Angelmass

by Timothy Zahn

  “Leaving me here all alone?” he asked pointedly. “I must have passed the test”

  Slowly, deliberately, she turned back. “You already called it, Kosta,” she said. “I don’t trust you. There’s too much about you that doesn’t fit. You’re too smart—too well educated, anyway—to be an ordinary scorer. But you’re not a typical blank-tower science-type, either.”

  His first instinct was to deny it. But looking into those eyes … “All I want from you and the Daviees is transport to Angelmass,” he told her quietly. “Nothing more.”

  For a long moment she gazed at him, her face still giving away nothing. “We’ll see,” she said at last. She turned back to the door. Hesitated. “You were right, by the way,” she said over her shoulder. “I checked the Gazelle’s records last night. For the past six months it’s taken an average of just over three days to capture each angel, even though Gabriel’s pay scale still figures on an average of four.”

  It took a second for Kosta to catch on to what she was talking about. “Interesting,” he murmured. “Could some of that be more advanced equipment?”

  She shook her head, her back still toward him. “They haven’t gotten anything really new in over a year. Actually, it’s worse—a lot of their old stuff is overdue for replacement. I just thought you’d like to know.” She glided through the door and was gone.

  Kosta stared after her, an unpleasant shiver running up his back. So it wasn’t just his imagination coupled with some kind of rogue statistical construct. Angelmass really was emitting more angels.

  A week ago he would have been quietly excited by the confirmation. Now, with Hanan’s theories echoing in the back of his mind …

  “Friz,” he growled, annoyed with himself. He was a scientist, and so far this was a purely scientific problem. The implications, if any, would be up to other people to worry about.

  Dropping lightly to his knees in the decreasing gravity, he began collecting his tools together. And tried to shake off the vague fears.

  CHAPTER 21

  The rotational gravity had all but vanished by the time Chandris reached the control cabin. To her mild surprise she found that Ornina was alone, seated in Hanan’s usual chair at the main command board. “Where’s Hanan?” she asked, glancing around as she maneuvered herself toward her chair.

  “No—up here, please,” Ornina told her, indicating her own usual backup command seat. “We got a red light on one of the maneuvering-jet fuel pumps; Hanan’s gone back to take a look.”

  Chandris nodded grimly. Just one more sign of how fast the Gazelle was falling apart. “Do we have any spares?” she asked.

  Ornina looked at her in mock surprise. “You mean you haven’t gotten around to memorizing our inventory list yet?”

  “I’ve been busy,” Chandris said with her best imitation of wounded pride. “I’m only down to the M’s—haven’t reached ‘pump’ yet.”

  Ornina smiled. “Actually, we do have a spare aboard if we need it. Whether he could actually get it mounted before we reach Angelmass is another question entirely.”

  Chandris pursed her lips. “Well, if it comes to that, Kosta could probably be pressed into service.”

  “Capable?”

  She shrugged. “He knows his way around a wrench, anyway.”

  The intercom pinged. “Ornina?” Hanan’s voice came. “Can you shut down power on the AA-57-C circuit for me? I need to get back into the coupling area and would just as soon not get singed.”

  “Right,” Ornina said, punching in a command. “Okay; it shows clear.”

  “You need any help with that, Hanan?” Chandris asked. “I could come down and—”

  “No, I’m fine,” he assured her. “It’s fixable; just going to take a bit more time than I thought. Speaking of time, why haven’t we hit the catapult yet?”

  “It’ll be another few minutes,” Ornina told him. “They’re having some trouble with one of the supply ships going through to Central, and it’s got things backed up.”

  “Typical,” Hanan sniffed. “Well, keep me informed.”

  “And let me know if you want any help,” Chandris added.

  “I won’t, but thanks.” The intercom clicked off. Chandris turned to Ornina—

  And paused. On her face … “You all right?” Chandris asked.

  Ornina turned to look at her, the lines trying to smooth out as she did so. “I’m fine,” she said.

  A cold knot settled into Chandris’s stomach. “Something’s wrong with Hanan, isn’t it?” she asked. “Is he getting worse?”

  Ornina shook her head tiredly. “He has no choice but to get worse,” she said. “It’s a degenerative disease. Degenerative diseases by definition get worse.”

  “Then he shouldn’t be down there alone,” Chandris said, reaching for her restraint release.

  “No, don’t go,” Ornina said, shaking her head. “You can’t help him. Not any more. You’re too much like family now.”

  Chandris stared at her. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I, really,” Ornina said quietly. The lines of pain were back in her face now. As if, having said this much, there was no longer any point in trying to hide them. “He’s funny that way, Chandris. It’s pretty easy for him to accept help from strangers and acquaintances, but very hard to accept it from family and close friends. Pride, or some strange form of denial, I don’t know which.”

  Chandris thought back to when she’d first come aboard the Gazelle; compared Hanan’s face and words then to how he’d looked and acted during her most recent lessons in ship’s maintenance. Thought about the brief conversation half an hour earlier, and Hanan cheerfully giving Kosta permission to fix the air scrubber. “That’s why you don’t sell your extra angel, isn’t it?” she said slowly. “So you can make sure there’s a steady stream of strangers like me who he can accept help from.”

  She locked eyes with the older woman. “Except that I’m not a stranger anymore.”

  “No, you’re not,” Ornina agreed. “You’re far more valuable to us than a stranger would be.”

  “Right—except that I can’t help you anymore,” Chandris retorted, a frustrated anger beginning to stir within her. ‘That’s real valuable.”

  “You know the ship as well as the two of us put together,” Ornina countered, her eyes taking on a firmness and a frustrated anger of their own. “You’re an extra pair of hands—an extra pair of skilled hands—and the way Hanan is going we’re going to need those hands if we’re going to keep the Gazelle flying.”

  “Oh, wonderful,” Chandris shot back. “I keep the Gazelle flying, and in the process grind Hanan’s pride into the dirt.”

  Ornina leveled a finger at her. “I want you to get one thing straight, young lady. You are not responsible for Hanan’s quirks and flaws and bouts of false pride. Yes, it hurts him to have to be dependent on people. But that’s reality, and denying it just makes things harder on himself and everyone else around him. Eventually, he’s going to have to bite the stick and learn that, and he never will if people always cave in to him. Understand?”

  “Yes,” Chandris muttered.

  “Good.” Ornina took a deep breath, the momentary anger fading from her face. “And one more thing. Like it or not, Chandris, you were a godsend to us. We need you here. More than that, we want you here. In five years of taking in everyone from outcasts to thieves to fugitives we’ve never found anyone who clicked even remotely as well with us and the ship as you have.”

  A ripple of old fear twisted through Chandris’s heart. “I can’t stay here forever,” she said. “I never said I would.”

  “I know.” Ornina turned back to her board. But not before Chandris saw that her eyes were shiny wet. “You’re free to leave anytime you want to, of course. I just wanted you to understand how we felt.”

  The board beeped. “Looks like the bottleneck’s clearing up,” she said. “We’d best get moving.”

  “Right,” Chandris murmured, the word coming o
ut with difficulty around the knot in her throat. Yes, she understood, all right. Understood that, for all the old fears and habits that still haunted her, she didn’t want to leave the Gazelle, either. Understood that, for probably the first time in her life, she had found something that was worth fighting for.

  She might not be a thief anymore. But she hadn’t forgotten how to fight.

  The almost-felt jerk came, and in a blink the Seraph catapult was replaced by the spidery arms of Angelmass Central’s tethered net poles. “Approach vector?” Ornina asked, all business again.

  “Vector logged in,” Chandris confirmed crisply, matching the other woman’s tone. “There seems to be a lot of traffic ahead, though. We might want to swing our approach a little wider than usual.”

  “Good idea,” Ornina nodded, fingers playing across her keys. “Let’s see … let’s try this.”

  Chandris gave the projected course a quick study. “Looks good,” she agreed. “Want me to implement, or confirm it with Central?”

  “I’ll call Central,” Ornina said, reaching for the comm section of her board. “Go ahead and plug it in so we’ll be ready when they give us clearance.”

  Chandris had just started keying in the new course when the door hissed open behind her. She turned, expecting to see Hanan—

  “I see we’ve arrived,” Kosta commented, drifting in.

  “Quiet—we’re working,” Chandris growled, turning back to her board.

  “Sorry,” Kosta stage-whispered.

  He headed over to his seat, busying himself with something. Chandris took her time, checking and rechecking the course and her inputting of it, with the desired result: Ornina finished her part of the task first. “All cleared,” she told Chandris, switching off the comm. “Go ahead and execute. Hello, Jereko,” she added, turning to Kosta. “Everything all right with your equipment?”

  “Yes, thanks,” he replied. “Better than all right, actually— I thought I was going to have to sit down there with it the whole time, but Hanan helped me tie the outputs into one of the Gazelle’s spare command lines so I can operate it from up here.”

  Chandris felt her lip twist. Kosta settling down in the control cabin. Terrific. “He’s supposed to be working on a fuel pump down there,” she told Kosta tartly. “Not fiddling around with your stuff.”

  “Hey, he insisted,” Kosta shot back. “It’s not my fault if he’s the kind who likes to be helpful.”

  “He is that,” Ornina murmured.

  Chandris clenched her teeth; but they were both right. Much as she’d love to do so, she really couldn’t blame Kosta for this one. “Well, next time make sure he’s not already doing something, all right?” she growled.

  “For whatever it’s worth to you, there probably won’t be a next time,” he reminded her stiffly. “By the time we get back to Seraph my credit line ought to be untangled, and we can go our separate ways.”

  “Good,” Chandris muttered. She glanced at Ornina; went back for a closer look. The older woman was gazing studiously at her displays, a slight but unmistakable smile playing around her lips. “What?” Chandris demanded.

  “Nothing,” Ornina said, the smile vanishing into the same sort of innocent look Hanan always used when he was about to close the trap on one of his jokes. “I must say, Jereko, that your work sounds fascinating. What exactly is this particular experiment supposed to do?”

  “I’m going to be sampling several small bandwidths of Angelmass’s radiation spectrum,” Kosta told her. “Hopefully, it’ll give me some clues as to why the angel emission has been increasing over the past few months.”

  “It’s been increasing?” Ornina frowned.

  “That’s what my numbers tell me,” Kosta said. “And yours, too, for that matter.” He looked at Chandris. “Didn’t Chandris tell you?”

  Ornina looked at Chandris, too, eyebrows raised. “It didn’t seem important,” Chandris said with a shrug.

  “Probably isn’t,” Ornina agreed. “Still, you can’t always tell what’s going to wind up being important down the line.” She turned back to Kosta. “But enough shop talk. Tell us something about yourself, Jereko.”

  Kosta took a deep breath, and Chandris turned back to her board, permitting herself a tight smile. The same territory she’d just gone over with Kosta below, territory she now knew by heart. This could, she decided, be very interesting.

  It was, too, though not in the way she’d expected. Kosta never contradicted any of what he’d told her, never slipped up on historical events or on the physical details of the places he said he’d lived. He was articulate enough, accurate enough, and apparently sincere enough for all of it to be true.

  But it wasn’t.

  There was plenty of evidence she could point to, at least to someone who knew the drill. A few flowery phrases that sounded like they’d been pulled from a Balmoral Visitors’ Guide; an occasional exact quote from their conversation below, something she knew from experience was exceedingly rare; an underlying preciseness in his voice that showed he was watching every single word he said. It was definitely puff-talk. Detailed and well rehearsed, but puff-talk just the same.

  But at the same time, there was something missing, something that any scorer good enough to have worked up such an elaborate background ought to have had. A sense of daring, perhaps, or some of the oily arrogance that had been a part of all the really expert puff-talkers she’d known back in the Barrio. Kosta played more like an actor parroting someone else’s lines.

  Which made Kosta … what?

  Chandris still didn’t know. But she intended to find out.

  And so she sat at her board, listening to every word he said and letting the Gazelle more or less fly itself toward Angelmass.

  And with her full attention on Kosta, she completely missed the first subtle clue that something had gone terribly wrong.

  “… and so, rather to my amazement, the Institute accepted my application,” Kosta concluded. “I didn’t give them time to change their minds. I booked passage on a liner and—” he shrugged “—here I am.”

  “Here you are, indeed.” Ornina shook her head—in wonderment, Kosta hoped, not disbelief. “That’s quite a story, Jereko. I certainly hope you can get your finances straightened out quickly. It’d be a shame if such a promising career was derailed by something as trivial as a clerical error.”

  “I’m sure it will be,” he assured her. He threw a glance at the back of Chandris’s head, feeling some of his tension draining away. He’d poured a lot of hours into memorizing his cover story, but it had been time well spent. He’d gotten through it without making any errors, and with a certain degree of panache besides. Maybe he was finally starting to adapt to this spy stuff.

  And just then, in the back of his mind, a quiet alarm went off.

  He froze, searching frantically through what he’d just said. Had he, at the very end, made some kind of fatal blunder in his story?

  And then he got it The gamma-ray sparks—those damned noisy ubiquitous gamma-ray sparks—had stopped.

  Which meant … what?

  He was just opening his mouth to ask when an electronic scream split the air.

  He jerked hard in his seat, pressing himself up against the restraints. Ornina spun back to her board, jabbing at it—

  The wailing cut off as suddenly as it had begun. “—hell was that?” Chandris snapped in the ringing silence.

  “Emergency call,” Ornina said tightly. “Get on the tracker and locate the signal. I’ll try to raise them.”

  Chandris was already busy at her board. “Got it … no. No, it’s wavering.”

  “Must be heavy radiation out there,” Ornina muttered, her hands dancing across her board. “Let’s see if this helps. This is the Gazelle, calling distress ship; Gazelle, calling distress ship. Can you respond?”

  There was a roar of static from the speaker, a roar punctuated by an incredible rapid-fire stutter of gamma-ray sparks. “Gazelle, this is Hova’s Skyarcher,” a bar
ely audible voice came through the noise. “We’re caught in a radiation surge—losing control of everything. We need help.”

  “Chandris?” Ornina asked.

  “I can’t get a fix on them,” Chandris said, her voice strained. “The radiation’s messing up the calibration.”

  “You got anything even approximate?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “That’ll do for now,” Ornina cut her off. “Hova’s Skyarcher, we’re on our way. ETA, maybe ten minutes.”

  A sound that might have been a word, and then the static and signal were gone. “What did he say?” Kosta asked.

  “He said ‘hurry,’” Ornina said grimly. The Gazelle’s engines, which had been idling softly, roared to full life. “Keep trying to get a fix on him, Chandris.”

  “I am.” Chandris glanced over her shoulder. “Make yourself useful, Kosta—get on the intercom and get Hanan up here.”

  “Don’t bother,” Hanan said from the doorway even as Kosta moved to comply. “You can hear that siren all the way down at the pumps. What’s going on?”

  “Radiation surge,”’ Ornina told him, getting out of her chair as Hanan slid into it. “It’s got Hova’s Skyarcher.”

  “Damn,” Hanan muttered, hands running over the board as Ornina and Chandris also played musical chairs, switching back to their usual seats. “Anyone else in range?”

  “I don’t know,” Ornina said. “Not even sure anyone else heard the call—signals don’t cut too well across radiation lines.”

  “Have you alerted Central yet?”

  “Haven’t had time. I’ll do it now.” Ornina busied herself with her board.

  The Gazelle began to move, pressing Kosta back into his seat. “Can I do anything to help?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Hanan said over his shoulder. “Just sit tight.”

  Kosta squeezed his hands into fists. Wonderful. Another ship was getting roasted by radiation out there, and all he could do was sit tight. And not roasted slowly, either, if that chatter of gamma-ray sparks he’d heard had been any indication.

  He stiffened. Gamma-ray sparks? Reaching to his board, he keyed for a real-time display from his detectors below.