James Swallow - Fallen Angel

“Sure,” Evelyn was saying. “You shouldn’t be moving around the cabin, though.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Whatever you say, pal,” said Faridah, and she deliberately dipped the Osprey’s nose sharply, forcing Khan to grab at the airframe to support himself. Turning the control yoke, she put the aircraft into a tight banking turn that crossed the Bel Canto’s mid-deck. Working the tilt-rotors, the pilot guided the Osprey down with a solid bump as the wheels touched the helipad.

“Open the hatch,” Khan ordered, and Evelyn complied. When Faridah’s co-pilot moved to climb out of her seat, the Belltower mercenary held up a gloved hand. “No. You wait in here. We won’t be on deck for long.”

When he was gone, Evelyn glanced at Faridah. “He doesn’t want us to get a good look at what they’re loading.”

Faridah leaned forward in her chair, peering through the wet glass of the canopy. She made out figures bringing up cylindrical white containers, tubes a little over two meters long and half a meter around the width.

“So now we both get to add smuggling to our resumes,” Faridah said quietly. “Must be some kinda cargo they don’t want anyone from customs to see.”

“What do you think it is?” asked Evelyn. “Drugs? ”

“Maybe…” Faridah considered that possibility. “Weapons would be more likely. Something the government of the People’s Republic would not want on their shores…” An unpleasant thought occurred to her as she realized that the containers would be large enough to hold anything up to and including a tactical nuke. A chill ran through her, and she pushed the thought away.

The Osprey shifted on its undercarriage as four of the capsules were dragged aboard and lashed down with cargo nets. Sharp white light flashed in the corner of Faridah’s eye, drawing her attention away. Over the sound of the waves came the low, bass rumble of thunder, followed a few seconds later by a second flash of light. This time, she was looking right at the lightning as it zigzagged down to the surface of the sea. Faridah’s augmented vision cut the glare from the jagged line of white, and she saw the flash-glow pool on the Bel Canto’s deck.

There was Kahn, standing off to one side in conversation with a tall, whipcord-thin woman dressed in shiny black leather; but not exactly in conversation, she thought, he’s doing all the talking. Tugged by the wind, a spindly pennant of black hair trailed from the top of the woman’s half-shaven head, and her expression was one of feral patience. She was very still, Faridah noticed, while Kahn was moving from foot to foot around her. Fighter’s reflexes, she guessed. The big Belltower merc seemed to consider the woman a threat, despite the obvious disparity in their physical builds.

Faridah watched the woman give Khan something – a pocket secretary, maybe? – and then wordlessly dismiss him, stalking away across the deck. It was then she noticed the woman’s legs; they were augmentations, but exotics of a type Faridah had never seen before. Steel curves, thin like the limbs of a gazelle, that gave her walk an unnatural grace. The lightning came again and Faridah blinked reflexively. Impossibly, in that instant the woman with the black jacket was gone. Faridah frowned and rubbed at her eyes, unsure of what she had – or had not – just seen.

“Pilot,” called Khan, as he climbed back into the cargo compartment. “We’re done here. Close up and get in the air.”

Evelyn scowled. “This is going to be fun.” Faridah’s co-pilot tapped out a command on the control panel in front of her. “No, wait. Not fun. The other thing. Sure you can do this?”

“Buckle up,” Faridah said, by way of a reply, and applied power to the rotors. The VTOL quivered and then rose sharply into the air, slipping sideways as a crosswind caught it. She gritted her teeth and compensated with a foot down on the rudder pedal, angling the props to lift them safely away. One of the Bel Canto’s masts came unpleasantly close to the tail planes, but then they were up from the freighter’s deck.

The Osprey turned hard and lurched unto a wall of heavy rain, shouldering its way back toward the Chinese coastline.

***

They were six miles out when the VTOL was hit.

In the half-second it took to happen, Faridah was cursing herself, cursing Cheng, cursing Khan and whoever the hell had set them up for this idiotic flight into danger. Lifting off the Bel Canto, she had made the choice to gun the motors and push the Osprey back to shore as fast as it could go, gambling on the power of the engines and the tailwind to get them home before the storm could overtake the aircraft. The other option – to push up through the cloud, go high and over the storm front – hadn’t seemed safe. But it was too late to second-guess herself now.

The sky that had toyed with her only hours earlier now seemed determined to grab Faridah’s aircraft and rip it apart. The wind beat at the Osprey’s wings, turbulent air causing it to drop into gut-twisting dives that brought the churning surface of the ocean too close for comfort.

But she was getting it there. Together with Evelyn, they were going to make it back ahead of the storm. And then the lightning.

A shriek of ionized air rattled the canopy windows and a spear of white light, bright as a laser, stroked the VTOL’s fuselage. A fug of burnt-plastic smell flooded the cockpit, and lights went out across the dashboard in a wave from right to left as the electrical system overloaded. The Osprey twitched and lost power, the control returns becoming thick and unresponsive. Back in the cargo bay, something big and heavy shifted abruptly, crashing against the inside of the fuselage.

Faridah swore under her breath and punched the restart panel, but the controls remained dark. The Osprey’s starboard wing dipped into the hard wind and the aircraft shuddered toward a flat spin.

“Screens are not coming back up,” called Evelyn. “Ah, hell.” She had her hands on the controls, struggling with the same inputs as Faridah. “We got a short. And this son of a bitch glides like a brick.”

“The secondaries!” said Faridah, reaching for the latch on her chest that secured her four-point harness. “I’ll go for it. Can you hold this thing on your own?”

“No!” Evelyn shot back, grimacing as the Osprey ignored every effort she made to bring it to a stable attitude. “So be quick!”

She didn’t need to explain what she was doing; both pilots knew that the reconfigured VTOL had a secondary set of circuit breakers behind a panel in the cargo bay, and if Faridah could get to them, they had a chance to get

power running back to the Osprey’s vital systems before it collided with the wave tops. At their speed and angle, it would be like striking a concrete wall. The V-22 would crumple and sink in seconds.

Faridah launched herself out of the pilot’s chair and across the cramped cabin, catching sight of the sea flashing past the nose as the spin dragged them down. She cracked her arm against the hatchway, nerves numbed by the impact, but Faridah couldn’t let it slow her.

She slipped across the tilting deck into the cargo bay and almost fell over Khan. He lay sprawled on the metal flooring, groaning and semi-conscious. The ends of the seatbelt on his chair flapped against the frame where the first bucking impact had jarred them loose; Khan had fallen hard, cracking his head on the deck, but she had no time to look to him.

Faridah pushed forward, past the white cargo pods straining against their nets, fighting the pull of gravity dragging her toward the hull wall as the Osprey’s death-spin tightened. Hand over hand, she pulled her way to the breaker panel and tore off the cover with a savage yank. Faridah clawed at the flip-switches and with a sudden shiver of power, the doused lights inside the cargo bay flashed back on.

From the cockpit, Evelyn gave a yelp of success and the Osprey rocked as she applied more power to the props. The aircraft’s engines howled and the fuselage creaked under the tension, but Faridah could immediately sense the shift in attitude and she knew that her friend had arrested their deadly descent.

Relief came over her in a wave and she let out the breath she didn’t know she had been holding. Faridah started back toward the front of the aircraft, and it was only then she noticed how cold it was in the cargo bay.

The containers were radiating a meat locker chill, and from one of them came a spill of white vapor and the sharp tang of cryogenic chemicals. The capsule’s lid was cracked open a few centimeters, doubtless jarred by the same tremor through the hull that had unseated Khan. Faridah went closer and saw that the curve of the cylinder was actually clear plastic, whitened by a layer of frost. And inside

Inside was a man. A pale and lined patrician face, framed with shoulder-length grey hair. His expression was not one of a sleeper’s repose, but of apprehension frozen in a single moment. Faridah reached for the container.

“What are you doing in here?” Khan was on his feet, one hand pressed to his head to staunch the wound there, the other holding on to a hull brace. “Step away.” The mercenary hove closer, his broad shoulders and towering build filling the compartment with a ready threat.

“Right,” said Faridah, “Yeah.” She moved past him before he could react and slipped back into the cockpit.

Evelyn threw her a weary but triumphant look. “Damn, girl, that was too close…” She trailed off, seeing her

friend’s troubled expression. “Ri, are you okay? Are you hurt?”

Faridah shook her head firmly, falling into the pilot’s chair. “Just… Let’s just get this thing down.”

Evelyn nodded. “Right. Nearest pad is-”

“No.” Khan was in the doorway again. The hard edges of his face were made even uglier by the streaks of

blood from the cut on his forehead. “You land at the destination you were given and nowhere else, understand?”

“In case you weren’t paying attention, we were just struck by lightning,” growled Faridah. “We need to land, anywhere. Now.”

“No,” Kahn repeated, and he let his hand drop to the big Diamondback revolver holstered at his hip, nodding toward the lights of Upper Hengsha. “Do as you were told. Don’t make me say it again.”

***

Trailing a thin streamer of smoke from the starboard engine, the Osprey performed an inelegant touchdown on a wide octagonal landing pad outside a dome-shaped building. Here on the northern edge of upper city, where the government had zoned light engineering works and low-impact industry, there was little air traffic.

The storm, which mercifully had not followed them up the Yangtze beyond the river mouth, had still pushed a front of rain before it. As the aircraft settled, the noise of water off the canopy became a steady drumming.

“Where the hell is this?” said Faridah, scanning the view. “No pad transponder here, no geo-code.” She studied the non-descript dome beyond, looking for anything like an identifier or corporate logo and coming up empty. The place had a clinical appearance to it, like a hospital or a laboratory.

“This district is usually off-limits to commercial traffic,” offered Evelyn. “Government complexes around here, that’s what Lee told me. That and all the top secret research and development centers for the big corporations… Tearglass, Kaiga, Tai Yong, those guys. They keep everything on the down-low for security reasons.”

Faridah nodded, taking that in. She couldn’t stop thinking about the face of the man inside the cryo-capsule. Khan was already out on the pad, supervising the unloading of the containers as box-lifter robots came in to carry the cylinders away in their metal claws.