Chapter Three

(Angel)

Angel awoke to the upturned bowl of an orange afternoon sky. Trees, grass and shattered asphalt framed the impossible stretch of her peripheral. Against her face the air felt tepid, smelled sterile. Sounds of breathing crackled in her ears. She was wearing a helmet, a helmet with a vision-expanding visor.

Like ice water in the face, it all came back as she sat up: the car wreck, the green glowing meteor, the blue light, the voice, the promise. Angel stood. She wore a skintight outfit, jet black with purple lines that gave definition to the cuirass and spaulders and other armored plates which contoured to her lanky frame. It made her think of one Carin's video games.

She looked at the garage-wide crater. The meteor had peeled down to a thin metal wrapper splattered with a silvery slime.

"So it was real," she said dully.

"Yes. Authorities are incoming," said the female voice. In her ear now and not her head.

"Authorities?"

"New Jersey State Police. SWAT units. Helicopter's ETA: three minutes, forty seconds. Ground vehicles' ETA: ten minutes, thirty seconds. Estimated strength: one twelve person squad, lightly arm--"

"Okay, okay," Angel said, raising a palm to no one. "But that's good, right? They're the police, not the bad guys. I'll just take this off and say, 'look what I found!' I haven't done anything wrong. You said these . . . hydro-nabites or whatever . . . you said they're"--she winced--"inside me, right? All I have to do is touch Carin for a while, and she'll be well."

"That is correct: prolonged exposure will eradicate the cancerous cells. But the police will not allow this contact. They are under orders to detain anyone potentially compromised by alien technology."

Angel practiced walking. The suit weighed nothing, and she felt stronger, faster. Her headache was gone, as were all the bruises from the crash. She had been given so many options; she tried to remember.

"This suit can fly, right?"

"Yes."

"And turn invisible?"

"Along the visible and infrared spectrum, yes."

Angel looked at the sky. She thought she heard rotors in the distance. "Well, I guess what the police don't know won't hurt them," she said. She flexed her gloved fists experimentally. "How do I use these powers?"

"Concentrate on the desired action. The nerve suit will convey the command."

She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was a disembodied point of view hovering at eye level. She held her arms out before her but saw only the asphalt and wetlands of her surroundings.

"Groovy," Angel said. But now . . .

Almost before she had completed the thought, she felt thin dragonfly wings sprout from her spine-plate. Small engine vents swiveled out along her thighs and the small of her back, and the rockets tickled with heat.

And she was flying.

The road shrank to a long gray snake, and she swerved east in a victory roll high over the heavy wooded sprawl of Passaic River Park. Her HUD gave altitude and speed, and highlighted along her new peripheral the dot of an incoming police helicopter. Too bad for them because they were late to the party.

She spread her arms, threw back her wings and raced up, up and away.

I'm flying an alien suit that gives me superpowers. The unreality of it brought laughter which rang against her faceplate. This was like that old TV show she watched reruns of as a girl. How did that theme song go?

"Believe it or not, I'm walking on air . . ."

She was dizzying herself with 300mph flip-kicks at 20,000 feet when something under her suit, in her jeans pocket, began to vibrate.

"How the hell am I supposed to answer that?" Angel demanded.

"I can link it through the suit's comms system."

"Do it."

"Angie," said Carin's weak, sleepy voice. "I . . . I got your text. You were . . . you were hit by a meteor?"

"Yeah, babe, but that's not the half of it." Angel laughed. "If I tell you over the phone you'll think I'm shitting you, but I got a some good news."

"But the car . . ."

"The Cutlass is dead, baby. Forget about it. But don't worry. I've got it all under control."

"But--"

"Look, didn't I always say I'd take care of you?"

"Yeah, but--"

"I love you, baby."

"I love you too, Angie, but--"

"See you in a few."

Somehow, Angel cut the call with a thought. She folded her wings into a skinny 'V' and dived before leveling in a smooth northeast flight. She'd been in airplanes before, but this experience was more vast, more immediate. Through nearly panoramic eyes, the street-sewed patchwork of residential Newark spread before her like a surburban ocean. Past the green-gray waters of the Hackensack lay Jersey City, and beyond that, across the Hudson River sat the Big Apple herself.

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***

(Linda)

Armed helicopters worry around our FBI building. Detachments of the New Jersey National Guard patrol outside. I've been at work for an hour and a half, and the Earth is a war zone.

We've lost many eyes and ears--half of the Web is down; EMPs have knocked out parts of our satellite surveillance--but the scattered news feeds piece well enough together to give us a scenario as nightmarish as it is ludicrous: giant killer mechas, everywhere, in every major city and every military hot spot. Some places are worse hit than others. The reports are anything but confirmed, but we've heard tales of these machines battling each other in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Serbia, Ukraine . . . and to top it off it seems Israel's put its nuclear arsenal to work. India and Pakistan might follow.

A few minutes ago, we watched a leaked video of two skyscraper-scale robots wrestling and rolling like mechanical schoolboys across a recently battle-torn Korean DMZ. One of them bore on its chest a Republic of Korea emblem, and looked suspiciously like a super-sized Gundam. The other sported elaborate medieval-style armor, its shiny golden head fashioned with the jovial, beaming face of the DPRK's Eternal President. The clip ended before we could see who won.

My co-workers seem numb, confused, as if they'd lost a war they didn't know they were fighting. I don't feel afraid, not really. But then I don't have much going on in my life. If this is The End, at least it's a good show. I should be with my cats now. It's a shame I'll never finish my fan fiction.

But in the meantime, we have a job to do. Fortunately the international arena's above our pay-grade, but the domestic situation isn't much better. It's all happening too fast, and with all the unchecked fires, the looting and traffic congestion, the military's too spread out to deal with the mecha attacks. And when they do engage . . . well, from what I've heard, they haven't exactly curb-stomped the machines.

We've learned things, however. We know the mechas came from the falling pods (so, probably aliens). We know they vary in size, weaponry and capabilities. We know humans, either abducted or willing, are the pilots.

But knowing is only half the battle; we need results. The bosses want to capture a mecha. That's where me and my team come in.

The easiest way to catch someone is to 1) know where they'll be before they get there and 2) be able to stop them when they do. We've been going over hastily compiled maps of local pod impacts and reviewing phone records of the surrounding area for potential leads. These may seem narrow, brittle straws to grasp, but I've been in intelligence analysis long enough to know data-mining can pay off faster than you think.

I pause from my keyboard to sip cranberry juice--good for UTIs. My computer monitor is my world. The emergency lights of our cubicles are a soothing blue, though this measure is forced on us by the power outage which blankets half of Newark. On the satellite rendered map I select a impact site near a parkland about eight miles southwest of here.

The SWAT teams that arrived at the crater found only a spread of metallic foil coated in silvery gel. The pod must have found someone, made them a pilot. The mecha couldn't have been one of the gigantic ones because the area is populated enough that someone would have seen. So, it was probably a smaller machine, maybe human-sized. Hopefully, that means it'll be easier to capture.

I filter the database by location and time and run across a grand total of one result: a single text message, sent within spitting distance of the pod. I pull up the content, read it and nearly laugh. That phone received a call half an hour later--and if the nearby cell tower readings are to be believed, at an altitude usually reserved for aircraft. The recipient of the text and the caller was in a New York hospital.

I look over the dossiers of both registered owners. Two women. Married couple. One's an elementary schoolteacher undergoing cancer treatment; the other's an auto mechanic war hero who I remember seeing on magazine covers a few years back. From their drivers licence photos, they seem like nice people.

It takes only a minute to find and download the call's audio. I listen as the auto-mechanic's blue-collar Jersey accent steamrolls the teacher's anemic-sounding Brooklyn. If I were to guess, she thinks she can cure her wife's cancer.

That may or may not be true, but it doesn't matter. Angel Zacarias is a pilot. And I know where she's headed. Though this is what I've been looking for, my heart sinks a little.

Sorry, I think as I touch my headset to speak to my supervisor, but Uncle Sam wants your mecha.

I'm sure she'll understand. After all, we're the good guys.