Angeli (22 page)

“There’s not much time in the world, period.” She jabbed a finger in the opposite direction. “Go. Go take care of whatever is more important than an entire planet.”

His mouth opened as if he wanted to respond. Instead he took the last two steps toward her and gripped her shoulder. She tensed when his face softened. “You’ve got this.”

She breathed in and out as smoothly as she could. “You’re just saying that.”

“No.” He drew up her mesh hood, covering her head, tightening it around her neck. His finger brushed her cheek and lingered. “I understand what Gregori sees in you. You have a vitality inside you that’s hard to ignore.”

She kind of hated Nikolas, but what the hell? She was about to die. “If you’re about to kiss me, make it fast.”

“I’m not, I’m not.” He stepped back, hands up. “Keep running. Keep shooting. Keep fighting.”

“I’ll do what I can,” she said, echoing him. “It’s a good thing I don’t have other responsibilities.”

She didn’t speak further. As soon as she gave him one last “eat shit” glare, she skidded down the tilted slab and picked her way across the rubble toward the half-clear road that led directly to her grave.

…

His sensors picked up life forms. Human life forms, several of them. Surrounded by entities. Gregori flew faster, so fast his shield couldn’t keep the wind from ripping at him and screaming in his ears. Near San Francisco, in the sector that had been decimated by Terran munitions, he found them.

Eleven women kitted out in tactanium body armor and armbands were positioned on a high, defensible structure that had mostly survived the bombardment. He didn’t recognize any of them as fellow Shipborn, despite their accoutrements. Most were busy picking off clumps of shades on the ground, and he could distinguish the black blotch of a larger mass of shades approaching.

A few of the women watched him fly toward them. One pointed her fist at him as if she expected him to start shooting and planned to shoot back. He back-flapped near the tower, reluctant to appear aggressive. They seemed to have sufficient laser power and strategic positioning to hold off the entities for the time being, but who were they?

Whoever they were, there was only one reason they would be this close to the nexus, dressed in Shipborn gear and killing shades. They were in league with Nikolas. As such, they probably knew what he had planned.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

The tall, dark-skinned woman who’d aimed her laser at him marched forward. Scratches marred her breastplate, which looked like the style of breastplate Nikolas favored. Its long, segmented flaps covered her to the knees.

“Gregori, I presume?” she said, her voice deep for a woman. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Screw that.” The combat adrenaline had long since eradicated all vestiges of the sedative from his system. “Where’s Adelita?”

She exchanged a look with another woman before turning back to him. “Don’t be stupid, alien. Let her do what she has to do and keep your fine ass out of it.”

Gregori winged closer to the tower. The women all looked tense, some more frightened than others. This many sentients this close to the nexus…they might be stemming the tide of shades now, but it wasn’t safe for them if they had no wings to fly away. He activated the DNA sensors in his array and scanned them at a molecular level.

What the…? Every one of the women was Terran.

And every one of them was pregnant.

He landed with a thump. “Who the hell are you?”

The tall woman smiled, her teeth white and somewhat sharp. “The backup plan.”

Nikolas had involved pregnant Terran women in a dangerous scheme, when all he’d needed to do was work with Gregori? What in the void’s name was wrong with the man? Had he lost his sanity?

“You people can’t be here.” Instincts warred inside Gregori. One set told him to get these unenhanced women away from the shades and daemons, out of the blast radius of the munitions Nikolas had presumably obtained for Adelita. The other set of instincts told him to find his lover as soon as possible.

She couldn’t do this alone. Without him. It should be him taking the risk.

The women apparently sensed his concerns. Several paused their assault and stood beside their spokes in a barricade of determination and silver armbands. Their clothing was tattered, and their bodies had scorch marks and wounds, but none seemed grievously injured, according to his scan.

“Get outta here,” one said. She had a painful, red brand on one cheek that looked suspiciously like an ichor burn. “We know what we signed up for.” To prove her point she aimed at some shades far below and disintegrated them.

“No, you don’t. You can’t.” Mother bedamned! Eleven pregnant civilians. He couldn’t abandon them. “Not all entities are as easy to destroy as shades.”

“Look down there.” The black woman pointed toward the base of the tower. “Now tell us we don’t know what we’re doing.”

Gregori let his gaze drop. Several stories below, red-skinned bodies, or pieces of them, littered the ground. Dead daemons. “You killed those?”

She flashed her armbands at him and laughed. “These aren’t for show, Blondie.”

Another woman, whose belly rounded in a more obvious pregnancy, wore what looked like a sensor array on her head. It lit up suddenly, and she frowned. “They’ve run into more daemons.”

“Dammit,” the tall woman cursed. “I knew it. We needed two fliers. He should have implanted me with the fucking wings. I should have made him do it, the fucking pussy-ass son of a bitch sexist motherfucker.”

“Must you, Claire?” the heavily pregnant woman asked. “I thought you’d agreed to quit talking ugly. It’s not good for the babies.”

Claire turned to Gregori, her face hardening. “Look, alien. If you want to save Niko’s fool self, he’s running into more daemons than he and my sister Tracy can handle. We need them to divert the horde from your girlfriend and get us the hell off this platform. After you fix that, you can check on Adelita. Just make sure she arms that bomb, and don’t sacrifice yourself in the process.”

Gregori balanced on the balls of his feet, uncertain. The hiss of the approaching horde made it hard to concentrate.

“The feeler group is almost in range,” he heard someone say. “I hope we can do this.”

Gregori’s insides twisted with dueling obligations. Save these women here, save his woman elsewhere. He took a step toward the edge of the tower, intending to launch himself at the horde, but Claire stopped him.

“You’ll want to put those on before you go,” Claire said to him, her voice raised over the hiss. She indicated a pair of wings near their gear.

“Why?”

She raised her eyebrows at his hesitancy. “They’re faster. And the force field’s better.”

Gregori allowed her to help him detach his pack and don the new one. She was rough, giving him no quarter with the endo-organics, but he didn’t care. Once he situated the new inserts, he expanded the wings for takeoff, even though he shouldn’t go. He wanted to…but he shouldn’t.

“Go,” Claire said.

Gregori’s heart buoyed him until he hovered several feet above the tower. “I can’t leave you undefended.”

“We’re not undefended. Send Nikolas back, and everything will be fine. As long as you don’t get yourself eaten.”

“Are any other Shipborn involved in this?” he asked. “They should be here, helping you.”

“Nikolas said we couldn’t trust anybody else. Not even you,” Claire told him. “Something about not knowing who was in on it.”

“Then he’s dumber than I thought.” Gregori had no idea what she was talking about, had had no clue Niko had been putting together a strike force. It made no sense. Why had Niko fought so hard yesterday? Why hadn’t he leveled with them, gotten their aid?

Perhaps because he’d known Gregori wouldn’t let him involve these women. And it didn’t matter right now. Niko’s plan was already in motion and Adelita was in deadly peril.

“I told Nikolas he should have gotten this fella involved weeks ago,” one woman whispered to another. “Ship wouldn’t have caught on if they’d played it cool.”

“He don’t listen,” the other replied. “Thinks he knows everything.”

“And he’s paranoid,” the first woman agreed.

Gregori stared toward the nexus. In the slowly brightening sky, at the farthest range of his enhanced vision, he could make out a flash of sun on tactanium and specks that might be Nikolas, hounded by daemons.

Beneath the specks, his sensors picked up an endless river of the horde at ground level, following the airborne sentients, calling the daemons, coming straight for these women.

Because the ladies were pregnant, the life force here was double or even triple what it would have been otherwise. They were a literal beacon to the ravenous entities.

But the terrifying black river that had almost reached the tower wouldn’t be all the shades. The kill zone would never be bare, and the shade zone would be dangerous for anyone rash enough to blunder into it. Worse, Adelita wouldn’t be able to move as quickly as someone with wings, giving the entities more time to react. Her native DNA would only deceive them for so long. If they sensed what she carried, they’d send all the daemons on the planet after her and that bomb.

“When did he last see her?” he asked the woman with the headset.

“I don’t know, honey. Let me check.” She closed her eyes, her lips moving with no sound. He had no idea how the headset worked for her when she wasn’t enhanced, and he didn’t care. “Twenty minutes, thirty-seven seconds ago. He put her down a quarter of a mile south of la boca del infierno. I think. It’s hard to tell over the yelling.”

“Have him verify,” Gregori said with a hard swallow, “that she’s still alive.”

“He can’t do that. He thinks her comm got destroyed.” She gazed at him with pale blue eyes. “Gregori, the bomb has a five-minute timer. It can’t be defused.”

Adelita had had twenty minutes to travel a quarter of a mile. Average humans could run anywhere from six to eleven miles an hour. Even considering Adelita had short legs and claimed to be out of shape… Even considering she would have to contend with shades, maybe daemons… She could have already reached the nexus and armed the weapon.

He jumped into the wind without another thought.

Chapter Sixteen

Sweat coated Adelita’s skin inside her clothing and the slouchy mesh armor. Her leg muscles burned as if she were trying to fire lasers through her feet. The backpack flopped with an irritating thump, thump, thump as she trotted along the cracked pavement, in an area that used to be a business district. Crumbled buildings lined the sides of the road, glass everywhere, wreckage sometimes blocking the road.

After the first five minutes of trying to pick off shades with short laser bursts, she’d learned aim didn’t matter. When there were more shades than she could dodge, she swiped the beams from side to side like a water hose, blasting herself a corridor. As long as she didn’t glance back at the shades closing ranks behind her—or bring a building down on herself—she was okay.

Shades in twos and threes dotted the debris everywhere she looked, with larger clusters negotiating the roadway. Daemons swooped overhead in pairs but mostly ignored her, intent on some other goal. She’d been attacked by two, which were now dead.

It had been touch and go. In the end, the laser had been mightier than the claw. Especially with the hideous, shrieking red faces near enough that she couldn’t miss.

She had a smashed earbud, a ripped hood, and a breach in the mesh protecting her leg to show for it. She was cut off from Nikolas, and a painful wound throbbed on her thigh. She thought maybe the ichor had cauterized the injury because there hadn’t been much blood. Still, she limped along, no longer as confident in the protective qualities of the armor.

A dense blot of shades crept out from behind a wrecked streetcar, hissing so loudly she couldn’t hear herself curse. Or pray. Hopefully the Lord could hear her pray, because she’d been doing it for the past fifteen minutes. When she wasn’t cursing.

Rather than risk exploding the streetcar, she darted around the entities, her thigh wound jabbing her with every step. She’d accidentally blown up an SUV a block or two back, and the detonation had almost whammied her into some lurking entities. For now she kept shooting and cursing and praying and panting and driving herself toward the kill zone with every ounce of determination in her body.

Determination that swelled with every stumble. Every agonizing step.

Ahead was a sketchy wall of dark monsters. The clumps were getting thicker. More frequent. She must be close.
Please, God—let me be close.
She’d already survived longer than expected. Had Nikolas’s plan to thin the entities worked? During their last moment of earbud contact, she’d been too busy screaming about daemons to ask. From her position halfway up another steep San Francisco hill, she couldn’t scope out what lay ahead.

She slowed for another onslaught, raising her sore arms and gritting her teeth. With an angry thought, fire shot through her hands at a barrier of black monsters. It didn’t matter that one wrist was sprained. She spread her fingers, which widened the beams, and brought her palms together slowly.

The entities disappeared when the light touched them like ice melting in hot water. They shrieked, too, louder than she did.

The trail she’d blazed wouldn’t be shade-free long. She shuffled forward, still firing.

The bands heated faster than she could switch them off. She hissed like a shade as they blistered her skin. She’d kept her mesh sleeves rolled down for protection. She hadn’t looked to see what the bands were doing to her poor arms.

Two more big clusters of shades, creeping toward her. Cars abandoned in the road. Buildings in heaps. Occasionally, what looked like animal bodies. Not much space to maneuver. Hills in every direction. She glanced to either side, seeking the best avenue, and ended up dashing between the globs of entities instead of taking the time to burn them out.

Her lungs protested along with her leg and arm muscles. The stitch in her side felt like a knife blade. That pain didn’t matter.