Archangel Down: Archangel Project. Book One Read Online Free Page A

her out. The wagon inclined more steeply and the back opened up. Her frozen companions started to slide into the open earth. Noa could hear shouts of surprise and alarm over the engine roars. Had they seen her? Tightening her grip, she waited for bullets … but none came … and the wagon stopped its incline. She looked down. The wagon was tilted at a seventy-degree angle, and there were still bodies at the bottom. She felt her fingers start to slip. Once she could have clung here like a xinbat for hours, but she was so weak. Her arms shook with cold and weariness. She heard more shouts, and then her fingers slipped from the front edge. Noa crashed onto the bodies below her, sending a few more toppling into the pit, but didn’t slip in herself. She blinked, and found herself staring at a body of a woman whose mouth was frozen open in horror. Noa looked up fast, knowing that strange woman’s face would be embedded in her consciousness forever. She shook her head and focused on the present and surviving. She couldn’t see anyone outside the wagon, but she heard shouting. Above her head she heard the whir of antigrav.
    There were more shouts, and the sound of engines turning off. One of the graveyard workers shouted, “The alien invasion is here! Quick, to your stations.”
    Noa’s brow furrowed. What the solar core? She was ranked high enough in the Galactic Fleet to be privy to the intel the public didn’t ordinarily hear: terrorist attacks that were thwarted and not thwarted, plagues that didn’t respond to standard antivirals, antibiotics, or radiation treatments; the latest in quantum drives, hidden jump stations, and all intel on extraterrestrial life. There were no aliens—well, not the kind that were sentient space-going beings or that would be anytime soon. There was plenty of blue-green algae, though. She frowned. She’d had to fill out many a report on blue-green algae in her time in the fleet. The Galactic Republic was so concerned with not disrupting the “natural habitat” of any potentially sentient being that it went to great lengths to prove that even the bloody-universal-blue-green algae they found all over the galaxy didn’t represent a hive mind. In all the cases Noa had reviewed as first officer, it hadn’t. She felt the muscles in her neck tense and her skin heat in memory of the maze of bureaucracy she’d had to go through each time they came to a semi-habitable world and she, as Acting First Officer, had gotten the joy of compiling the reports from the scientists. She should have stayed a pilot.
    Shaking snow off her shoulders, she took a deep breath. It didn’t matter what the crazy Luddecceans believed about aliens, what mattered was escape. She scrambled to the edge of the wagon and peered over. Not a human in sight. Hauling herself over the edge, she slid down to the dumper platform, and jumped to the ground. Overhead she heard cannon fire and more antigrav engines. Instead of an alien vessel, she saw a single civilian flight vehicle—the kind that could just get far enough out of atmosphere to traverse the globe rapidly or rendezvous with Time Gate 8. It was being rapidly pursued by one of the Luddeccean Guard’s ships.
    Noa didn’t have time to wonder who it was. Ducking her head, she ran. She heard more cannon fire in the sky—so close the ground reverberated beneath her feet and her ears rang. But no one fired at her. She couldn’t have planned a more brilliant decoy strategy. Threading her way between hillocks, she didn’t stop until her heart felt like it would beat out of her chest and she was well into the trees. Her lungs burned and felt like they were filled with shards of glass. Her legs felt like they were made of rubber. Panting, she stooped and took out the bundle. She didn’t reach for food first; she reached for the pliers.
    Moments later, the bolt in her neural interface was discarded in the snow at her feet. With trembling fingers, she reached into the data port