James Swallow - Fallen Angel

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.

Evelyn was climbing out of her seat. “I gotta get up on the wing, check where we got burned,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean, if we can’t take off again-”

“Make sure we can,” Faridah told her, as she watched Kahn follow the loaders down a ramp and into a staging area below the landing pad. “I have to look at something…”

She pushed past her friend and made for the crew hatch. Evelyn called out, her expression a mix of confusion and worry. “Faridah! Don’t. Just…don’t get involved. Let’s do this and get back to ArcAir. Whatever Cheng is into, we don’t want to know about it, right?”

Faridah reached for the answer she usually gave, the choice to look the other way and push aside what troubled her; it wasn’t there anymore.

“Just be ready to get airborne,” she told her, slipping out of the aircraft and down toward the ramp.

***

It was easy enough for her to avoid being seen by the slow-moving gaze of the pad’s Big Bro security monitor, and Faridah used racks of storage containers to hide herself as she found a vantage point on the wide concrete ramp. Crouching low, she watched the robots lay down the cryo-containers and retreat. Waiting for Khan was an oriental man in a sharply-tailored business suit and three more of the same kinds of Belltower troopers she had seen at ArcAir. A nervous young woman who appeared to be some kind of medical technician stood nearby.

“Were there any problems?” said the man in the suit, eyeing Khan’s injury. He was clearly an executive of some sort.

“Bumpy flight,” Khan replied. “Shall we get this done? I’m sure our employer doesn’t want to waste her time and mine.”

The suit nodded. “As you say.” He nodded to the woman. “Open them.”

The medic produced a handheld device and tapped out a code on its surface. The four capsules hissed open, releasing gusts of mist into the room. Each of them had a person lying inside, and the woman walked between them, taking readings and administering swift injections. “Intact,” she announced, after a while.

Faridah’s mind filled with questions as the four people in the capsules awakened and rose.

“Where is this?” said one, a portly Asian man.

“Welcome to Hengsha,” said the executive, with a false smile. “And to your new employment!”

The group exchanged anxious glances. “We…we work for Isolay,” said the grey-haired man, the one Faridah

had glimpsed in the cargo bay. “In Lima,” he added.

Isolay was one of the major manufacturers of human augmentation technologies in the western world, and Faridah recalled that they were in bitter competition with several of their Far Eastern rivals in China and Japan. If

these people were here, she doubted it was because they wished it.

The executive was nodding and smiling indulgently, as if he were talking to a child. “You are no longer employees of that company. Your skills were not being valued there. And so, it was decided that you might prefer to bring your expertise to a more… Lucrative workplace. We have taken the liberty of doubling your fees. You will be provided with new accommodation and facilities that far outstrip anything Isolay could offer you.”

Suddenly, it was all clear to her. Faridah was witnessing the tail end of what was known as an ‘enforced contractual transfer’ – a fancy term for kidnapping. The old guy and these other former Isolay employees had probably been stolen off the streets in Lima for their knowledge and abilities, extracted forcibly and brought to their new homes. A brain-drain from one corporation to another, at gunpoint.

Faridah’s jaw stiffened. It sickened her to know that she had been a part of something like this, through ArcAir and the Red Arrow in some kind of unholy alliance with Belltower and whatever corporation had ordered the trafficking of these people. She found herself wondering what other cargoes she had unknowingly carried for the triads, what might have been hidden in the crates and containers that she and Evelyn had never thought to consider. Part of her was ashamed that she had ever looked the other way.

You always suspected something like this was going on, said a voice inside her mind. And now you know for sure.

The older man was talking. “We don’t want this,” he snapped, gesturing sharply at the suit. “I have a wife and a daughter in Lima! A life! I did not agree to come work for thieves and kidnappers!”

“Now, wait,” said the Asian man. “We should hear them out-”

“No!” The voice of the grey-haired man rose to a shout and he stepped toward the suit, shaking his fist. “You have no right, you have taken us against our will! This is a criminal act! Release us now!”

“We were informed this gentleman would be difficult,” said Khan, with a sigh.

“Yes…” said the executive. “I had hoped he might change his mind. But I see that is not so.” Something passed between the man in the suit and Khan, a sly look and a turn of the head.

It was enough for the mercenary to draw his pistol, and in one smooth motion, place it on the old man’s chest and pull the trigger. The gun barked and the grey haired man was thrown back against his cryo-capsule by the blast.

The fixed, machine-like smile on the executive’s face did not waver in the slightest. “Would anyone else like to contest the details of their new contract?”

Faridah’s hand flew to her mouth and she recoiled from what she had seen. The casual brutality of the execution made her gorge rise, and for a long second she felt like she might throw up. An edge of panic in her movements, Faridah scrambled to her feet and sprinted away back up the ramp, back toward the parked VTOL.

She did not see Khan looking up toward the spot where she had been hiding, his brow furrowing as he parsed the sounds of movement gathered by his aural augmentations.

***

“So, the damage is not as bad as it looks,” Evelyn began, as Faridah raced up the Osprey’s drop ramp. “I think

we’ll be able to make it back to ArcAir without any more-”

“Spin it up,” Faridah broke in, before she could finish her sentence. “We’re leaving.”

Her friend saw the pallid cast to her face. “Ri, what is it? What’s wrong, did that asshole Khan do something?”

Faridah frowned, the echo of the gunshot still ringing in her ears. “I saw…,” she started to speak, but she

couldn’t say it aloud. “We… We’ve got to get out of here right now!” The words had barely left her mouth before a low, skirling alarm tone sounded, and the shadows of men in

ballistic armor appeared on the ramp, moving swiftly toward the landing pad with their weapons drawn.

As the Belltower troopers drew level, the Osprey’s twin rotors were already chopping at the air. The downdraft beat hard at them, making it impossible for the troopers to draw a bead on the aircraft. Still, they opened fire, ten-gauge blasts crashing from the muzzles of their Widowmaker shotguns.

The VTOL lifted off with a full-power surge to the engines, kicking up a small hurricane of dust and loose debris that blinded the troopers and covered the aircraft’s escape.

***

“They were firing at us!” Evelyn gave Faridah a hard look, her voice rising. “Why the hell were they trying to bring us down?”

“Did you hear the shot?” Faridah’s gaze was fixed on the view out of the cockpit. “Before?”

“What?” Evelyn’s expression became one of confusion. “Look, if we just go back there, you can explain all this, right?”

Faridah shook her head, angling the Osprey to thread the needle through a suntrap in the upper deck of the city complex. “That’s not gonna work.” The aircraft dropped through a wide open void in the pangu and fell into the shadows of Lower Hengsha.

Evelyn heard the firm refusal in her friend’s tone and was silent for long minutes. As they turned inbound toward the artificial reef and the ArcAir landing strip, she found her voice again. “Faridah, what did you do back there? You can tell me. Was it something about that cargo?”

People. There were innocent people in those containers. The words pushed at her lips and she wanted to shout them out loud. Murder. We’re party to kidnapping and a cold-blooded murder. But instead her throat

tightened and she found she could not speak. Faridah was suddenly very aware of the implant in her skull, feeling the false weight of the augmentation as if it had grown heavier because of what it now carried. There, in the memory buffer of her black box, was the footage of Khan executing the Isolay scientist. A killing caught in motion. She could not unsee it.

All she had to do was blink-click the right series of commands and the footage would replay in her mind’s eye. The gunshot. The old man’s rag-doll body hurled away by the blast. She felt sick again.

Faridah shuddered and shook her head. “We…have to land.”

***

The Osprey came down on the south pad and Evelyn unstrapped, climbing out of her seat to face her. “Talk to me,” she said, raising her voice to pitch it over the sound of the rotors as they slowed to idle. “I’m your friend, I’m in this with you. Remember? You and me against the world, right?”

“Right,” Faridah replied, in a weak voice. But still she said nothing. An icy chill filled the pilot’s gut, the color draining from her face. After what she had witnessed, could she put her best friend at risk by sharing that knowledge? The Belltower troopers had been coming for her; but Evelyn Carmichael was just someone who was unlucky enough to be friends with a reckless, foolish woman whose conscience had pushed her over the edge.

Faridah looked up, out of the canopy, and her gaze found Jai Cheng. He stood on the flight apron near one of the jets, and he was staring right at her. He had a vu-phone pressed to his ear and in his expression there was absolutely no hint of the friendly, affable guy Faridah had got to know over the months she had worked for him. In that second she realized her grave mistake in coming back to the ArcAir landing field.

Cheng was talking to them right now, she knew it instinctively; on the other end of that call there had to be someone from the Red Arrow demanding the head of Faridah Malik on a platter.