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ARCHANGEL
By
Jaide Fox
© copyright by Jaide Fox, August 2005
Cover Art by Alex DeShanks, May 2008
ISBN 978-1-60394-184-6
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
THE BEGINNING
In the beginning, when the star dust of an exploding sun sprinkled the world with the seeds of life, they were among the first to crawl from the primordial soup, emerging as chameleon-like creatures, able to change shape and color at will to protect themselves from the predators that emerged alongside them. Like the salamander, they could heal the most grievous wounds with amazing speed and grow new appendages when necessary. This gift for rapid cell regeneration, they used to give themselves an even stronger advantage over the beasts that would prey upon them, the development of wings to glide high above the tangle of vegetation that had sprouted from the soil, where death lay behind every frond and leaf. Eventually they developed the ability for true flight.
These endowments gained them the right to life when others perished and eventually, over time, they emerged as the Elumi, evolving into the dominant, intelligent species of their world.
When the first, ape-like creatures that were man’s ancestors emerged and began their struggle to cultivate and dominate nature, the Elumi had already conquered the known world and its skies, and their gifts had led them to see what no other eyes could see—the gateway to a world that coexisted with the primitive, violent Earth, beyond the destructive forces of nature, beyond the reach of time, beyond the tedious struggles of mankind, who were multiplying and polluting the world the Elumi had dominated for ages.
For a time, the Elumi and mankind lived side by side and the Elumi enjoyed the awe with which these weaker creatures viewed them, calling them gods, angels, demons, fairies—and endowing these God-like beings with many powers the Elumi didn’t actually possess. For a time, the Elumi fought the boredom of their existence with these intelligent beasts, amused themselves with these savage, pseudo-intelligent creatures, but there was little sport in it when all was said and done and in time they grew more annoyed than amused and the Elumi passed beyond the gate, away from the distraction of these lesser beings to pursue their own course.
Their gifts had made them virtually immortal, resulting in a notable lack of fear of death, which encouraged their natural aggressiveness. With no reason to progress beyond that stage they found most compatible with their warlike dispositions, they simply did not. The strongest and most aggressive carved out kingdoms for themselves, twelve in all. Twelve kingdoms dwindled to four as the ages passed and one by one they fell to a mightier foe.
Many ages of mankind passed in the world below them while the remaining kingdoms contented themselves with merely squabbling over boundaries and incursions into the other kingdoms from time to time to count coup or to take a particularly appealing prize, but the time came when they grew restless. The time came when the petty disputes erupted once more into all out war when King Braeden of Nardu threatened the balance of power by seeking to ally himself to the kingdom of Marceena by marriage to the Princess Leia.
Wily King Edric, father of Princess Leia, did not oppose the match, but did not approve it either since he was well aware that King Braeden wanted his kingdom far more than his daughter. He allowed the courtship and bided his time while he considered how he might turn the situation to his own advantage and add the Kingdom of Nardu to his own holdings under his rule.
The threat was enough to alarm both King Sorecet of Garyn and King Gozal of Tearra and although they were fast enemies, they began to negotiate the possibility of joining forces to oppose the army they feared would rise against them the moment King Braeden and King Edic settled their differences.
And thus it came about that the wars in the land of Pearthen, high Earth, spilled over into the lower world of mankind once more.
Chapter One
Danielle Logan couldn’t believe she’d finally succeeded in building the next ‘big thing’. The ‘thing’ that would revolutionize the world—eliminate vast amounts of pollution, connect life from one end of the world to the other in seconds … even far reaching space travel was now a possibility.
She felt like bouncing around the room, she was so excited. Finally, she would have the respect of the scientific community, and she wouldn’t have to put up with bureaucratic bullshit to have a good life. She would have money, lots of money, for research or whatever. The sense of achievement had her floating on cloud nine, but of course, the money aspect of her invention was a damned fine bonus.
Tamping her excitement, Danielle studied the transporter pods. She’d have to think of a less sci-fi name for them otherwise people wouldn’t take them seriously.
Then again, having them linked to sci-fi might not be such a bad thing if she could get over the hump of people believing that using a transporter would turn them into a monster. It could get the system into use much quicker.
Just thinking about marketing strategies boggled her mind, but it was something she’d have to consider since she’d opted to do her experiments entirely on her own—without help, or intervention, from established labs. It had been the only way to retain her rights. Unfortunately, most of the experimental labs had wanted her to sign away every idea she could possibly come up with years down the road—even if she left and struck out on her own—they would see it as a violation of their rights and she’d be liable.
It had been hard scrounging for money, but well worth the hardships she’d endured.
Once she’d worked out the kinks in her system and successfully transported simple inanimate objects like paper and pens without a hitch, she’d moved on to complex structures—DVDs, telephones, computers, fruit, fast-food. When the fruit went through and tasted fine, she’d moved on to mice and then rats—a cat—a toy poodle she’d borrowed from a neighbor while she was away at work.
Okay, so it was immoral, but she’d been confident nothing would happen and she needed to test larger animals … she wasn’t an entirely bad person. This was for the good of everyone, after all, and could potentially cut down on highway deaths of animals.
That realization sent another surge of excitement through her. Jeez! She hadn’t quite thought out all the implications of the transporters, but the more she thought about it, the more excited she got.
So far her foray into living creatures had been successful. The animals all checked out okay, even several months afterward. They hadn’t developed cancerous cells or organ deceleration—nothing to indicate anything internal had gone haywire. She hadn’t moved beyond that, though.
Now that she was nearing the end of her tests, she wanted to have the process fully documented for approval for human testing, but she hadn’t managed to get approval for a Rhesus monkey—not without showing her other tests and revealing her invention. She needed to test higher life forms, but she didn’t trust anyone not to steal it. The problem was, there were so many people racing toward the same end, she felt like any day someone else would make a break through and all her work would be for nothing. She couldn’t guard the house all the time if someone took it into their head to do some espionage—and as farfetched as that sounded, it was entirely probable given the monetary value of such a discovery.
She had to move forward.
That was why she’d covered every window in her house and moved the units out of her crowded office and into the living room. She retested it. Nothing had jostled loose. All was in readiness. All she had to do now was step inside and test it out on herself.
She felt confident that there would be no problem with the process. She was ready for this. It had to be done.
She’d put consoles linked to the main computer inside both trans. pods, so she wouldn’t have to worry about getting stuck. She’d have to make a small panel version in the future, maybe something like an elevator. Later.
Torn between elation and anxiety, Danielle opened the pod door and stopped. Would it be better to try it out naked or clothed? She hadn’t considered that possibility before. The complex objects hadn’t scrambled, so she couldn’t imagine the probability was that high for it to happen to her. Still … better safe than sorry. When she’d done a few test runs and was certain there weren’t any problems, she would try it with clothes. Pulling off her clothes, she stepped into the small pod, hunching over the console to close the door.
She performed a vitals scan. Blood pressure, slightly elevated but in the norm. Her breathing was also elevated, but she knew that was from excitement. She was healthy and capable of traveling.
She just prayed nothing more that transporting would happen. Otherwise, the landlord would be in for a surprise next month when no rent was forthcoming.
The machine began its warm-up, cooling fans whirring softly as they picked up speed to keep the unit from overheating. A bead of sweat trickled between her breasts despite the fans, making her itch. She wiped it away, ticking off the seconds until transport. The unit hummed and released a short burst of air that ruffled her hair.
She watched the digital timer inside the unit.
Thirty seconds.
Visions of Cronenberg’s The Fly danced in her head.
Twenty seconds.
Her heart rate increased. Her ear drums rumbled. Nothing to worry about. She’d be okay. The poodle had survived, hadn’t it?
Ten ... nine ... eight….
Danielle clenched her hands, counting down in her head. Three … two … one.
Darkness engulfed her.
For a moment, she thought she’d gone blind. Then light burst all around her. Mist dampened her skin. She blinked against the rush of air cooling her flesh. Light and color streamed across her vision. Abruptly, her gaze locked on an image that was traveling at almost the same speed as she, the stunned countenance of a winged man.
She shrieked.
Blackness settled over her vision again and then she was surrounded by cool, gray metal and a glass shield revealing her disarrayed living room.
Another burst of air hit her as the door hissed open, depressurizing the atmosphere inside the chamber.
Danielle’s knees gave out and she collapsed in a heap on the floor, half in and half out of the receiving pod.
Her heart pounded painfully in her chest, not from excitement this time, but residual fear. Her temples throbbed. She looked around the room, dazed, willing herself to return to normal. Elation was slow in coming—non-existent, actually.
What the hell had just happened?
After a while, she pulled herself up, feeling weak, washed out. She didn’t bother to get dressed, instead she hobbled to the main computer, collapsing limply in her chair to examine the data.
She’d expected to blackout and then wakeup in the other pod across the room. She hadn’t expected … whatever that was.
Had she hallucinated? Had a near death experience like she’d seen proselytized a million times on TV?
She wasn’t a religious person. As a scientist, it was hard for her rational mind to comprehend the fantastical, like God in his many incarnations around the world. She didn’t rule it out, but neither did she truly believe in miracles. There was always some kind of explanation.
Despite that, she could’ve sworn she’d seen an … angel, which was completely preposterous.
Closing her eyes, she found that she could visualize the image, recall details she hadn’t been aware of her mind assimilating at the time. He had looked exactly like depictions she’d seen of seraphs in old books and paintings—like a human with wings. Dimly, she recalled that he’d had some kind of drapery thing covering his lower body. The image of long, wavy hair that was a very light brown with golden highlights was clearer. She remembered fair, but golden skin, bulging well defined muscles all over his chest and arms—even pierced nipples with a thin golden chain between the rings. She remembered the wings best—palest gold tips to dark gold, shaped very like the wings of a bird, and feathered. She couldn’t quite envision his face, beyond the look of surprise, but she had the impression of regular, angular features—sort of Nordic and appealingly symmetrical.
How could she remember the image so vividly if she hadn’t actually seen it at all? If it had been purely hallucination, wouldn’t it have been all blurry and indistinct in her mind like dream images? Would she remember something as minute as the glint of light off a golden chain?
Angels didn’t exist. Magic wasn’t real. Cold, hard science was real, facts she could see and touch and wrap her mind around. It had to be a hallucination brought on by her mind in transience.
Shaking her discomfort over the experience, Danielle accessed the data her computer had collected and began going over it. She’d gone over it twice before she realized something was off. The transference should have only taken ten seconds at the most—enough time for the second pod to ‘pick up’. She would have lost consciousness as her body was basically broken down and reassembled inside the other pod. Technically, she would be vaporized and dead ten seconds before the data transmitted her across the room. It was basically like an advanced fax machine.
That’s what she’d always thought of it as.
But she’d been aware of something else, and the data clearly showed a delay of fifteen seconds before the receptacle had received her. She’d been transferring for twenty five seconds.
She’d seen something.
Was the mind still capable of existing—of cognition—even in that state, though? And how could her eyes have seen when she was only atoms? Was it at all possible that the soul actually existed as a separate entity within the body?
Maybe the delay was caused by the size of her body? She hadn’t transported anything nearly as big before.
She didn’t know, but it disturbed her greatly not knowing what had happened.
Once she’d gone over all of the data, she’d begun feeling more like herself, more the scientist than an alarmist. She put her t-shirt on and went back to the pod to run another scan. Everything was normal.
She tested the pods—every single aspect, from the casing to the console inside. Everything was in working order. The pods hadn’t spontaneously changed or reset themselves. She rebooted her computer, made sure the atomic clock still functioned properly. Nothing wrong there.
She decided to resend something through the pod, to make sure it wasn’t just the new location affecting it. The shoe went through fine—precisely 9.99 seconds to traverse from one pod to another.
The only explanation that fit was that the human body was too complicated to transmit in less than ten seconds.
She was going to have to try it again and see if it replicated the same results the second time, she realized. She didn’t have time for speculation. Even though she was tired, that wasn’t unexpected. She had to believe that nothing had happened to her because the data emphatically denied that.
Uneasiness moved over her, though.
She decided to sleep on it. She was exhausted. She would rest a few hours and then test everything again. If she found no evidence to the contrary, she was going to assume it was just some sort of side effect from the process that was non-threatening and she would try the experiment again.
She found it hard to sleep. After tossing and turning for hours, she finally drifted off. The vision, naturally enough, invaded her dreams. This time, though, she wasn’t startled or fearful that he represented death, far from it. In the dream, the gorgeous vision waited for her with open arms, smiled at her, set her heart to pounding with excitement when he pulled her against him and made love to her.
She was aroused when she woke and torn between the desire to burrow deeper and try to retrieve the dream and the nagging of her mind to get up and go back to work. Work won out and she rolled out of bed with a groan and went to shower to prod her sluggish mind into awareness.
It took hours to go over everything again, but once she had, she saw the results were the same. She hadn’t missed anything critical. All of her vitals were normal. Everything on the system checked out.
Her belly clenched in anxiety at the thought of testing again on herself, but she dismissed it. One thing that was definitely not going to sell the thing for her was any sign of doubt about using it herself.
Resolutely, Danielle stripped and got into the first pod, starting up the process once more.
Despite the mental pep talk, she was more nervous this time. Giving herself a mental kick, she willed herself to breathe slowly, forced her hands to unclench as the seconds ticked by. She resisted the urge to chew her nails or bite her bottom lip. When the rush of air came, she readied for the blackout and held her eyes open wide, as if it would somehow help her see whatever it was she’d seen before.
The sudden darkness still surprised her when it hit. The blinding light stunned her even more. She blinked, her vision blurry, unfocussed—or rather everything around her was out of focus because of the speed she was moving. Her heart beat twice. She sucked in a breath of strangely sweet air just as something slammed into her from behind, changing her trajectory instantly and smacking her face first into a blur of green mossy-like substance that turned slimy as her body smeared it.
It took Danielle several stunned moments to realize she’d stopped moving. The distinct smells and tastes of dirt and chlorophyll from the vegetation her face was burrowed against filled her mouth and nose. She struggled for breath, tensed against the pain she expected to begin filtering through to her shocked brain.
There was less than she’d expected and she did a mental inventory to see what was mangled.
She thought she might be paralyzed for a few, panicked seconds, then realized that something heavy was pinning her to the ground. Sluggishly, her perception moved beyond her own body to the world around her. The sound of wings flapping and harsh breathing caught her ears. Her hair stirred with each beat of the wings. Nearby she could hear a sizzle of electricity, similar to the sound her transporter pods made when a transference was in progress and realized with a touch of amazement that she’d been plucked from the transference stream.
With her face squished into the dirt, she couldn’t see anything beyond … dirt, though.
Abruptly, Danielle’s brain threw off the effects of shock and kicked into high gear. Her mind was whirling, collecting and storing data for future use. The dirt felt like dirt, but it didn’t smell like it. Nothing smelled right. Everything was … almost sweet.
The heavy weight on her was warm. She could feel muscles flexed around her waist and knew she wasn’t lying beneath a limb, not a tree limb, anyway. Fingers tightened in her hair, which explained why she couldn’t move her head.
There was definitely a humanoid holding her. If she was hallucinating, it was the most vivid hallucination she’d ever thought to experience. Imagining that she was seeing things was one thing, but feeling? Smelling strange scents?
Strangely, except for those few unnerving moments when it had popped into her mind that she was paralyzed, she felt no sense of impending panic. She supposed that was because she was having to focus on dragging air into her lungs. She could almost believe something had fallen on her if not for the breathing right behind her neck and the very real feeling of a man on top of her.
She might not have had a lot of practice in the mating practices of humans, but she knew what a man’s body felt like. He was heavy, hard all over. Hair roughened skin skimmed along the backs of her legs.
“Zahtifah ezeto unta,” a deep, guttural voice growled behind her, pronouncing each word slowly.
Danielle tried to move her head enough to talk through her squashed open mouth. “Engwith. I sweak Engwith,” she said with an effort, wondering if it was even worth it to try to communicate at this point. Surely she’d wake up in the pod at any moment?
“Zahtifah ezeto unta!” His hands tightened in her hair, making her scalp hurt and annihilating her efforts to convince herself that nothing she thought she was experiencing was real.
She’d had just about enough of that. Anger surged through her. She totally lost her cool then. Struggling until she managed to free one arm, she sent her elbow flying back to connect with hard flesh.
He grunted and loosened his hold. She bucked the instant his grip slackened, growling with the effort of trying to move him enough to gain some leverage and throw him off of her.
Finally, she managed to lift her head from the muck and cuss him. “Ow! Damn it, you asshole! Let me go.”
The pressure on her backside decreased. He moved off of her, releasing her. Before she could try to follow up with her attack, or even decide if she wanted to, she was rolled onto her back, and then he was on her again, his hands pinning her wrists, his chest crushing her breasts. His face was mere inches from hers.
She gasped as the breath left her lungs and just stared, feeling her heart stick in her throat.
It was the angel.
There was no welcoming smile, no desire in his eyes the way she’d dreamed it. Aggression, not passion, tautened every line of his body. His face was a harsh mask of fury. “How did you find the gateway?”
Danielle swallowed the hard lump in her throat. “You speak English?” she asked a little weakly, her brief righteous indignation vanishing abruptly along with her spine. Great, genius. Didn’t he just ask you in English? “What I meant to say is … what gateway? I didn’t see anything.”
A muscle worked in his jaw, as if he was striving for patience … and not succeeding very well. “Do not pretend ignorance. Twice you have passed through it.”
Maybe she’d died and gone to heaven? This couldn’t be happening. “Am I … dead?”
He moved off her and tugged her roughly to her feet. “Not yet,” he said through gritted teeth.
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