The Fallen Part 5

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 shead have to consider since shead 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 shead be liable.

Itad been hard scrounging for money, but well worth the hards.h.i.+ps shead endured.

Once shead worked out the kinks in her system and successfully transported simple inanimate objects like paper and pens without a hitch, shead moved on to complex structures: DVDs; telephones; computers; fruit, KFC. When the fruit went through and tasted fine, shead moved on to mice and then rats; a cat; a toy poodle shead borrowed from a neighbor while she was away at work.

Okay, so it was immoral, but shead been confident nothing would happen and she needed to test larger animals a she wasnat an entirely bad person. This was for the good of everyone, after all, and could potentially cut down on highway deaths of animals.

Jeez, she hadnat 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 was successful. The animals all checked out okay, even several months afterward. They hadnat developed cancerous cells or organ deceleration--nothing to indicate anything internal had gone haywire. She hadnat moved beyond that, though.

Now that she was nearing the end, she wanted to have the process fully doc.u.mented for approval for human testing, but she hadnat managed to get approval for a Rhesus--not without showing her other tests and revealing her invention. She needed to test higher life forms, but she didnat 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 couldnat guard the house all the time if someone took it into their head to do some espionage--and as far fetched as that sounded, it was entirely probable given the monetary value of such a discovery.

She had to move forward.

Which was why shead 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.

Shead put consoles linked to the main computer inside both trans. pods, so she wouldnat have to worry about getting stuck. Shead 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 hadnat considered that possibility before. The complex objects hadnat scrambled, so she couldnat imagine the probability was that high for it to happen to her. Still a better safe than sorry. When shead done a few test runs and was certain there werenat 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 Cronenbergas The Fly danced in her head.

Twenty seconds.

Her heart rate increased. Her ear drums rumbled. Nothing to worry about. Shead be okay. The poodle had survived, hadnat it?

Ten ... nine ... eighta.

Danielle clenched her hands, counting down in her head. Three a two a one.

Darkness engulfed her.

For a moment, she thought shead 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, grey metal and a gla.s.s s.h.i.+eld revealing her disarrayed living room.

Another burst of air hit her as the door hissed open, depressurizing the atmosphere inside the chamber.

Danielleas 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 h.e.l.l had just happened?

After a while, she pulled herself up, feeling weak, washed out. She didnat bother to get dressed, instead she hobbled to the main computer, collapsing limply in her chair to examine the data.

Shead expected to blackout and then wakeup in the other pod across the room. She hadnat expected a whatever that was.

Had she hallucinated? Had a near death experience like shead seen proselytized a million times on TV?

She wasnat a religious person. As a scientist, it was hard for her rational mind to comprehend the fantastical, like G.o.d in his many incarnations around the world. She didnat rule it out, but neither did she truly believe in miracles. There was always some kind of explanationa.

Despite that, she couldave sworn shead seen an a angel, which was completely preposterous.

Closing her eyes, she found that she could visualize the image, recall details she hadnat been aware of her mind a.s.similating at the time. He had looked exactly like depictions shead seen of seraphs in old books and paintings--like a human with wings. Dimly, she recalled that head 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 couldnat 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 hadnat actually seen it at all? If it had been purely hallucination, wouldnat 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 didnat exist. Magic wasnat 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. Shead 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 apick upa. She would have lost consciousness as her body was basically broken down and rea.s.sembled 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.

Thatas what shead always thought of it as.

But shead been aware of something else, and the data clearly showed a delay of fifteen seconds before the receptacle had received her. Shead been transferring for twenty five seconds.

Shead seen something.

Was the mind still capable of existing even in that state, though? Was it at all possible that the soul actually existed as a separate ent.i.ty within the body?

Maybe the delay was caused by the size of her body? She hadnat transported anything nearly as big before.

She didnat know, but it disturbed her greatly not knowing what had happened.

Once shead gone over all of the data, shead begun feeling more like herself, more the scientist than an alarmist. She put her t-s.h.i.+rt 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 hadnat 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 wasnat just the new location affecting it. The shoe went through fine--precisely 9.99 seconds to traverse 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 didnat have time for speculation. Even though she was tired, that wasnat 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 a.s.sume 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 wasnat 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 hadnat 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 shead 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 shead 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 shead 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 shead been plucked from the transference stream.

With her face squished into the dirt, she couldnat see anything beyond a dirt, though.

Abruptly, Danielleas 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 didnat smell like it. Nothing smelled right. Everything was a almost sweet.

The heavy weight on her was warm. She could feel muscles flexed around her waist and knew she wasnat lying beneath a limb, not a tree limb, anyway. Fingers tightened in her hair, which explained why she couldnat move her head.

There was definitely a humanoid holding her. If she was hallucinating, it was the most vivid hallucination shead 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 manas body felt like. He was heavy, hard all over. Hair roughened skin skimmed along the backs of her legs.

aZahtifah ezeto unta,a a deep, guttural voice growled behind her, p.r.o.nouncing each word slowly.

Danielle tried to move her head enough to talk through her squashed open mouth. aEngwith. I sweak Engwith,a she said with an effort, wondering if it was even worth it to try to communicate at this point. Surely shead wake up in the pod at any moment?

aZahtifah ezeto unta!a 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.

Shead 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. aOw! d.a.m.n it, you a.s.shole! Let me go.a 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 crus.h.i.+ng her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. 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 shead dreamed it. Aggression, not pa.s.sion, tautened every line of his body. His face was a harsh mask of fury. aHow did you find the gateway?a Danielle swallowed the hard lump in her throat. aYou speak English?a she asked a little weakly, her brief righteous indignation vanis.h.i.+ng abruptly along with her spine. Great, genius. Didnat he just ask you in English? aWhat I meant to say is a what gateway? I didnat see anything.a A muscle worked in his jaw, as if he was striving for patience a and not succeeding very well. aDo not pretend ignorance. Twice you have pa.s.sed through it.a Maybe shead died and gone to heaven? This couldnat be happening. aAm I a dead?a He moved off her and tugged her roughly to her feet. aNot yet,a he said through gritted teeth.

Chapter Two.

Kirin s.n.a.t.c.hed the woman into his arms and shot into the air. She gasped, flinging her arms tightly around his neck and clung to him with a death grip as he flew the short distance to his post.

In the many millennia since the Elumi had pa.s.sed through the rift into the great beyond, the gateway had never been breached by their kind, the humans. That it would happen during his watch boded ill for his future as an archangel--a guardian of the borders of his kingas lands. That head allowed the offender to escape before could mean death a or worse, banishment to lower Earth, the realm of humans, if it were ever discovered.

Kirin could not fathom how this human had gone through, when not even all Elumi had the skills to do so. Nor could he understand, with his great speed, how head managed to lose her the first time shead breached the gateway.

He might have been able to dismiss it as hallucination bred of sheer boredom if it had only been the one time, but twice? He had been too stunned even to react the first time and when she had disappeared almost as quickly as she had appeared, he had been tempted to simply reject the possibility that it had actually happened.

No Elumi had pa.s.sed. He was stronger, faster, and cleverer than the average Elumi or he would not have gained the position he held, which was reserved for the elite warrior, the very best of the best.

It certainly could not have been a human.

And yet when he recalled the image to his mind, he had known it could be nothing else. There had been no wings. She had not worn the garb of any house of Pearthen, had born no weapon--and he had never seen hair in that shade on any Elumi in all his time.

It was, in point of fact, that bright flame of color that had drawn his gaze to begin with. Otherwise, he might not have seen her at all.

Death was a powerful incentive for vigilance, however. He could not afford the luxury of simply dismissing the incident as the product of imagination that he had suspected/feared it was.

It was his sacred duty to defend the gateway, and a matter of honor, but neither that duty nor the certainty that failure would be the forfeiture of his life had bothered him the most. In truth, the more head thought about it, the more certain he was that the human had taunted him and the angrier head become. Not only had a human, of all things, made a fool of him by penetrating his station when no Elumi had ever succeeded in doing so, she had thumbed her nose at him by zipping past him so quickly he could do nothing more than gape at her.

She would come again. He had known she would not be able to resist taunting him with her amazing ability.

And so he had waited, tensed for action, determined that if she breached the gateway again, he would not fail his duty. He would apprehend the enemy spy or die trying. As he had feared, she had, but he had been ready for her this time. This time she had not caught him by surprise with her stunning speed. This time, he had launched himself at her as she zipped past him and tackled her.

His success leavened his anger somewhat, but not entirely. He would have to report that his position had been breached. They would know even if he had been tempted to lie--and he was facing charges even though he had captured her. She had ruined his perfect military record.

He would be demoted and he would be banished to lower Earth, perhaps for a very long time.

Reaching the tower, Kirin landed before the entranceway and set the woman onto her feet. She couldnat be trusted not to bolt, however, so he held her tightly around the waist to prevent her escape as he opened the door. The door creaked from disuse, for it had been many, many years since the cell had held a prisoner. He shouldered the stiff door open, pus.h.i.+ng the woman inside before he closed the door behind him, watching her suspiciously through the small observation window in the door. The moment he released her, she dashed away from him and backed up against the far wall, covering her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with one arm and the apex of her thighs with her other hand.

Until that moment, Kirin had been so preoccupied with his dilemma, so stunned to have his position breached, by a human of all things, he had not really looked at her as an individual. The demure pose immediately brought his focus upon her body, however, and the swath of naked flesh and soft curves sent a flash of heat through him. Head never seen a human before, though he had studied their cultures in his bored youth--which was how head managed to pin-point her language from the few words shead spoken.

With an effort to detach himself from his surprising, and unnerving, state of arousal, he allowed himself to study her thoroughly.

She was similar to their women, though not as tall or muscled. The crown of her head just barely topped his shoulders. She looked soft all over, without any of the muscle definition to her body that he was accustomed to seeing. The Elumi women were strong, as fierce warriors as the men. Obviously, human women were not warriors at all or this one would not look so soft and rounded.