Archangel Down: Archangel Project. Book One

by C. Gockel

  Noa wasn’t running through the forest. She was shambling. Her limbs were cold, and it seemed that in every direction she could hear pursuers.

  “Ashley,” she muttered. “I am so angry with you… making me do this alone, making me leave you, making me so cold … for being right that you wouldn’t have made it this far.”

  “Did you hear that?” someone shouted.

  Noa didn’t turn her head. Her Fleet-implanted locator app plotted the speaker as a glowing light a few meters behind her. She tried to run, but all that came to her limbs was a slightly faster shuffle.

  She heard her own breath, raspy and loud. And she heard antigrav engines, the big kind, just clicks away. It was all strangely muted. By the snow? Or was she finally losing her mind? “I can’t lose it now, I can’t, I can’t, I won’t, I won’t.”

  “I hear her,” someone said.

  Noa wanted to run, but sending that message to her limbs didn’t work. It was like her body was a puppet that belonged to someone else. Without warning, the puppet master ripped her feet out from under her. Noa went sprawling forward, the front part of her body connecting with the cold ground. She heard men, too close behind, looked back, and only saw a large root jutting out of the snow. “Damn you for tripping me,” she muttered, trying to drag herself to her feet. “Stupid root. I hope you die of rot. Or weevils. Or … ” She groaned. It took too much energy to talk, and breathing sent daggers of ice into her lungs. She was on all fours, and somehow, she wasn’t able to get up. So she crawled, hands burning with cold in the snow. She found the ability to speak again. “And damn you body. I hate you. Giving out on me at a time like this.”

  “Well, she still has energy enough to talk,” someone said with a laugh. It wasn’t a nice laugh.

  The boot that connected with her side a few moments later shouldn’t have taken her by surprise. Pain seared through her, but it was muted like sound in the snow. I’m sorry, body, she wanted to say, but couldn’t. Sorry, I don’t want to leave you yet. Don’t give up on me.

  Someone kicked her again. Lungs aching, she found herself staring up at white. Snow? Or had she fainted? She wasn’t sure. But then her vision half-returned and she was looking at the dark arms of trees reaching for the sky. Someone said, “End of the line for you, throwback.” She heard the click of a safety and found herself facing the barrel of a pistol. Beyond the pistol was a tan face, with Eurasian eyes, above a thick down coat in Luddeccean Green.

  “Don’t shoot her, Art,” someone else said. “Command wants to interrogate her and to yank her port out. Fleet pulled a number on us.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, Joe?” said the guy holding the pistol.

  Noa could actually hear the guy who must be Joe shrug, even though she couldn’t see him. “Orders are orders.”

  The pistol pointed at Noa’s nose slowly lowered.

  Out of her line of sight, Noa heard a soft thud.

  “What was that?” someone who wasn’t Joe or Art said.

  She willed her body to swivel in the snow, to knock the feet out from under her closest pursuer, and steal his pistol. Instead she just managed to scoot backward like an upside down snake. Did snakes move upside down? They were a recent addition to the Luddeccean fauna from Earth. A tiny, obviously useless, part of her brain tried to access the ethernet.

  * * *

  Over the sound of his breathing and his pounding feet, James heard someone say, “End of the line for you, throwback,” and then the click of a safety.

  He came to a skidding halt at the sound, and his vision pulsed, as though he were in a room where the lights were flickering.

  “Don’t shoot her, Art,” said another voice. James blinked, and his vision normalized. He crept forward and peered around a tree. He saw what looked like a pile of rags on the ground, and four men in Luddeccean Green orbiting around it.

  “Command wants to interrogate her again—and to yank her port out.”

  The words “interrogate” and “yank her port out,” stood at the forefront of James’s mind. The snow and storm disappeared as his neural interface crowded his mind with images of prisoners of war in WWII, and of victims of amateur port removals—their brains and nanos spilled out in back alleys.

  He should run away from these savages. There were four of them, and only one of him.

  He wanted to run. And couldn’t.

  He remembered a mountain climbing expedition to a sunken city along the San Andreas rift on Earth—he used to tell his students that he was a historian of the Indiana Jones variety—after he explained who Indiana Jones was. On that particular trip, his companion’s safety cord had slipped from the rock face. James had caught him and helped him to safety without a second thought … and managed to pull his own shoulder out of its socket in the process.

  Was he the type of person that simply couldn’t turn away? But he wanted to turn away, and that person in the memory seemed like a completely different person.

  James looked down at his feet half-buried in snow, immobile despite his wishes. He looked to the pile of rags that might be Noa Sato, and then to her pursuers. He couldn’t run away—and he couldn’t just haphazardly try to intervene—he’d be captured, too. How could he rescue her and keep his own skin? He needed a distraction …

  Gazing at the snow, he recalled another winter he’d spent here as a child. He’d thrown a snowball at his father’s back, missed spectacularly, and hit a tree. His father had turned to the remains of the snowball before turning to James and lobbing a snowball back.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was what he had. Kneeling down, James quickly made a snowball. He threw it at a tree thirty meters from his location, and hit it dead center.

  “What was that?” said one of the men. Raising his rifle, the man looked toward the sound.

  James made another snowball, and threw it at a tree a few meters from the first. His aim was unerring. He tilted his head; he’d been a terrible pitcher at cricket. Was fear improving his arm?

  “What joker is throwing snowballs?” one of the other men said.

  “Knock it off!” said another.

  “Probably Jaurez. I’m going to check this out,” said another, clicking the safety of his pistol and walking into the trees.

  Swinging his rifle around without conscious thought, James found himself watching the man walk between the trees through the sights.

  He’d never shot a human before. The realization hit James just as the man in the trees reached the remains of his snowballs on the silvery white tree trunks. James had a memory of watching some Fleet personnel boarding a shuttle back on Earth. It was right after a hostage standoff that had ended with the Fleet killing innocent civilians. James had shaken his head, turned to a professor colleague beside him, and said, “Violence is never the solution, not in this day and age.”

  Now his rifle was aimed at a man. Was he truly ready to shoot?

  The man spun around, raising his firearm in James’s direction. James pulled the trigger. The man’s head jerked backward as the bullet hit and James felt … relief.

  One of the men by the pile of rags screamed, “Pari!”

  The same force that compelled him to find Commander Sato seemed to take hold of James. He moved from the tree he was hiding behind to another. A second man stepped into the trees. James’s rifle was still raised, his eye still in the sights, and he pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  There was another soft thud, and then another rifle shot. Noa’s body belatedly responded to her brain’s order to move. Sitting up, she saw the first man crouched behind a tree. He had a heat-seeking screen up, and he was aiming it into a swirling blur beyond him. Noa managed to climb to her feet, and then wavered there like grass in the wind. Her pursuer wasn’t paying attention to her. His face was on the screen, swinging it around, trying to find the source of the rifle shots … the snow was so thick that the heat screen was a blur. He stopped, and over his shoulder, before Noa’s eyes, a face emerged o
n the screen, very close, and very familiar.

  Noa’s body responded before her brain could even give it orders. She charged forward and delivered a blow to the side of the Luddeccean’s head. It should have been enough to knock him over—but somehow wound up more like a tap.

  “What the—” Joe let out a string of curse words. Before Noa knew what was happening, she was flat on her back in the snow again, the side of her jaw stinging, blood on her tongue, air whipping out of her lungs. There was the sound of a rifle shot, the crunch of snow, and the face she’d seen on the heat screen appeared above her. Bright blue eyes above high cheekbones, pale skin with a few freckles, all framed by dark blonde hair.

  “Timothy,” she whispered.

  * * *

  James stared down at the woman that might be Commander Noa Sato, the woman he had killed to defend—which seemed like it should be a milestone in his life—a marker, an event. But it wasn’t. It felt as ordinary as breathing.

  It was hard to reconcile the woman in the snow with the healthy, beautiful, laughing woman in his memory. This woman’s cheeks were sunken, her hair was sparse, and her full lips were dry, split and bloody.

  “Timothy,” she whispered.

  “No, my name is … James Sinclair.” As the names spilled from his lips, they felt wrong. But they weren’t. It was his name, a name with history. James was an ancient name, from Hebrew. It meant “he who grasps the heel” or “supplanter.” Sinclair was Scottish, and it meant “bright and clear.”

  Why did it sound off? Because it was just a jumble of syllables that didn’t sound like one who overthrew, and it didn’t offer any clarity?

  In the snow, the dark eyes of the woman rolled back as her head listed to the side. James took a step back. If this was Commander Sato, she didn’t recognize him. Why was he drawn to her?

  He heard the whisper of the snow falling on their bodies, and above the trees the sound of antigrav engines approaching. He remembered the expedition on the cliff face and catching the fallen man. Was it the instinct of a herd animal that compelled him to save her, or just a personality trait?

  This woman was not part of his “herd,” and logically, James knew she would be dead weight. Kneeling, he scooped her into his arms anyway. As he pulled her close, he smelled a raw stench of vomit, sweat, and unwashed clothing. He pulled her tighter, due to some instinct he could not name or fathom. Over those unappealing smells he felt something else—a rush of familiarity. Clutching her tighter still, he looked around. He saw four hover bikes in the trees. If he could start one, they could be at his parents’ cottage in an hour or even less.

  He carried the woman over to the bikes. They were oblong in shape with a padded seat that looked large enough for two, and a turbo engine at the back. Two antigrav engines, each about the diameter of a large serving platter and the height of his palm, jutted out from beneath it, the dull silver of the timefield bands that counteracted gravity gleaming in the low light. The timefield bands created a bubble in time—much like the ones created by the time gates that facilitated nearly instantaneous travel through space—but the fields generated by this craft were less precise and robust. The computations for the timefield were complex—the engine’s location relative to the planet, solar system, galaxy, and universe had to be taken into account. Warping time disrupted gravity’s pull and created lift with a simple propeller mechanism, but these engines looked too large for a bike of this size—older tech, he suspected.

  Sliding onto the seat, he slung the Commander awkwardly over his legs. The bike’s controls looked antiquated. Besides the overly large engines and manual steering, there was a flat screen and actual dials. There didn’t even appear to be a cable to connect to his data port. Dipping his chin, he focused on the dark screen and tried to pick up the bike’s wireless signal—and got nothing.

  He tried to access his data banks for information on the bike model, but drew a blank.

  The Commander stirred. “Crazy, primitive, Luddeccean tech,” she muttered, her voice barely audible.

  James blinked down at her.

  Her eyes were closed, but she continued to mumble. “Ignition controlled by retinal scan, scanner above the speedometer … remove the speedometer and hot-wire it. Just touch the yellow wire to the green port … Removing the speedometer will also remove the tracking device.”

  James heard shouting, and actual footsteps. He had only minutes before they would be in visual range. He ripped the main screen off at the front of the bike with one hand.

  “Nebulas!” the Commander hissed. “You’re strong for a figment of my imagination.”

  Too worried to ponder the statement, James almost dropped the screen.

  “No!” She coughed. “Do the same to the other bikes, wire them up, activate them, and voice command them to go far away.”

  James held the broken bike component above her head. It seemed like a waste of time. He almost chucked the thing into the snow.

  The Commander took a shaky breath. “Throw the one you’ve got into the boot of one of the others when you do it.”

  The implications of that sank in. It was bound to be discovered that they’d stolen this bike. If they threw the tracking device into one of the other bikes, and the other bikes went to the wrong location, their pursuers could be diverted for hours. And he’d thought throwing a snowball at a tree for attention was clever.

  “Do it!” the woman hissed.

  His neural interface was blinking like the lights of a Christmas tree. He had less than two minutes. James swung Noa off his lap without paying attention to her landing. He left her cursing in the snow at the foot of the bike, and a part of him ached for it; but there was too little time for it to be helped. After ripping off the other speedometers, he quickly found the green port and yellow wire she was speaking of. He activated both bikes, gave them commands, and watched them zip off through the trees.

  He heard the last bike engine rev. Spinning, he saw that the Commander had managed to get up, slide onto the seat, and activate the vehicle.

  He looked back at the trail the other bikes had left in the snow. The search party on the ground was fifty-one seconds to visual range. She had his bike now, he’d slow her down and …

  “Get on!” she ordered him.

  James felt his mind stutter. She didn’t seem to have the same ambivalence about rescuing him that he did rescuing her.

  “What are you waiting for?” she asked.

  Running forward, James jumped on, just barely fitting on the seat behind her.

  “Hold on!” she commanded over the roar of the bike’s engine and the search party. The bike rose before he had a chance to put on his safety belt, and he wrapped his arms around her waist. The bike was capable of soaring above the treetops—but the Commander kept it close to the ground, following the crater-like path the other bikes’ antigrav engines had left in the snow … which was strange. She was the one who had told him to use the other bikes as a decoy. Before he had a chance to question, they were gliding over a large stream, not yet frozen over. The Commander immediately doubled back, but kept to the course of the stream. It wasn’t in the precise direction he wanted to go, and he almost protested … and then realized the antigrav engines left no trace of their movement in the water. It was clever.

  The Commander hit the accelerator and within minutes the sound of the antigrav engines in the sky was several dozen kilometers in the distance, and he could no longer hear the shouts of the ground party.

  It should have been comforting. But without the threat of imminent death, James’s brain started to replay how he came to be sitting behind a strange woman who was as thin as a scarecrow and reeking of disease. He tried to think back to when he had first rented the shuttle on Time Gate 8—wondering if somehow he’d managed to get the wrong authorization. But he couldn’t remember being at the counter of the rental kiosk, or collecting the shuttle at the terminal. And then there was the time after the shuttle was shot that he couldn’t remember, eithe
r.

  James released a long breath. His arms tightened on the Commander’s waist. She was a stranger, and just a shadow of the vision of her he had in his mind, but she felt real, familiar, and good. Between his knees he felt the Commander shiver. He could feel the edge of her ribs beneath the thin coat. He had an inexplicable desire to slip his hands up beneath her coat to feel her heartbeat.

  The Commander shivered again, this time so violently he was sure if his arms weren’t around her she would fall off.

  “Hope you can drive, figment of my imagination,” the Commander said.

  “My name is James,” he said. And then, like a delayed reaction, he realized that she might be telling a joke. Why would she make light of the situation? He blinked, remembering when he caught his friend as he fell down the cliff. Afterward, James had said, “Next time you decide to plummet to your death, could you lose a few kilos?” He used to joke about death, too.

  “My second wind just blew away,” Noa said. “I think I’m going to … ” She drew the bike to a stop. Water sloshed below them, spreading out in small waves.

  “What?” said James.

  She promptly slumped in his arms.

  * * *

  James stumbled through the snow, clutching Sato tightly to his chest. He kept his eyes closed—the snow was falling too thickly to see anything anyway. Instead he kept his mind focused on the glowing square in his mind’s eye that was his parents’ cottage. It was only ten meters away now.

  He’d abandoned the bike about five kilometers ago when it had been almost out of fuel. He’d commanded the machine to continue along the river. Hopefully, when it was found, it would be sufficiently far away to throw off anyone who might discover it.

  He shivered. He’d wrapped his coat around the Commander. At first, exertion had kept him warm, but then the very exertion that had kept him warm had caused the snow to melt into his clothes, and he was cold. He nearly tripped again. He was hungry, too, and there was a perplexing haze at the edges of his consciousness, as though all non-vital systems had been shut down. It was a relief in a way. He hadn’t obsessed about his missing blocks of time or how he knew the Commander in exactly forty-five minutes and thirty-three seconds … Apparently, his brain thought a chronometer was a vital function. The observation almost brought a bitter smile to his lips—but they felt numb, and it didn’t come.