Excerpt

Chapter 1

"We know you are a part of the Archangel Project."

Commander Noa Sato of the Galactic Fleet glared across the table. Two men wearing the dark green uniforms of planet Luddeccea's Local Guard glared back at her. Her arms were shackled behind her back to the cold metal chair she sat on. The room was chilly—she could smell the cold of it, along with the odors of various bodily fluids. Her back ached, her mouth was as dry as lizzar skin, and she thought the bright lights of the interrogation room might leave her permanently blind.

"I told you, I don't know what you're talking about," she spat.

"Then why are you here?"

"I'm on leave," she explained for the hundredth time. "I thought I'd spend my vacation visiting my brother on the planet where I grew up. Is that so difficult to understand?" Agitated, she spun her engagement and wedding rings around on her finger. Closing her eyes, she thought of her brother, Kenji, and inwardly begged his forgiveness. When they'd picked her up, she'd assumed this was all a misunderstanding. She hadn't meant to pull him into this.

"I've had enough!" said one of her inquisitors. A pair of sharp, pointed pliers emerged in his hand, and suddenly he was on Noa's side of the table. "Do you understand what I can do with these?"

Noa tried to keep from screaming … and woke up in the darkness, her whole body shaking, her breathing so fast and ragged her ribs hurt, cold air stinging her lungs. The darkness smelled like cold and various bodily fluids, an unhappy constant with the nightmare. She rubbed her eyes. But the rest had been just a dream. They hadn't used those pliers except to scare her during the interrogation. When she hadn't told them what they wanted to hear, they'd brought her to this camp.

She blinked. Was it unusually bright in the barracks? Stifling a groan, she sat up. Her vision immediately went black. She tried to access the reason why—and for the millionth time remembered her neural interface had been deactivated since she'd arrived here. Sucking in a sharp breath, she clutched her head, fingers drifting to the smooth, cool surface of the neural interface in her left temple. The guards were fond of parroting, "Freedom from information streams is the path to real wisdom," but it was torture, not freedom.

Noa's body swayed. Why was she dizzy? It couldn't be Luddeccea's gravity—the planet's gravity was the same as Earth's and standard starship grav. Was it malnutrition, or something more sinister? She bit her lip to stifle a bitter laugh. She was being slowly starved to death. How much more sinister could it get?

The spell finally passed, and she surveyed the barracks. All around her were rough wooden bunks four platforms tall. The beds were narrower than the single bunks on a starship, but each was shared by up to three women packed chest to back beneath thin blankets and without pillows. She could make out their faces—just barely—but it was definitely lighter in the barracks. Noa looked down at her bedmate, Ashley. Noa's skin was dark as straight Earth coffee. Ashley's was what Tim's people would call "peaches and cream." It made Ashley's delicate features easy to see, even in low light. As she slept, clutching her crutch like a pillow, her face looked peaceful and her breathing was gentle. Not wanting to wake her, Noa gently folded her side of the blanket over Ashley's sleeping form. Slipping down the slats at the end of the bed, she padded to the window.

Peering through the dirty glass, she caught her breath. Sure enough, thick white flakes of snow drifted from the sky, sparkling in the camp's harsh spotlights. Their barracks was close to the barbed-wire fence that enclosed them, and she could just make out snow catching on the Luddeccean pines in the surrounding forest. Noa pressed a hand to the window. The snow on the dense foliage would throw off heat-seeking scanners, and the thick branches would throw off radar, but it wasn't bitterly cold—yet. If they were going to escape, now was the time. Her brow furrowed, and she touched her interface. She squinted at the clouds as though she could will herself to see through them. Somewhere above their heads, the satellite that was Time Gate 8 floated just outside the atmosphere above Luddeccea's equator. The gate allowed instantaneous travel to any other system that had a gate of its own. It also sent and received data. Time Gate 8 and the other satellites that orbited around Luddeccea's equator acted as relay stations for the vast data traffic of the ethernet. And, she thought more darkly, if her neural interface couldn't be activated, the satellites would serve as useful landmarks for navigation … if the snow let up.

Dropping her hand to her side, she balled it into a fist and bowed her head. As a pilot of the Galactic Republic Fleet she'd been given POW training. She was taught to stay put, to obey orders, and not to make foolish escape plans. She closed her eyes. But there was no war going on, and she wasn't the captive of some pirate clan. She was in a concentration camp on her home world, Luddeccea, which hadn't declared independence from the Republic. Opening her eyes, she looked down at her wrist. A black 'H' and a number had been tattooed there, barely visible against her dark skin. She'd been captured, interrogated, and interned without a trial for being, in the guard's words, a "heretic." Not an admissible crime in the Republic. If the Fleet had known she was here, she'd have been rescued by now. Her hands formed fists at her sides. Kenji should have reported her missing. If he hadn't reported her missing, it had to mean he'd been interned, too … spinning on her heels, she went back to her bunk.

A few moments later, she was leaning over her bedmate, gently shaking her shoulder. "Ashley, Ashley, wake up, it's time to leave."

Ashley rolled over onto her back. Her eyes opened—visibly blue in the snow-brightness. She stared at Noa dumbly.

"Today is the day," Noa whispered. "It's snowing."

Ashley put a hand to her head and ran it through her sparse hair; they'd all been shaved when they arrived. A tattooed 'A' for "augment" stood out on her wrist like a black scar. Ashley's fingers went longingly to her neural interface just as Noa's had. About three centimeters in diameter, the interfaces were made of copper with titanium and polyfiber exteriors. At the center of each was a circular port that could be hardwired directly to external computer systems via cable, but it was more common to use the internal wireless transmitters. Around the central port, tiny drives, the width and breadth of fingernails, were arranged. When functioning, they could be used for app insertion. Normally, Noa thought neural interfaces looked like flowers—the tiny drives surrounding the central ports like petals. But like every prisoner in the camp, Ashley had a large, ugly, black polyfiber screw jammed into her interface port. The screw disrupted the flow of electrons between neurons and nanos and completely jammed their wireless transmitters. It was a primitive but very effective way to keep inmates from accessing their neural interfaces and the wider universe with their minds.

"We have to get ready before the others get up," Noa whispered.

Ashley stared at her a beat too long, but then sat up and quietly handed Noa her crutch. Noa slid off the bed and down the ladder, crutch in hand, and waited for Ashley. When Ashley had first arrived at the camp, she had a cybernetic limb, her 'augment,' having lost her left leg to an accident as a teenager. The guards had ripped the leg off on Ashley's arrival—no anesthesia, of course. Noa scowled in the darkness, anger bubbling in her gut on Ashley's behalf. Noa's thumb went to the stumps of the fingers on her left hand—her ring finger and pinky had been removed for different reasons than Ashley's leg, but at least Noa's "surgery" had been quick.

Ashley stumbled over the side of the bed, and Noa helped her down the ladder. Instead of giving Ashley her noisy wooden crutch, Noa swung Ashley's arm over her shoulder. Together they went to the corner of the room. There was a waste bin there reeking of vomit. As they drew close, a few scrawny rats scrambled out over the edge. Ashley gasped, and Noa put a finger to her lip for silence as the filthy creatures darted into the shadows.

Holding back her bile, Noa gave Ashley her crutch, released her, and then rolled the waste bin to the side. Ashley immediately went to her good knee and lifted a small piece of floorboard. She pulled out a sack and carefully unwrapped it.

Inside were a few pieces of bread they'd painstakingly saved over the last two weeks. There were also a few tools in the bundle. Ashley was a cybernetics engineer. Noa wondered if it was her engineering ability, as much as her cybernetic leg, that had gotten her thrown in the camp. Noa's hand fluttered up to her interface; almost everyone but the most strident fundamentalist Luddecceans were augmented in some way or another in this day and age.

"It's all here," Ashley whispered, snapping Noa back to the present.

Noa's bunk mate had created the tools in the bundle from bits of glass, scavenged wire, and castaway cybernetic parts. Along with a precious pair of pliers to remove the bolt, there was also, miracles of miracles, a shattered com chip that Ashley had cemented together with nail polish she'd stolen from a guard. The size of a fingernail, the com chip glittered in the low light. Slipping the chip into a neural drive would give Ashley or Noa the ability to listen to the restricted frequencies the Luddecceans were using.

"Well done, Ashley," Noa whispered, patting the woman's shoulder. She couldn't help but notice that Ashley was trembling. Outside, she heard guards talking to one another, debating who would wake up which barracks. "Tie it up, and be ready," Noa said. "As soon as people start waking, we offer to take corpse patrol." No one wanted corpse patrol—it meant being last in the breakfast line—among other things.

Visibly shaking, Ashley replaced the board. Noa quickly rolled the waste bin back over it, and helped Ashley up.

Outside, she heard the guards laughing and their footsteps approaching. Any moment they'd come in.

Trembling beside her, Ashley said, "Noa, I can't go with you."

Noa looked at her sharply, uncertain of what she'd just heard. "What?"

Not meeting her eyes, clutching the tiny bundle to her stomach, Ashley said, "I'll slow you down."

"No," Noa lied. "You won't." Noa was taller by at least four inches. Leaning down, she put her hands on Ashley's shoulders. There was a tear running down Ashley's cheek. Noa wiped it away without thinking. She felt her gut constrict. Ashley didn't look well; she was paler than even Tim had been—and he'd been blonde, blue-eyed, and genuine Aryan purist stock.

Ashley and Noa had bonded over their skin coloring when they first met. They were both throwbacks to an era people considered less enlightened, when humans had been many races instead of one. People like Noa and Ashley were reminders of that time; it made people nervous and, ironically, prejudiced. It had been a superficial reason to bond, and it could have backfired spectacularly when Noa had first voiced her escape ideas. But Noa had sensed bravery and mettle in Ashley and knew she wouldn't betray her. "I need you, Ashley," she whispered. She didn't want to carry out their escape plans alone.

Hunching her shoulders, Ashley looked at the floor.

Trying to ease her fears with a laugh, Noa said, "If you don't come, who will listen to all my crazy schemes and tell me they won't work? Who will tell me to shut up when I'm whining? Who will kick me when I snore?"

Ashley's eyes lifted.

Noa tilted her head and gave Ashley what Tim used to call her best "cornball grin." Although Noa had some acquaintance with corn, she wasn't sure what a cornball was—probably some Aryan-Europa purist isolationist thing Tim's people did—some sort of weird ball sport? Whatever it was, the grin had always worked on Tim and usually worked with her friend.

Instead, Ashley whimpered, "Don't make this worse! You don't need me, Noa. I showed you how to remove the bolt and turn your neural interface back on. You can move more quickly without me."

Noa squeezed her shoulder. "Ashley, Starmen do not leave Starmen behind."

"I'm not a Starman," Ashley protested, wiping her eyes.

"I can't leave you here," Noa whispered back. There was a part of her that wanted to, that was afraid of having to half-carry Ashley through the snow and wilderness. Starmen didn't give into fear.

Ashley closed her eyes. "Yes, you can, and you have to. You have to tell people about this place—if you tell them, they'll come for us and the nightmare will end."

"You could be dead before that happens," Noa whispered, the reek of the vomit in the bin creeping into her consciousness. People died here all the time—of illness, injuries, and starvation.

"I won't die," Ashley whispered.

Every muscle in Noa's body tensed. Ashley was too smart to believe that.

Putting her hand on Noa's arm, Ashley whispered, "And you have to go rescue your brother. From what you told me, he's in much worse danger than I am."

Noa swallowed. Most of her family had left Luddeccea—complaining that it was becoming more fundamentalist. But Noa's brother Kenji had left and then come back. Considering what Kenji was, that was especially crazy. Oh, nebulas, what would they do to Kenji? If they permanently deactivated his neural interface and deep neural implants—

The door to the barracks opened, and one of the guard women strode in. The guard was new and wore fresh Luddeccean Green—layers and layers of it. She looked so warm, Noa hugged herself instinctively. The guard had the amalgamation of East Asian-East Indian features that were most common: East Asian eyes, straight nose, full lips, tan skin, and black hair. She was very tall, and Noa noted enviously, well-fed. The woman bellowed, "Up, all of you!"

Around them, women cried and rose from their bunks.

Leaning to Ashley's ear, Noa whispered, "Do you want to wait until another day?" Her fingers twitched at her sides. The longer they stayed here, the weaker they became. But maybe Ashley's pallor was due to illness? Sometimes people here recovered from minor illnesses. Sometimes.

Ashley pushed the bundle at Noa's chest. Noa quickly tucked it in the waistband of the secondhand rags that served as pants. Her own clothes had been confiscated.

Ashley whispered, "If you don't go, I'll tell them you are planning to escape."

Rocking back on her feet, Noa's eyes went wide. The women in the barracks began stumbling into the line that went to the mess hall. Grabbing her crutch, Ashley hobbled quickly toward them. Noa chased her, feeling anger and dismay welling in her chest. "Ashley, wait … "

Ashley turned back. Wavering on her crutch, she hissed, "I'll scream, I swear it."

Noa stopped in her tracks.

"Why aren't you getting in line?" the guard bellowed at Ashley.

"I don't want to sleep with this woman anymore," Ashley said, shaking her crutch in Noa's direction. She curled up her lip and stammered, "Filthy African!"

Noa's jaw fell. It was the language of the European purists—a group to which Ashley didn't belong. She was like Noa—a random winner of a genetic lottery who looked like one of the old races. There were sharp chuckles from the women in line, maybe enjoying the irony of one perceived purist insulting another.

If the guard hadn't been new, she would have smelled the lie. Ashley and Noa had been friends since their arrival. But the guard was fooled. Huffing, she said, "Stupid Europa, get in line. And you—" She pointed at Noa.

Noa threw up her hands and moved to the line, but then her eyes slid to Ashley. The other woman was mouthing the words, "Go, Go, Go."

Noa's lip curled in despair and fury. Her eyes blurred—stupid, selfless, brave, Ashley. Noa was going to curse her name for years, she already knew it. Sucking in a sharp breath, she said to the guard, "I'm on corpse duty."

* * *

Noa watched the other women go to the mess, their shapes blurred by the snow and the dawn twilight. She could just make out Ashley hobbling on her crutch.

Noa looked heavenward. The snow-bearing clouds seemed to go on forever. There was no hope that she'd be able to navigate by Time Gate 8. She touched her interface, and her fingers slipped to the bolt blocking her data port. As soon as the bolt was removed and her neural interface was activated, she'd be able to find her way. She stroked the edges of the port, and her hand shook with hunger and weariness—or perhaps just yearning for connection. She'd be able to contact the Fleet, her family, everyone … she shook her head. Maybe not right away, not until she put some distance between herself and this place. Otherwise her signal might be targeted, and she'd be dust. But she'd be able to receive signals. Her heart clenched, thinking of her mother's voice. Her mother would have left a message as soon as Noa missed her weekly call. It had to be up there, suspended in the ether; Noa could receive it if she could just access the ethernet. The cold polyfiber of her interface burned her fingers, and Noa realized she'd been standing there, staring blankly at the clouds for much too long.

Exhaling and dropping her hand, she looked down the row of barracks. The snow was falling so thickly she couldn't see to the end. There was a large, open wagon two barracks away. The wagon looked like a thing out of the twenty-first century. It was made of rusty metal, with actual wheels. The source of locomotion, by contrast, looked prehistoric. The wagon was attached to a lizzar, a herbivorous animal native to Luddeccea that was lizard-like in appearance. It was as large as a cow. Instead of scales, fur, or feathers, it was covered by thick gray hide plates, as wide as a hand. It stood on four squat legs, had a short heavy tail, and a beak-like snout for ripping bark from trees. Noa had grown up in Luddeccean farm country surrounded by imported Earth livestock; lizzar made cows and even chickens look like geniuses. She watched as women from other barracks on corpse patrol threw bodies into the wagon. The smell of death didn't bother the lizzar a bit. It stood licking at the falling snowflakes. The smell of death didn't seem to bother the driver either. He sat unmoving at the front of the wagon, a barbed whip in his hand. Noa let out a breath in trepidation. There were no dead in her barracks. She had no corpse and no excuse to be near the vehicle. It was a sickening thing not to be relieved by the absence of death. What was she becoming?

Her skin heated despite the cold and her thumb found its way to the stumps of her fingers. Her fingers had been swollen when she first arrived; to steal her rings, the guards had cut off the last two digits. The memory of the pain didn't compare to the loss of those simple bands. After years as a widow, they were the only reminders of Timothy she kept on her person, and these people—animals—had stolen them. For a moment, she was so angry her vision went white as the snow. As her vision cleared, she spotted a barrel with a fire burning in it near the wagon. Two female guards were standing beside it warming their hands. Yelling for the driver's attention, the guards motioned for the man to get off the wagon. He perked up, hopped off, and followed them into a guard house. Noa's lip curled. For her husband's memory alone, she should take the barrel into one of the barracks, tip it over, and set this whole camp on fire.

Her feet started moving as though they had a will of their own. She pictured the flames rising up above the roof of the barracks, and it made welcome heat flare in her chest. And then she remembered Ashley's plea, "Tell people about this place," and swore. She heard her husband Tim's voice in her head, "Revenge isn't rational if it is suicidal, and it doesn't help anyone." She shook her head. Timothy was always so damned logical. "Damn you to Hell for being in my head all this time," she muttered. Her face crumpled, and she held back tears.

She drew to a stop and stood between the flaming barrel and the wagon. It was the first time she'd ever seen a corpse wagon unguarded and without a driver. In the guard house, she heard the guards and the driver; it sounded as though the guards were flirting with him. She snarled in frustration; how dare they laugh? She imagined picking up the barrel and hurling it through the building's window. Her hands balled helplessly at her sides. Or maybe she'd just burn herself. She looked at the wagon loaded with bodies, heard one of the female guards say, "We get so lonely sometimes," and bit her lip to keep from screaming. They deserved to die in flames. She heard the crunch of boots in snow, and looked frantically between the wagon and the fire.

* * *

"I should have set the whole damn place on fire," Noa projected the thought into her mental log as the wagon hit an exceptionally large pothole. She was shivering, colder than she'd ever been, and sick of it.

"Ehh … Lizzy, did you hear that?" the driver asked. Her neural interface was dead, and she had spoken aloud instead. Quietly sucking in a breath, she said a prayer—silently this time—but her mind still reached for her neural interface, though it had been disabled for weeks.

"Must be going crazy," said the driver. Noa could barely hear him over the sound of Lizzy the lizzar's feet and the creak of the wagon wheels.

Noa's lips curled, even as her heart rate picked up in fear. She longed to get up and shout, "You despicable blob of blue-green algae! You have been to the camp. You are a monster to allow such horror." But then she'd have to kill him before he killed her, and he wouldn't show up to his destination on time. She needed to get out just before he reached his destination—whatever that was—and quietly escape without anyone being the wiser.

But she was so hungry … and so alone. She longed to open up her bundle, not just for the food, but to activate her neural interface and have the collective consciousness of humanity piped blissfully into her brain.

No, Noa, don't go down that road, she thought. You'll get out of this.

She bit her lip. She'd been in plenty of dire straits in the Galactic Fleet, but she'd never been in a situation this bad. Even the Asteroid War in System 6 … she took a breath. At least, in that hell she'd had her crew mates.

Her one small relief now was that her fellows lay still and silent in the wagon. She had heard horror stories of barely-alive prisoners being thrown out with the dead.

She scrunched her eyes shut and took another breath, counting to ten as she did. Shutting her eyes was a mistake. Unable to see the meager light filtering through the blanket draped over her like a shroud, she focused on the feeling of the bodies around her. Where they should have been warm and soft, they were frozen and hard. She pictured their cold, graying eyes. She opened her mouth, about to say, "Get a grip, Noa, Captain Kim escaped a hostage situation with this same ploy … " Catching herself, she restrained a shudder. After his cadaver-escaping-hostage experience, Kim had become a haunted man.

Her hand drifted to the bundle. The rational part of her brain warned her that extracting the bolt was bound to be a noisy business … but the emotional part of her brain was screaming that if she went insane with loneliness, survival wouldn't be worth it. Her hands tightened around the bundle. She almost pulled it out, but then jerked her hand away. Closing her eyes, she tried to focus on happy thoughts, the kittens on her starship, her last lover—not Tim—she could never think of Timothy. He wasn't a happy thought. But, of course, telling herself not to think of her husband made her think of him, and made her thumb seek the stump of her ring finger. She could picture his dark blonde hair, slightly sunburnt cheeks, pale skin and ice-blue eyes. What would he say right now? "Don't think of me, woman, think of something happy." She bit back a smile and the hard edge of old grief. Think of something happy. She closed her eyes, and thought of her little brother Kenji …

* * *

The sunlight sliding through the window onto Kenji's bed seemed to have physical shape. It put his sleeping ten-year-old form in a natural spotlight. The spotlight effect was amplified by the midnight black walls of Kenji's room. Over the black paint he had put a map of the universe as it would appear from the core of Luddeccea. He longed to leave Luddeccea and explore the greater universe as much as Noa did, but for different reasons. Noa wanted excitement, adventure, and freedom. In Noa's mother's words, Kenji's fascination was much more "scientific." He'd agonized for months over how to make a cuboid-shaped room simulate a 360-degree spherical view. In the end, he'd made his bed the core and painted the constellations on the walls in a way that created an optical illusion of a sphere. Without an active neural interface, he'd tediously calculated the exact distortion he'd need to make the constellations appear realistic by entering formulas verbally into a computational device. Perhaps it hadn't been tedious; to Kenji, math was never tedious.

Kenji's eyelashes fluttered. Noa's fourteen-year-old self sat down beside him on the bed.

"Noa?" he whispered, rubbing the bandages over his data port.

Leaning forward, Noa took his other hand. His skin was tan, unlike hers, and instead of her fine tight coils, his hair hung in smooth black ringlets.

"I'm here, Kenny," she said. "How do you feel? Are you in pain?" Everyone received a neural interface in the soft spot at the left side of their skulls when they were just infants. The interfaces weren't activated until they were ten, when nanoparticles were injected into the central port. The nanos spread out over the surface of the brain in a net and could receive and send electrical pulses. Through the electrical pulses, sights, sounds, words, and even shadows of emotions could be received and sent. Secondary applications made arithmetic and memory tasks easier, too. Noa's "awakening" hadn't been a painful process; joining with the greater collective conscious had been, and still was, wonderful. As her neural interface had been gradually activated, she had been able to explore larger and larger parts of the universe with only her thoughts. But Kenji's "awakening" was different. Among other peculiarities, Kenji lacked the ability to read facial expressions. So doctors had sent some of the nanoparticles into deep structures of his brain to stimulate the regions that were at work when humans saw a smile, a frown, or a flinch.

Kenji's eyelids ceased their fluttering, and his hazel eyes finally opened; in the bright sunlight they looked almost gold.

"No, I don't hurt," said Kenji, his voice and expression flat.

Noa smiled, not sure if the extra nanos had helped, but glad that he didn't hurt. A lot of the Satos' neighbors had disapproved of the family's decision to add the extra nanos, and she'd been worried about it herself. Her mom said it was the "Luddeccean influence" affecting Noa's reasoning. Her family was part of the fourth wave of settlers to Luddeccea, the "fourth families." They weren't part of the hard-core Luddeccean "first families" and "second families" that had migrated here to escape the coming Cyber Apocalypse and Alien Wars. It had been over four centuries since the first, primitive neural interfaces were designed and humans had begun exploring deep space. Neither of those conflicts had come to pass. Now, only the most fundamentalist Luddecceans didn't receive the neural interface—interfaces might be forbidden by Luddeccean gospel, but then, so was birth control. Most Luddecceans practiced birth control, and neural interfaces were even more popular than that. Still, many of the Satos' neighbors were against more drastic augmentation, like what had been done to Kenji. It would strip him of his "soul," they argued.

Noa had worried about that, and that it might hurt. But it didn't. Her smile broadened.

Kenji gasped. "You're happy."

Noa's eyes widened. He'd read her expression! "Yes." She hadn't sent that feeling to him through the net—his nanos were too new, and it would be a while before he was sending and receiving feelings or data.

Kenji's brow furrowed. "And you're surprised … " His eyes drifted down to her mouth. "And happy."

"Yes!" Noa cried, squeezing his hand. "Are you?"

"Yes," he whispered. And then he smiled. A little awkwardly, to be sure, but genuine. Kenji's smiles were always genuine.

"I feel … " he murmured. His hand tightened around hers. "Not alone."

* * *

The wagon jerked to a stop, and Noa's eyes bolted open. She heard shouts, and the roar of large engines, but not the distinctive whir of antigrav. She was at the destination; she'd fallen asleep and missed her proverbial stop.

Outside of the wagon someone shouted, "Detach that dumb lizzar and get that loaded up onto the dumper! Let's toss those corpses and bury them so we can get inside and get warm!"

Noa's heart stopped. So that was what they did with the dead. She heard the driver step down from the wagon, heard engines approaching, heard four loud squeals, and then the wagon was hoisted into the air. Creeping out from under her blanket to the side of the wagon, Noa peered down and gulped. She was thirty feet above a deep pit in the dark, rich earth. She lifted her gaze. Beyond the pit was a field of low hillocks covered in snow. Her heart sank as she realized the hillocks were graves. "Focus on the positive, Noa," she reminded herself, and then realized there weren't many positives to focus on. "You're out of the camp … and being a first officer was boring you half to death. Stupid blue-green algae reports."

"Did you hear that?" someone said. "I swear this place is infested with spirits."

Her eyes went wide. Damn it, she'd spoken aloud. But then someone else said, "You're starting to hear things. These are augments, they don't have souls to be trapped in the afterlife. Human up!"

Noa's fists clenched at that, but she focused on the terrain beyond the graves. Through the falling snow she made out low, forested mountains—the perfect hideout if she didn't freeze to death.

She heard engines to her right; she looked and saw enormous bulldozers. The platform the wagon was on started to incline and the frozen bodies started to slip. Scrambling forward, Noa grabbed the front edge of the wagon. She had to stay on top of the bodies. Clinging to the cold metal, part of her brain screamed that this was it, that the dirt from the bulldozers was going to be on top of her before she made it out of the pit. "Shut up, brain," she whispered. This time no one heard. The whirring of the engines and screeching of the dumper drowned her out. The wagon inclined more steeply and the back opened up. Her frozen companions started to slide into the open earth. Noa could hear shouts of surprise and alarm over the engine roars. Had they seen her? Tightening her grip, she waited for bullets … but none came … and the wagon stopped its incline. She looked down. The wagon was tilted at a steep angle, but there were still a few bodies at the bottom. Once she could have clung here like a xinbat for hours, but she was so weak. Her arms shook with cold and weariness. She heard more shouts, and then her fingers slipped. Noa crashed onto the bodies below her, sending a few more toppling into the pit, but didn't topple in herself. She blinked, and found herself staring at a body of a woman whose mouth was frozen open in horror. Noa looked up fast, knowing that strange woman's face would be embedded in her consciousness as long as she lived. Granted, her lifespan felt like it was getting shorter by the second. She heard shouting. Above her head she heard the whir of antigrav.

There were more shouts, and the sound of engines turning off. One of the graveyard workers shouted, "The alien invasion is here! Quick, to your stations."

Noa's brow furrowed. What the solar core? She was ranked high enough in the Galactic Fleet to be privy to the intel the public didn't ordinarily hear: terrorist attacks that were thwarted and not thwarted, plagues that didn't respond to standard antivirals, antibiotics, or radiation treatments; the latest in quantum drives, hidden jump stations, and all intel on extraterrestrial life. There were no aliens—well, not the kind that were sentient space-going beings or that would be anytime soon. There was plenty of blue-green algae, though. She'd had to fill out many a report on blue-green algae in her time in the fleet. The Galactic Republic was so concerned with not disrupting the "natural habitat" of any potentially sentient being that it went to great lengths to prove that even the bloody-universal-blue-green algae they found all over the galaxy didn't represent a hive mind. In all the cases Noa had reviewed as first officer, it hadn't. She felt the muscles in her neck tense and her skin heat in memory of the maze of bureaucracy she'd had to go through each time they came to a semi-habitable world and she, as Acting First Officer, had gotten the joy of compiling the reports from the scientists.

She took a deep breath. It didn't matter what the crazy Luddecceans believed about aliens. She scrambled to the edge of the wagon and peered over. Not a human in sight. Hauling herself over the edge, she slid down to the dumper platform, and jumped to the ground. Overhead she heard cannon fire and more antigrav engines. Instead of an alien vessel, she saw a single civilian flight vehicle—the kind that could just get far enough out of atmosphere to traverse the globe rapidly or rendezvous with Time Gate 8. It was being rapidly pursued by one of the Luddeccean Guard's ships.

Noa didn't have time to wonder who it was. Ducking her head, she ran. She heard more cannon fire in the sky—so close the ground reverberated beneath her feet and her ears rang. But no one fired at her. She couldn't have planned a more brilliant decoy strategy. Legs pumping as fast as they would go, breathing so hard it felt like her lungs were filled with shards of glass, she threaded her way between hillocks, and didn't stop until her heart felt like it would beat out of her chest and she was well into the trees. Panting, legs shaking, she stooped and took out the bundle. She didn't reach for food; she reached for the pliers.

Moments later, the bolt in her neural interface was discarded in the snow at her feet. With trembling fingers, she reached into the data port 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 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 tops like mad banners. She curled her hands more tightly against herself and kept going.

Over the Luddeccean channel, someone said, "Sato's data bolt has been found. Fan out!"

Another voice cracked, "We can't send a jump team from the cruisers. It's too windy."

"We've got men on the ground, divert them!" someone else said.

Nebulas. Scowling, Noa willed her legs to move faster—but they didn't. She cursed under her breath. She had to have more reserves than this.

In the sky above she heard the whir of antigrav engines, the scream of cannons, and then the roar of exploding cannon fire as it collided with a ship. Noa closed her eyes and said a brief prayer for the unknown person overhead.

A Luddeccean voice rang through her mind, over the secure channel. "The Archangel is down!" Stopping in her tracks, Noa spun in the direction of the explosions, memories of her interrogation flashing back to her at the word, "Archangel."

Someone on the channel gave coordinates for the crash site, and it seemed that every secure Luddeccean channel on the planet echoed the strange message. "I repeat: Archangel down, Archangel down!" The words exploded in her mind, and she felt a buzz in her head.

And then all voices went silent. Noa plugged the coordinates for the crash site into her neural interface's calculator app. Could there be any survivors? Could she reach them in time? The answer blinked back at her before she could even finish the thought: it would take hours to reach the craft on foot at her pathetic excuse for a jog. She couldn't help, or expect help, from any fallen angel.

Chapter 2

He fell.

The ground rushed toward him, he swept past the limbs of towering Ponderosa pines to the ground of dead needles and rough stone, and he didn't feel pain. He was pain.

He opened his eyes and found himself flat on his back, bright lights burning his retinas, tubes in his mouth and nose. He heard the sound of rushing air, felt his lungs expand with a stab of agony, and then felt the air slowly seep back out. Dimly, he realized he was on a stretcher being pushed down a long, white hallway. Heat rushed down his cheeks.

"James," a familiar voice said.

His gaze followed the sound, and he found himself staring into his father's hazel eyes. They were red-rimmed with tears. His father never cried. "James! Stay with me," his father said. He pulled James's hand to his cheek. James blinked. His hand was pale next to his father's darker Eurasian skin. His mother was dark, too. His father and mother had struggled so hard to make sure that their blonde-haired, blue-eyed child wouldn't face any disadvantages. And he hadn't. James had had a wonderful life. A perfect life of mental stimulation, meaningful work, good friends, and adventure. He wanted to say so, but the mask over his face prevented him from speaking.

He heard shouting, and the sound of many footsteps, rubber on linoleum, a beeping long and slow, and someone saying, "Sir, you must step away."

"No," his father said. "No!"

His father's words echoed the feeling in James's heart. He couldn't swallow, but his body tried to. A gurgle rose up from the tubing, and the furious whir and beeping of machines became more furious still.

Blue-gloved hands wrapped around his father's shoulders, pulling him away, and James was moving through the long white hallway alone, the shouts becoming muted. He closed his eyes. He hadn't had a chance to say what he wanted to say—but the time capsule, his father would find it. Everything was in the time capsule … the world went dark behind his eyelids.

His eyes opened again. He was flat on his stomach instead of his back. Instead of pain he felt cold; it sizzled from his hands and the front of his legs and torso to his spine like an electric charge. He scrambled up, and for a moment he was suspended in a white blur. Trying to get his bearings, he spun in place. Was he in the hospital? But then why was it was cold? And there was no sound of beeping, footsteps, or the whine of antigrav stretchers—just a soft whisper.

His head ticked to the side, and the white blur came into focus. He found himself alone, outdoors—the ethernet strangely silent. He blinked. Beyond the snowflakes, there were trees. The whisper he heard was the sound of millions of snowflakes colliding with the pines, the ground, and his body.

Snow whispered.

He didn't think he'd ever noticed that before.

He blinked snowflakes from his lashes. The trees were Ponderosa Pines, which meant he was on Earth near the accident he'd just been dreaming of … no, remembering. He took a deep breath, and instead of the scent of pine, a different fragrance like mint and lavender flooded his senses—Luddeccean pine. He shook his head, blinked again, and saw that the trees he'd mistaken for Earth's Ponderosas had needles in gradients of red and purple, and silvery-gray bark. The morphology was almost identical to Ponderosas, hence his confusion. Similar gravity and climate on Earth and this planet had produced some of the most dramatic examples of convergent evolution in the galaxy.

How had he gotten here? He brushed snow from his chest and his hand encountered a strap. His eyes slipped down to a belt slung over his shoulder to his side … a holster … for the rifle on his back. Why did he have a rifle on his back?

He looked down at the outline his body had made in the snow. He must have fallen. Again. He shuddered, feeling a crawling sensation under his skin. Over the whisper of snow came the loud whine of antigrav engines above the treetops, ten kilometers away, south by southwest, and approaching at a rate that would put them here in 3.5 minutes.

He shook his head and clutched his temples as the recent past jolted to the forefront of his consciousness. He'd come to Luddeccea from Earth to visit with his parents at their vacation cottage—just as they had done every year since he was ten years old. The rifle was for hunting, as was the camouflage he was wearing. This year he'd come early. The recently elected Luddeccean government was very conservative. He'd heard things over the ethernet that made him suspect that the planet might have become inhospitable for outsiders. He had come to Luddeccea a week before his family, just to make sure things were safe.

He winced—the expression didn't go further than his eyes; his lips felt odd, stiff. The last thing he remembered was being in the shuttle he'd rented from the time gate … He'd had the proper authorizations; but, before he transmitted them, the Luddeccean Guard had begun firing. He blinked snow out of his eyes. His parents had said he was paranoid—things didn't get dangerous that quickly. James was a historian; his specialty was twentieth century Earth. Cuba had become dangerous in the 1950s very quickly … and apparently Luddeccea was undergoing such a dangerous revolution just as quickly. He couldn't remember ever being so unhappy to be right.

After the Guard had begun firing, he remembered a jolt as the shuttle's engines had been clipped. His body had been flung against his safety harness, and over the ethernet he'd heard, "Archangel down, Archangel down." Everything after that was a blank. But somehow he'd made his way here from the crash site …

He looked back at his footprints, rapidly filling with snow.

Archangel down. What could it mean? The ethernet was still silent—something must have become dislodged in his head in the crash. He shook his head in frustration and tried to access his own data banks. For a frightening moment he couldn't … but with another furious shake his neural interface kicked into gear. Although his specialty was twentieth century media, he had other historical data on hand. His neural interface picked up his last question and began to project images of archangels into his mind: illustrations from medieval manuscripts, paintings, and photo manipulations from the late 1900s and early 2000s, all of men with wings, often with weapons. At the same time the images flashed, nanos piped words. "Archangels: 'high angels,' mythical creatures, first imagined in 300 BC in the Judaic tradition: Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Uriel, Raguel, Remiel, and Saraqael. Lucifer was also sometimes considered to have been an archangel before he fell from grace. Archangels were present in the religions of all the Abrahamic traditions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam."

He exhaled a long breath. The Abrahamic traditions were popular on Luddeccea; had they been comparing him ... Professor James Hiro Sinclair ... a historian, to the devil? His head ticked violently to the side. He was certain he could feel his synapses blinking in confusion at the lack of logic.

A shout on the ground drew him from his thoughts. James looked over his shoulder. The whine of antigrav was louder—as was the sound of wind above the trees. He still could not see anyone or even a ship; the snow was falling too densely. He stood, transfixed. The right thing to do would be to put his hands over his head, wait for an actual human, and explain the situation. If only they saw his authorization chip, they'd realize it was a mistake—he was a citizen of Earth, and purposely firing on him could be grounds for sanctions. Surely they'd merely deport him? On the other hand, if he ran, he would be a fugitive.

The approaching voices grew louder. He found himself backing away from his pursuers without conscious thought. He wanted to stop and think—but his body seemed to have a mind of its own.

… And then it occurred to him, in a bright moment of lucidity, that maybe his body had caught on to what his brain seemed determined to ignore. When he had told his parents the world might be unsafe for off-worlders, he thought maybe they'd have rocks thrown at their cottage windows—he didn't think he'd be shot out of the sky.

Could he reason with a government that broke the laws of the Republic under mythological pretexts?

Before his mind had even formulated an answer to that hypothetical, he found himself spinning in place. He started to run, calling on his data banks of the local terrain. A three-dimensional holo appeared to superimpose itself over the scene before him, an illusion his nanos were piping into his visual cortex. The perceived holo showed a map with a blinking light for him, the cottage a tiny block of light 234 kilometers away, and a refueling station twenty kilometers away demarked by a tiny glowing triangle. Could he catch a ride there? Or at least hide and find food and shelter before he died of exposure?

There was one other light. In his auditory apparatus the name "Commander Noa Sato" rang. He leaped over a large boulder, and, with the impact of landing, more memories hit him in a rush. Just before he'd been shot, he'd heard the Luddeccean authorities declare her "dangerous." An image of a woman in a crisp Fleet uniform came to his mind. Her eyes … Noa Sato's eyes, he was almost sure … were sliding to the side at someone out of the camera's line of vision. A wide smile was on her face. Her skin was so dark it made the drab gray of her uniform appear silver. Her cheeks were round and plump despite the sleek athleticism of her form. He knew, like he knew her name and face, that she was forty-two years old in the picture, though the Fleet's anti-aging regimen meant she looked closer to twenty-five. She looked vibrant, healthy, and very alive. In the cold, running for his life, the image impossibly made him want.

James felt the urge to frown, but his numb lips did not respond. He didn't know her … he couldn't remember anything about her other than that picture. She was in the opposite direction to his current course. He couldn't go to her. It was too risky. He stumbled, clutched his head, and stumbled again. His footsteps slowed, until he was standing, panting, staring at his feet, his breath curling in front of him.

He tried to move along his intended trajectory.

… And found he couldn't. The shouts rose behind the curtain of snow. Someone said, "It fell down here!"

It?

James looked in the direction he wanted to go, and then in the direction of Commander Sato. His feet moved toward the Commander … and at least he was moving away from the people calling him "it." At first he went slowly, but when he didn't stumble, he started to run faster. Every stride became longer, and faster, until the world was a blur. A fallen tree loomed before him, the crest of the felled trunk a meter and twenty-four centimeters high. He leapt over it before he'd had time to think—he had to have misjudged the height because he cleared it easily and landed lightly on his feet.