Angelmass

  Nothing.

  For a long minute he stared at the result, not believing it. Even given that the package was selecting only a few narrow bandwidths, there still should be something coming in. He keyed for a more sensitive reading—

  “Kosta!” Chandris snapped.

  He jerked around. “What?”

  “Get on the comm,” she ordered. ‘Try and raise the Skyarcher—tell them we’re on our way but can’t get a solid fix on them. See if they can give us some location data.”

  “Right.” Kosta turned back to his board. A minute later, he had them.

  “Gazelle,” a voice called through the roar of static and gamma-ray stutter. “Gazelle, are you there?”

  “We’re here,” Kosta called back. “Hang on, we’re coming. Can you give us your location and velocity vectors?”

  “We don’t have them.” Even through the noise, Kosta could hear the fear in that voice. “The whole damn ship is falling apart. You gotta help us.”

  “We’re trying to get there,” Kosta told him, an icy shiver running up his back. “Just hang on and try to relax—”

  He broke off as something went crack behind him. For an instant he thought his ears were playing tricks on him, that the sound had come from the comm speaker. But it was followed by another, and another—

  “Hanan!” he shouted over the roar of the engines and the increasingly noisy crackling. “We’re getting into radiation.”

  “I know,” Hanan called back. “No choice—it’s our only intercept vector. Don’t worry, the hull can handle—”

  The rest of his statement was swallowed up in a sudden cloudburst of gamma-ray sparks.

  And all hell broke loose.

  Hanan screamed, a cry of pain that sent Kosta’s teeth locking together. Ornina shouted something and grabbed for her restraints; Kosta got to Hanan first, without any clear memory of having left his seat. “What’s wrong?” he shouted over the din, dimly aware that he was once again weightless—the Gazelle, clearly, was no longer under power.

  “His exobraces,” Ornina shouted back, trying to get her hand into Hanan’s shirt. “They’re misfiring—overloading the sensory nerves. Got to shut everything down.”

  Kosta swore, trying to remember everything he’d learned at the Institute about Empyreal electronics. There wasn’t anything that even remotely touched on this sort of thing. Helplessly, holding Hanan’s pain-curled arms as steady as he could, he watched as Ornina finally got to whatever cutoff switch she was trying for. The arms went limp, and Hanan gave a long, trembling sigh. “God,” he muttered, the word just barely audible. “God, that hurt.”

  “You’ll be all right,” Ornina told him, her face tight “Jereko, help me get him down to the medpack.”

  “Never mind me,” Hanan insisted, trying to shrug their hands off. He succeeded only in flailing uselessly against Kosta’s shoulder. “We’ve got to get the Skyarcher before it’s too late.”

  “Stop that!” Ornina snapped, pushing his arm away from the restraint release. “You need help.”

  “So do Hova and Rafe—”

  “They’ll get it,” Kosta cut him off, popping the strap on his side of Hanan’s seat. “Ornina and Chandris can handle the ship while I get you below. Fair enough?”

  A surge of pain came and went across Hanan’s face. “All right,” he gritted.

  Kosta wedged a foot under the edge of the chair and took Hanan’s arm, feeling the muscles trembling under his hand as he got the arm around his shoulders. “I’ll need a few minutes at half a gee or less,” he told Ornina, hauling Hanan bodily out of his seat and fighting hard against the fat man’s inertia. “Can you do that?”

  “Assuming we have any control at all, yes,” she said grimly, wedging herself into Hanan’s seat. “You know how to work a huntership medpack?”

  “I do,” Hanan said before Kosta could answer. “I’ll be there with him, remember?”

  “Well, then, get there,” she snapped, giving her brother one last look before turning back to her board.

  Hanan turned slightly watery eyes to Kosta and gave him the ghost of a smile. “The hospital, officer, and step on it.”

  It took some effort, even at half a gee, to manhandle Hanan onto the medpack table. But Kosta managed it, and under Hanan’s guidance got it programmed.

  He had completed the procedure, and Hanan was starting to fall asleep, when the gamma-ray cloudburst abruptly dropped off to more or less normal levels again.

  The intercom, when he tried it, was inoperable. He considered heading back to the control cabin to find out what was going on, but even though Hanan seemed all right he decided it wouldn’t be a good idea to leave him alone.

  And so he sat there, watching the glowing green lights on the medpack and listening to Hanan’s steady breathing.

  And tried to think.

  Chandris was sitting in Hanan’s usual seat when Kosta arrived in the control cabin. “How are we doing?” he asked her.

  She turned to look at him, her eyes flat and dead. “We’re going home,” she said, turning back to her work. “How’s Hanan?”

  “He’s all right,” Kosta told her, moving forward to drop into the seat next to her. “Ornina says he’s not in any danger.”

  “She probably told you, then.”

  “That the Skyarcher didn’t make it?” He nodded. “Yes.”

  Chandris shook her head slowly. Disbelievingly. “It killed them. Burned all the electronics and optics out of their ship and just.. .killed them.”

  Kosta nodded again, looking at the display. At the stars and, just barely visible now, the pattern of lights indicating the Angelmass Central space station. “We stopping at Central or going on to Seraph?”

  “Probably the latter,” Chandris said. “There’s no need to stick around unless either Hanan or the Gazelle need immediate attention. Central isn’t set up for major long-term work.”

  “Yeah.” Kosta looked at her. “That radiation surge. From the way Hanan and Ornina were talking, it sounded like this wasn’t the first time it’s happened. You ever seen one before yourself?”

  Chandris gave him a long, cool look. “Two men just died out there,” she said, her voice even colder than her eyes. “Is it too much to ask for you to put your scientific curiosity into storage for a while?”

  “I’m sorry,” Kosta said quietly. “Did you know them well?”

  “Hardly at all,” she said, turning back to stare at her board. ‘I only talked to the owner once, back when I was trying to get a job. Before I found Hanan and Ornina.” She shrugged, a slight movement of her shoulders. “He wasn’t very nice to me. Sarcastic and pretty nasty.” She snorted a sound that might have been a sort of laugh. “It’s funny, you know. When I first came here I wouldn’t have cared a two-ruya reek if a frag like that got himself sliced. Look at me now.” She shook her head.

  Kosta nodded, searching for something to say. “At least you tried. That has to count for something.”

  She looked at him again, a faint sheen of contempt in her eyes. “This isn’t a university final, Kosta,” she growled. “This is real life. There’s no partial credit given for effort.”

  He winced at her tone. “That’s not what I meant.”

  She sighed, the anger fading from her face. “I know.”

  For a few minutes they sat together in silence. Kosta was just wondering whether he ought to leave when Chandris stirred. “You were asking about the radiation surge.”

  “Yes,” Kosta nodded. “I was wondering—”

  “I remember the question,” she cut him off. “I’ve heard stories of things like this happening, but I’ve never been this close to one before.”

  “Any idea what might have caused it?”

  She shrugged. “You’re the expert. You tell me.”

  “That’s the problem,” he said. “I can’t. According to everything I know about black holes, what just happened should have been impossible.”

  She frowned at him. “What do
you mean, impossible?”

  “I’ll show you. Come on back to my seat and I’ll call up the data from my experiment.”

  “I can bring it up from here.” She fiddled with her board, and a moment later a page of numbers appeared on one of the displays. “Okay, you’ve got access—that part of the board, there.”

  “Thank you.” Kosta keyed in the plotting/extrapolation program, set it running. “Now, let’s see just what this looks like …”

  The numbers vanished, to be replaced by a fuzzy pink cone with an equally fuzzy dark blue line down its axis. Kosta gazed at it, a shiver running up his back. “I’ll be damned,” he murmured.

  “What?” Chandris asked.

  Kosta pointed, noting vaguely that his finger seemed to be shaking a bit. “The blue line in the middle is the surge of radiation,” he explained. “The pink cone is where there was no radiation at all.”

  Chandris looked at him. “No radiation?”

  “None. At least, not in the frequencies my sensors were set for.”

  She looked back at the display. “But …”

  “Yeah. I don’t suppose you’d have any records of those other surges aboard, would you?”

  “I don’t know,” Chandris said grimly, reaching for her board. “Let’s find out.”

  CHAPTER 22

  The baby was asleep, her eyes pinched shut against the gentle night-light in the room, a delicate pattern of veins crisscrossing her eyelids. Occasionally she stirred, waving her tiny hands around or making them into fists, and once made a series of sucking motions with her mouth.

  Sitting in the semi-darkened room, sipping at a mug of cold tea, Kosta watched her sleep.

  He’d been there perhaps twenty minutes when the door opened behind him. “Dr. Qha—? Oh, hi, Jereko,” Gyasi interrupted himself cheerfully. “Aren’t you supposed to be out at Angelmass or somewhere?”

  “The trip ended early,” Kosta told him. “If you’re looking for Dr. Qhahenlo, she’s down the hall in the lab.”

  “No rush. Who’s that, baby Angelica?”

  Kosta felt his Up twist. “That’s her name, is it? I should have guessed.”

  There was a brief pause. “You all right?” Gyasi asked, his voice frowning.

  “Not really.” Kosta gestured at the screen with his mug, the movement sloshing a few drops over the rim and onto his fingers. “I don’t understand this, Yaezon. What kind of people are you, that you blithely put an angel around the neck of a baby?'

  “It’s a bit of a gamble, sure,” Gyasi agreed, coming over to stand beside Kosta’s chair. “It was hardly done blithely, though. Or quickly, either—the argument and discussion lasted nearly a year, with just about the whole Institute getting in on it before it was over. Director Podolak and the others finally decided it was just something we had to do.”

  “For science.”

  Gyasi shrugged. “You could put it that way, I guess. Don’t forget, though, that we didn’t go in entirely cold. We had nearly two decades of experience with the High Senate and others to go on, not to mention a few years of lab studies before that. Even if we don’t know exactly what the angels are, we know pretty well what they do.”

  “And what if you don’t?” Kosta asked, turning away from the sleeping baby on the screen to look up at him. “Suppose they’re not just quanta of good. Suppose there’s more to them then that.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as motivations of their own,” Kosta said. “Such as possibly even an intelligence of their own.”

  Gyasi blinked; and then his face cleared. “Ah,” he said with a knowing nod. “That’s right—you were aboard a huntership, weren’t you? Let me guess: they pulled that old trapped-alien ghost story on you.”

  It was Kosta’s turn to frown. “What do you mean, pulled it on me? You mean it was a joke?”

  “Oh, it’s no joke,” Gyasi said. “It’s just that that same theory, in one form or another, has been kicking around the huntership crews for years. No one really takes it seriously anymore.”

  Except maybe the Pax, Kosta reminded himself silently. “Why not?” he asked. “Do you know what would happen to a ship that tried catapulting through a black hole like Angelmass?”

  “No, but that’s not the point,” Gyasi said. “The problem is that that theory doesn’t do anything except push the real issue a step farther back. If the angels are one or more fragmented souls, why are they all uniformly good? Why don’t we get demons mixed in with the angels?”

  “Are you sure you haven’t?” Kosta countered. “I mean, how would you test for something like that?”

  “I don’t know, actually,” Gyasi admitted. “But the High Senate and the Institute seem to know how.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  Gyasi raised his hands, palms upward. “At some point in life, Jereko, you have to accept the fact that you can’t get by without occasionally trusting other people.”

  “Maybe,” Kosta conceded grudgingly. “Doesn’t mean I have to like it”

  Behind them, the door opened again. “Mr. Kosta?”

  “I’m here, Dr. Qhahenlo,” Kosta said, squinting in the sudden brightness as he stood up.

  “Watching Angelica, I see,” Qhahenlo commented as she walked to her desk. “How’s she doing tonight?”

  “She’s dreaming, I think,” Kosta said, turning off the monitor and going over to the desk. “Did you find anything?”

  Qhahenlo nodded. “Two things. First of all, the data you got from the Gazelle are perfectly correct: there have indeed been fourteen instances of unusual radiation pulses recorded over the past eighteen months. None of them anywhere near this strong, but definitely there.”

  “How strong are we talking about?” Gyasi asked.

  “Extremely,” Qhahenlo told him grimly. “The one Mr. Kosta recorded was strong enough to kill a huntership crew right through a sandwich-metal hull.”

  Gyasi gave a low whistle, turning to look at Kosta. “Not your crew, I hope.”

  “No,” Kosta said, shivering with the memory. “But we were close enough that it could have been.”

  “Which brings me to the second point,” Qhahenlo said, tapping keys. “We’re still analyzing your data; but at the moment it looks as if that conical low-radiation zone is an artificial construct. Here’s the picture we’ve come up with.” She swiveled the display around for him to see.

  Kosta frowned at it. The central fuzzy line of the main radiation pulse was still there, but the outer cone had been replaced by a strange, almost random-looking mottling. “That doesn’t make sense,” he objected. “The radiation data came out symmetric despite the fact that the Gazelle’s path curved all through that region.”

  “Which is obviously why your computer fitted a cone shape to it,” Qhahenlo nodded. “This more sophisticated analysis was able to take into account the fact that your sampling was very limited in both space and time. It was also able to fit it closer to known black hole theory.”

  Kosta looked at her sharply. “What do you mean, fit it closer? Shouldn’t you be taking the data on its own merits and seeing where it leads?”

  “We did,” she said. “But you have to understand that there wasn’t all that much there, by the nature of your experiment’s design and the incident itself. If we run it parallel to the theory, on the other hand, we can get a more likely explanation.”

  Kosta pursed his lips. It was, he had to admit, a fairly standard technique. Not much more, really, than a sophisticated version of curve-fitting. And under normal circumstances he would have seen nothing wrong with it.

  But here, for some reason, he did. And didn’t know why. “So what did the theory-fitting tell you?” he asked, fighting hard to stay open-minded.

  Qhahenlo shrugged. “About as I expected,” she said, tapping keys to bring up some numbers. “Best guess is that what we’re seeing is a radiation self-focusing effect, probably triggered by a sudden influx of gravitational energy.”

  Kosta leaned over the d
esk, studying the figures. It did, indeed, seem straightforward enough: a significant mass, falling in toward Angelmass, would release gravitational potential energy as it fell, pushing some of the radiation streaming from the black hole over the threshold for self-focusing.

  And yet … “Where are we assuming this triggering mass came from?” he asked. “Angelmass isn’t big enough to get all that much gravitational energy from.”

  “True,” Qhahenlo agreed. “And the self-focusing effect won’t last all that long, either, so it gets a little tricky. We’re assuming that the trigger is coming from the affected hunterships themselves—something dropped, or maybe something coming from the drive. We’re looking into it.”

  “Mm.” Kosta rubbed at his lower lip. “I don’t know. That surge lasted an awfully long time.”

  “Oh, there’s no doubt it pushes the edges of the theory,” Qhahenlo nodded. “But I don’t think it’s going to take too much to fit it in. The tricky part will be to figure out what the trigger mechanism is and how to keep it from happening again.”

  “Is there enough data for that?” Gyasi asked.

  “I don’t know,” Qhahenlo said. “Ideally, we’d like to have the exact configurations and operating procedures from each of the ships this has happened to. Try to find some common factor in the incidents. Whether we can get that or not I don’t know, particularly with those that occurred more than a month or two ago. I presume we’ll be studying the wreckage of the Hova’s Skyarcher, too, once EmDef retrieves it. That should tell us something.”

  “And what happens until then?” Kosta demanded.

  Both of them looked at him. “I’m not sure what you mean,” Qhahenlo said.

  And here’s where it hits the blades, Kosta thought, bracing himself. “I mean I’d like to go ahead and publish this,” he told her. “At least as a preliminary report. I think it’s important that the huntership crews know what’s happening out there.”

  A slight smile twitched at Qhahenlo’s lip. “And you’re worried the Gabriel Corporation may take exception to you stirring up trouble?”

  “Why would they?” Gyasi put in before Kosta could answer. “You’ve found a problem no one else has noticed. They’re more likely to thank you for pointing it out.”