Dark Angels Rising Read online

  Moments before the flyers were due to be called to their machines, Blind decided to come over. It was a distraction neither of them welcomed, but his approach seemed friendly enough.

  “I just wanted to say no hard feelings and to wish you well in the race,” he said.

  Taylor, deep in her race zone, barely acknowledged him. Mosi was prepared to be civil at least, but then Blind did something unforgiveable. In what appeared to be an unconscious action, performed without malice, he ran his fingers along one of the falcon’s support struts.

  Nobody but a flyer and their crew were permitted to touch a rig in the build up to a race. It was against both protocol and superstition.

  “Fuck off, Blind!” Mosi said, balling his fists and struggling not to punch the man.

  “I… I’m sorry.” Blind backed away, looking both suitably embarrassed by his action and dismayed by the ferocity of Mosi’s response. He hurried back to where the Lanner Team was gathered.

  “Relax,” Taylor said. “He didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Maybe.” Mosi was already giving the machine another once over, running scanners and diagnostic sensors across the strut Blind had defiled. Everything seemed normal. Perhaps it had been just a thoughtless mistake after all.

  Despite this, Mosi couldn’t escape a sense of foreboding as he helped Taylor climb into the racing harness.

  He always got a rush at the start of a race. There was something magnificent about the way the field took to the air and then plummeted downward – a flock of hurtling raptors – and the huge roar from the crowd as they set off. Then came the magical moment when the falcons opened their wings, all at fractionally different times dictated by each flyer’s race strategy.

  The plateau provided the perfect vantage point, and viewed from above the sight always brought to mind for Mosi a field of flowers opening in time-lapse rapidity, as each competitor unveiled their rig’s liveried wings. Team Lanner, who boasted four birds in the race, had a mobile design which started as dark grey against paler grey scalloping – in imitation of their namesake’s wings, but then rippled through a random sequence of colour changes. Set on top of this in unchanging white was a single letter representing the first letter of the pilot’s name. Mosi had always found the choice over the top and garish. Taylor’s livery, on the other hand, could not have been simpler: the black silhouette of a falcon set against a plain blue wing to represent the open sky.

  Of course he looked for her bird first. She came out of the stoop in fifth or sixth place – not that it mattered too much at this early stage. Difficult to judge the varying heights from this perspective, but fortunately the army of flying cameras – nearly three hundred of them in total – were on hand to catch every detail. Some were stationed at crucial parts of the course, others followed the race or focussed on individual falcons. The watching public wouldn’t miss a thing.

  Already those on the plateau were retreating back to the viewing lounges, where they would settle back in comfort, safely out of the wind, and enjoy their individual 3D feeds, offering a choice of viewing perspectives which they could switch between at will.

  Mosi lingered, as was his wont, to watch with naked eye as the field negotiated the first hazard, the Spire Turn. Only as he saw Taylor emerge safely and disappear from direct line of sight among the peaks did he activate his own viewer.

  Sonje, who always started quickly, was in the lead, while Taylor came out from the Spire in fourth, having swooped past another independent, Ketta, in the turn. Mosi had seen something that worried him, though, a suspicion that grew once he used his viewer to zoom out and get a broader picture.

  Taylor was bracketed by two other Team Lanner flyers, identified by the bold white T and N on their wings as Tammi and Niall respectively.

  Neither showed any inclination to catch the flyers ahead of them. Instead they seemed more intent on shepherding Taylor. Lanner were working as the team they claimed to be and had clearly identified Taylor as the principle threat to their prospects.

  One flyer could never have done it. Taylor would simply have slipped past them at some point and left them behind, but two working in concert… Sure enough, as Mosi watched, Niall overtook the hampered Taylor, who now had two blockers directly in front of her. To add insult to injury, at the next turn Ketta sailed past all three of them.

  Tammi and Niall were sacrificing their own chances in the race to ensure victory for Sonje.

  Taylor would be livid – this went against everything she believed falcon racing should be about. Mosi watched as she dipped and soared, trying to get past these mobile obstacles, but one of them always went with her, allowing the other to move a little ahead to be in the way even if she succeeded in giving the first the slip.

  No one else caught them, but Sonje continued to pull away at the front.

  Disaster struck shortly before the halfway point. There was a particularly tricky turn called the Funnel, where flyers had to negotiate a canyon defined by a long concave-curved rock face with a jutting overhang that played havoc with wind currents. The best approach was to come in hard with wings tilted at around thirty-five degrees, but Taylor must have been desperate by this point, seeing the Funnel as her opportunity to get past both the Lanners. She tilted her wings at closer to forty degrees, taking her in a tighter turn and away from the rock face where winds were more predictable, towards the more irregular far wall.

  Niall reacted to the bold move, adjusting his own angle and coming across to block her, but he was a fraction too slow and a bit too aggressive. His manoeuvre put the two birds on a collision course. Mosi could only look on in horror, anticipating what was to come but unable to do a thing about it. The repellors kicked in at the last moment, as they were designed to, flinging the two falcons apart.

  Niall’s bird started to tumble, dropping like a stone. Mosi lost sight of him immediately because he was concentrating on the other bird. Taylor was thrown towards the inner rock face… and she struck it.

  That should never happen. Where are the repellors?

  Mosi watched in horror as the falcon he had worked on with such devotion for years came apart, and the woman he loved plummeted towards the rocks that waited below.

  “She died doing what she loved best,” might have been true but it didn’t help, no matter how often he heard the phrase in the days that followed.

  Team Lanner sent a big bunch of white flowers. Many people sent flowers. The whole place was swamped with fucking flowers. They didn’t help either.

  Niall perished in the same incident that claimed Taylor, giving Team Lanner their own reason to mourn. The race went on despite the tragedy and Sonje was crowned King of the Mountains. Mosi heard these facts without caring. Of course the race hadn’t been stopped – falcon racing was a dangerous sport; two riders had died in separate incidents earlier in the season. Tragic, but the ever-present sense of risk was one of the factors that made the sport so popular.

  Four riders perished this season. It had been five the previous year.

  The woman who gave him reason to breathe had just become a statistic.

  He fell apart.

  Thanks to Taylor’s success he wasn’t short of credit to fuel his binges, and he set about running through money with abandon: alcohol. Stims, VR trips – the more extreme the better – anything to put a buffer between him and the real world.

  There were times when he believed that the only reason he hadn’t taken his own life was because he lacked the courage to do so. At others he wondered if somewhere deep down a spark of hope still lingered that, despite everything, things might somehow get better.

  It took an assassination attempt to make him face the fact that neither was entirely true. He hadn’t ended his own life for the simple reason there was still one thing he needed to do before he died.

  He could still see the consternation on Leesa and Jen’s faces. They had popped up out of nowhere to pull him from a jury-rigged VR death trap
over at Pedre’s arcade – a favourite haunt in those dark days – identified an organisation called ‘Saflik’ as being responsible, and then seen him refuse to join their cause. They couldn’t believe it, but he couldn’t join them; not yet and maybe not ever. He had some unfinished business to attend to.

  The official enquiry ruled that Taylor’s death had been an accident, while acknowledging that Team Lanner’s tactics were a contributory factor. Mosi didn’t believe it for a minute.

  Blind’s words kept coming back to him: you won’t be winning another, and then there was that inappropriate touching of the falcon’s strut immediately before the race. What if it hadn’t been so innocent? Team Lanner had resources that Mosi could only dream of, was it so implausible that they might have developed a means of neutralising the repellors that was beyond his ability to spot, ensuring that they malfunctioned during the race? The repellors were newly fitted and Mosi had checked them a dozen times prior to the start. They had been working earlier in the race yet failed at the vital moment.

  Whether through deliberate sabotage or callous tactics, there was only one person responsible for Taylor’s death: Mr Team Lanner himself, Cory Blind.

  Leesa and Jen left him reluctantly after the incident at Pedre’s. It was obvious they didn’t believe his promises to join them when he could and they were right not to. He had drunk away the best part of half a year. Nearly dying had sobered him up enough to start noticing the outside world again. The first thing he noticed was that falcon racing had returned, the new season already under way.

  The world moved on, without him, without Taylor.

  The Sun Peaks Trophy was always the second big event on the race calendar. Mosi was a familiar face and no one questioned him when he turned up at the start plateau. There was an unusual tension in the air, though that had nothing to do with his presence. There was talk of postponing the race – the winds were uncharacteristically subdued – but Mosi knew they would have to be all but absent before an expensive decision like that was taken. Everyone would prefer an exciting race, but even a dull one was preferable to no race at all.

  Echoes of Taylor surrounded him at every turn – only a year ago they had been here together. Her laughter, her smile, her scent pursued him as he made his way across to where Team Lanner had established themselves. As usual, they weren’t hard to spot.

  He didn’t go there with any intention beyond confronting Blind and getting the truth out of him, an admission of guilt. They were so wrapped up in prepping for the race, as if nothing had ever happened, that no one spotted him until the last minute. Once they had, Blind stepped forward.

  “Mosi, it’s good to see you around the circuit again. I understand…”

  “You bastard! You rigged it, didn’t you. You murdered her to claim the crown!”

  “Now, Mosi, you’re still grieving…”

  Mosi hit him, cutting off the parade of platitudes. The blow wasn’t premeditated, though perhaps that wasn’t entirely true; certainly he’d pictured himself punching Blind a hundred times, he just hadn’t realised he was going to do so there and then.

  What happened next was a little hazy. Blind had pushed him away, forcefully, and he’d staggered back, half falling against something. Was that when he’d grabbed the solder blade? He couldn’t remember, but when he punched Blind a second time it wasn’t just his knuckles that sank into the corporate man’s belly.

  Then they were on him – a whole mass of Lanner crew, punching, kicking, forcing him down. The last thing he recalled was his cheek pressed against the ground as something struck the back of his head.

  He came to in a dark cubbyhole, barely large enough to contain him. He didn’t cry out, didn’t hammer against the walls, he simply sat there and replayed events in his mind. He didn’t even know whether Blind was alive or dead.

  They came for him soon after. Not the police as he might have expected, but a squad of muscle-bound goons. They wrenched him out into fading daylight – the race clearly over long ago, the plateau empty apart from one black flyer. He was bundled inside and flown to the Elders only knew where, after which they fetched him to the meat room. To Vissecz.

  Mosi thought he knew all there was to know about pain, but Vissecz introduced him to whole new meanings of the word. He was taken to the brink of passing out, revived, and then taken back again.

  Finally, mercifully, he was allowed to tip over that brink and into temporary oblivion. This is just the beginning, Vissecz murmured as consciousness fled. Gather your strength. Tomorrow we’ll get properly acquainted.

  Plans, however, had evidently changed, because now as he swam back to a degree of awareness, he was clearly somewhere else. Had he dreamed half waking before, was he really… on a ship?

  Mosi blinked, determined to focus properly. He tried to lift his hand, just to confirm that he really wasn’t chained to anything, not any more. The limb responded listlessly. Finally he managed a semblance of clarity. Only then did he realise that he wasn’t alone; a figure stood at his shoulder.

  “You’re mostly healed, so we’ve had Raider bring you round,” said a voice he had never expected to hear again.

  He forced his head to lift up off the pillow and squinted, his mind struggling to process what he thought he was seeing. “Captain, he managed at last, “is that really you?”

  Three

  Drake still felt like an imposter. Over the past year he had struggled to maintain his assumed identity as an unflappable and resourceful field operative for First Solar Bank, sensing that he had outgrown that persona but unable to see a way of moving on. Now, when he had been gifted the opportunity to leave Drake behind for good, he was finding it hard to think of himself as anyone else. The irony didn’t escape him.

  A decade had passed since he disbanded the Dark Angels and mothballed the Ion Raider. More than once in the intervening years he had found himself questioning his reasons for doing so, but he knew deep down that it had been the right decision taken at the right time.

  Their notoriety had grown to the point where even the vastness of space felt too restrictive. Life took on a constant ambient level of stress, as an increasing number of worlds were closed to them and, more often than not, disguise became their only recourse. The crew had grown individually wealthy thanks to their exploits but they were getting precious little time to enjoy that wealth, plus the strain of being ‘the Dark Angels’ was beginning to tell. He never had liked the name much, but after a young girl whose life Leesa had saved called them that and the media picked up on it, there was no escape.

  No, he had no regrets; even Raider had backed his decision to draw a line under the Angels when he did. The Elder aspect that came to inhabit the ship’s computer when the Dark Angels were born had been so much a part of everything they did back then; it had been his confidante as he wrestled with the issue, supporting his decision, encouraging it even. Drake had been left with a sense that Raider believed the Dark Angels’ story had reached a natural conclusion for the time being, but not necessarily for ever.

  In the years that followed, he slowly came to terms with the thought that this nebulous sense of ‘business unfinished’ had been nothing more than his own imagining, a placebo to make the disbanding of his crew more acceptable.

  Now, he wasn’t so sure.

  Whatever the truth of that, he had always thought that his return, if and when it ever happened, would be more… memorable: a joyous homecoming, a triumphant restoration of how things ought to be. Instead he felt only numb, detached, an outsider looking in.

  Here he was, back where he belonged: aboard the Ion Raider with members of his old crew around him – people who knew him as Cornische rather than Drake – so why did he find it so hard to resume the mantle of the man they expected him to be?

  Perhaps while inhabiting the role of a dapper banking agent he had outgrown Cornische as well, without ever realising it. Or maybe it was just that events had been moving at such break-neck pa
ce that he was finding it hard to keep up.

  He had thought he was dead. That was the truth of it.

  His jump from the cache chamber on Enduril II had been blind, motivated by the need to escape and with no notion of where the Elder relic he had activated would deposit him. When he emerged on a barren world with too thin an atmosphere to support human life he had genuinely believed that was it, his time was up. His last desperate gamble had been no more than a delaying tactic in face of the inevitable.

  He would never forget the mercifully few moments spent on that world, the realisation of his impotence: fully aware of what was happening to him and powerless to affect the outcome; the headache, the nausea, the growing pressure on his chest as breathing became more difficult, the sucking in of great lungfuls in a futile attempt to scour precious oxygen from the sparse atmosphere, the sense of impending suffocation that he could liken only to claustrophobia, for all that he was in a wide open space. In the end his legs were no longer able to hold him upright. The overwhelming despair, the realisation of defeat that swept over him as he collapsed to the ground, remained vivid, seared into his memory, haunting his dreams whenever sleep claimed him…

  There would be no escape this time, no last minute rescue. This was his end and no one would even know what had become of him. In many ways, that seemed fitting.

  Then, the sight of feet striding towards him; the impossible, inconceivable promise of rescue that they represented.

  Hel N… He dismissed her appearance as mirage, the last desperate sparking of a dying brain starved of oxygen and stubbornly refusing to accept the universe’s judgement. Of all the people in all the universe, why her?

  Even when he felt himself lifted up he could only interpret it as another step closer to the end, this sense of floating…

  Despite Leesa’s timely intervention it had been touch and go. If not for Raider’s ministrations, his story would have ended there on that unnamed world teetering on the very edge of the galaxy. What made it worse was that in a very real sense the rescue represented the beginning of his problems rather than the end of them, and this time his problems were everyone’s.