by Timothy Zahn
Kosta felt a twinge of guilt. Preoccupied first with the Gazelle and then with Hanan, he’d completely forgotten Ronyon’s near-collapse before all this had started. “Yes— Ronyon. How is he?”
“Resting in his cabin,” Forsythe said. “He seems to have gotten over that panic attack, though that could just be the sedative Ornina gave him. I’ll collect him and we’ll get off.”
Behind them, the door opened and Chandris walked in. “How is he?” Kosta asked her, glancing at the hatchway display in time to see the ambulance drive off.
“He’s all right for now,” she said tiredly. “Whether he’s going to stay that way they don’t know yet. I’ve got to get the ship off the strip and back to the yard.”
“I’ll get out of your way, then,” Forsythe said, standing up. He glanced at the hatchway display, now showing free of reporters, and moved toward the door. “Mr. Kosta, I’ll contact you at the Institute.”
He left, the control room door sliding shut behind him. “What was that all about?” Chandris asked as she began shutting down the Gazelle’s systems.
“Something strange is happening with Angelmass,” Kosta told her. “I don’t think I should talk about it right now.”
“Fine with me,” Chandris said, her thoughts clearly elsewhere. “So you two are getting together later?”
Kosta opened his mouth … closed it again. It had been a perfectly casual question, asked in a perfectly casual way. But this was Chandris, and he was slowly learning that with Chandris you always had to look beneath the surface. And in this case, below the surface meant— “You still gunning for that angel?”
She turned to look at him, her eyes suddenly hard and cold and far older than they had any right to be. “Don’t get in my way, Kosta,” she said quietly. “I mean that.”
“Stealing Forsythe’s angel isn’t going to solve anything,” he said. “All it’ll do is get you in trouble.”
“Only if I get caught,” she countered. “Anyway, why do you care if I get in trouble?”
“I don’t know,” he shot back. “Probably because you’ll drag Hanan and Ornina down with you, and I don’t want them getting hurt. That’s not why I’m here.”
For a long moment Chandris just looked at him, an unreadable expression on her face. “Look,” she said at last. “They need money. Desperately. What do you expect me to do, just sit around and watch them go under?”
“Of course not,” Kosta said. “But there has to be some other way to raise money than by stealing Forsythe’s angel.”
“How?” Chandris demanded. “Sell something? Look around you—they haven’t got anything of value. Except— never mind.”
“Except what?” Kosta asked.
Her lip twisted in obvious annoyance with herself. “They’ve got a second angel stashed away in the storage room,” she said. “But don’t tell them I told you—no one’s supposed to know about it.”
Kosta frowned. “They’ve got a second angel? Why haven’t they sold it?”
Chandris shrugged. “Maybe it helps them stay on good terms with each other. I asked you once whether angels could do that kind of thing, remember?”
Back when they’d first run into each other at the Institute. “Yes,” Kosta murmured, his thoughts racing. A spare angel … “How long have they had it?”
“A couple of years at least. Maybe more. Why?”
Kosta shook his head. “Just curious.”
From somewhere forward of them came a dull thud. “That’s the tow car connecting up,” Chandris said, turning back to her board. “You’ve got about two minutes to get off if you don’t want to ride all the way back to the Yard.”
Kosta shook himself out of this thoughts. “Right,” he said, getting to his feet “I’ll be in touch.”
“I’ll be at the hospital later if you need me,” she told him distractedly, her attention back on her work.
“Okay.”
He paused at the door and looked back at her. A spare angel. A spare angel, moreover, that had spent a good deal of time since its capture in the vicinity of Angelmass. “Say hello to Hanan and Ornina for me,” he added to Chandris before ducking out into the corridor.
Because there was a good chance he wouldn’t make it anywhere near the hospital himself tonight. A very good chance indeed.
The Gazelle’s service yard was dark when Kosta returned that night, in marked contrast to several nearby yards whose outside lights were blazing brightly as huntership crews worked to prepare for early-morning launches. The Gazelle itself was sealed, but that was no problem: on that first trip out, Ornina had given him the combination for the exterior lock.
Inside, it was even darker than the yard outside, with only the dim night panels giving a ghostly glow to the corridors. For a long moment Kosta stood just inside the hatchway, listening for sounds of life. But there was nothing. Obviously, Chandris and the Daviees were still at the hospital.
Alone or not, though, his training had been very specific on the proper procedures involved in breaking and entering. Slipping his shocker from his pocket, he adjusted it for a wide field of fire and got it nestled inconspicuously across his right palm with his thumb resting on the firing stud. With the angel box he’d borrowed from the Institute in his other hand, he headed for the storage section at the bottom of the ship, wishing his heart wouldn’t pound so loudly.
But the flowing adrenaline was all for nothing. He saw no one and heard nothing along the way, and he reached the storage room without incident. Here, as everywhere else, only the night panels were on, their faint light throwing dark fuzzy shadows everywhere. Lowering the angel box to the deck, he reached for the wall switch—
“Don’t bother,” Chandris said from his left.
—and even as he spun toward the voice a dazzling light flared to life in front of him.
He squeezed his eyes shut, automatically throwing his left arm up to protect his face from the glare. “Chandris?” he called. “Come on, it’s me. Jereko.”
“I know,” she said, her voice icy. “I was expecting you. I figured telling you about the Daviees’s spare angel this afternoon would flush you out.”
Kosta winced. He’d done it again. The great Pax spy, making a thorough mess of it.
And, naturally, making a mess of it because of Chandris. “I’m not here to steal the angel,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady. “I just need to borrow it overnight to run some tests.”
“What, the Institute’s run out of angels?” she countered sarcastically.
“Theirs aren’t any good for this,” Kosta told her. “I need one that’s spent a lot of time near Angelmass.”
‘They’ve all done that. That’s where they come from, remember?”
“That’s not what I mean,” Kosta insisted. “Look, can’t we sit down and talk about this?”
“Stay where you are,” she said sharply. “I’ve got a cutting torch, and I’m not afraid to use it. You give me trouble and I’ll slice you in half.”
Kosta frowned at the shadow behind the light. “What in the world has gotten into you, Chandris? Come on—you know me.”
“Do I?” she demanded. “Or do I just know the role the Pax taught you to play for us?”
And there it was. The moment Kosta had been dreading ever since his ship and the cocoon had been blown out of the Komitadji’s cargo hold into Empyreal space. “It’s not a role,” he said, a part of him marveling at his own unexpected calm. After all the worrying and nightmares, the actual event had become anticlimactic. “I really am a researcher. They just sort of maneuvered me into this job.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means they came by one day and hauled me out of school,” Kosta told her. “Said they needed someone with my expertise to find out what the angels were and how they were affecting the people of the Empyrean. They said the angels were an alien invasion, and that if we didn’t stop it both the Empyrean and the Pax would be taken over and destroyed. I guess they convinced me that I co
uld keep that from happening.” He shrugged uncomfortably. “Maybe I convinced myself.”
“You still believe that?” Chandris asked. “The invasion part, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” Kosta admitted. “A week ago I would have said no. Now … I don’t know.” He gestured to the angel box beside him. “That’s why I need to borrow the Daviees’ angel.”
“Is this test of yours important?”
“Very important. Possibly even critical.”
“Then why don’t you just shoot me and take it?”
Kosta felt his stomach curl up inside him. He’d completely forgotten about the shocker pressed against his right palm. “I didn’t think you could see it from there,” he said between suddenly stiff lips.
“I know what it looks like when someone’s palming something,” Chandris said. “You haven’t answered my question.”
Kosta swallowed, his heart suddenly pounding in his ears. She was right, he realized. At this range, with the shocker still set for wide field, a single shot would take out the light, the cutting torch, and Chandris herself.
A simple, casual tap on the firing stud, and he would be free. He could take the angel, run his tests, then escape back across the Empyrean to Lorelei. There he could hide; and when the Komitadji returned he would be able to face them all with the knowledge that he had succeeded beyond all their expectations. Even Telthorst would have to wipe that smirk off his face then.
He squinted past the light, to where Chandris waited silently with her torch. A torch she could have fired, but didn’t … and belatedly it dawned on him that she was running a test of her own here. A test just as critical as the one he had planned for the Daviees’ angel.
“I didn’t come to the Empyrean to kill people, Chandris,” he said quietly as he set the safety on the shocker. Dropping the weapon on the floor, he kicked it her direction. “I came here to help.”
For another minute the room was quiet. Then, to Kosta’s surprise, the light dazzling his eyes went out. “The light switch is beside the door,” Chandris said.
Kosta found it and flicked it on. Behind the light stand she’d rigged up, Chandris was standing by the storage room wall. There was no sign of any cutting torch. “What’s this test you want to run?” she asked.
Kosta glanced down. The shocker was still lying on the deck where he’d kicked it. “I want to measure the angel’s mass,” he said, looking up again. “I think it may help us figure out what’s happening to Angelmass.”
“You mean with these surges?”
“The surges, and a theoretically impossible shift in its gravitational field,” Kosta said. “That’s what I was talking to High Senator Forsythe about after we landed.”
“You know what’s going on?”
“I’ve got an idea,” Kosta said grimly. “I hope I’m wrong.”
For a long moment she studied him. Then, abruptly, she nodded. “All right. But you have to promise the angel won’t be damaged.”
“There’s no danger of that,” Kosta assured her. “None of the tests I want to run will hurt it”
“And I have to be with the angel at all times.” Reaching down, Chandris picked up the shocker. “Here—put this away somewhere,” she said, tossing it to Kosta.
He almost fumbled it in his surprise. “Don’t you want to keep it?” he asked. “I mean, as a guarantee of my good behavior?”
She snorted. “Good behavior be nurked. If you think I’m going to risk getting caught with a Pax weapon on me, you’re crazy.” She brushed past him. “Come on—the angel’s in a carrying case in my room. You’ve got three hours to do your tests.”
CHAPTER 28
On the display screen Kosta’s friend Gyasi straightened up from the big shiny box and busied himself for a moment with an inset keyboard. He watched it another moment, then turned and gave a thumbs-up signal to the monitor camera before walking out of its range. “Okay, he’s got it running,” Kosta said, half under his breath. “We’ll know in a few minutes.”
Chandris nodded, looking at the big box still centered on the screen, and the other equipment stacked on the table behind it. All that, just to measure the weight of a tiny little angel. “How much smaller than the other angels do you think it’ll be?”
He sighed. “I don’t know,” he said. “According to everything we think we know about quantum theory it shouldn’t have lost any mass. By definition, a quantum is as small as that particular package can be. Unless Dr. Qhahenlo’s quantum bundle theory is right. But I’ve never really liked the mathematics she used to cook that one up.”
“So who decided it had to be a quantum?”
“It’s a subatomic particle with a mass in the quadrillions of AMUs,” he said. “Nothing that big has any business being stable unless it simply can’t break down into smaller pieces.”
“So who decided it had to behave like everything else you’ve ever found?” she persisted. “And don’t give me any of that ‘if you were an expert you’d understand’ crapsy.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Kosta said. But he was staring hard at the display, his forehead furrowed with concentration. “I wish I knew, Chandris. But I don’t. I’m not sure I know anything at all.”
She thought about that, watching him out of the corner of her eye. “Your masters aren’t going to be very happy with you, are they?” she commented at last.
He snorted in derision. But even as he did, the vague demons swirling across his face seemed to recede a little. “I’m beyond caring what they think of me,” he said. “What gave me away, if you don’t mind my asking?”
She snorted. “What didn’t give you away? You might as well have hung a sign around your neck saying you didn’t belong here. That background story you spun for Hanan and Ornina was part of it. Too good and too well-memorized for an amateur con man, but without the flair a professional would have put into it.”
Kosta nodded. “I could tell there was something about it that bothered you. I guess my trainers didn’t expect me to run into someone with your expertise.”
“But it was that snide comment you made about aphrodisiacal perfumes that finally cracked me into you,” Chandris went on. “I’d never heard of anything like that, but I didn’t get around to checking up on it until tonight. Turns out they don’t exist. At least, not in the Empyrean.”
“Aphrodisiacal perfumes,” Kosta said ruefully. “I don’t even remember making that comment.”
“You did. Trust me.”
“Oh, I believe you,” he said. “I’m not all that surprised I did, either. Too much information was the number-one fatal error on my trainers’ list Given the rest of my record, it was inevitable I’d trip over the most amateurish mistake in the book.”
Chandris was still trying to come up with a response to that one that wouldn’t sound too sarcastic when the door opened behind them and Gyasi came in. “Anything?” he asked, nodding toward the computer display..
“Not yet,” Kosta told him, leaning forward and tapping a key. “Still working the baseline.”
“This mass tracer’s always been a little slow,” Gyasi said as he slid into the chair beside Kosta. “While we wait, you might want to take a look at the package that just came in for you.”
Kosta sat up straighter in his seat. “The huntership data from High Senator Forsythe?”
“I didn’t see a name on it,” Gyasi said. “Sending address was Angelmass Central, though. I wasn’t sure if your files would be accessible, given your funding freeze, so I dumped it into one of mine. You want me to pull it up for you?”
“Please.”
Gyasi swiveled a terminal over and keyed in a command. “So this is from a High Senator, huh? I swear, Jereko, you’re getting more interesting stuff done since your funding froze than you ever did when things were purring along.”
“You have no idea,” Kosta said, hunching a little closer to the display. “Here it comes.”
Chandris frowned at the screen. A fuzzy ball made up of short
multicolored vector lines had appeared in the center, rotating slowly around its vertical axis. “I was right,” Kosta said softly. “Damn. I was right”
“About what?” Chandris asked, a creepy sensation sending a shiver through her. Kosta’s demons seemed to be contagious. “What is all that?”
“It’s a global vector map of Angelmass’s gravitational shifts during that last radiation surge,” Kosta told her. “Those shifts go clear across the board.”
“I don’t believe this,” Gyasi breathed, his voice sounding awestruck. “Look at that scale—those decreases are up to a tenth of a percent in places.”
Chandris’s mind flashed back to the conversation aboard the Gazelle. “Could it be something statistical?” she asked. “You said the Gazelle didn’t give you enough data points.”
“There are more than enough data points here,” Kosta said. “It’s not a mistake, either. Or a malfunction, or—”
“Hang on,” Gyasi interrupted, tapping the screen. “What’s this coming up?”
A narrow cone of brightly colored red was becoming visible as the vector map rotated, a red cone with a thin white line down its center.
And suddenly Chandris felt her stomach trying to turn inside out “It’s the same picture,” she identified it, her voice sounding strange in her ears. “The one you got when you plotted out the surge that killed the Skyarcher. The same picture exactly.”
“It’s close, anyway,” Gyasi said cautiously. “We’d have to run a curve comparison to be sure.”
“Don’t bother,” Kosta told him. His voice, Chandris noticed distantly, was trembling slightly. “If Chandris says it’s the same, it’s the same. And there it is—there; that blue point that the white line’s cutting through. That’s where the Gazelle was.”
Gyasi shook his head. “This is insane, Jereko,” he insisted. “A black hole hasn’t got any internal structure. None. What possible theoretical mechanism could exist to explain something like this?”
“Angelmass isn’t a normal black hole,” Kosta said. “Not anymore.”
Chandris eyed him closely. There was a tension around his eyes, a graveyard look to his face. “What do you mean, not anymore?” she asked.
