Читать онлайн «Fallen Angel»

Faridah Malik was falling through a dawn sky full of amber sunlight and grey clouds. The howling wind thundered at her, ripples of it streaming over her body and the bare skin of her face, plucking at the thin material of her clothing. She could believe it was alive, the way it toyed with her like a cat with a mouse, batting her back and forth. Somewhere below, concealed in the gossamer strata of smoggy city-haze, the golden towers of Upper Hengsha were reaching up for her, vast glassy daggers catching the light of the rising sun.

She opened her mouth to cry out, but her breath was stolen away and the scream she wanted to release was gone in an instant. The sky took it from her.

Afforded some protection behind a pair of goggles, her eyes scanned the horizon line and looked for a familiar silhouette moving against the drifts of heavy cloud. She found it, maybe a few hundred feet away, turning against the sunrise. A boxy white shape hung between two stubby wings and the blurred discs of massive rotor props. The aircraft was an old military transport from the mid-2010’s, a V-22 Osprey years past its wartime prime, decommissioned for civilian flight.

Faridah grinned and changed her attitude, reconfiguring herself in the punishing airflow to alter her body’s aerodynamics. At first she was a diving human missile, arms flat to her sides and her legs together, mimicking a dolphin-like profile; but now she let her arms extend out, legs bend and shift. She cut into the wind, widening her silhouette. Slowing. Defying gravity.

But still too fast, she told herself. The Osprey was coming up quickly ahead of her.

The aircraft was very close now, and she was coming in behind it, aiming herself on an invisible line between the vertical fins of the Osprey’s H-shaped tail. A yawning drop ramp was open beneath the fins, a brightly-lit cargo bay visible within. Five minutes ago and a few thousand feet higher up, she had thrown herself out of that same hatchway and into the pink glow of the cold, pre-dawn air.

Faridah laughed, feeling the sound in her chest more than hearing it as adrenaline surged through her bloodstream. She felt swift and dangerous, and she knew she was utterly alive in this moment, in a way that it would be impossible to express to anyone who had not shared such an experience.

The wintry kiss of the sky, the heavy embrace of gravity and the thundering power of the winds left her elated. Part of her wanted to close her eyes and fall forever.

But then she forced out a banshee whoop and pivoted into a side-slip motion, letting her body be her aerofoil. Faridah plunged into the V-22’s turbulent wake and burst through it. The open cargo bay reared up like a hungry mouth and she allowed it to swallow her whole.