Read Online Archangel Down: Archangel Project. Book One by C. Gockel - Free Book Online

can’t smile at your joke,” he said, voice almost a whisper. “I can’t frown, either.”
    Feeling a pinch of worry for the strange man, she leaned closer. His skin, where she could see it beneath his fingers, looked healthy—there was no sign of frostbite. She drew back, more pieces of the puzzle clicking together in her mind. “You have to be very augmented. They announced the coordinates of your crash over the channel. To reach me in time, you would have had to have run sixty-seven and a half kilometers per hour over mountainous terrain.” The way he was patting his face … if he couldn’t smile or frown, it meant he had augmentation there too, not just run-of-the-mill plastic surgery. But why?
    James dropped his hands. “There was an accident, on Earth, before. I fell, the equivalent of many stories. I nearly died … ” His head ticked to the side in a quick staccato movement. It reminded Noa of some of the compulsive tics Kenji used to have.
    She sucked in a breath. An accident like he was describing would require facial augmentation, not just plastic surgery. If he was telling the truth, then maybe he’d received some damage to his augments during the crash? It would explain his inability to smile. But there was more to his story that didn’t add up. “You had access to the secure Luddeccean channel if you heard their ‘archangel down’ message.” And how had he known where she was? “Are you part of the Fleet?”
    His jaw twitched, and he touched one side of his lip, and then looked down at his fingers. “I am not in the Fleet. I am a professor of history. I specialize in late 21 st century. Most recently, I was in the process of reviewing discoveries I made along the San Andreas Rift.”
    Every hair on the back of her neck prickling, Noa interrupted him. “You killed three men.”
    For a heartbeat too long James was too still, his eyes on a place in the distance. When he spoke, his words came out as an uncertain stammer. “Yes … they kicked you, and were speculating on whether to kill you, talking about interrogating you and yanking out your port … and … I couldn’t let it happen … I … I have hunted before, but never killed a human. I wasn’t bothered by killing them, but I am bothered by the fact that I am not bothered, and I wonder if I should be … if that makes sense?”
    Noa exhaled. Her hands flicked to her side—and she remembered being kicked—thanks to Fleet tech she was healing much faster than natural and it wasn’t unbearably painful. “It does make sense,” she said, and she did understand his ambivalence. She had pulled the trigger on more than a few unsavory individuals; it was harder than the holos made you believe. A man with no history of combat, nor apparently in a profession that would have given him training, killing three men? Her throat tightened. Of course, he’d just been shot out of the sky—probably because he was hyper-augmented. The situation was extreme—it could have pushed an ordinary man to extreme actions. And he hadn’t hurt her, or ignored her, or dumped her off the snowmobile when she fainted. He had spooned with her scrawny, stinking self to save her from hypothermia.
    “I feel … disconnected,” James said. His face was turned away; his hand was on his data port.
    “Because we’re disconnected from the ethernet,” Noa whispered.
    His eyes narrowed and he shook his head, eyes roving around the room. “It’s more than that. I feel off, Commander.”
    Noa’s eyebrows rose. Something was off with James, but she didn’t feel threatened. Instead she felt herself softening, seeing him for what he was—a civilian thrust into a war zone, a man who had overcome some physical and probably mental handicaps with augmentation. Her eyes grazed his perfect jaw line, the muscles and tendons in his shoulders that showed just above the comforter that covered them, and remembered the perfectly chiseled body below—his augmenters might have gone