James Swallow - Fallen Angel

“I’m sorry…” She said. “Ev, I’ve put you in danger.” “What are you talking about?” said the other woman. Faridah did not get the chance to reply. There was a clanking sound from the rear compartment and she

turned in her seat to see Lau climbing into the cargo bay.

Lau was what passed for security at ArcAir, and both Faridah and Evelyn had learned early on to avoid him. A former go-ganger from the bad side of Beijing, he was all angles and foul moods, his shorn scalp covered with violent tattoos depicting fiery dragons and monstrous animals. Barely contained by the mock-leather biker’s rig he wore, Lau had a tricky manner and a thuggish attitude. “Hey,” he said, addressing Evelyn. “Cheng sent me. Wants

to talk to you.” He pointed out on to the apron. “Don’t keep him waiting.”

“You should do what he says,” Faridah said quickly, before her friend could protest. “It’s okay.”

Evelyn gave her a suspicious look. “All right,” she said reluctantly. “I’ll see you in debrief?”

“In debrief, yeah,” lied Faridah. “Be right there.”

Lau waited for the other pilot to step off the open drop ramp and disappear out of sight, then he pulled a

compact MAO automatic from his belt loop and aimed it into the cockpit. “Good girl,” he sniffed. “Now don’t make me put a bullet in that pretty guilao ass of yours. We don’t want to make this any harder than it has to be.”

“No,” said Faridah. Her hands were still on the controls, and outside the Osprey’s pitched rotors were still turning lazily.

“Shut this thing down,” Lau demanded. “There are some people who want to have a talk with you.”

“Sure.” What she did next did not feel like a deliberate decision; instead her body seemed to react without Faridah’s conscious input.

With one hand she slammed the throttles all the way to the stops, feeding maximum power to the engines in

a fraction of a second. Rotors howling, the Osprey jerked forward and leapt clumsily off the landing pad. With the other hand, she pulled back sharply on the flight yoke, and the aircraft’s nose rose sharply.

Lau stumbled as the VTOL left the ground, his free hand flailing for something to grab at as the deck tilted underneath his feet. He cried out and jerked the trigger of his pistol, sending wild shots into the walls of the cabin and through the hatchway into the cockpit.

A ricochet cracked the armored glass of the canopy and whined off the panel, causing Faridah to flinch away. She pulled on the controls and the Osprey tipped out of its near-stall, wallowing into a steep turn.

Shifting the pitch of the wingtip engines, Faridah put the aircraft into a climb and powered away from the ArcAir landing strip, skimming the roofs of nearby warehouses.

“You go tsao de bitch!” Lau shouted, punctuating his words with another salvo of shots. “You’re crazy!”

“It has been said,” Faridah nodded to herself as she put the Osprey into a hard, fast wing-over to shake loose the gun thug. Lau gave a high-pitched scream that trailed away to nothing as he lost his grip and tumbled through the open hatch at the back of the aircraft.

She tried not to think about what would happen to Lau, dashed to the ground somewhere below or thrown out over the shore. He was going to kill you, she told herself. You had no choice.

A chaotic mix of emotions ran through Faridah; sorrow and anger, fear and elation. She touched on a moment of memory from the skydive earlier that morning, the sheer sense of wild freedom that had come over her. This felt the same, but colored with shadows. It was the thrill of cheating death, of stealing away from the darkness.

“I know what you did,” she said to the air. “I saw what I wasn’t supposed to see…”

“ArcAir Zero-Niner-Niner.” Faridah jumped at the sound of the voice through her headset. “Malik. This is Cheng. Turn around before you do something we’ll all regret.”

She hesitated, drawing on her strength to keep her voice level and calm. “I already regret something, Jai. Working for you. And your pals in the Red Arrow.”

She heard him sigh. “I wish you hadn’t said that.”

“Do you know what was in those containers? Do you know what that bastard Khan did?”

“I’ve always known. It’s just business. Now, get back here. Unless you want your friend to suffer in your place.”

The pilot’s eyes narrowed. “Evelyn doesn’t know anything. You hurt her and I’ll tell the whole world what you and Belltower are doing out here.” She shifted course, staying low to follow the coastal edge of the lower city.

Cheng sighed again. “Ah, Malik. If that’s how you want it, okay. You’re not going to live that long.” The radio channel cut with a crackle of static, his threat echoing in her thoughts.

A heartbeat later, something small and angular shot past the Osprey’s cockpit in a blur, nearly forcing the VTOL into a collision.

***

The drones deployed from Belltower’s central security tower in Upper Hengsha within moments of an alert signal sent under the authorization of Major Nahari Khan, an operational field officer of the Hengsha District Command.

Fast, low-observable mobiles, each of the three unmanned aerial vehicles resembled a delta-winged lawn dart. Powerful vectored thrusters kept the drones in the air, and a globe of sensor eyes and camera windows on the nose allowed the machines to function in a semi-autonomous mode. Their limited, dog-smart on-board artificial intelligences were quick enough to lock on to the silhouette of the fleeing V-22 Osprey; they were assisted by the Red Arrow’s provision of the target’s transponder frequency, and in short order the drones had been able to

triangulate the target’s location. Typically, these autonomous aircraft were deployed in long, loitering missions for surveillance of persons of interest to Belltower and its clients. But not today.

Khan used a voice interface to give the machines simple and direct orders. “Weapons free,” he told them. “Seek and destroy.”

***

Shards of red tracer fire lashed past the Osprey’s cockpit and Faridah pushed the nose down, dropping out of the mid-level air corridor over the city and into the narrow confines of Lower Hengsha’s streets. Canyons of glass and steel hemmed her in on both sides, and in some places the spinning rotors on the VTOL’s wingtips chopped air less than four meters away from the balconies of apartment blocks. She saw the ghosts of terrified faces peering through windows as she shot past.

Without pilots on board, the Belltower drones were capable of making steep high-g turns that would have caused a human to black out and crash. They moved like a flock of raptors, harrying her at every turn.

The Osprey blew across a wide rooftop yard in a snarl of engine noise, blasting aside lines of hanging washing in a brief hurricane of sound and fury. As she pivoted the aircraft into another turn, Faridah caught a glimpse of the lead drone – a black shape with a sharp, smooth profile and the muzzle of a gun pod slung beneath its fuselage. More tracer shots crackled through the air, and she did her best to jink away – but the V-22 wasn’t a fighter plane and it lacked the agility to duel with the smaller robot flyers. Hours earlier, she had been risking her life for the sheer hell of it. Now she had no other choice.

Part of her couldn’t believe this was happening. An aerial chase through downtown Hengsha? It would be impossible to keep something like that out of the news feeds and off the social network sites. Belltower and whomever was pulling their strings couldn’t hope to hush that up…could they?

Then she thought about all the reports of ‘gang warfare’ and unusual ‘accidents’ she saw on the local Picus TV affiliate and wondered how many of them had been people like her, who saw too much and didn’t run fast enough.

That galvanized Faridah and she concentrated on the path ahead, thinking her way though streets that were familiar to her from forays into the nightclubs of the Kuaigan and Daigong districts.

“All right boys,” she said to the drones. “Try to keep up.”

A crossroads came up fast, the junction of Perfume Row and the Street of Six Dragons. Faridah stamped on the Osprey’s rudder pedals and made the aircraft drift into a wallowing spin, trading speed and height for angle and impetus. She threw the VTOL into a ninety-degree turn and shot away in a southerly direction. Six Dragon Street was a three-lane roadway, comparatively wide for a Hengsha avenue, but up off the ground the width of it was choked by tall illuminated billboards that extended out from the side of the buildings.

She waited until the last second to put the Osprey into a heavy half-roll, pitching it up on to one wingtip as a neon screen advertising Happy Carp Beer loomed large before her.

The lead drone, bore-sighted on putting rounds into the back of its target, detected the billboard too late. Fast, but too fast to maneuver in the tight confines of the street, the unmanned aerial vehicle collided with the shimmering lights. Glass and metal rained down on the street below. The smoking fuselage of the drone ripped through the billboard and carried on for half a block before its forward momentum planted it in a deserted alleyway.

“Splash one,” Faridah called out the words, defiant and challenging. “Who’s next?”

Networking with its cohort right until the moment it was destroyed, the second drone took a different tack. It described a wide barrel roll that took it up over the Osprey. The drone’s gun pod pivoted and strafed the VTOL as it passed. Faridah felt the punching recoil of heavy-gauge rounds as they punctured the wings and the fuselage. Warning lights pinged into life on the dashboard, but nothing was on fire and nothing was dead, so for now she ignored them.

Faridah gripped the controls grimly. She was a damn good pilot, that was never in doubt; but the Osprey had limits and so did she. The drones were going to get her, it was only a matter of time. To get out of this alive, she had to think fast and think smart. She had to find another way out.

In the meantime…

It was dangerous to alter the pitch of the rotors over a certain airspeed and Faridah was well past that red line, but she didn’t have the liberty of following the manual. Yanking the controls over hard to port, the pilot threw the Osprey down a blind corner, ripping through a web of power cables strung between two narrow housing towers.

The second drone blared past, pulling into a vertical Immelmann turn that would bring it back toward the fleeing VTOL; the third drone mimicked Faridah’s course and followed her around the blind corner.

The side street ended in a brick wall that climbed high off the ground, and floating there in front of it was the Osprey, the tilt-rotors pitched up to make the aircraft hover like a helicopter.

Faridah watched the drone pass over top of her cockpit, airbrakes deploying as it frantically tried to bleed off speed. She revved the engines and applied power, and in the throat of the blocked passage, the confined downdraft was like a sudden blast of wind. The surge disrupted the airflow over the third drone’s razor-thin winglets and spun it into the wall with a concussive burst of fire.

Still turning in place, spinning upwards, Faridah guided the Osprey past more gaping windows and the bright panels of holographic signs. There were more red lights on the control panel now, and she could feel the aircraft becoming sluggish. Hydraulic pressure was ebbing away, engine heat levels were rising too fast.

“One last thing, big guy,” she said to it, willing the machine to stay airborne for a few moments more. “Don’t let me down now.”

Below and to the starboard, light glittered off black metal and Faridah knew that the last of the drones was coming around, drawing a firing solution on her that would rip the Osprey apart. They were over a construction zone now, the skeletons of bank towers and office blocks on all sides. She saw figures in orange hazard vests scrambling away even as their robotic co-workers ignored the sight of the aircraft buzzing overhead.

Laser light from a rangefinder licked the front of the aircraft, flickering as it touched the bullet-shattered glass.

“You think you got me?” she asked. “You haven’t got me.”

Faridah pivoted the props and pushed the throttle forward, the Osprey dropping into a dive that took it straight toward the rising drone. She tried to imagine what the Belltower operator monitoring the machine’s nose camera was thinking in those last seconds, as the big VTOL came thundering in to fill the screen. Was that bastard Khan watching? Did he see her face through the canopy in the last seconds, the hard daring in her eyes, the refusal to surrender in the set of her jaw?

The drone tried to veer away, but the Osprey slammed into the unmanned vehicle, in a jousting pass that tore the smaller aircraft in two. The VTOL suffered for the act, the airframe ripping open and spurts of fire igniting along the ventral surface of its wings.

Black smoke pouring from holes in the fuselage, the Osprey howled as it twisted into a flat spin. Skidding through the air, its port rotors sliced the thick plastic sheath covering the scaffolding around the unfinished upper floors of a L.I.M.B. clinic, and the Osprey crashed tail-first into the skeletal concrete frame of the building, lodging there.

Fire bloomed around the point of impact, orange and black lighting up the surroundings, reflecting back off the underside of the pangu overhead.

The Osprey burned fast, never to rise again.

***

“Why won’t anyone tell me what is going on?” shouted Evelyn, her patience cracking. “Faridah gets us shot at, she spooks and runs… That’s not like her!” She glared at Cheng from across the ArcAir pilot’s lounge, her hands tightening into fists. “What did you make us do, Jai?” “Your job,” he shot back, matching her angry tone. “Didn’t I tell you a hundred times, just fly the damn helos

and let me worry about the rest. Is that so hard for you to understand?”

“You pay us to be pilots, not blind!”

His vu-phone sounded with a samisen ring-tone, and he cut it off within the first few notes, ignoring the

woman’s retort. “Go for Cheng,” he said. The man was silent for a moment, and Evelyn could hear the mutter of a deep, indolent voice on the other end of the line. Khan, she guessed, calling to check in.

Cheng looked at her coldly. “What about the other one?” There was another distant reply and his lips thinned. “You’re certain of that…? All right. I’ll take it from here.”

He hung up and studied Evelyn. Her anger cooled as the seriousness of her situation caught up with her. If all the stories about Cheng’s relationship with the Red Arrow were true, then Evelyn and Faridah could be in the worst kind of trouble…

“Malik took the Osprey downtown, did something foolish. She clipped a building.”

Evelyn backed away a step, feeling a sudden hollow open up inside her. “No…”

“Went up in flames,” Cheng continued, without an iota of pity. “Malik’s dead, and she’s cost me an aircraft and my reputation. You get that? Do you?”