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

and found the damaged circuits. She snapped a few tiny levers back into place. And felt … nothing. She shook her head violently side to side, and her interface was reignited by the kinetic energy of the action. She felt the familiar buzz in her neurons, and she threw up her arms in joy. She had an urge to call her mother, the Fleet, anyone, but stifled it, remembering her signal might be detected. Instead, she set about searching the ethernet for proper escape music, or maybe what she needed was a direct link to the mind of a footballer on Mars sprinting in low gravity; that would lift her heart. She settled on a channel for Mars’s premier stadium. Instead of a direct link to a footballer’s brain, she heard an announcement: “The Republic has failed to heed the Luddeccean warnings of alien invasion. We will be alone in our struggle, but as Luddecceans we will prevail!” Noa blinked. Madness, obviously. She searched for a channel on Venus she liked for its dance music and got the same announcer, this time warning, “Disconnect your neural interfaces lest they be compromised by alien influence.” Noa felt her heart tumble as she skittered through the stations. All were broadcasting the same announcer—all the off-world and planet-side channels had been compromised.
    Swearing, and almost crying, she plucked the chip from the open bundle, put it into a spare slot, and immediately tuned into the Luddeccean secure channel—as she should have done immediately, she scolded herself. She heard a different man’s voice, low and sonorous. “Team four has joined the pursuit, target will soon be down.”
    Belatedly, Noa realized the chase above her head was still going on.
    Another voice crackled in her brain. “Should we give up the search for the lost prisoner?”
    Noa held her breath.
    “Negative, do not abort the search. Commander Noa Sato is considered a high security risk and extremely dangerous.”
    Noa’s hackles rose. “Curse of bloody competency,” she grumbled.
    “We don’t have her individual port reading,” one of the voices said. “She must not have a locator.”
    Noa did have a locator—a Fleet supplied one. If there were any Fleet close by, they would have detected her. But, of course, the Galactic Fleet had devices that scrambled signals and even location. They didn’t want shot-down personnel being trailed by terrorists. Unless they had a Fleet decoder—or until she tried to call for help—she would be as invisible as a phantom.
    Another voice chimed in, “The screw jammed into her port should have a short-range locator. Try homing in on that.”
    Noa’s eyes widened. She looked at the piece of polymer and metal at her feet. It was big enough to contain a locator chip. Picking it up, she hurled it through the air. And then, after stuffing some bread and snow in her mouth and letting it warm, she accessed some data her parents had made her download when she was just a girl. For an instant she worried that the ethernet bands used by her GPS would also have been hijacked—but a map seemingly etched in light appeared in the air before her—an illusion created by data as it interacted with her visual cortex. She saw her location as a single, red blinking light in a three-dimensional landscape. She concentrated—saved the data locally in case the GPS was hijacked, and then focused on finding the closest human habitation. There was a winter retreat town exactly twenty clicks away. She could make it … if she didn’t freeze to death.
    Curling her hands against her stomach for warmth, she set off through the pines. Just a few minutes later, Noa heard a howl so loud, it made every hair on the back of her neck stand on end. She heard a crack, snow fell all around her, and she ducked. A branch as thick as her leg landed not six steps away. The howling continued. Noa looked up. Where she stood there was only a breeze, but beyond the shelter of the pines’ great trunks, the wind was whipping the tree