Angelmass

by Timothy Zahn

  “Perhaps,” Lleshi said. “But only if you can persuade everyone else aboard to believe you. And can prove me incompetent.”

  For a long minute the only sound was the hum of soft conversation from the command deck below. On the balcony itself, no one spoke, and Lleshi had the odd impression they were all holding their breath. Perhaps they were. “In two days there will be no need for me to prove your incompetence,” Telthorst said at last. “You’ll have proved it for me.”

  “Perhaps,” Lleshi said. “Until then, I am still commander of this ship.”

  Telthorst’s eyes darted to the tactical display. “And what does the commander choose to do about those incoming enemy ships?”

  “I’ve already told you,” Lleshi said. “Commander Campbell?”

  “Harpies locked onto incoming spacecraft,” Campbell said briskly and, to Lleshi’s ear, with a note of quiet relief in his voice.

  “Fire Harpies,” Lleshi said, his eyes still on Telthorst.

  “Harpies firing, sir.”

  Ornina shook her head. “Who would have believed it?” she murmured.

  “I’m not sure I believe it myself,” Kosta admitted, searching her face and Hanan’s for some clue as to what they were really thinking about all this.

  As if he, with his eight whole weeks of secret agent training, would be able to decipher any such clues even if he did spot them. “But even if I’m misinterpreting the facts, the facts themselves are still there.”

  “I believe it,” Hanan said, his pinched face thoughtful in the dim light. “So many other things suddenly make sense now.”

  “Like Ronyon’s fear reaction when we hit the system,” Chandris said. “Somehow, he was able to sense it in a way the rest of us couldn’t.”

  “Yes; Ronyon,” Hanan said. “Other things, too. Do you remember what Jaar Hova was like, Ornina, when he first started flying his huntership?”

  “He was a nice man,” Ornina said, nodding. “A bit gruff around the edges, but essentially a nice man.”

  “He wasn’t very nice to me when I came looking for a job,” Chandris murmured.

  “No, he wasn’t very nice at all there at the end,” Hanan agreed. “So many of the others have gone sour, too. Or bitter, or just plain mean. I’ve always assumed it was the stress of an angel hunter’s life that had gotten to them. Perhaps instead it was all that time spent close to Angelmass. Close to all that evil …” He shivered. “So what do we do about it?”

  “The first step is to prove there actually are such things as anti-angels,” Kosta told him. “Either to find a pseudo cloud chamber track or, even better, to actually capture one.”

  “What about the damage to our angel?” Hanan suggested. “Can’t you use that as proof?”

  “We’re not using it,” Chandris said.

  “No, but—”

  “We’re not using it,” Chandris repeated, her tone accepting no argument.

  “She’s right,” Kosta seconded, mildly surprised that he was on her side on this one. From the quick look she shot him, she was apparently surprised, too. “Besides, all it proves is that something is happening out there. We still need an anti-angel to show what that something is.”

  “All right,” Ornina said, a sudden decisiveness in her voice. “What do you need from us?”

  “I can get the test equipment together,” Kosta told her. “At least, I think so. What I need is a ship to take it out to Angelmass.”

  “That means the Gazelle,” Chandris said. “So we need you to get repairs started on it as soon as you can.”

  Ornina pursed her lips. “I can try,” she said doubtfully. “But Gabriel’s repair schedule has always been something of a work of fiction.”

  “We don’t need Gabriel,” Chandris said. “You get a private repair firm on the job. I’ll supply the money to pay for it.”

  Ornina looked at her. Shifted her eyes to Kosta; back again to Chandris. “May I ask how?”

  “Legally,” Chandris assured her. “That’s all you need to know.”

  “Of course it’ll be legally,” Hanan said firmly. “We know that. All right, that’s the rest of you. What about me?”

  Ornina frowned. “What about you?”

  “What’s my job in this?” Hanan asked.

  “I think lying there getting well should about cover it,” Kosta said.

  Hanan drew himself up, or at least drew himself up from the neck up. The rest of his body didn’t seem to want to move. “Now see here, everyone,” he stated with exaggerated dignity. “I am the captain of the Gazelle; and the captain does not simply lie around while his ship is on a mission.”

  Ornina drew herself up, too. “Hanan—”

  “Compromise,” Kosta put in quickly. “We’ve got at least a couple of days’ work ahead on the ship before we can head out If, Hanan—if—you’re a good boy and you lie there and heal, we’ll think about taking you with us when we go.”

  “That’s better,” Hanan said, blandly mollified. “Wise old ship’s captain, you know. Fountain of knowledge and sage advice—”

  “Or failing that, a little extra ballast,” Ornina said with a sigh. “All right. I’ll get a service contract written as soon as Shikari City opens for business.”

  “And make it a rush job,” Chandris told her. “As many men and crews as you need. I’ll make sure we have enough to pay whatever they want”

  “Chandris—”

  “People are already dying out there, Ornina,” Chandris said quietly. “We have to stop it. Whatever it takes.”

  Hanan cleared his throat. “All of us?” he asked. “Including you, Jereko?”

  Kosta braced himself. He’d been waiting for this other shoe to drop ever since he’d revealed his true identity to them. “If you think it’ll help, I’m willing to turn myself in.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Chandris jerk slightly. “Wait a minute,” she objected. “You can’t make him do that.”

  “Why not?” Hanan asked.

  “Because—” She hesitated, just a fraction of a second. “It’ll tie up the rest of us six weeks from Sunday, that’s why. They’ll be bound to investigate his link to the Gazelle, and we’ll never get off the ground.”

  “Maybe if I turn myself in you won’t have to,” Kosta suggested. “If I can convince them of the danger, maybe they’ll mount an official study. A full Institute investigation will find an anti-angel a lot faster than we could.”

  “If they believe you,” Chandris countered. “Would you believe a self-confessed spy?”

  “If he had the data, yes,” Kosta said, wondering why she was arguing so hard on his behalf.

  And then suddenly it hit him. “Look, I wouldn’t have to call them right now,” he added. “I could hold off a day or two. Plenty of time for you to get away.”

  The look on her face was like someone had just slapped her. “Is that what you think?” she asked quietly. “That I’m just worried about me?”

  Kosta winced, feeling ashamed. Now, for the first time since realizing who and what she was, he suddenly saw her not as a con artist but as merely a young woman struggling to survive a battering life. “No, of course not,” he managed. “I just thought …”

  Helplessly, he looked at Hanan. “Come on, fountain of sage advice, I’m drowning here,” he growled. “A little help?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Hanan said thoughtfully. “It’s quite instructive to watch the two of you. At any rate, I wasn’t going to suggest you head straight over to the police. As Chandris rightly points out, it would at the very least bury us in official paperwork and paperwork shufflers. But.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “When this is all over and we have the proof we need, you will need to come clean. There’s no way around that.”

  “I understand,” Kosta said. “Do you want me to write you out a confession or something right now?”

  “No,” Hanan said. With a clear effort he turned his right arm over and opened his hand. “But you might give
me your weapon.”

  Kosta blinked. “How did you know about that?” he asked, pulling the shocker out of his pocket and laying it across Hanan’s palm.

  “Because I’m a wise old ship’s captain, of course,” Hanan said with a straight face.

  “Don’t pay a bit of attention to him, Jereko,” Ornina admonished, standing halfway up and peering uncertainly at the weapon. “He was just guessing. How dangerous is this thing?”

  “The safety’s on,” Kosta assured her, showing them both the small switch. “And it’s tuned to its lowest setting besides. Even if you managed to accidentally fire it, you’d only shock your target a little.”

  “Good.” Hanan closed his hand on the shocker and yawned prodigiously. “So are we finished for the night?”

  “As far as I’m concerned.” Kosta looked at Chandris. “You have anything else?”

  She shook her head. “And I have a busy day tomorrow. I’d better get back to the ship and get some sleep.”

  “Sleep fast,” Ornina warned her. “Ship repair services open at six in the morning, and I hope to have someone at the Gazelle by seven. Did you happen to pull up a damage survey, by the way?”

  Chandris nodded. “I can transmit it here to you if you want.”

  “Yes, please,” Ornina said. “It’ll save time in the morning if I can tell them what exactly they’ll need to do.” For a moment her eyes searched Chandris’s face. “You know, we can probably scrape up the money from somewhere else.”

  “I said I’d take care of it,” Chandris told her, standing up. “You just concentrate on getting the ship ready to fly.”

  “All right, dear,” Ornina said, giving Chandris a small and clearly forced smile. “You take care, then.” She looked up at Kosta. “You, too, Jereko.”

  “We will,” Kosta promised her. “Come on, Chandris, let’s get going.”

  “High Senator Forsythe?”

  With a jerk, Forsythe started awake, the muscles in his neck screaming with the sudden movement. He was, he discovered with some embarrassment, sprawled across one of the couches in the fifth-floor hospital lounge where he’d apparently fallen asleep. “You startled me, Zar,” he said reproachfully, blinking his eyes to clear them. The horizon outside the window, he noted, was starting to lighten with the coming of dawn. He’d been asleep for probably the past five hours or so.

  “Sorry, sir,” Pirbazari apologized. “Are you all right?”

  “Sure.” Forsythe said, frowning at the tightness of his aide’s expression. “What’s the matter? Ronyon?”

  Pirbazari shook his head. “A level-one message just came in from Uhuru. Lorelei has gone silent.”

  Something got a grip on Forsythe’s throat. “What do you mean, ‘gone silent’?”

  “It’s been twelve hours since the last scheduled skeeter to anywhere,” Pirbazari said. “That puts the last one six hours overdue.”

  And there were five skeeter-sized catapults in the system, any one of which could fire out the regular capsules if necessary. “Could the planetary catapult have gone down, and for some reason they couldn’t get a transmission to any of the ones in the belts?”

  “Not likely,” Pirbazari said. “For starters, there are six different official transmission systems out to the asteroids, plus all the commercial and private channels the government can commandeer in a pinch. And SOP is to send something on schedule, even if it’s just a notice that systems are temporary down.”

  Forsythe hissed under his breath. “Which means all five catapults have been knocked out.”

  “Looks that way,” Pirbazari conceded. “And fast enough that no one had time to get out a warning.”

  “How fast would that be?” Forsythe asked, reaching to his throat and tightening his neck clasp back into place.

  Pirbazari pursed his lips. “Not much more than an hour. Maybe an hour and a half, depending on how badly the situation caught them napping.”

  ‘“The situation’?” Forsythe bit out. “Is that the official EmDef term for a Pax invasion?”

  “We don’t know that it was an invasion, sir,” Pirbazari warned. “Or that the Pax was involved. Jumping to conclusions isn’t going to get us anywhere with EmDef Command.”

  “Oh, the Pax is involved, all right,” Forsythe said grimly. “I don’t know how they did it, but it was them. If EmDef Command hasn’t figured that out, they all ought to be fired. What’s anyone doing at the moment?”

  “Uhuru sent a quick courier to Lorelei four hours ago to look things over,” Pirbazari said. “As of my last check, it hadn’ t yet responded.”

  “And when it does, it’ll report back to Uhuru anyway,” Forsythe said, retrieving his jacket from a nearby chair and slipping it on.. “Where’s the local EmDef HQ?”

  “Eastern end of the huntership yards,” Pirbazari said, dropping into step beside Forsythe as the High Senator headed for the lounge door. “Far side of the launch dishes.”

  “Good,” Forsythe said as he pushed open the door and hurried out into the quiet corridor, still with its night lighting in place. “I want a courier of our own sent to Lorelei right away, with a collapsed skeeter catapult aboard.”

  “You think that’s a good idea?” Pirbazari asked carefully. “The only way for the Pax to have destroyed the skeeter catapults at all four nets would have been for them to have overwhelmed the defenses there. Those sectors will be crawling with Pax ships.”

  ‘True,” Forsythe said. “But follow it through. If they’ve destroyed the defenses at the nets, there’s a fair chance they also destroyed the nets themselves.”

  “Which would mean the whole system would be open to their incoming ships,” Pirbazari pointed out.

  “And to ours,” Forsythe reminded him. “If we can put something small into the system, maybe at a good distance from anything the Pax would be interested in—”

  “There’s a fair chance it could sit there quietly and put together a skeeter catapult without being noticed,” Pirbazari finished for him, the first hint of cautious hope tugging at his voice. “It might work. But what if there’s still one net working?”

  “Then we’ll have lost a courier,” Forsythe said. “Hardly worth counting after we’ve lost a whole system.”

  “I suppose not,” Pirbazari murmured.

  Forsythe threw a sideways look at him. “Something?”

  “I was just wondering,” Pirbazari said slowly. “All those mining ships we armed.”

  “What about them?”

  “We gave them targeting systems,” Pirbazari said. “But we never gave them any instruction about tactics or strategy. I hope they’ve organized themselves into some kind of guerrilla-style resistance among the asteroids instead of just throwing themselves uselessly at incoming Pax ships.”

  Forsythe grimaced. “Let’s hope they were smart and not just brave,” he said. “In the meantime, let’s see if we can find out what’s going on.”

  CHAPTER 32

  The receptionist on the Stardust Metals executive floor was regally seated behind a desk the size of the Gazelle’s machine shop, working diligently at a petite little computer terminal as Chandris pulled open the heavy door and stepped from the hallway onto a wide expanse of light gray carpet. To the casual observer, she supposed, the receptionist would probably have appeared totally engrossed in her work, oblivious to the newcomer’s approach.

  But to Chandris’s street-trained eye, it was clear the whole thing was an act. The receptionist was fully aware of the younger woman’s presence; and from her body language Chandris could guess she was wondering who this intruder was.

  Who, or what. Chandris still hadn’t really nailed down the proper upper-class clothing styles, and she’d had even less to work with on Seraph than she’d had aboard the Xirrus. Dressed in the best outfit she’d been able to throw together, she probably still looked a mess.

  But there was no time for anything better now. And besides, she wasn’t going for the sophisticated seductress role now. This time sh
e was going straight for an even more basic human motivation.

  Greed.

  She was three steps from the desk before the receptionist finally looked up. “Good morning,” she said. Her voice was polite enough, but there was a slightly contemptuous edge to the look she sent up and down Chandris’s outfit. “May I help you?”

  “Yes,” Chandris said, nodding toward the five doors set into the curved wall behind the receptionist. The upper-class voice and gestures, at least, she had down cold, and she could tell the receptionist was taken slightly aback by it. “Please tell Mr. Amberson Toomes that Chandris Adriessa is here to see him. We met on his last flight from Lorelei aboard the Xirrus.”

  For a second she thought the woman was going to refuse, or at least ask for some ID first But the upper-class mannerisms had apparently triggered her standard business reflexes, and without a word she picked up the phone and touched a button. “A Miss Chandris Adriessa to see you, Mr. Toomes,” she announced.

  For a minute she listened in silence, her eyes occasionally flicking to Chandris. Chandris returned her gaze with the best air of unconcern she could manage, mentally running through possible escape routes in case she had to chop and hop. If Toomes was calling the police …

  The receptionist replaced the handset. “He’ll see you now, Miss Adriessa,” she said coolly. “Center door behind me.”

  “Thank you,” Chandris said, circling the desk and heading for the indicated door. This didn’t prove anything, either. Toomes could just be giving her a little more stall-rope while the police collected themselves and got over here.

  The door opened as she reached it. Holding her head high, she stepped inside the room.

  Toomes was standing beside a thickly padded chair in a contoured work area probably twice the size of the receptionist’s, across a room that made the desk look relatively small by comparison. “Hello, Chandris,” he said. “It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s good to see you, Amberson,” Chandris said, studying him as she walked toward the desk. He was exactly as she remembered him from the Xirrus, only not as drunk. There was the same easy charm, the same air of ego and self-absorption, the same predator’s smile aimed in her direction.