’s nowhere to land out there.”

“That’s not your concern,” Khan replied. He had a slow, measured manner that seemed to put the echo of a sneer into everything he said. “Just fly the plane.”

“What about the weather?” she insisted, using the pad to point at the sky. The rain was gentle, but the thick black clouds gathering to the East threatened much worse. “Because that really is my concern. This course will send us right into the teeth of a storm front.”

“Is that an issue? I was told you were a very good pilot, Ms. Malik.” Something about Khan knowing her name made Faridah’s gut twist. “I’d hate to think Cheng here was overselling you.”

“My crew will return with your cargo in short order,” Cheng insisted, shooting a warning look at Faridah. “The storm is still hours out.” She doubted her employer’s liberal prediction of the weather pattern, but clearly her opinions were going to carry little weight here.

Khan nodded to his men, and they stepped back. One of them cocked his head as he sub-vocalized into an implanted infolink.

“This transfer has to be supervised,” Khan continued. He pushed past Cheng and took a step toward the Osprey. The other man looked as if he was about to protest, but then Khan laid a heavy, lidded stare on him and Cheng swallowed his objection with a nod.

“We’re not exactly set up to carry passengers,” said Faridah.

“I’ll manage,” Khan demurred, then gestured at the hatch. “After you?”

Faridah’s jaw hardened and she climbed back aboard the Osprey. “Just don’t go looking for the flight attendant,” she said over her shoulder.

Khan gave her an indulgent smile and climbed in after her. Faridah felt the Osprey’s nose gear sink slightly as the big man set his weight onto the aircraft. She wondered about the armor he wore, and realized that whatever extra mass he was carrying, it was likely to be in the form of heavy-duty cybernetic limbs and sub-dermal implants. This guy’s a tank, she thought. Which begs the question – what’s he here to protect?

***

Faridah and Evelyn changed stations in the cockpit and she took the V-22 out from the ArcAir landing field,

letting the big triple-bladed rotors angle forward and slice into the damp air. Moving fast and true a hundred feet off the whitecaps coming in from the sea, Faridah shifted the angle of the wingtip props to level flight and eased the Osprey’s throttles forward. The chattering blades cut into the fine rain falling from the clouds that lead the bigger storm beyond, and despite a flight path that aimed them directly into a steady headwind, they made good time out from Hengsha. Still, the late morning looked like nightfall now, the rising sun that had welcomed Faridah as she jumped lost behind the veil of the oncoming storm.

She and Evelyn kept their conversation to a minimum, sticking to shop talk and call-outs as they left Hengsha airspace for the open sea. Neither of them really needed to say what they were thinking out loud, they knew each other well enough to read the emotions in small gestures or turns of the head. After take off, Evelyn had very deliberately glanced over her shoulder to the rear cabin, where Khan was riding out the bumpy flight in a folding seat. She toyed with her earlobe, made it look like an idle motion, but Faridah read it for what it really meant. He’s listening to us.

She gave a small nod. It stood to reason that if Kahn was a much a hanzer as Faridah thought he was, he probably had aural implants capable of snatching their conversation from among the noise of the VTOL’s rotors.

“How the temp?” she asked, nodding at the gauge for the replacement engine.

“Good,” Evelyn replied. “Would have liked to cool it down some first, but…” She trailed off, catching sight of something out beyond the Osprey’s nose. “What’s that? Your eleven o’clock?”

Faridah saw it, a slab-sided shape low against the waves, rising and falling in the growing swell. She glanced down at the digital notepad on the thigh of her flight suit, lit with the data Kahn had given her. “We’re coming up on the coordinates. Is this what we’re looking for?”

It was a cargo ship, an ugly brick of a vessel shouldering its way through the water, heavily laden with containers of varying sizes. They were approaching from the aft, and as Faridah’s eyes followed the churn of the ship’s wake

she saw a massive corporate sigil above a Panamanian flag and the vessel’s name; Bel Canto.

“XNG Shipping,” said Evelyn, reading the company identifier painted across the hull. “Judging by the heading, they’re on a course for Osaka. Guess they don’t have time to stop off in our town.”

“Yeah,” said Faridah quietly, “how about that.” She wondered what could be of interest to someone from Belltower on a ship sailing from Panama to Japan. Everything about this impromptu sortie was ringing a wrong note with her, and it bothered Faridah that she couldn’t see a pattern to it. Cheng was in the pocket of the Red Arrow, that was a given… But what connection did he or the triad have with Belltower and their erstwhile passenger? Did the PMC have the same kind of relationship with the triad that ArcAir did?

The questions rose up from that place inside Faridah Malik where she had been carefully hiding them away, unwilling to look too closely at the doubts she had about the city she had made her home.

Ahead on the mid-deck of the Bel Canto, a ring of lights snapped on, designating a landing area. “Can you put us down there?” said Khan, from the cockpit doorway.

Faridah stiffened in her seat. She hadn’t heard him approaching, and given his size, the fact he could be stealthy with it troubled her even more.