WingSpan (Taken on the Wing Book 1) (43 page)

“We need to talk about us,” he says as he drops to a squat then rocks onto his ass. A quick wiggle of his hips moves him against the wall and he crushes the corner of his box to activate the heater.

“Sure, Rye,” Angel concedes. The colour code on her box contains a lot of red for protein. Rye’s shows equal amounts of red, green, blue and white. Protein is for shakers but it stops her back end up like nobody’s business and after two weeks she wonders if she’ll ever function right.

She knows what’s coming. Angel has been Rye’s ‘regular’ for nearly six months since he came to her quarters dressed only in a towel. She was beautiful and very private, he explained, and someone he could trust to be discreet. Any intimacy shared wouldn’t leave the room. Their time together would give them a chance to push the real world away for a while and nothing more.

He couldn’t hide his emotion when he found out he was her first and after, he cried silently in her arms. He knew he could trust her, he said, if she trusted him with her innocence. It was strange to think of herself as innocent since she’d already taken hundreds of Aphid lives by sabotaging life support systems or overloading their weapons banks. Her physical demonstration of trust had triggered his.

“We got too close,” she mumbles around a dry fibre bar. Like fibre will help with the protein cramps.

“Later,” he insists and looks away when her hands become too unsteady to keep eating. “Sleep.”

“Yeah.”

Angel uses the ration box to keep her short blonde hair off the dirty floor and curls up. For a few minutes she watches Rye’s face glow in the soft light of the palm-sized data tablet he pulled from his thigh pocket. His spiky brown hair and angular cheeks complement the three days stubble on his jaw as it works in thought.

“Sleep,” he orders without looking up.

“Can’t,” she sits and goes through her pockets for something to help. Just as she breaks the seal on a small sleep-aid disk, a deep rumble no more than a block away jars the building, knocking dust into the steep light streaming in from the window.

“Tong?” Rye fingers his earpiece as he gets an update from his twin brother, his second in command. Tong’s voice rattles in Angel’s ear as well.

Town hall went up, Rye.
A second blast jars the building and her earpiece shuts down to protect her hearing.
Greens everywhere. The school’s gotta be empty. I’ll keep the ... clear for Angel and follow ... in.

“Need you solid for a couple more hours, Angel,” Rye orders but she’s already on her feet, pulling out a stim-tab. No sleep now but her hands shake so bad she can’t get the packet open.

Rye grabs the tablet and pushes her against the wall. He opens the foil envelope containing a translucent thumbnail sized disk and presses it against her neck. Thousands of micro needles coated in stimulant penetrate her skin, not deep enough to hurt but enough to get the drug into her system. Shit, she usually takes it in the arm to slow the rush.

Nothing ever prepares her no matter how many times it happens. Rye turns, pinning her to the wall, his hip pressed hard into her lower belly as her heart lights up. With her head thrown back, she sucks her lungs full and Rye slaps a hand over her mouth to silence her involuntary screech.

Every nerve in her body immolates, triggering a fiery orgasm deep in her over-sensitive sex. It isn’t good at all and tears burst from her eyes as she tries to bite her way free of Rye’s hand.

As her sight fails, the building rocks through the biggest explosion yet and Rye’s other hand shields her wide open eyes from a cascade of falling dust and ceiling tiles. Angel can’t breathe and the dust thickens, sending her into a terrified primal reaction to Rye’s big body and the hands over her face. Gun in hand, she strikes out.

“Angel,” he growls as she recovers from the horrible jolt to her system. Rye holds his fist over hers on the pistol grip as he groans in her ear. “Easy.”

“Rye,” she wheezes but her legs tremble and she blinks as he brushes dirt from her eyes.

“You came hard,” Rye sounds close himself as he shoves her pistol back in her holster and fastens the snap.

“You put it in my fucking neck, Rye.”

“You’re a big girl.”

Angel shudders as her strength returns. When she holds her still hands over Rye’s chest he rests his lips in her hair.

“Tong thinks the schoolhouse is empty. Their comm system is still blocking us up close so we can’t be sure.”

She nods. For two days they’ve been careful in the dead zone around the elementary school.

“I’ll keep an eye on you then you’re on your own until Tong gets there,” Rye steps away, the lover in him shuts down as he checks his weapons. Angel does the same, thoroughly buzzing inside. For the moment, she forgets their intimacy and the stimulants take control.

“You’re going to suck their data banks dry, Angel,” Rye orders but his next words don’t foreshadow the breakup she sees coming after her confession of love. “You’re going to prove a first gen can pull her weight in my unit. You’re going to prove you deserve to be here permanently, with me.”

“I’ll do my job.”

She can barely acknowledge his words, the closest he’s come to expressing he wants her and with his comm line open to Tong it isn’t a private sentiment.

“Go.”

The initial effects of the stimulant pass, allowing Angel to focus. Artificial endorphins and relaxation from sex combine to help her bring up models of Aphid computer systems and security protocols with unusual clarity.

Easy job, she tells herself. The chemicals in her system drive out random thoughts that might intrude on her orders. Hack the Aphid comms, steal what she can and make Rye proud.

Be a good soldier, Angel. Show them you’re not a pretty liability.

She's overheard the talk from some of Rye’s men. After pulling off some minor miracles on previous assignments, she landed a temp spot with Rye’s unit and it’s just what she expected. She stays out of the way while the real soldiers work, moves faster than Scarlet the medic yells when things get hot and jacks herself into whatever Aphid data port they shove her at.

It doesn’t take up all her time.

With access to the advanced and well appointed labs on Rye’s home base on
The Barrington
, she spends her spare time duplicating Aphid tech and has several untested hybrid data blocks in her belly pack. Tech that may be able to draw Aphid data out and digest the mess of ones and zeros into something Core can use other than more mysterious ones and zeros. All without the constant babysitting of a biological interface like her.

When she steps from the building, the world outside no longer resembles the one she left half an hour before. The summer breeze moves toward the explosions, clearing the air and fist-sized chunks of demolished buildings dot the grass veined road. Fire and gunshots sound to the north where the town hall used to stand and she gets down behind a rusted truck. Even so far from Earth, humans built around them so it felt like they’d never left.

“Go, Angel,” Rye shoulders his arc-rifle over the truck box, flips it to laser and squeezes off a couple of dirty, glowing rounds. The thick, two foot long sub-rifle doesn’t recoil so the scent of hot plasteel is the only evidence it fired, other than the rounds themselves and the tight explosions three blocks away.

She doesn’t question her orders.

Even with the humans gone, the air is redolent with their overgrown flowering trees. Transplanted lilac, magnolia and wisteria exceed three times the size of their earth grown counterparts from over a century of alien nourishment. Midday sunlight, too bright for comfort, casts Angel’s harsh, short shadow as she steps out on the main street of the small town six generations of colonists called Constant.

The schoolhouse stands two blocks south and Angel runs low and fast enough that a mis-step would put her flat on her face. Through her earpiece, she gathers what she can from Rye and Tong’s chatter as Rye gets up to speed and takes command of the offensive around the burning town hall. Nobody knows what caused the explosions but it drew in the Aphids and in turn Rye’s Core soldiers. As she nears the schoolhouse she’s on her own. Aphid comm signals overwhelm her earpiece and over the last dozen meters she hears nothing but hiss.

Angel squats by the open school door, pressed flat against the wall. Smoke and the slow bend in the road hide the truck and Rye though the hisses and reports of the firefight still reach her.

Gun in hand, Angel crawls into the small two-story building. She knows the openings on the left and right lead to a couple of classrooms and the office. The heavy metal door at the end twists into charred chunks caused by an old battle. Not much remains of the ivory paint since the Aphids blew it open to slaughter the children and teachers who sought refuge on the second floor twenty years earlier.

Halfway down the hall, Angel spots what she came for and pulls her useless earpiece free so the buzzing doesn’t distract her from any noises which would warn she’s not alone.

The main computer station and thick rectangular keypad occupy the top of the only unbroken office desk. Like most Aphid tech, it accommodates a two handed grip. Finger control buttons and touch-pads on the sides in concert with pressure from the thumbs on the top send three dimensional data to the Aphid CPU.

In a few minutes, the three displays glow. The characters hide, indecipherable from the background and Angel pulls out special polarized glasses to filter the extra light. The data materializes before her in three dimensional arrays of angular text, the reason for the three dimensional grip on the keypad.

A small explosion to the north causes her to freeze until she’s certain the rattle of falling debris doesn’t conceal an Aphid. For a few seconds there’s nothing then a minute rasp of boots against the dirty floor.

Angel releases the keypad and pushes herself against the wall to hide. Keeping her gun in reach, she pulls out a small silver tablet the size of a pack of cigarettes. With her eyes on the classroom door, she taps in an access code then another set of numbers which auto-program the unit. It warms quickly at her touch as it reads the comm frequencies and starts to produce a counter signal to partially mask the ones Core needs for scanning and comms. If the Aphids don’t notice then they won’t come to investigate the cause.

As she slides the tablet onto the desk beside her gun, she lets her lungs empty at the sight of Tong in the doorway. He blocks as much light from the hall as Rye can and if he wasn’t facing her it would be impossible to tell which brother he is since his thin, sleazy moustache is the only way he’s different from his twin. He steps in, back to the wall and scans around with his gun like he’s clearing the room.

Bad news.

If Tong acts like she isn’t there then he’s been followed. He’ll stay ahead of the Aphids, likely a small team of three, and set up an ambush. Before he steps out she stands at the keypad, well aware she’s nearly out of time.

Angel draws a second silver customizable tablet from her pack and activates it. She doesn’t program it for recording yet. Data storage is her job but she’s been distracted by Tong. Rye and his brother couldn’t behave more differently but the two are as close as Angel and her own brother had been. Instead of holding the Aphid data in the drives which share her ribcage with her lungs, she can use the tablet and help Tong.

If she can prove she can fight in close and get the data then she’ll be a permanent addition to Rye’s unit.

Once the zipper above her left jacket cuff opens, Angel grabs the thick tan mole on the inside of her wrist and pulls out her data tether then she rubs spit in the maintenance port on the keypad. During the two seconds it takes to reboot, she shoves the mole in the port and silently prays.

The display stays green when the Aphid keypad reconnects to the computer.

Angel programs the data cube while she overwhelms the Aphid system with maintenance protocols and watches as a single light starts to blink.

Holy shit, it works. She doesn’t have to stand here like a target while her internal servers micro manage the data retrieval. Those internal computers, hardwired to her brain, take advantage of billions of neurons she doesn’t use. No portable device has ever had the power to pull it off but this one does.

Angel squats out of sight as more footsteps enter the school. While the Aphids try hard to be quiet, they must still believe Core scanners are blocked and Tong doesn’t know they’re coming. Angel shoves her earpiece in place. The hiss remains but in the background she can make out the occasional syllable of human speech, each one stronger than the last. The clicky sounds of quiet Aphid talk reach her as she sends a signal to the Aphid computer to expel her tether. While she has an affinity for Aphid tech, she’s never learned a word of their convoluted and subtle spoken language.

As the tether retracts, three Aphids pass down the hall. They don’t look inside and stop talking as they reach the bottom of the stairs. Angel slips silently to the door and peeks out just in time to see their feet disappear up the landing to the second floor. A scuffle breaks out overhead. With her small pistol pointed at the ceiling, she unsnaps her dagger and follows.

Chapter 2