Angeli

by Jody Wallace

  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.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then guess what we’re going to do with you?”

  Nikolas didn’t even blink. “Flash your tits at me again?”

  “No.” She felt icky about that, but it had worked. Stupid man.

  “Torture me?”

  “If I have to. Without those bombs, your people will die, too.”

  “Hardly. Ship’s leaving soon,” Nikolas said. “That’s why I need to bring Gregori in now. I’m sorry about your planet, but there’s nothing more we can do.”

  Adelita hoped Gregori wouldn’t be disgusted with her for this. She hoped she wouldn’t be disgusted with herself, because what she was about to say was the truth.

  “Your people will die,” Adelita said, “because I’ll feed you to the shades and wake your leviathan.”

  Gregori’s cheek twitched. Nikolas, however, stared at her with more horror than she’d seen on anyone’s face since she’d told her family she didn’t intend to have children.

  “You’d let her do that?” he asked Gregori. “All your people, your friends, your Ship. We’d have no chance.”

  Gregori stared fixedly at the alien base, as good as giving Adelita the reins. While she wondered what was going through Gregori’s head, blackmail seemed the surest way to get a bomb from Nikolas.

  “You’re leaving my planet with no chance, alien.” She fingered the switch on her Taser. “I pick us over you.”

  “You’ll still die,” Nikolas said.

  Adelita had no idea if Gregori would throw Nikolas to the shades and doom Ship, but he hadn’t denied her threat. She ran with it. “Gregori told me you have no idea what happens after a leviathan shows up. Maybe he gets his belly full on Ship and leaves us alone.”

  Nikolas glared at her. “Does your god forgive genocide?”

  “Not lately. Does yours?”

  “We’re doing everything we can to preserve your—”

  “You don’t want to go there,” Gregori interrupted, proving he wasn’t ignoring the conversation. “She doesn’t see eye to eye with code on that.”

  Adelita squeezed her weapon. What good soldiers they were. Ship had brainwashed its staff into never questioning its authority or motivations. “You’re not preserving anything but yourselves. You need our females because you’ve killed yours off.”

  “You think we killed our females? Where did you find this one, Gregori?” Nikolas asked with a pained laugh. “The conspiracy club?”

  Gregori glanced at her, his gaze hooded. “Arizona.”

  “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here.” How many times could she use the Taser on Nikolas before Gregori made her stop? “Gregori told me you don’t lose many planets to the monsters. Don’t you think it’s strange you lost this one?”

  “Gregori tells you lots of things.” Nikolas smiled, and for a split second she could see why people all over Earth had wanted to meet this creep. It helped when he wasn’t talking. “You must be a damn good lay.”

  Gregori’s shoulders stiffened, but he didn’t respond. Adelita considered the man on the ground. Nikolas was needling her, goading her into mistakes. What he hoped to achieve, she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t as if they were in front of a judge and jury.

  She was in charge here.

  Instead of kicking Nikolas, which hadn’t shut his nasty mouth the first three times, she told him the truth. “You’re right. I’m an excellent lay.”

  Both Nikolas and Gregori looked at her with shocked expressions.

  “What?” She stuck her hands on her hips. “I am. But that’s not why Gregori leveled with me. He leveled with me because I deserve to know.”

  Nikolas twisted his bound wrists until he could prop his arms on his knees. “You’d be happier if you didn’t.”

  “I’m sure you’re happier not thinking too hard about the fact that Ship chose an idiot to save this planet. Of course it was a disaster. Was it any wonder he failed?”

  Nikolas’s lips tightened.

  “Come on, you can tell me. I won’t tell your precious Ship you had doubts. Did it surprise you when Adam Alsing couldn’t do the job? Either of you?”

  When neither man denied it, she said, “Once your patsy failed, you had the perfect excuse to take our ladies and run.”

  “It’s not like that,” Nikolas said hotly.

  Adelita smiled. “Are you one hundred percent sure?”

  Nikolas rested his forehead on his arms. His defeated posture would have roused her sympathies, if he hadn’t been a horrible person who’d beaten up her angeli. Her personal helicopter.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” he admitted, his voice harsh. “There’s no going back. Retrieval is your only hope. I can get permission to collect your family, Adelita. Ten or twenty people. That’s my last offer. I don’t know what else to do here.”

  “Get us some bombs, and let the grown-ups take care of things, you spineless weasel.” Like she could settle on the twenty people in this world who deserved to live. What kind of hell did this man wish on her?

  Nikolas raised his head. “What if I do? What then? The horde’s stretched thin, but not even Gregori the Great can enter the kill zone around the begetters and the nexus. It’s swarmed. Nobody can get close enough to make a difference.”

  “Why is closeness an issue?” Adelita asked. “We’ll send a guided missile. I assume your highly advanced society has torpedoes.”

  Nikolas laughed. “As your people noticed when they blew up half of San Francisco, the nexus protects itself from long-range attack. Munitions have to be hand-delivered.”

  Adelita pointed at him with the Taser. “I know our bombs can’t do much, but I assumed you geniuses would have found a way around that.”

  He smirked. “Hate to break it to you, but we’re not actually gods.”

  “But that means—”

  “Yeah,” Nikolas said. “That means it’s impossible.”

  “Impossible is a word for quitters. I don’t give up,” she said, ignoring the fact that as recently as a week ago, she’d been half-suicidal. “Gregori can fly the bomb to la boca, drop it down the bad guys’ throats, and fly out, like Luke Skywalker. He’s faster than the demonios rojos, and if he’s not, he can use your gun to shoot off their heads.”

  “Because it’s that easy?”

  “Because we are willing to try.”

  “Two problems. One, you have no idea what a swarm is like.”

  “I saw it on television.” Of course, that had been weeks ago, when broadcasts had extended into the bad zone. “Gregori can do it.”

  Her angeli gave her a long look. He’d better not challenge her in front of Nikolas, or they’d never get the slimy bastard to cooperate.

  Luckily for Gregori, he didn’t. “She’s right, Niko. If you get us the munitions, I’ll fly them to the nexus myself.”

  Nikolas cursed vividly, using words Adelita didn’t recognize. “That is the worst idea yet. You can’t enter the kill zone without tipping them off.”

  “Who besides me?” Gregori asked. “Are you going to volunteer?”

  “Hell, no,” Nikolas said. “I’m not going down in history as the asshole who got a Ship and everyone on it eaten by a leviathan.”

  “Then are you going to conceal my actions while I’m training a native strike force? Might take longer without an actual demolition squad to help.”

  “If I did get you a bomb, you wouldn’t have time to train anybody.” Nikolas smiled without it reaching his eyes. “Thanks to your mutiny, the general scheduled daily inventory checks to make sure nobody else is trying to play her
o. Bombs go missing, Ship’s gonna know.”

  “What will Ship do?” Adelita asked. “Call 911 to report a theft?”

  “If Ship were sufficiently motivated, it would take ten minutes for us to retrieve the tech.” He laughed. “Neutralizing a minor threat like Gregori isn’t high-priority.”

  “Obviously not, if they sent you,” Adelita said.

  “So I’d have twenty or so hours once you get the munitions before the planetwide sensors go active.” Gregori closed his eyes, his face drawn. “Doesn’t matter. I can get close enough.”

  “Like all your close-enoughs the past three weeks? Those tactics won’t work at the nexus. We were monitoring you the whole time.”

  “Like hell,” Gregori said. “If you’d known where I was, I wouldn’t have lasted three weeks. Though you heading up the trackers does explain why the efforts to bring me in were half-assed. Let me guess—you were busy with all the women.”

  “I tried to explain how hard it was to—” Nikolas shook his head and cursed. “I don’t care. Think whatever you want. I wasn’t lying when I said there are more important things going on than a deserter who believes he can save an entire planet. Or enter the kill zone three weeks into an infestation without getting detected. You can’t get close enough to the nexus to plant a bomb, and you know it. You’re being obtuse.”

  Adelita wasn’t sure what Nikolas meant about a kill zone or Gregori not being able to get close when all he had to do was fly over the heads of the shades and avoid some daemons.

  Meanwhile, Gregori crossed his arms, as if settling in for a long argument. “I haven’t done half-bad so far.”

  “You haven’t done half of what you think you’ve done.”

  “Boys.” Adelita clapped her hands. She didn’t have time to decipher the tension under the surface and didn’t want to toss a living person, however annoying he was, to the shades. She’d rather convince him to help. “Do you want this planet dead, Nikolas?”

  “What do you think?”

  She considered what might push him over the edge. He liked women, but what about… “Babies, Nikolas. Helpless little babies everywhere. Eaten by monsters.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Fuck you.”

  “I know it isn’t your way to risk Ship, but it sounds like nothing has gone according to your code this whole time. You’re in what we call no-man’s-land. We have to get creative. The payoff will be huge. Worth it.”

  He wouldn’t look at her. “Not if Gregori wakes the leviathan. Then we all die. I don’t see how this can succeed.”

  “Gregori won’t screw up.”

  “It’s not a matter of screwing up. It’s a matter of it being impossible. He can’t get close enough.”

  “It’s not impossible.” She infused her voice with everything she believed—this was not the end of days, and her Lord who watched over them all would help them if they helped themselves. “We’ll find a way to do this, and you can save these people. Innocents. Babies. You know they don’t deserve this. Can you give my planet this chance?”

  “Let’s say I agree to get an explosive powerful enough to shut the nexus.” Nikolas glanced at the ridge that concealed the base. “When you let me go, you lose your leverage.”

  Adelita almost laughed. She’d found his trigger. He wanted something to change, wanted someone on his team. Badly. He was as desperate as they were. “We’ll let you go. We’ll trust you,” she said, emphasizing the word trust, “to come back with what we need.”

  She and Nikolas locked gazes, and what she read there was… No, it wasn’t hope. But it was something.

  “That’s a lot of faith when I’ve done nothing to earn it,” he admitted.

  “It’s not faith,” Gregori said before Adelita could reassure Nikolas. “If you don’t bring the munitions within a certain time frame, we’ll wake the leviathan.”

  Nikolas stared. “You gonna call it up on a comm, tell it dinner’s ready?”

  “No,” Gregori said. “I’ll give myself to the shades instead of you.”

  “You’ll do no such thing,” Adelita said instantly, but then realized she was doing exactly what she didn’t want Gregori to do. Weakening their position. “You won’t have to, because Nikolas is going to cooperate. He’s going to leave the bombs we need in the lodge at Old Faithful tomorrow, and he’s not going to tell anyone what he’s doing, because he wants to save the babies. And Ship. Isn’t that right, Nikolas?”

  “I’ll do it,” Nikolas agreed, but he wasn’t watching her. He was staring at Gregori as if he were envious of the other man. As if Gregori possessed something Nikolas wished he had, and Adelita was fairly certain it had nothing to do with her.

  Chapter Twelve

  Gregori didn’t want to spend his last day alive sightseeing, but Adelita was a persuasive woman. Either that, or he was easily persuaded.

  It hadn’t started out like this. After leaving Niko, they’d rigged the Old Faithful area with sensors from the new multipurps and agreed not to go near it until Niko transmitted the signal. Gregori had gotten the impression Niko hoped the plan would succeed. It was almost as if a weight had been lifted from the other man’s shoulders.

  Funny, he hadn’t seemed especially burdened about Terra’s downfall in the weeks he’d been trying to stop Gregori from saving it.

  Plan outlined and sensors in place, Adelita had started in on Gregori. One hand on her hip, one finger wagging, she’d rebutted every reason he’d given her why sightseeing was a bad idea. He’d fought the torrent valiantly.

  He shouldn’t have bothered.

  Instead of planning for the maneuver, instead of running scenarios or gathering supplies or practicing his bomb-tossing skills, Gregori and Adelita sweated in the mineral-scented fog of a hot springs while Adelita snapped picture after picture and made him do things like “fly over there and wave at the camera” or “quit scaring the buffalo, you’ve ruined the shot” or “fetch me that rock.”

  This was a stupid time to lose his immunity to feminine wiles. It had been stupid when she’d kissed him earlier, and it was stupid now. There was too much to do.

  “We need to go,” he mentioned, not for the first time. The hot springs, geysers, mud cauldrons, and fumaroles were scenic, but once you’d seen thirty, what was the point in seeing thirty more?

  She lowered her camera and faced him. Her cheeks were pink, and sweat and mist beaded on her tan skin. A green band held her hair in a wad at the nape of her neck. She hadn’t mentioned what had nearly happened before Niko had found them, and neither had he.

  For a brief moment, he wished she’d toss the camera in the springs and kiss him. Or that he could quit thinking about tomorrow long enough to kiss her.

  But he couldn’t, except for moments like this, when her face looked like he imagined it would after an orgasm.

  “You ready to see Yellowstone Falls?” she asked. “We could fly to the bottom.”

  The moment was over. Gregori shook his head no.

  “What do you want to do, then? Mammoth Hot Springs is north of us.”

  “Scout the area near San Francisco and round up supplies.” With his tech upgraded by Niko’s, he could be in California in twenty, maybe thirty minutes. He’d stash Adelita somewhere en route. She wouldn’t be safe with him if he ran into daemons, which he was bound to do.

  She flipped through images on her digital camera, not meeting his eyes. “Most tourists never see the bottom of the falls.”

  “We’re not tourists.”

  “We are until we have the bomb.” Her soles scraped the rough boardwalk as she leaned against the guardrail. “Has he called you yet?”

  “I would have told you immediately.” Gregori’s repaired sensors read no people, no transmissions, no entities in the vicinity. Granted, Niko could have figured out a way to cloak himself, but it would have required him to invent new tech in the past three weeks. As far as Gregori knew, not even Niko was that gifted.

  “Then there’s no need to go,
” Adelita insisted. “We still have time.” A hint of desperation bled through her words. “These photos aren’t going to take themselves.”

  He’d expected mulishness, not anxiety. Was this sightseeing not about the sights?

  “Adelita, do you—”

  The wind swirled an immense, white cloud of steam around them like a sauna, obscuring his vision. The stench of sulfur smacked into him like heavy rain. As did the acrid taste, leaching into his mouth and pores. His eyes watered, and his nostrils tried to close themselves. Almost instinctively, he flipped on his force field for climate controls.

  “Mierda.” The dense fog muffled Adelita’s voice. “Where’d you go? Come here and let me stand in your shield. It’s too hot and funky. I feel like a boiled egg.”

  He walked toward her through the haze. She smiled when he got close enough to see.

  “This spring is 159 degrees Fahrenheit,” he told her. “The ambient temperature is 80.2 degrees. Let’s go somewhere cooler.”

  Like San Francisco.

  “Good idea.” She slipped an arm through his, and he altered his force field to accommodate her. “Mammoth doesn’t have as many active features. Pick me up?”

  “We should talk first.” He didn’t want to drag Adelita to San Francisco, but he couldn’t waste his last hours cataloging the geothermal features of a planet that was doomed if he failed. The horde would be thick. Unavoidable. As a Shipborn, he wouldn’t be able to enter the kill zone undetected, so he’d have to deliver the bomb from a distance without using propellants.

  He’d have to throw it. From the side, from above, from far enough away that he wasn’t sure it was possible. His chances were limited at best, and worse if the shades called in a swarm of daemons to snatch their prey out of the sky. He also had to hope a leviathan couldn’t be woken after the nexus closed, a hypothesis some Shipborn believed and some did not.

  Lack of preparation would reduce his chances to minuscule.