James Swallow - Fallen Angel

“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.

“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.