Angeli (14 page)

“I’ve been sent to bring you in.” Niko’s gaze broke to the side. “Dead or alive.”

“That’s a lie.”

“How would you know what we were told to do?” Niko said between gritted teeth. “How would you know what we’ve been reduced to? What we have to do to save our people? You, the perfect soldier, never succumbing, never setting one foot wrong until you betrayed us all—”

A quick movement behind Niko. A dull thud. He toppled to the earth with a groan. Adelita stood over him with the large binoculars in her hands.

“You smell like dog food,” she said to the prone man before kicking him in the ribs. “Pervert.”

Gregori was on her in a millisecond, scooping her up and vaulting away from Nikolas. The other man could fake unconsciousness, too.

“Gregori, stop,” she exclaimed.

Air rushed past them. His chest ached as he pressed her against it. His force field couldn’t keep the wind from buffeting them. She trembled.

“What the hell were you thinking?” he yelled, not sure why he felt the need to yell. She’d conked Nikolas in the head the first chance she’d gotten. It was obvious what she’d been thinking, and it had nothing to do with sex and lunacy.

“Me? Me? I wasn’t sure I could knock him out, with his big, iron head, but I tried anyway.” She clung to him like a second skin, her face in his neck. He didn’t need to see her expression to know she was furious. “What were you thinking, chopping his wings like kindling? We needed those.”

“No, we didn’t.” Yes, they did. His force field sucked the void.

“Where are we going in such a hurry?” She burrowed against him, shivering, which abraded his tender chest.

“Anywhere but here.”

“Would you quit being jealous? You’re going to waste all my hard work.”

Gregori slowed his trajectory. They circled several hundred yards above Niko, who was still crumpled on the ground. No signs of other Ship-lickers. Yet.

“Your hard work? I’m the one who got shot.”

“You poor man. My hero.” She pulled slightly away from him, and he could see her sneer. “Get our butts back down there so we can steal his stuff.”

Gregori supposed they could land briefly. If nothing else, he needed to insert the array he’d ripped out of Niko and put it to work detecting attackers. He hated to do it without sterilizing, but it wasn’t likely another Shipborn had germs that could harm him.

Without a word, he returned to the ridge, hovering above Niko’s body for several moments until he was certain the man was unconscious. Adelita and her binoculars packed a wallop. He’d do well to keep that in mind.

When they landed, Adelita leaped out of his arms. “Tie him up and take his gun. I’ll get the wings.”

Gregori was going to restrain Niko anyway, so it wasn’t as if he were following her orders. He slid Niko’s multipurps onto his own arms until he was banded from shoulder to wrist with silver. With great satisfaction, he slid the laser onto his right wrist, where it molded itself to his other blaster as designed.

He reprogrammed the multipurps to himself only and used a few to secure Niko’s arms and legs. Adelita, dragging the wings by the insert pack, returned to his side. She also carried her satchel. She took a bottled water from it and glanced at Gregori.

“Ready?” she asked.

“For what?”

“The questioning. I’ll play bad cop. You play worse cop.” She dumped the water on Niko, who woke with a splutter.

Gregori could tell when full awareness hit the other man. His gaze sharpened and his body tensed.

In a very astute move, he focused on Adelita instead of Gregori. “Are you possessed by Satan or just the archangel?”

“Cut the crap, alien.” Adelita shoved the empty bottle into her pack and zipped it with a hard tug. “I know everything. Especially I know what a useless, cowardly dog you are.”

Niko had the grace to look surprised. “Is that so?”

“She’s telling the truth.” Gregori shrugged. “I guess we both broke code, huh, Niko?”

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Adelita said. “We’re going to trade you back to your people for the bombs we need to save my planet. And you’d better hope you haven’t pillaged any of the women you kidnapped, or I’m going to feed you your own balls. Yours and all your horny little friends.”

Chapter Eleven

This one, this Nikolas. Adelita recognized him. Second to the archangel. Tall, dark and mysterious. He was the one with the most fan pages—and alleged sex tapes.

She didn’t like him.

The alleged sex tapes had been all right, but the man? Jackhole.

Normally she didn’t judge on appearance. In this instance, she’d make an exception. She didn’t like the way he looked. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. She didn’t like the way he was looking at Gregori.

She’d be worse cop now.

“You have pissed me off, Mr. Nikolas. You’re in for it,” she told him.

The man stared at her with eyes as brown and shady as her ex-boyfriend’s. “You’re crazy.”

Adelita dug through her backpack and located her Taser. The gun could wait. “Call me that again, punk. We’ll see who’s crazy.”

“She doesn’t like that word. You probably shouldn’t use it.” Gregori crossed his arms and watched the man who used to be one of his friends. They didn’t look too buddy-buddy now. Buddies didn’t shoot each other with laser guns.

“You’re both crazy if you think this is going to work.” Nikolas twisted until he was sitting up. His white toga had blood on it, his armor was dirty, and he didn’t look so handsome anymore. “Gregori, seriously. Bombs? Maybe a day or two after nexus formation, but three weeks? There’s no way. Do you want everyone to die instead of just the Terrans?”

“Hey,” Adelita protested. “Don’t act like we don’t matter.”

“The code exists for a reason,” Nikolas continued. “Now that you’ve broken code and told your girlfriend the truth, Ship will make you priority one and take you down before you can betray us to the entities. You know it can be done.”

“Only if Ship finds out,” Gregori said.

“You think it won’t?” Nikolas scoffed, frown lines Adelita didn’t remember from the television deepening beside his mouth. “You can’t hide anything from Ship indefinitely.”

“What I think is that you don’t have an array, so Ship won’t be hearing it from you.” Gregori patted his breastplate and its hidden pocket. “Why are you still on duty? I bet you had to pull strings to be allowed dirtside again.”

Adelita held her tongue another minute, giving Gregori a chance to get information out of Nikolas before she Tasered him a few times. If she could make him wet himself, he’d be more cooperative.

Nikolas averted his gaze. Adelita knew that expression…it was the expression of a man about to lie.

“I’m patriotic,” Nikolas said. “I volunteered.”

“You might like to know he’s lying,” Adelita told Gregori.

Nikolas’s jaw shifted as he presumably gritted his teeth. Adelita knew that expression, too. “Fine. They think I can talk you into coming back. Our team is the best, and they consider you an asset.”

Adelita doubted that was all there was to it. There was a woman involved, mark her words. A planetful of women.

“You made a big effort to talk me down,” Gregori remarked, “with your blaster.”

“Playacting,” Nikolas argued. “How was I to know the Archangel Gregori, He Who Can Do No Wrong, had spilled his guts to a Terran?”

Gregori raised his eyebrows. “Why else would I have her with me?”

Nikolas smirked. “Sex.”

Adelita kicked Nikolas in the thigh with her steel-toed hiking shoe. “Watch your mouth. Gregori wasn’t the one who let a coed videotape him in her bed.”

“I didn’t know she had a camera.” Nikolas turned his attention from Gregori to her, his snake-mean eyes promising retribution. “What’s your gripe, anyway?”

“Besides how you lied to my planet for six months and played fast and loose with our religious beliefs? Besides how incompetent you are at saving us from the diabolos? Besides how you and your people are kidnappers? Not to mention how stupid you are, being led around by your noses by a sentient computer.”

Nikolas blinked several times. “Besides that.”

“Some of that’s not true,” Gregori said.

Adelita frowned. Gregori obviously didn’t understand the whole “bad cop/worse cop” approach. “All of what I say is true. You should be ashamed. You have no light in your heart.”

Nikolas sighed. Some of the belligerence drained out of him like menudo broth in a strainer, leaving only the hominy and tripe. “It doesn’t matter how convinced you are. Doesn’t matter what your god thinks. There’s not a damned thing anyone can do about the nexus and the entities. There’s no way to save this planet.”

“Don’t you say that.” Kicking him did nobody any good, but she did it again. It wasn’t really hurting him. The angeli soldiers had steel inside like Terminators. “Give us the bombs, and let us decide if there’s a way to save my people.”

Nikolas stared at the silver band around his ankles. “They’re not going to hand our tech over to a pre-code society.”

“You gave the chosen jackass a bomb,” Adelita said. “That went well.”

“The munitions you need to disrupt a fully formed nexus aren’t like the ones Alsing screwed up.”

Gregori twisted a band on his arm and studied Nikolas. “They do function differently.”

She assumed that meant they were more destructive. “Big deal. Nobody’s left in California anyway.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Nikolas insisted. “Sharing tech is more against code than anything involving sex.” He and Gregori exchanged a glance.

No, no, no. She couldn’t have Gregori communing with the enemy. Changing his mind. They would get these bombs and save her planet if she had to deliver the charges herself.

Assuming outright theft wasn’t an option—how did you break into a mountain?—what could she do to convince an all-powerful Ship and its supercharged inhabitants to see things her way?

Or one supercharged inhabitant. Who had access to munitions. Whom she really, really disliked, so if he got caught, no skin off her nose, though she would have to come up with another plan to get the bombs.

Nikolas nodded toward Adelita. “Is this about her, Gregori? We can take her with us. They’ll approve her if it brings you back into the fold. The retrieval process is still under way, and she’s young enough to—”

Adelita punched him in the jaw as hard as she could. His head snapped back.

“The hell,” he exclaimed.

“Rapist.” Her knuckles throbbed, and she flipped away the pain. “I’ll die first.”

Nikolas ran a tongue over his teeth with a scowl. “Have it your way.”

“We can make a deal,” Gregori said. “We won’t detonate until Ship’s out of the area. Then if something goes wrong, what difference will it make? The tech won’t have a chance to influence this world, and you’ll be safe from the leviathan.”

“No deal. They won’t allow terrorists to dictate their actions.”

“You’re General-son.” Gregori unclipped a band from the top of his arm and repositioned it around his wrist. Adelita figured she was lucky he wasn’t scratching his back. “They’ll do it to rescue you.”

“Not by giving in to your demands. You think you can outsmart them? You know they’ll come after you, and when they catch you, you’ll be de-hanced and sent to prison.”

“What about me?” Adelita said.

“They’ll ignore you,” Nikolas answered, but his gaze skipped sideways. “Gregori, you’ve got about two minutes before they send a squad.”

“Don’t think so,” Gregori said. “I’d bet the Mother nobody knows you came after me alone. You must cover your tracks well. Ship doesn’t approve solo missions.”

The dark-haired angeli’s expression blanked.

“What are you after?” Gregori asked. “Why are you part of the hunt for me?”

“Obeying orders from Ship,” Señor Shifty Eyes insisted.

“Fibber, fibber, fibber,” Adelita said in a singsong voice. “Gregori, shoot him with the laser like he did you. See if that makes an honest man out of him.”

Nikolas lowered his chin. “You’re not a fragging lie detector, Adelita Martinez. You’re nobody. Nobody of interest to Ship, anyway.”

She didn’t want to be of interest to Ship, considering how corrupt Ship seemed to be. That didn’t mean she enjoyed being told by this chupacabra she was “nobody.” “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’re a poor candidate for retrieval. A childless, overweight, twenty-six-year-old, Catholic law student?”

“Overweight?” Adelita rolled her eyes. “Compared to who? Soldiers? Skeletons?”

“You got me there.” He grinned. “Genetically there’s nothing wrong with you. I guess Ship detected your personality defects.”

“If personality defects were an issue, you’d be in prison.” The conversation was veering off track, fast. Adelita jumped on the contradiction in Nikolas’s argument. “If I’m a horrible candidate, was it a lie that Gregori could bring me along?”

“That’s not a retrieval. That’s a bribe.”

“Knock it off, Niko,” Gregori said.

“I can handle this yapper.” Adelita had kicked and punched Nikolas. It hadn’t done any good except now her knuckles hurt. She held up the Taser and advanced on the dark-haired man. “Do you know what this is?”

Nikolas glanced at Gregori, as if wondering why his former compadre was letting Adelita behave like a TV villain. But Adelita knew the answer to that—Gregori knew what was good for him.

“Some kind of weapon,” Nikolas finally said.

“I can show you how it works on your crotch.”

“I’m immobilized, woman. What is it with the violence on this planet?” Nikolas exclaimed. “Your people’s societal intellect is atavistic.”

“So’s your humanity.” She was thankful her angeli was Gregori and not this Nikolas. She would have had to kill him, which would have avalanched her growing mountain of misconduct. Now that she knew her Lord hadn’t deserted them to the apocalypse, she really needed to find a priest and confess her sins.

But the reminder that the Lord still watched over her assured her that she, or someone, was fated to save this planet. This would not be the end of days if she had anything to say about it, and she could always find something to say.

“Gregori is too genteel to deal with you properly,” she told Nikolas. “As you pointed out, I’m not civilized. I’m tired of waiting. Tell us how you’re going to get us a bomb.”