Archangel Down: Archangel Project. Book One (5 page)

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.

The dot that was him and the square that was the cottage collided. James opened his eyes. He couldn’t see the circle of pines that surrounded the remote retreat. The only thing he could see was the front stoop. A knee-high landscaping ‘bot with a plow at the front was pushing snow away from the door. It flashed a red light at him, attempting a retinal scan. James dutifully met the red glow head on. The ‘bot beeped in recognition, and before James even set his hand on the fingerprint recognition plate, the heavy wood door swung open. He stepped inside. It was warm—the ‘bots had been expecting him. In the foyer, he paused. Everything was exactly as he remembered it. The floor was local limestone, the ceilings had exposed beams of Luddeccean pine. The walls were the same pine, but more finely sanded and stained a lighter color. He heard the whir of other housekeeping ‘bots, and the distant hum of the furnace that heated water. James kicked off his boots and felt the familiar rush of warmth from the floors through his now-drenched socks. Familiar … and off. Something was missing.

His coat slid from the Commander’s torso to the floor, bringing his attention to his mysterious burden. She had been absolutely silent since she’d passed out on the bike—he noticed with dismay that she was soaking wet, just as he was. Eyes still closed, she began to shiver. He didn’t have time for his apprehension—as wrong as this place felt, it was still shelter.

He carried her to the bedroom. Dropping her on the bed, he put his hand on her forehead. Thirty-four degrees Celsius—she was mildly hypothermic. He flexed the fingers of his hand … he didn’t remember having a temperature app. He didn’t have time to ponder it. James quickly stripped her out of her wet clothes down to only her undergarments. For the first time he noticed that there were fresh scars on her left hand where her last finger and ring finger were missing. There were also two very small scars on her face—one beneath her eyebrow and one above. They didn’t look like the aesthetic scarification that was popular a few years ago on Earth. There was another larger scar on her abdomen. Strange that she had not repaired the glaring imperfections. Besides those, she had visible bruising around her ribs and on her cheek. She was also visibly emaciated. She may have passed out from hunger as much as cold. For now, he couldn’t help the hunger, but he could help with the cold.

Tucking her beneath the duvet, he stripped down himself and joined her. Removing her clothing had taken away some of the odors of filth that clung to her—but not all. For all the smell of death … there was something comforting about her presence. Maybe she’d only mistaken him for someone else earlier because she was exhausted from cold and hunger? Perhaps she’d wake up, they’d eat, and she’d remind him of how he knew her?

She shivered, and he put his hand over her heart. He could feel her rib cage too acutely, but the beat was steady.

Ten minutes later, the Commander’s shivering ceased, and a quick check of her temple showed that her temperature had risen above hypothermic levels. His hand drifted down to her waist. He found that if he concentrated, he could hear her heartbeat over the sound of the wind outside, the furnace rumbling in the distance, and the house ‘bots.

Settling into a semi-conscious haze with only the sound of her heart and his internal chronometer for company, he had an odd memory of being ten years old, in this very house, and curling up in this bed with a toy giraffe that played bedtime lullabies.

After four hours, six minutes, and thirty-seven seconds, the Commander shifted against him in a way that wasn’t toy-like. Before James had a chance to come to full consciousness, she murmured drowsily. The tone of her voice was like a lover’s, and his hand tightened on her hip, as though by reflex. Before he had time to fully process her murmur, or his reaction, she whispered, “Timothy ...”

The same body that had betrayed his logical mind and helped him find her, and was now gripping her hip in a way that was too familiar, betrayed him again. He responded without thinking.

S
econd Lieutenant Noa Sato
leaned against the bar, staring at the empty dance floor. Crossing her arms, she frowned. It was her first night after finishing Officer Training School, and she’d wanted to dance. Unfortunately, her roommate wanted to catch up with her ex-boyfriend, and worse, the dance floor was empty. Noa stamped a high titanium heel in impatience. More friends would be here soon—but she wanted to let loose now.

“Excuse me, can I buy you a drink?”

Noa wasn’t in the mood. She wasn’t one for hook-ups—love sex though she might. What was the point in rolling in the sheets with a man who didn’t feel the pressure to perform?

Without looking, she said, “No thanks.”

“Oh, come on!” said the proposer, his voice indignant. “You have to realize what sort of internal anxieties I’m overcoming to talk to you!”

Expecting to hear some variation of “look at me, deigning to talk to someone who’s an African throwback,” Noa rolled her eyes. Turning to the speaker, she was prepared to give him a withering glare; instead, her eyes opened in shock. She expected to see tan skin, straight-to-wavy brown hair, and hazel-to-brown eyes. Instead the man before her was as pale as the moon, his eyes were bright blue, and his hair was dark blonde streaked with highlights that were nearly white.

The speaker lifted his hands and gestured at her. “I mean, look at you, you’re … ”

Noa’s eyes narrowed. “I’m what?”

“Taller than me!” the man declared.

Noa’s lips pursed, and one eyebrow shot up. In her seven-centi heels, that was definitely true. This particular pair of shoes had a collapsible heel by design. She could lower herself to his height and make him feel more comfortable—but she wouldn’t.

He touched a hand to his chest. “I think you should consider that it takes a big man to love a taller woman.”

Noa’s jaw dropped.

The man’s eyes went wide, and then his skin flushed red from the roots of his hair to the neck of his shirt. Putting a hand to his temple, he winced. “Nebulas, that came out wrong. Big heart, I mean, big heart!” He had lips so thin, Noa wondered how they could possibly sip from a glass, and a long, straight pointy nose—but those eyes, when they peeked at her—they were so wide they gave him an air of innocence, even if they were shockingly blue.

Noa found herself laughing. She held out her hand. “Second Lieutenant Noa Sato.”

“Oh, I know!” said the man.

Noa’s lips pursed.

Almost cautiously, the man said, “You did receive a commendation for your performance in hand-to-hand combat … ” A mischievous smile tweaked at the corners of his thin lips. “I thought you were there when they gave you the ribbon in front of the rest of us.”

Noa felt her cheeks get warm, but knew her skin would hide the evidence. “And what is your name?”

Taking her hand, he said, “Second Lieutenant Timothy Anderson.”

A lot of men had wanted to shake Noa’s hand since she got that ribbon. Too many of them tried to crush the bones in her fingers to assert their masculinity. Pathetic in this day and age, really.

Timothy didn’t try to break her hand, but neither was his handshake weak. It was just right. Noa found her whole body warming at the touch. She knew right then that she and Timothy would be lovers … and that they would be together for a very, very, long time.

N
oa was cold
. She felt a chill deep in her bones, which was strange, because she was curled up with her back pressed to Timothy under a huge thick duvet, lying atop a mattress that was so soft and comfortable she thought that she may have to be antigravved out of it. She was so hungry that she could feel the sides of her stomach touching together—so hungry that she felt limp and dizzy from it. She heard the wind howl outside and actually smiled. Of course, because they got married yesterday, in Colorado of all places, in winter … there had been a snowstorm. Noa loved snow.

Her eyelids fluttered briefly. She saw light wood-paneled walls, a rustic quilt on a chair … the honeymoon suite. She sighed and closed her eyes.

She hadn’t eaten at all during the wedding banquet. She’d been too busy greeting all their guests, too excited and too happy, that was why she was hungry. She shifted against Timothy and remembered with bemusement that they hadn’t had sex the night after their wedding, either. Her mother had said they’d be too tired. And her mom had been right. She frowned. But she hadn’t been too tired to dream … terrible, frightening dreams. A concentration camp, and Timothy being dead, but then saving her and her saving Timothy.

She wiggled again, trying to get warm, and get closer to Tim. She felt fingers tighten on her hip. The cold … the lack of marital consummation, these could be easily remedied. “Timothy,” she whispered.

“I am not Timothy,” said a masculine, strangely familiar voice, but not Tim.

With an undignified yelp, Noa rolled out of bed. Hitting the floor with jaw-rattling impact, she skittered like a crab on her hands until her back hit something solid. Literally, backed against the wall, she stared at the bed. It was a high mattress, box spring combo, very old fashioned, complete with a thick quilt, like the one on her honeymoon. A man was sitting there. He might have been Timothy’s twin, a clone, or the type of animatronic that some people made so they didn’t forget great-grandma, their partner, or their dead child.

After a beat too long, the not-Tim held up his hands as though in surrender. His jaw shifted from side to side oddly, and his brows drew together. “I am sorry,” he said softly, as though she were a frightened ptery or bird. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

Noa felt bile rise in her throat. She had a moment of complete disorientation and wondered if she was still dreaming. She took a few shaky breaths, and nebulas, the cold still felt like it was clawing at her lungs even in the warm room.

“My name is James Sinclair,” the stranger said. A part of her brain fumbled to draw up his name on the ethernet and found it still disconnected.

James’s chin dipped to his chest and his eyes bored into hers. “Don’t you know me?” There was an urgency in his voice that was disquieting.

Noa jerked her head in the negative. He pulled back and his eyes went to the ceiling, as though he was seeking some answer in the air. The picture of confusion—or dismay.

She gulped. His voice was too low and rich to be Timothy’s. And he’d either bought an app to simulate the speech patterns of a wealthy Earther—probably European, maybe even British—or he was born into money. She didn’t normally associate with either type of person. She looked down at herself … she was a skeleton … dressed in ratty underwear. She sniffed. And she stank. “It wasn’t a dream,” she muttered, her shoulders slumping. The escape, the concentration camp … her eyes fell on the scars on her lower abdomen, the thumb of her left hand touched the stumps of her ring finger and pinky … and Timothy was dead, and it hurt all over again.

“What dream?” the stranger said.

Noa blinked up at him. The likeness was extraordinary, and disturbing, but if she focused on him, she saw an artist’s rendition of her late husband, not her Tim. James’s hair color was the same—dark blonde, highlights of nearly platinum; he had the same skin tone, and blue eyes. But this man’s lips were fuller, his nose not quite as long, his jaw more square, and his frame more muscular. He didn’t have Tim’s laugh lines, either. He had the sort of agelessness she associated with Earther plastic surgery and nano-repair. He looked to be late twenties, but could be anything from late twenties to early fifties. He was too perfect.

Her eyes narrowed. “Why was I … ” She gestured to the bed. “With you?” And then she remembered the cold.

“You had—”

“Hypothermia,” she said, dropping her eyes.

“A mild case,” he said softly.

She shivered again with such force her spine hurt. In the periphery of her vision, she saw James sit up straighter—as though startled. She pulled her knees to her chest and curled into herself. James picked up the covering on the bed and walked over to her. Without preamble, he sat down beside her and draped the thick down quilt over them both, creating a welcome bubble of warmth, but she struggled not to scoot away. Scooting away would show fear—and she wasn’t afraid—not really. She closed her eyes.

“Commander, the bed is warmer.” His voice was a whisper,
concerned.

“Here is fine,” Noa said, even though the bed would be more comfortable. She didn’t feel violated, but spooning with the doppelgänger of Tim was too much right now. She felt weak and disoriented, and she needed to get her bearings.

“Very well.” After a pause, he said, “I’d hoped you’d recognize me.”

She did, sort of. “Nope,” she said, rubbing her temple.

“But I know you’re Commander Noa Sato.”

Noa dropped her hand. Her body tensed.

James didn’t seem to notice. “I don’t know how I know that.”

Tension left her shoulders. In the grand scheme of things in her life that were wrong, that seemed the smallest to Noa. “I’ve been in the press a few times,” she said. “You’ve probably seen me in holos or on the ethernet.”

Leaning his head back, he gazed up at the ceiling. “Nothing makes sense. This is my parents’ cottage—we were going to spend the holiday here together.” He closed his eyes and massaged his lids. “I came here a week before them to verify that it was safe. I was shot out of the sky by the local forces. The last thing I remember hearing as my ship crashed was the Luddeccean authorities saying, ‘Archangel down, Archangel down.’”

Noa blinked as her memories came back. “Say that again?” she said.

“Archangel down, Archangel down,” James said, dropping his hand and blinking at the ceiling.

Noa’s skin prickled. If she was remembering correctly, he was saying that in the same voice with the same inflection as the Luddeccean who had first made the announcement … Which could have a lot of explanations. Voice chip for damaged vocal cords, natural ability to mimic ...

Still not looking in her direction, a dazed expression in his eyes, he continued. “I knew that the locals were becoming more fanatic—what with the election of the new premier—but I had not realized the extent of the fanaticism.” He shook his head. “I had all the right permits.”

A glow bug lit in Noa’s mind. “You are the one they shot out of the sky. You’re the archangel.”

James’s head whipped to hers. “I am not an
it
.”

Noa’s lips pursed, uncertain where that had come from.

His jaw dropped and he looked away. “I don’t know why they called me that, or why they shot me down.”

Noa said softly, “Mistaken identity?”

James’s face remained impassive.

The speed of the head turn just now, the way he’d ripped the screen off the hover … “You’re augmented,” Noa said.

Eyeing her and lifting a brow, he touched his data port. “Aren’t we all?”

Noa sighed. “Yeah, it’s ridiculous, but when were fundamentalists ever rational?” As soon as she said it, she felt off-kilter. Guilty. Earthers like him thought all Luddecceans were crazy. There were a lot of crazy fundamentalists on Luddeccea, but there were wonderful people, too. She’d been to Earth and met “extreme atheists;” she hadn’t found them more moral or enlightened. She was ready to quip something defensive about all extremists, religious and irreligious being irrational, but James was touching the sides of his mouth with the fingers of both hands. The words died on her tongue at the odd gesture.

“I can’t smile at your joke,” he said, voice almost a whisper. “I can’t frown, either.”

Feeling a pinch of worry for the strange man, she leaned closer. His skin, where she could see it beneath his fingers, looked healthy—there was no sign of frostbite. She drew back, more pieces of the puzzle clicking together in her mind. “You have to be very augmented. They announced the coordinates of your crash over the channel. To reach me in time, you would have had to have run sixty-seven and a half kilometers per hour over mountainous terrain.” The way he was patting his face … if he couldn’t smile or frown, it meant he had augmentation there too, not just run-of-the-mill plastic surgery. But why?

James dropped his hands. “There was an accident, on Earth,
before.
I fell, the equivalent of many stories. I nearly died … ” His head ticked to the side in a quick staccato movement. It reminded Noa of some of the compulsive tics Kenji used to have.

She sucked in a breath. An accident like he was describing would require facial augmentation, not just plastic surgery. If he was telling the truth, then maybe he’d received some damage to his augments during the crash? It would explain his inability to smile. But there was more to his story that didn’t add up. “You had access to the secure Luddeccean channel if you heard their ‘archangel down’ message.” And how had he known where she was? “Are you part of the Fleet?”

His jaw twitched, and he touched one side of his lip, and then looked down at his fingers. “I am not in the Fleet. I am a
professor
of history. I specialize in late 21
^st
century. Most recently, I was in the process of reviewing discoveries I made along the San Andreas Rift.”

Every hair on the back of her neck prickling, Noa interrupted him. “You killed three men.”

For a heartbeat too long James was too still, his eyes on a place in the distance. When he spoke, his words came out as an uncertain stammer. “Yes … they kicked you, and were speculating on whether to kill you, talking about interrogating you and yanking out your port … and … I couldn’t let it happen … I … I have hunted before, but never killed a human. I wasn’t bothered by killing them, but I am bothered by the fact that I am not bothered, and I wonder if I should be … if that makes sense?”

Noa exhaled. Her hands flicked to her side—and she remembered being kicked—thanks to Fleet tech she was healing much faster than natural and it wasn’t unbearably painful. “It does make sense,” she said, and she did understand his ambivalence. She had pulled the trigger on more than a few unsavory individuals; it was harder than the holos made you believe. A man with no history of combat, nor apparently in a profession that would have given him training, killing three men? Her throat tightened. Of course, he’d just been shot out of the sky—probably because he was hyper-augmented. The situation was extreme—it could have pushed an ordinary man to extreme actions. And he hadn’t hurt her, or ignored her, or dumped her off the snowmobile when she fainted. He had spooned with her scrawny, stinking self to save her from hypothermia.