Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) (24 page)

She did not bother to acknowledge the command. Like a dancer, she spun around his torso and stood behind his chair. She removed the redundant collar from the pouch on her right thigh, balanced it on his shoulder, and pushed his head forward. He offered no resistance. She used the controls on her glove to activate the seam that connected his hood to the rest of his uniform.

The seam split in the darkness and she activated twin LED lights on either side of her head, flooding his neck with a soft, red glow. The open seam of the hood revealed an oval-shaped metallic strip fastened to the skin of his neck between two cervical vertebrae, pulsing with a subtle blue light. Four recessed buttons were located at the sides and the top and bottom of the silver oval. She noted a large dent on one side.

“What could inflict this kind of damage?” she whispered to herself.

She pressed the buttons on the top and bottom of the metal strip and the glow faded to a dull translucence. There was a soft clicking sound and his head slumped and dropped to his chest as if he had fallen asleep. With his head bowed against his chest, she continued with the procedure.

Twenty seconds remained in which to replace the damaged collar. With the buttons depressed, she pulled the plate away from his neck. As she pulled, dozens of microfibers as fine as spider’s silk extended from the plate in her hand into miniscule ports dotting across a corresponding plate embedded into his skin. The filaments stretched and became taut as she pulled the plate away.

When the plates were three inches apart, the tiny strands began to curl into themselves and retract toward the damaged plate in her hand. A low-pitched hum indicated that the retraction process was complete and she placed the damaged collar into the pouch on her thigh. She picked up the replacement collar from his shoulder and positioned it above his neck plate. She held the plate with her thumb and finger and depressed buttons on the sides.

A hum resonated from the new plate as it activated. It began to glow and pulse as the hair-like strands unwound like the tentacles of an octopus reaching out into the dark ocean, feeling their way to their next meal.

The fibers found their corresponding micro ports and began to tug against her hands. She kept a firm grip on the plate as it closed the gap between her hand and his neck. She stole a glance toward the detention entrance. The chaos seemed to be subsiding. The maintenance crews would soon have restored power to the station and the security officers would regain order and confine the inmates to their cells. She was running out of time.

The glow of the plate intensified as it locked into the plate imbedded in his neck. When the connection was complete, his head rose from off of his chest and he looked around. He turned his head, spying out of the corner of his eye the visual confirmation of his partner’s black figure standing behind him.

When the two agents made eye contact, he gave a silent nod and flexed against the restraints that held him bound to the chair. She severed the restraints binding his hands and feet with the corrosive spray, then she turned around to face him. He interlocked his fingers at waist height as she stepped into them. With little effort, he lifted her up into the open duct. She planted her hands on the inside wall of the duct and pulled while he pushed her up by soles of her feet.

She rolled again onto her back as before. As she pulled her legs up into the duct, he stepped up on the chair. He jumped and grabbed onto her feet. He hung there suspended, dangling for a moment until she began scooting herself along the bottom of the metal tube, dragging him along with her. A sliver of skin peeked out from underneath his unsealed hood. It would have to wait until they were in a secure position to reactivate the seam.

They crawled through the round metal duct, one after the other, as they backtracked the same route she took to get into the detention area. The darkness vanished as the power system was restored. The female agent feared someone below might look up and notice two dark masses crawling through the duct. The pandemonium below seemed to increase with the return of the lights and they took advantage of the noise to move faster toward their final extraction point above the station.

The female agent knew from experience that their escape route had to be different from her ingress. Not only would it have been impossible to sneak among the furniture and cubicles with the lighting restored, but also there was no way to tell if someone had stumbled upon her trail. Forward, not backward, was their only course of action; onward and upward through ducts, ceiling spaces and – if lucky – an unutilized stairwell to the roof.

She startled when Campbell’s voice barked into her earpiece.

“Progress report!”

THIRTY-EIGHT

Zipping along on the maglev Evangeline’s mind drifted between the bizarre and horrific events of the past two days. The adolescent Angel wrapped in a filthy blanket and buried alive under a tomb of steel. Daryl’s accident on the landing field, and his near-fatal condition as medics rushed him to the base clinic. The cloaked attackers in the arena, and the brush with death she and Jack shared.

Daryl’s grotesque condition in the crisis unit maintained its demand for the center stage of her mind. Evangeline pulled open her jacket and rubbed the tender spot on her shoulder. The growing bruise resulting from her collision with the doctor, and two nurses, she bowled over while escaping Daryl’s room. She winced, trying to remember the doctor’s feeble explanation for Daryl’s outburst.

He had introduced himself as Dr. Saul Abraham, the chief pathologist of the crisis unit. When Evangeline told Dr. Abraham what Daryl said, the doctor waved it off. “The combination of the trauma to his system, the pain he’s undergoing and the cocktail of chemical’s we’re utilizing to manage his condition, he’s most likely in a state of drug-induced paranoid schizophrenia. Once we find restore his skin with a transplant, and find the right balance in his medication, you won’t even remember he ever acted out like that.”

The comment made Evangeline feel like she he gave her a proverbial pat on the head and dismissed for recess. She did not believe his answer, and she could tell from his eyes that he did not believe it either. The nurses standing with Dr. Abraham cited similar cases of pain-induced dementia and other forms of hallucinations brought about after severe trauma. They said his mind had simply written a story to explain how and why he was experiencing such agony.

In other words, no one, not the medical personnel nor the security officials, put any credit into Daryl’s claims that he had been poisoned. It was no more than a delusion.

The maglev hummed to a stop and Evangeline got up from her cozy window seat and stepped onto the platform. She took in a lungful of unfiltered air wafting in from outside the station. Scents of dust, flowers, open fires, and vehicles filled her nose, evoking an involuntary sigh. Feeling the weariness of a long train ride, she shook her body awake and descended the monumental staircase down to the southwest industrial section of the LTZ. The platform was not far from the scene of the vehicular collision she had witnessed, where Daryl had encountered the strange man with the water. It was the only starting point she could think of.

Evangeline was not convinced Daryl was deluded. She had witnessed him take a drink from the man’s flask. The gesture had appeared harmless at the time, but in the light of Daryl’s condition and her own attack in the arena, she felt she owed it to Daryl to investigate.

Evangeline was still ignorant of the fact she was not carrying her communicator about with her. She had slipped into patrol-mode. When she was on-duty she was not permitted use of her personal communicator, and in her frame of mind, she did not notice its absence.

The intersection where the accident with the pipes had happened was less than two miles away from the maglev platform, so she began walking toward the scene of the accident in lieu of taking a shuttle. Evangeline could run a mile in under six minutes - she enjoyed the exertion of walking. She had been sitting or standing on public transportation all evening and it was a blissful relief to move her muscles.

She was weaving her way through a market district adjacent to the industrial complex when the wafting aromas from the food vendors made her stomach growl. Her mouth watered for something to eat; the tilapia and rice suddenly seemed ages ago to her hollow belly. She permitted herself a few minutes to inspect the different vendors selling cooked meat, fruits and vegetables, bread and soups, and just about every other form of food you can prepare, cook, and sell from a small handcart on the street. She settled on one vendor who sold chicken kebabs with slices of roasted peppers and onions.

Although she was still determined to reach the scene of the accident before dark, she could not help herself from watching the people as she devoured the kebabs. She could tell by their clothing who was from Olympus and who was an LTZ native. The ones from Olympus were
unspotted
, to use Jack’s term., Olympians were too well-dressed and out-of-place. LTZ attire was modest; nothing drab or ragged, but less manicured and tailored than the fashions from Olympus.

She observed people laughing, engaged in energetic debates. The security officers paid no mind to two neighboring shopkeepers in a heated argument. As she passed, Evangeline witnessed the neighbors resolve the spat on their own. She mused to herself that if such a conflict had happened in Olympus, the security officers would have been involved at once. The laid-back vibe of the LTZ was at odds with the Olympic traditions taught to her as a youth.

Walking through the market, she heard the all too familiar roar of the engines of a TRTV patrol. Everyone’s eyes were drawn to it as it arced across the sky, but the people almost seemed frustrated by the intrusion of an Olympic patrol in their airspace. Evangeline even overheard a man whispering to his wife, “Those damn patrols. I wish Olympus would keep their nose out of our business.”

She finished her kebabs and came across a young boy sitting with an older girl, who she assumed was his sister, selling bottles of water and juice from a bucket filled with ice. The apparent age of the girl, and her lighter hair color brought up the memory of the adolescent Angel. Evangeline could not help but wonder if the girl selling drinks would look as peaceful and serene if she had been found in a metal crypt wrapped in a blanket with a hole in the back of her skull.

Evangeline shook the horrible image from her mind and bought a bottle of water from the girl. Charmed by the little boy’s ear-to-ear grin, she bought a bottle of juice as well. She thanked them and continued toward the scene of the accident with renewed energy, now well-fed and focused.

Within a minute of finishing her bottle of juice, she had reached the other side of the market. She resumed her usual brisk pace, completing her trip to the intersection of the accident. She was amazed at how different it looked two days later. The area appeared no different from the dozens of intersections she had passed to get there. If she had not known there had been a collision there the previous day, she would have never guessed two freight transports had been overturned on that same spot less than forty-eight hours before.

Evangeline spotted one or two mangled pipe fragments scattered at the edges of the street. Evangeline assumed they had been considered unsalvageable scrap and left behind to be collected by anyone willing to make the effort. She found small pieces of debris that looked like they could have belonged to one or both of the freight transports.

Her most prominent observation was the lack of corn. There was not a single kernel of corn anywhere in the streets.

“It seems food,” she mused to herself,   “is more precious than steel down here.” She could understand that. There were times off world when they had enough ammunition to fight their enemies ten times over, but food rations had been limited to one meal a day.

She remembered something she had learned early in school that had always stuck with her: the rule of threes.

“There are three things you don’t think about until it’s happening to you,” her teacher began with a mischievous grin. The class only offered him blank expressions in return.

“Suffocation, dehydration, and starvation,” he urged. “Who can tell me why?” Not one student raised their hand.

“Hmm,” he muttered, turning around to the board. “Okay.”

He wrote three lines in chalk.

You can live without _____ for ___ minutes.

You can live without _____ for ___ days.

You can live without _____ for ___ weeks.

“Fill in the blanks!” he said as he smiled around the room. No one took the bait.

After a few seconds tiptoed by on the clock, a single had risen toward the ceiling, and the teacher’s grin doubled in size. Evangeline seemed shocked to discover the hand was her own. The teacher motioned to her and she cleared her throat.

“Well, you already said it yourself… sort of…,” she   “Air, water, and food. You can only live without these for a certain amount of time before you die.” The teacher nodded with such vigor Evangeline wondered if his head would roll off his shoulders.

“Very good!” he cheered. “But, can you tell me what is the order and the duration of each to make what I’ve written accurate?” This teacher was one of the few among the faculty who did not treat Evangeline like a pariah for her parents’ actions - his warm encouragement filled her with bravery to answer him again.

Olympic citizens rarely worried about the necessities of life, what sustenance the body required to survive. Food came from the store, water came from the tap, and air was all around them. Scarcity was not a concept they had dealt with in several hundred years. The concept was intuitive to Evangeline once she thought about it, but most Olympians never thought about such trivialities. These concerns were for the simple residents of the LTZ.

Evangeline cleared her throat a second time before answering. “You can live without air for three minutes, you can live without water for three days, and you can live without food for three weeks,” she responded, now brimming with confidence.

The teacher beamed and walked into the center of the room. “Very good!” he crowed. “Now, who can tell me why?”

A figure approaching from down the street caused Evangeline’s mind to retreat from her childhood classroom. She scanned the area surrounding her. The industrial complex had appeared abandoned when she first arrived. There were no signs of residences nearby, so she dismissed the idea that it was a local on their way home. She thought someone must be using the area as a shortcut from one part of the LTZ to another.

The sun sank behind the horizon, leaving the area washed in a dusky haze.

The figure moved at a slow, but determined pace. As the form drew near, she noticed it was not one, but two people walking in an offset single file.

Their formation reminded her of days in basic training. She could still hear the voice of her drill instructor resonating in her head. “Do not walk single file. That way a sniper can’t get more than one kill per shot. Do not walk side by side, either. You can get in each other’s way if you’re too close together and you need to find cover quickly.”

A peculiar thought crossed Evangeline’s mind, which was that few people without special combat training would walk in such a formation. Her shoulders tensed as she recognized the formation headed straight in her direction.

Evangeline made eye contact with the figures stepping between the shadows. They responded with a change in their pace. The one in the lead was leaner, of a feminine build. She slowed a half step and reached behind her to her companion. The second individual had a tall and stocky frame, and he took an extra half step and reached forward, taking the hand of his companion.

When they were a block away they leaned in towards each other and looked like any another couple out for an evening stroll. They turned the corner and their faces were illuminated as they passed under a streetlight. Evangeline’s breath caught in her lungs.

It was the woman, the retired TRTV pilot. The couple was wearing simple clothing that could blend into crowds in Olympus or the LTZ, but her face was unmistakable. And the man beside her fit the description she remembered in her after-action report. He kept his eyes on Evangeline as the pair crossed the street, headed in her direction.