James Swallow - Fallen Angel

“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.