Dark Angels Rising Page 17

  “And in those transitions he can tweak things, take away a wall that’s in the way, for example, but it comes back again when he stops,” Jen added.

  “That sounds outrageous.”

  “Wait till you see him actually do it. Outrageous is as good a word as any. In this crowd, Jen and I are the normal ones, trust me.”

  “Yeah, of course you are. Why ‘Frame’, though, where did the name come from?”

  “That’s down to Kyle – your predecessor as Ramrod,” Jen explained. “First time he saw Billy do his tinkering, he said it was like watching a really ancient movie one frame at a time, with the continuity out of synch. The name stuck.”

  “Actually, Billy’s a bit like Jen in one sense, in that the basic strobetech has melded with his body, so he can produce the effect to a limited extent even without his suit, but the suit amplifies things enormously. He’s much more effective and in control when wearing it.”

  “If you call the technology ‘strobetech’, why isn’t Billy called Strobe?”

  Jen shrugged. “I guess he liked Frame better.”

  Mosi wandered into the galley, looking as if he could have done with another hour or two in bed. He grunted a ‘good morning’ and shuffled over to the autochef, coming across to join them a moment later carrying a mug of strong coffee and a small stack of crisped bacon atop a style of flatbread he favoured.

  Leesa sipped at her citrus drink, which was cooling rapidly to the point where it no longer scalded her throat on the way down, and glanced at the plate in front of her, where a half-eaten slice of hi-fibre toast topped with smoked fish lay abandoned.

  “We’re still a good few days out from Lenbya,” she said to Nate – Lenbya was situated in human space but at the fringe, where few people ventured unless they had good reason to. “That gives us the opportunity to complete your training.”

  “I thought I was doing okay,” he replied, sounding overly defensive.

  “You are, you’re doing brilliantly,” she said quickly. “At the moment you’re one hell of a threat to your enemies and only a minor threat to us, but we’d like to downgrade that to ‘negligible’.”

  “It’s just a matter of honing your control,” Jen joined in, giving Leesa a quick irritated glare before smiling encouragement at Nate. “The more you practice, the more natural it will all come to you. I can take this morning’s session, if that’s okay with everyone – it’s not as if I’ve anything else to do.”

  Mosi held his hands up defensively. “Hey, don’t look at me when it comes to training. You two are the fighters. Naj and I are more on the scouting side of things.”

  Leesa shrugged. “Sure, why not?” She wanted to give the engines a further once over in any case, just to make certain the parts salvaged from the Night Hammer ship were holding up. Not that there was much she could do about it at this juncture if they weren’t, but she enjoyed the tinkering.

  “Right, that’s settled then,” Jen said, standing up and slapping Nate on the back. “I’ll see you in the gym in fifteen minutes.”

  Nate was feeling distinctly awkward as he waited for Jen to arrive at the gym. She had seemed perfectly okay with him at breakfast, but that was in company. How would she be with him when they were alone? On the other hand, she had volunteered to take the training session, so clearly she wasn’t trying to avoid him. He didn’t know whether to say anything or just ignore it and trust they could both move on.

  He was still undecided when she showed up, a few moments later, which didn’t prevent him from blurting out, “About last night…?”

  “Saavi, you mean?”

  “No! I mean the meal… after the meal.”

  “Nate, it happened. It was just a kiss. I hope we can both put that moment behind us and still work together, otherwise we’ve got a problem.”

  “No problem,” he said quickly, relieved at how pragmatic she was being. “That’s fine by me.”

  So why did he feel disappointed alongside the relief?

  “Good. Let’s crack on, then.”

  The morning session was all about focus. Nate had always assumed that Ramrod was like a human battering ram, that his suit gave him extraordinary strength and was robust enough to withstand deadly force of varying types – which was what most people thought. While that still stood as a summary, the truth proved to be a little more complex.

  He had been surprised to discover that the ‘suit’ was nothing more than a skeletal frame and a helmet – which immediately scuppered the myth of it being woven from impenetrable material. In fact, the frame generated an energy field which surrounded the wearer and was activated by movement. The tighter that field remained to the wearer’s body, the stronger it made them seem and the greater the protection it afforded. It all came down to a combination of momentum to generate the field and concentration to focus it. If he relaxed, the field would dissipate, spreading out and weakening. If he focussed on holding the field close to him, he could literally run through walls.

  The part he struggled with was maintaining that level of concentration for any length of time. It had to be relentless; the moment he allowed himself to be distracted, the moment his focus turned elsewhere, the field would spread, leaving him correspondingly weaker and more vulnerable.

  It was exhausting. “No one told me that being a Dark Angel would be this hard!” he complained.

  Jen grinned. “Hey, you chose to be Ramrod.”

  “Is it too late to change my mind? Remind me again, what does that Quill character do?”

  “Something lame, as I recall. Are you ready for the next one?”

  “No, but that’s not gonna stop you, is it?

  “Not a chance.”

  He hated the next exercise. He was jogging down dimly lit streets. A series of targets presented themselves at random intervals from random directions – some emerging from the ground, some from walls, others seeming to materialise out of the very air, and he had to strike each one without stopping. That would have been tricky enough in itself, but, just to make things interesting, each target was surrounded by a ring of fragile discs, and he was expected to hit the target without shattering any of the discs. To stand any chance of doing that, especially with the smaller targets, he had to hit them dead centre while keeping Ramrod’s energy field as tightly focussed as possible.

  To start with, he was rubbish, shattering more of the peripheral discs than not, but he got better, and was pretty pleased with his progress, until it started to get worse again.

  “Okay, that’s enough for now,” Jen said, mercifully. “And don’t worry about the last part, that was just fatigue setting in.”

  “No kidding,” Nate said, bent over with hands on his knees as he attempted to catch his breath.

  Something had been bothering him, and Jen was his best bet of getting a straight answer. After they’d both taken a dry shower, he blurted out, “What exactly are the Dark Angels?”

  In the face of her puzzled frown, he continued, “I’ve agreed to join up and am now in training… and it occurs to me that I know next to nothing about who you – who we – are. Not really.”

  “You’ve seen the holodarama,” she said, grinning. “I thought you were the expert.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Okay, so what do you want to know?”

  “How it all started, why it started.”

  “I wasn’t part of the original crew who first discovered Lenbya,” Jen said. “I joined later. If you want to hear about that, you’d be better off asking Leesa.”

  “You’ve been there, though, to Lenbya I mean?”

  “Yes, just once, when I first became Shadow.”

  “Start with that, then, if you’re willing.”

  “Not much to tell, to be honest. I hooked up with the Dark Angels by accident – in the right place at the right time, sort of thing – at least that’s what I thought at the time. Having seen what Saavi can do since, I’m not so sure. She was d
ifferent then – the ‘adult’ Saavi – to the version of her you’ve seen: more involved, more a part of things, less insular. Anyway, I used to be in the military but I wasn’t any more, the Dark Angels were looking for a new recruit and I seemed a good fit, so they invited me to join. This was in the early days, but I’d heard rumour of the Dark Angels – the mystique had begun to form around them even then. I was at a loose end, looking for some excitement in my life, and they were offering to provide it, so I said ‘yes’. And they took me to Lenbya.”

  “What was that like?”

  “Nothing I’d experienced before. I’d never seen the inside of a cache chamber at that point, but it was a bit like stepping into one of those but neater, more organised. I got to visit a couple of cache chambers after that, and they were both cluttered, the organisation that might have been there once upon a time having become muddled over the centuries, but not here. Everything was neat and tidy and in its proper place. And the whole thing was huge. I only got to see one chamber but it was clear that there were others, lots of others.

  “So Lenbya isn’t a single chamber, but rather a whole bunch of them joined together?”

  “Possibly, or maybe there’s one huge central chamber and several satellite rooms and I was taken to one of those, I don’t know.”

  “And the tech that enabled you to become Shadow was waiting for you in that chamber?”

  “Essentially, but it wasn’t as simple as that. There was this long counter, and I was invited to walk its length, to see what I reacted to. Arranged along it were these neat little packages of tech and clothing and… things.

  “What sort of things?”

  “All sorts. Weapons, oddments, jewels…”

  “And each parcel represented a potential Angel?”

  “Yes, but none of them really grabbed me. It was all a bit overwhelming to be honest. I felt the pressure of expectation, you know? The captain and Leesa had brought me there, but they then stood back, leaving me to browse, and I knew I was supposed to choose one of these parcels, but none of them stood out. I thought I’d end up having to just pick one at random, to keep everyone happy, but that didn’t feel right. Not for something as big as this.

  “I’d almost reached the end of the counter and had just about given up, when I saw it. A dish of deep ebony darkness, which looked like oil. That was it. No fancy suit, no exotic tech, nothing that resembled a gadget or a weapon, just a shallow dish of perfectly still liquid. When I gazed into it, I saw my own reflection, but in negative – don’t ask me how. The simplicity of it fascinated me in a way that nothing else in the chamber had. Almost before I realised, I was reaching out to touch the dish, to dip my finger into the darkness.

  “As soon as my fingertip touched the surface the liquid started to flow into me – not over me, I couldn’t see it run up my hand or anything like that, but into me. I could feel it coursing through me veins, making my hand, my arm and then my whole body tingle, The sense of energy, the thrill of it, was almost erotic, but more intense than even that. One touch with a single finger was enough to draw the dish’s contents entirely into me. Nothing remained on the dish, not a single drop.”

  “And you were Shadow.”

  “And I was Shadow,” she confirmed.

  He pondered that for a moment, then said, “One thing I still don’t get. I’ve always discounted Lenbya as a myth, an old spacer’s tale, but if the place is real, which clearly it must be, how has it stayed hidden for so long? I mean if the Dark Angels found it, how come no other ship has? It’s not as if there haven’t been folk looking.”

  “Ah, now therein lies Lenbya’s greatest secret.”

  He waited for to continue, but all she did was grin.

  “Oh come on, you can’t leave me hanging like that.”

  “After lunch we’ll do a bit of work on the defensive side of things,” she said. “If you do well enough at that, I’ll tell you.”

  “Really?” Nate couldn’t help wondering if she was punishing him for that kiss after all.

  “Yes, really.”

  They dropped out of Rz late afternoon, still days short of their destination but deep within a planetary system, as close to its sun as Raider dared take them. They stayed just long enough to bury Saavi, sending her body on a trajectory that would bring her swiftly into the star’s fiery embrace.

  Nate was still mulling over what Jen had told him regarding Lenbya – evidently he’d acquitted himself well enough in the day’s final training session to merit the promised information. A pocket universe… He hadn’t even known such a thing was possible. It was hardly surprising that no other ship had stumbled upon the place; it didn’t exist – not in this reality at any rate – and could only be accessed via a specific gateway that linked it to the larger universe. Quite how the Iron Raider had ended up there was another question entirely, and one that Jen claimed she couldn’t answer. “I wasn’t there then, remember,” she told him.

  The brief ceremony in Saavi’s honour brought back memories of the last time he’d taken part in something like this. That had been for Anna, pilot and longstanding crewmember on Pelquin’s Comet. Drake and Leesa had been present then, too – Anna had lost her life during their successful cache raid, at the periphery of Xter space. The recollection was particularly uncomfortable for Nate, because it reminded him of just how ill he had felt throughout – poisoned, it later emerged, by the ship’s treacherous doctor.

  Poisoning aside, the difference between then and now was that he had known Anna, whereas Saavi he’d barely met. For most of his brief time on board she’d been closeted away in the Cloud Chamber. While he could sympathise with the grief displayed by the others, he couldn’t match it, standing mute while each Dark Angel took it in turn to say a brief sentence or two. He felt like an imposter for being there at all.

  Sleeping arrangements on the Ion Raider were much the same as on any other ship of the class, including Pelquin’s Comet, so the accommodation had hardly came as a surprise to Nate: a recessed alcove just deep enough and long enough to contain a bed and a compact cabinet for clothing and personal effects, with a small lip providing minimal personal space and a privacy screen that could be activated if wanted.

  He’d stayed in far worse.

  Nate lay in bed, his mind too restless to sleep. He still didn’t feel at home aboard the Raider. They all knew each other and he didn’t – not in this context, not even Leesa. The loss of Saavi was terrible, of course, but her funeral had only brought home just how distant he felt from the rest of the crew. It was one more thing that set him apart, and left him trying to figure out where he fitted in here. On the Comet he’d been Pelquin’s confidante. They’d shared plans and plotted the next move together. Not something that was ever going to happen with this captain.

  He’d also been the fixer. Nate would often slip off the ship as soon as they docked to organise supplies, parts, cargo, or to negotiate the more sensitive transactions and arrangements. He had contacts on many worlds and an eye for a profit, but none of that was of much use to the crew of the Ion Raider. No, they wanted him to fight, and he still wasn’t entirely sure how to feel about that.

  Pelquin would have said that he was living the dream, shipping with the Dark Angels, but for Nate the dream had begun to lose much of its sparkle. The holodrama had never been like this.

  Eventually, sleep sidled up and mugged him, but not for long. He came awake in a rush, convinced that he’d barely closed his eyes and sensing immediately that he wasn’t alone.

  A figure loomed over him. He went to move, to struggle, but stopped when he realised it was Jen.

  “Wh…?” he started to ask.

  “Shhh…” Her shush was soft, quiet; a finger lifted to her lips, then slowly lowered to his lips, before its tip gently traced a line down his chin to caress his neck.

  “I thought…” He was on the verge of saying something about her husband, but stopped himself, reckoning that was the last th
ing he wanted her thinking about just then.

  “As you pointed out, we could all be dead tomorrow,” she said, and leant forward to kiss him.

  Her lips were warm against his, her tongue small and darting. Too soon for his liking, she pulled away, but only in order to slip out of her clothes.

  For a moment, all he could do was stare. She looked stunning. Slender, toned, with narrow waist, small breasts: just perfect. She moved her arms to cover herself, in a self-conscious way that made him smile.

  He lifted the duvet, inviting her in.

  She climbed on top, straddling his waist, gazing down into his eyes a little anxiously.

  “I just hope I can remember what to do,” she whispered. “It’s been a while.”

  He reached up to run his hands down the sides of her body, feeling the contours of each rib, marvelling at the supple strength of her, the absence of any surplus. She felt vital, alive, wonderful.

  “For you and me both,” he assured her, as he sat up to kiss first one nipple then the other, loving the way she trembled slightly as he did so.

  As it turned out, both of them remembered a good deal more than they’d feared.

  They made love twice, the second time especially slow and tender. Afterwards, limbs entwined in a post-coital tangle, she asked, “Are you all right?”

  He smiled, hoping he could express just how all right he was.

  “Yeah,” he assured her. “More than all right – I’m living the dream.”

  Sixteen

  The next morning, Cornische called a meeting first thing. Nate wasn’t normally a fan of meetings, but he welcomed this one, if only because it gave him a break from training. The crew gathered in ops, which was one area where the Ion Raider definitely won out over his old ship, the Comet. Pelquin’s vessel followed the standard pattern for the class, with a small cockpit area for the pilots which was barely large enough to accommodate the two chairs and their occupants. Comets were built as trading ships and designed to be functional, with most everything reduced to a bare minimum, sacrificed to allow for as large a cargo bay as possible.