Fallen Angels

by Stephen Kenson

  "Javin, have a VTOL standing by," he said.

  "Yes, sir."

  "Thank you," Akimura said, and Telestrian nodded. "Aerwin manipulated my son to suit her ends," he replied, "and she turned on me back then, too. It’s past time for some payback. And I’m sure I’ll give you the opportunity to repay me at some point," he said with the hint of a smile.

  "I’m sure you will."

  "Were are we going?" Orion asked, as Akimura and the others headed for the door.

  "To the Cascade Mountains—the place where Kellan’s father died, where he summoned one of the most powerful spirits the world has ever seen, and where it has been trapped for nearly twenty years."

  * * *

  "Midnight, what the hell is going on?" Kellan asked. "Get out of the car," Midnight repeated, gesturing with her pistol for emphasis. Kellan did as she was told, unbuckling her safety harness and opening the car door, as Midnight did the same on her side. Kellan slid out of her seat and stepped out of the car, Midnight mirroring her motions, keeping the gun trained on her the whole time.

  "It was true, wasn’t it?" Kellan asked. "The dream, what I saw, it was true."

  Midnight didn’t respond, moving around the front of the car, never taking her eyes off Kellan. They were as hard and cold as chips of black stone.

  "Take off the amulet and hand it to me slowly," she said. "Now. Don’t try anything foolish, Kellan. At the first sign of any magic, I will shoot you. I’d prefer to have you along for this, but it’s up to you."

  "The amulet," Kellan said softly. "You took it from him. . . ."

  "Yes, and it was taken from me. Now . . . hand it over, unless you want me to take it from you the same way." Midnight held out one gloved hand.

  Kellan reached up and slowly unfastened the chain, closing the clasp again after she’d taken off the necklace. She dropped the jade amulet into Midnight’s outstretched hand, which closed around it in a tight fist, golden chain spilling out around her fingers.

  "Good," she said. "Now, start walking toward the tree line." Midnight responded to Kellan’s confused, frightened look with a tight, cold smile. "It’s okay. As long as you behave yourself, you don’t have anything to worry about. If I intended to shoot you, I’d have done it long before now."

  "So it was the amulet all along," Kellan whispered, numb with shock.

  "Of course. It’s nothing personal, Kellan, just an opportunity too good to waste."

  "I trusted you."

  Midnight shook her head sadly. "Kellan, if I have taught you anything, isn’t it that you can’t trust anyone?"

  * * *

  The elven woman’s head was perfectly lined up in the crosshairs of the targeting scope projected over his field of vision, zoomed in close enough to make out her features: the cool, confident expression, and the wary way she watched the younger, human woman who walked ahead of her. Though the full moon was the only source of light out in the wild lands, light-intensifying electronics made everything as bright as day to the sniper’s cyber enhanced vision.

  "I can take her from here," he said quietly, subvocalizing into the pickups implanted in his throat.

  "Negative," came the reply, transmitted through bone-induction speakers in his skull. "Not until we get a go order from the home office."

  "I've got a clear shot."

  "And you’ll have others. We’re to take no action other than surveillance until we get the order. Monitor their progress, but stay out of sight, and don’t get trigger-happy. Understood?"

  "I copy that," the sniper replied reluctantly. It was such a good shot. He allowed the crosshairs to linger for a moment, just enjoying the feel of having a target dead to rights, knowing he could put a bullet through her before she even knew what was happening: one shot, one kill. Of course, that also took some of the fun out of it, the target never knowing it was coming.

  With a sigh, the sniper allowed the targeting lock to slip, and shifted his weapon back to his shoulder, hunkering down in the cover of the tree line. The two women were definitely headed upcountry, which suggested his unit’s intel was right. Getting into elven territory and into position hadn’t been easy, but now at least it looked like it was going to be worth it, once they got the order to go ahead.

  Then it would be over, just like that. They wouldn’t know what hit ’em. Bang.

  The Cross Applied Technologies sniper slipped back into the shadows of the trees to rejoin the rest of his team, keeping a close eye on the two figures headed up the mountain, and being careful not to be seen.

  * * *

  Jackie retreated from the sentinel ice safeguarding the subsystem she needed to access, in order to design a better response to its demand for verification. Her second attempt had been a makeshift effort, an improvisation. She needed a more carefully customized response.

  Though it added risk to her operation, she decided to leave the Cross system for the relative safety of the open Matrix, for as long as it took to put together a better response. Her cloaking programs had gotten her inside once, and, so long as nothing else compromised the system to put it on alert, she was confident they could do so again, though she didn’t want to test that theory too many times if she could avoid it.

  Working in virtual space, she began assembling the components of the new program from the software she had on hand, using what she knew about Eve and the Cross systems. She had to work quickly, but not as fast as when the ice was looming directly in front of her. In less than five minutes she was satisfied with the result of her work, and reasonably confident it would do the trick. There’s only one way to find. out. She turned back toward the Cross host.

  As expected, her cloak allowed her to slip past the watchful presence of the stone angel once more, through the main rotunda and up the stairs to the corridor off the main system. Once again, the guardian ice emerged from the shadows of its alcove to challenge her.

  "Password," it intoned in its deep, cold voice.

  This time, Jackie’s persona reached into her pocket to produce a perfectly red and shiny apple, which she held out to the ice with a flourish. He plucked the fruit from her hand, and the decker held her breath, preparing to act. This time, if her spoof didn’t work, odds were good the ice would trigger an alert and she’d find herself in combat.

  The hooded figure raised the apple to the dark void of his face, as if smelling it. Then he suddenly engulfed the apple in his hood, and swallowed it with an audible gulp. There was a pause, and Jackie tensed.

  "Password accepted," the ice said, stepping back into the shadows of his alcove. Jackie breathed a sigh of relief, and hurried down the corridor, looking for one particular cubicle. She scanned quickly through executive departments and meaningless names until she found the one she was looking for, about halfway along the subsystem.

  The cubicle was unoccupied, writing materials laid neatly out on the angled surface of the desk— parchment, quills and ink—along with several envelopes, and packages wrapped in paper and twine or sealed with colored wax. All these items represented the personal storage node of her contact at Cross, the corner of the system where she’d placed her evidence of Toshiro Akimura’s activities and movements.

  Jackie ignored the materials on the desk itself, knowing they weren’t what she was looking for. Even with the security of the company’s host system protecting her files, Eve would hide her information deep in the node, for fear that an internal competitor would steal her coup. Sliding behind the desk, Jackie’s persona felt along the underside of the edge. As she’d hoped, the angled desktop moved slightly, indicating that there was something below. She ducked her head and looked, and saw it was locked.

  "We’ll see about that," she muttered, withdrawing a silver key from her pocket and slipping it into the lock. She had to jockey it around a bit before the key caught. She gave a twist and the desktop popped open, the key vanishing back into the nothingness from where it had come.

  The space inside the desk was a yawning black void, like the dark
ness inside the hood of the guardian ice. Jackie stared into the apparent nothingness, looking for a means of access. Suddenly a tendril of darkness erupted from the void, wrapping around the slim form of her persona. It was followed by another, and then another, as if a monstrous kraken of shadows dwelled in the depths of the storage node. Jackie struggled, her cyberdeck interpreting her movements as commands to disengage, but the ice program held her fast. She was trapped!

  Chapter 18

  The Federated-Boeing tilt-rotor hummed through the night sky over Tir Tairngire, dark treetops rushing past below, the moonlit mountains in the distance toward the east. Black, ragged clouds had begun to veil the face of the full moon overhead, but the VTOL moved swiftly, its running lights dimmed to the absolute minimum, guided solely by its instruments and the mind of the pilot plugged directly into its systems.

  Orion sat in the passenger compartment alongside Lothan, G-Dogg and Toshiro Akimura, watching the landscape below. Lothan was reading the Morningstar file on a dataslate, occasionally rumbling "hmmm" as he read something of particular interest. G-Dogg double-checked his weapons, while Akimura gazed out the windows without speaking.

  "If you knew Midnight was after Kellan, why didn’t you warn her?" Orion finally burst out. Akimura sadly shook his head.

  "I tried," he said. "As soon as I tried getting in touch with Kellan through the regular channels, Midnight set up a run on Nightengale’s, letting Kellan believe I was the client. Then she paid the Halloweeners to cause trouble and claim they worked for me.

  She knew Kellan would have enough friends along to deal with them, and it made Kellan too suspicious to trust me when I finally did make contact."

  "But why wait so long? Why didn’t you get in touch with Kellan before now?"

  "I did," Akimura said. Orion studied Akimura’s face while he thought.

  "You’re the one who sent Kellan her mother’s gear."

  "Of course. When I didn’t hear from Mustang after a certain period of time, I knew something must have happened to her, and assumed it was Midnight’s work. I knew she would come after me next. So I used my connections to get work from a patron who was willing to invest in an ex-company man—a patron even Midnight didn’t care to cross."

  "A great dragon," Orion said. "Dunkelzahn." Akimura smiled. "Yes. I was one of his most trusted fixers, which allowed me to build up a considerable reputation and network, but then things far bigger than me happened. My employer was killed, and though the inheritance he left me provided some security, I suspect Midnight saw an opportunity to make her move."

  "Why didn’t you deal with her first?" G-Dogg asked, and Akimura shrugged.

  "I attempted it a few times, but Midnight wasn’t an easy target, and, honestly, I had bigger things to worry about. Dunkelzahn’s fixer network imploded, and a lot of people in the shadows didn’t like learning that they could have been working for a dragon any time I hired them. I hadn’t heard anything about Midnight for years—I didn’t even know her by that name. She wasn’t working under the name Aerwin, and I’d lost track of her—same as the Tir authorities, I imagine. I had stopped expecting trouble from her, and when I realized she was still on my trail, it was almost too late. I was very lucky to avoid her first attempts to get the amulet.

  "When I realized that she was really after the amulet, I knew I needed to keep it away from her. I didn’t know what destroying it would do, and I wanted a safe place to hide it—someplace from which I could eventually retrieve it. So I went to Seattle to deal with Midnight, and I sent the amulet to Kellan, along with a note and a few spare items of her mother’s equipment I’d held on to. I figured it would be safe in Kansas City for a while. I didn’t expect Kellan to come to Seattle looking for the truth—though I should have; she’s her mother’s daughter."

  "If you knew she had come to Seattle, why didn’t you contact her as soon as she got here?"

  Akimura gave Orion a long look that spoke volumes.

  "Oh—the clinic. The records Kellan saw. . . ."

  "I found Midnight," the fixer said, "or, more accurately, she found me. I made the nearly fatal mistake of underestimating her a second time, and I almost didn’t survive my error. Midnight left me for dead— hell, I was dead, technically—but I had backup plans in place. DocWagon tracked me down by following the signal from an implant Dunkelzahn had paid for, and delivered me to a discreet cyberclinic. My treatment was paid for in advance from a deeply buried escrow fund set up for just such an emergency.

  "They practically rebuilt me," he said, slowly flexing one hand in front of his face as if seeing it for the first time. "Replacement tissue, cybernetic reconstruction, backup organs, cloned parts, gene therapy—the works. It took months of slow convalescence, surgery and therapy, and it was necessary to let the world think I was dead, or else Midnight easily could have showed up to finish the job. As it was, I had to leave the clinic immediately when she discovered I was alive. I suspect that’s when she put her plan into motion, with Kellan at its center.

  "She’d already gained Kellan’s trust by then, and was managing the situation so that Kellan wouldn’t trust me, so she could—"

  Lothan’s homed head suddenly came up, as if he could hear a sound imperceptible to anyone else. He held up one hand for silence, the other hand setting aside the dataslate and closing around the Staff of Candor-Brie.

  "We have a problem," the troll mage pronounced, nodding toward the front of the VTOL.

  The four of them looked out the cockpit windows to see dark clouds gathering to blot out the night sky. Lightning tinged a bluish violet flashed between the clouds, lighting up the darkness, followed by an echoing boom of thunder.

  The pilot called back from the cockpit. "Make sure you’re strapped in!" she said. "This is going to get rough!"

  "This storm is not natural," Lothan said. "There is magic at work."

  "Can you do something about it?" Akimura asked, already making sure his safety harness was in place.

  "Let’s see," the troll replied. He clasped both hands around the staff planted on the floor between his booted feet, and closed his eyes. The crystal atop the Staff of Candor-Brie glowed faintly in the dimness of the cabin as the first blast of wind hit them.

  The VTOL listed to the side, engines roaring against the force of the wind. The turbulence jostled the cabin, slamming the passengers against their restraining straps as the wind howled outside like a living thing, clawing to get at them. Another flash of lightning lit up the sky.

  "We’re not going to be able to keep flying in this! Damn, I wish we had Max at the controls," G-Dogg muttered.

  The turbofan engines whined as the VTOL listed again. Lothan opened his eyes, the light within the crystal on his staff fading away.

  "I’ve never encountered power like this before," he said. "There is a force behind the weather, but it’s too great for even my arts to counter it—not from here, anyway."

  "I have to find a place to set down before we get knocked down!" the pilot shouted. "Everybody hold on!" The lightning flashed again, this time perilously close to the vehicle, the smell of ozone sharp in the air as the crack of thunder rolled over the cabin, and the wind shook everything inside. The pilot struggled with the controls, using sheer muscle power to wrestle against the storm, in addition to the force of her will, which directed the VTOL’s systems in the landing procedure.

  They came in at a sharp angle, but their descent leveled out as the ground rushed up toward them. The clearing in the foothills of the mountains was barely large enough to hold the VTOL, but the pilot managed to set them down in it with only a few branches dislodged by their descent. They hit the ground with a rough bump, but it was a far better landing than reasonably could be expected under the circumstances. Everyone in the cabin simultaneously sighed with relief.

  "Now what?" G-Dogg asked.

  "We’re grounded," the pilot answered, "until I can see if we took any damage, and until the weather decides to let up. I can try and radio back to
headquarters for help, but . . ."

  "Then we go it on foot," Orion responded with a look at Akimura, who nodded in reply, unfastening his safety harness. Lothan and G-Dogg quickly followed suit.

  "Wait here for us," Akimura told the pilot, who shrugged.

  "Not like I can go anywhere, anyway," she said.

  "And maintain radio silence until we make contact, just in case there’s someone listening in."

  * * *

  Jackie Ozone cursed as the trap ice squeezed her persona in an ever-tightening grip. The tendrils felt icy cold as the pressure seemed to squeeze the breath out of her. Jackie knew full well they were only false sensory impressions, but they felt entirely real.

  Well, we can dispense with stealth. Jackie switched her deck from stealth to cybercombat mode. The silvery cloak around her persona dissolved, replaced by gleaming armor of polished chrome with flat black highlights. She pulled one hand free, and a slim silver sword materialized in it, blazing with light.

  A slash of the blade severed one of the black tendrils, sparks crackling from exposed circuits within, the broken end dissolving into a shower of pixels before vanishing altogether. Several more of the tentacles waved and grabbed at her as Jackie struggled to get free. She slashed again, but watched with dismay as the first tendril she severed began to grow back.

  Self-repairing, she thought, great. She couldn’t afford to dance with the ice program. If she didn’t take it out quickly, its repair subroutines would allow it to keep fighting until either the system allocated more resources to dealing with her, or she got tired enough to make a mistake. She needed to end things quickly and decisively.

  Fingers flashing over the keyboard, thoughts moving faster than even she could register, Jackie shifted processor capacity from her persona’s defense to offense. It was risky, but she couldn’t fight a defensive battle. She made some adjustments to her attack programs, taking what she knew about the host system into account, along with the particular model of ice. If she could just hit the right section of its code. . . .