Angelmass

by Timothy Zahn

  Kosta finished his conversation and looked up. “She’ll be along in a few minutes,” he told Forsythe. “You can wait here, or else I can take you to the control cabin and introduce you to Ornina.”

  “Let’s do the control cabin,” Forsythe decided. “After that, perhaps you’d be good enough to pull up the specs for this ship and let me start learning my way around.”

  “Certainly,” Kosta said. “This way, please.”

  They had again passed the hatchway and turned inward toward the center of the ship when, turning a corner, they came face to face with a young woman, a stack of linens in her arms. “There you are,” Kosta said, turning back to Forsythe. “These are our guests: High Senator Forsythe and—ah—”

  “His name is Ronyon,” Forsythe supplied, giving the girl a quick once-over. In her mid to late teens, he estimated, attractive enough in an immature sort of way, her posture exuding confidence and control. Clearly, she belonged here on the Gazelle; and for a brief moment he wondered if he’d jumped to the wrong conclusion about who she was.

  And then he took another, longer look at her face, with that neutral-polite expression, and those coldly calculating eyes. It was the measuring look of a professional politician … or a highly competent con artist.

  No, there’d been no mistake. “And you, I take it,” he added, “must be Chandris.”

  “Yes,” the woman said, her gaze flicking once to Ronyon. “The Gazelle is honored by your presence. May I ask what brings a High Senator aboard our humble ship?”

  “Circumstances, plus an interest in Mr. Kosta’s work,” Forsythe told her. “I’ll try not to get in your way.”

  “I’m sure there’ll be no problems,” she said coolly. Her eyes dropped to the pendant around his neck, perhaps to reassure herself that he really was who he claimed to be. “If you’ll excuse me, there are still several things that need my attention before we hit the launch strip.”

  “Of course,” Forsythe nodded, stepping to the side of the corridor to let her pass. “If that’s the bedding for our rooms, though, you can just give it to Ronyon. There’s no need for you to take it there personally.”

  “All right.” Stepping to Ronyon, she offered him the bedding.

  The big man looked questioningly at Forsythe. Take it back to our rooms, Forsythe signed to him. You remember the way?

  Sure, Ronyon signed, accepting the bundle and tucking it under one arm. Should I wait there then? he signed onehanded.

  Might as well. I’ll come back for you in a little while.

  Chandris was still standing close to Ronyon, an odd look on her face. “He’s deaf,” Forsythe explained. “If you need to talk to him, you’ll have to do so through me.”

  “I see,” she said. “I’d better get back to work, then. Are you sure Ronyon can find his way back to your cabin alone?”

  “He’s got a good sense of direction,” Forsythe assured her.

  “Ah,” she nodded. “Well, I’m going back that direction anyway.”

  “All right.” Forsythe caught Ronyon’s eye. This is Chandris, he signed. She’ll walk with you back to the rooms.

  Ronyon nodded, and together he and Chandris headed down the corridor. ‘'And now, as I recall,” Forsythe said, turning back to Kosta, “we were heading for the control cabin.”

  Kosta was staring down the corridor at the departing twosome. “Right,” he said, bringing his attention back to Forsythe with obvious effort. “If you’ll follow me, sir … ?”

  And as they walked, Forsythe permitted himself a brief grimace. Kosta and Chandris were up to something, all right. He could read it in their reactions to him as readily as he could read Ronyon’s signing. All he had to do was to figure out exactly what it was.

  And hope like fury that whatever it was wouldn’t interfere with his plans to stop the flow of angels.

  CHAPTER 25

  Outside, the tow car took up the slack; and with a jerk, the Gazelle started rolling. Ronyon, still carrying the bedding, was caught off-guard by the sudden motion and staggered slightly, bumping into the corridor wall.

  It was the opportunity Chandris had been waiting for. In an instant she was at his side, steadying his arm and pressing against him.

  A couple of seconds were all she got before he was back on balance again and she had to pull away. But a couple of seconds were all she needed. Her senses had not, in fact, played her false during that conversation a minute ago with Kosta and High Senator Forsythe.

  Ronyon was carrying an angel.

  An angel. She repeated the word silently to herself, her thoughts spinning with old plans and fresh possibilities. An angel. Not the Daviees’ spare, which she’d promised herself not to take, but a government angel. One of thousands. One that would probably never be missed.

  All it would take, Hanan had told her, would be some highly specialized neural surgery and six months of intensive treatment … and two million ruya to pay for all of it.

  I’m reformed, she reminded herself. But the words sounded hollow and meaningless. And anyway, she’d never said she was reformed. The only reason she hadn’t stolen anything lately was that she hadn’t happened across anything worth the effort.

  Until now.

  They reached Hanan’s cabin and Ronyon went inside, smiling cheerfully at Chandris as he set the bundle of bedding on the desk. “You want me to do the beds?” Chandris asked before remembering he couldn’t hear her. But even as she tried to think of how best to act out the question, Ronyon shook his head and tapped his own chest. Turning to the bunk, he began to strip it.

  So he could read lips. Interesting that Forsythe had neglected to mention that fact. In fact, he’d strongly implied exactly the opposite, that Ronyon could only communicate through sign language.

  For a long moment she stood in the doorway, gazing at Ronyon’s broad back while he worked, the old juices starting to flow again as she considered how to make the approach. Picking his pocket would be the simplest if she knew where he was carrying it. But she didn’t; and anyway, out here in the middle of nowhere she wouldn’t exactly have the option of chop-hopping if he noticed the loss. The best way would be for him to give it to her, for whatever reason she could concoct. A man of his obvious limitations should be easy to score.

  Ronyon finished the cot and turned back, seemingly surprised to see her still there. But he smiled again as he collected the other set of bedding. She smiled back, moving out of the doorway to let him pass. The smile faded as he crossed the corridor and went into Hanan’s room. An easy score … except for one minor detail.

  The track in this case was deaf.

  Chandris bit at her lip, a swirl of uncertainty like she hadn’t felt in years swishing through her stomach. She’d never scored a deaf person before; and up to now she’d never properly appreciated just how much of her talent was tied up in her voice. Her tone, her vocabulary, the texture of her phrasings— those were what made the tracks see someone who wasn’t really there. Even more than basic disguise and body language, it was what had given her her edge through the years.

  Only here, that edge was gone.

  Across the room, the intercom pinged. “Chandris?” Ornina’s voice called. “Where are you?”

  She stepped to the desk and tapped the switch. “I’m in your room,” she said. “Helping Ronyon get the bed changed.”

  “Ron—? Oh, right—the High Senator’s aide,” Ornina said. “I hadn’t caught his name. I wanted to let you know we’re almost to the launch strip.”

  Chandris grimaced. “I’ll be right up.”

  The intercom clicked off. For a moment Chandris just stood there, staring some more at Ronyon’s back and trying furiously to come up with a scheme she could run within the next sixty seconds. If she let this chance slip away …

  She took a deep breath. Relax, she told herself firmly. Don’t push it. There’ll be time enough later.

  She touched Ronyon on the shoulder. “I have to go to the control cabin,” she said when he turn
ed around, being careful to enunciate her words clearly. “Do you want to go with me so that you know the way?”

  He looked down at the half-made bed, forehead wrinkled in thought, and shook his head. His hands began to trace out a pattern in the air in front of him—

  “I don’t understand that language,” Chandris said, reaching out to gently stop his hands. “Maybe later you can teach me. Are you going to stay here?”

  He nodded. “All right,” Chandris said. “I’ll see you later.”

  The roar of the Gazelle’s drive faded into a dull rumble, weight fading away with it. Kosta set his teeth carefully together, focused on the back of Hanan’s head directly across from his jumpseat, and concentrated on not being sick.

  “We’re on course now for the Seraph catapult, High Senator,” Hanan said, half turning. “It’ll take about an hour to get there. I’ve started the Gazelle spinning—we should have enough for at least a little gravity in a couple of minutes.”

  “Thank you,” Forsythe said. Kosta risked a look that direction, saw no trace of freefall sickness in the High Senator’s face. As usual, Kosta seemed to be the only one having trouble. “How much of a wait will there be at the catapult?”

  “Ideally, there shouldn’t be any wait at all,” Hanan said. “Turnaround is usually pretty much as we get there.”

  “Even with three launch dishes feeding one catapult?” Forsythe countered. “That sounds like a situation begging for a logjam.”

  “You’re right, it does,” Hanan agreed. “Oddly enough, though, that doesn’t usually happen. For one thing, there’s no problem with coordinate-setting; the catapult and Central’s net are binary linked. As long as they’re both functioning, you can’t go anywhere else. Same thing coming home, too.”

  “What about mass settings?”

  “The readings are taken by the launch dish,” Hanan explained. “They’re then transmitted directly to the catapult. That’s usually the only time problems crop up, come to think of it: when ships get out of order and the mass settings are therefore scrambled.”

  “Interesting.” Forsythe looked at the doorway. “I’d very much like to go over more of the operational details with you later, Mr. Daviee. But first, I should probably go and find Ronyon.”

  “Actually, I can just—no, I can’t,” Hanan interrupted himself. “He can’t hear the intercom, can he?”

  “No,” Forsythe said. “I have a call stick, but that won’t do any good unless he knows where I am.”

  “He was making the bed in Ornina’s cabin when I left him,” Chandris offered. “Shall I go get him?”

  .Forsythe shook his head. “Thank you, no.”

  “It’s no trouble—”

  “I said no,” Forsythe repeated; and this time Kosta heard a slight edge in his voice. “It’ll be better if I—”

  He broke off as a sound Kosta had never heard came from Ornina’s control board. “What was that?” he asked.

  “EmDef ID,” Ornina said, turning back to her board. “Someone with high priority is coming through … oh, God,” she added, very quietly.

  “What?” Kosta asked.

  “It’s Hova’s Skyarcher,” she said in the same quiet voice. “They’re bringing it home.”

  “What, only now?” Forsythe frowned, leaning forward as if he would get a better look that way.

  “It wasn’t easy to retrieve,” Hanan said. “Very close in to Angelmass. They had to send an autobooster in to push it out to where the towship could get it without frying the crew.”

  “Can we get a look?” Kosta asked.

  “I’m trying,” Hanan said. “They’re pretty far away and going the opposite direction. Let’s see …”

  And suddenly, on all the displays, there it was.

  Ornina inhaled sharply, and Kosta found himself feeling a little sicker than he already was. The Hova’s Skyarcher was a wreck: its shape noticeably warped, its vaunted Empyreal sandwich-metal hull blackened and pitted. “It must have really gone deep to have taken that much damage,” he heard himself say.

  “Yes,” Hanan agreed. He sounded a little sick, too. “Far deeper than it should have. The radiation surge must have scrambled all the control settings before it …” He trailed off.

  Before it killed them, Kosta finished the thought silently. With an effort, he tore his gaze from the wrecked ship.

  To find Forsythe watching him.

  Briefly, he held the High Senator’s gaze before turning away, wondering dimly what was going on behind that stolid face. But he wasn’t especially concerned about it. For the moment, all his thoughts were tied up in the implications of what had happened to that ship out there.

  “Getting out of range,” Hanan murmured.

  Kosta turned back to the displays. The dead hulk and the sleek EmDef ships towing it were becoming hazy as they pushed the limits of the Gazelle’s telescope and optical enhancement system. “They taking it to the Institute?” he asked.

  “Probably to a decon center first,” Hanan told him. “It’s got to be blazing with secondary radiation—you saw the length of cable the tow ship was using.”

  Forsythe shifted in his seat. “Mr. Daviee, you said you normally only get logjam problems when the hunterships get out of order,” he said. “Do you ever get logjams otherwise?”

  “What do you mean?” Hanan asked.

  “For the Institute’s self-focusing theory to be right, hunterships have to occasionally drop bits of mass into Angelmass,” Forsythe said. “If they drop things there, it follows that they should also sometimes drop things during other parts of the trip, too.”

  “Which could show up as recalibration problems when catapulting,” Hanan said, nodding slowly. “Huh. I never thought of that. Jereko?”

  “I don’t know if anyone else has thought of it, either,” Kosta said, glancing at Forsythe with newly heightened respect. In his admittedly limited experience, he’d never found government types to be exactly brimming with creative thought. Either Forsythe was an exception, or the Empyrean had found a way to attract a smarter class of people into public service than the Pax had.

  Or else it had something to do with the fact that Empyreal politicians carried angels.

  The others, he realized suddenly, were still waiting. “I don’t know if the mathematics would work out, either,” he added, forcing his mind back to the question. “It could be that the amount of mass necessary to start a self-focusing surge is still within catapult tolerances. Worth checking out, though.”

  “I’ve got a list here of all the catapult delays we’ve been involved in over the past year,” Ornina spoke up.

  “How do I get it?” Forsythe asked, fingers hovering over the control board in front of his seat.

  “Allow me,” Kosta said, unstrapping and stepping carefully in the low gravity to the High Senator’s seat He keyed for an echo of Ornina’s screen, gave it a fast once-over. “I don’t see anything obvious,” he said.

  “Me, neither,” Hanan agreed. “Though that may not mean anything. One huntership for one year isn’t much of a sample.”

  “Let’s try anyway,” Kosta suggested. “If you’ll allow me, High Senator … ?”

  “Certainly.” Forsythe swiveled the panel around to where Kosta could more easily operate it.

  The Gazelle’s computer library contained two different statistical packages. Kosta called them up for a quick look. “I don’t think either of those can handle a sample this small,” Hanan said, watching the echo of Kosta’s work on his own display.

  “No,” Kosta agreed. “But I know of one that might be able to. Let’s see if I can remember how it works.”

  It was a highly esoteric program he’d learned in his first year at the university, and he wound up with two false starts before he got it right. But finally it was ready. Feeding in Ornina’s data, he set it running. “Interesting program,” Forsythe said. “How long until it’s done?”

  “A couple of minutes,” Kosta told him. “Speed is not its primar
y virtue.” He let his eyes drift around the room, relaxing from the close-focus work of the display screen.

  Chandris’s seat was empty.

  He glanced surreptitiously around the room, heart suddenly thudding in his ears. She was gone, all right Sometime in the last few minutes, without anyone noticing, she’d just slipped away.

  He opened his mouth to announce his discovery; bit down gently on his tongue instead. She’d probably just gone to find Ronyon, that was all. Or something equally innocent.

  Except that Forsythe had already told her not to go after Ronyon. If she was up to something else …

  The program beeped notice that it was done. Reaching to the board, Kosta keyed for the results.

  He might as well not have bothered. “You’re right,” he said to Hanan as he dumped the screen. “One ship and one year just aren’t enough.”

  “The catapult itself should have complete records, though,” Ornina pointed out. “Perhaps you could ask them to send us a data copy, High Senator.”

  “I’m sure I could,” Forsythe said. “However, as I told Mr. Daviee, I’m here on a strictly unofficial basis. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “I see.” Ornina looked at Hanan, and in her face Kosta could see that that bit of information had somehow missed getting passed to her. “I’m sorry. Ah—”

  “The Institute should also have them,” Kosta spoke up quickly. “When we get back I’ll get Yaezon to look them up for me.”

  “There might be another way to get the information now, though,” Hanan said, an odd tone to his voice as he tapped keys. “If they happen to have a new trainee or two on station at Control …”

  He cleared his throat; and he was launching into a very official-sounding speech as Kosta quietly slipped out of the room.

  He went first to Hanan’s and Ornina’s cabins, not from any real expectation of finding Chandris there but merely as a reasonable place to start his search. To his surprise, however, he heard the faint sound of running water as he approached. Someone inside Ornina’s cabin was apparently taking a shower.