Angelmass

  For a long moment he hesitated outside the door, a half dozen scenarios—some of them decidedly discomfiting— scrambling through his mind. But if Chandris was up to something underhanded, it was his duty to intervene. Bracing himself, he opened the door and went in.

  No one was in the main living area, but there was a neat stack of clothes on the bed—Ronyon’s, Kosta tentatively identified them. At the back of the room, through the open bathroom doorway, he could see back to the shower.

  The shower door was only slightly translucent, but that was enough. The size and shape of the shadow showed that it was Ronyon in there. Alone.

  Quickly, Kosta backed out into the corridor, cheeks hot with embarrassment and annoyance. The Chandris Effect, all right: give him half an hour with her and he’d make a fool of himself somehow. But at least she wasn’t pulling some scam on Ronyon.

  So where was she?

  He looked up and down the corridor, wondering if there was any point in continuing the search. She’d probably left on some perfectly innocent ship’s business, after all. For all he knew, Ornina or Hanan might even have openly sent her away while he was preoccupied with his statistics program.

  Then, from down the corridor, he heard a faint grinding sound.

  The sound came and went three more times before he located its source: the machine shop. Inside, hunched intently over a grinder, was Chandris.

  “There you are,” Kosta said, stepping inside. “What are you doing here?”

  She didn’t jump in her seat or spin around or do any of the other things people were supposed to do when they were caught doing something wrong. But it seemed to Kosta that she took a fraction of a second too long before turning her head to look at him. “What does it look like I’m doing?” she countered mildly. “I’m working.”

  “Now?” he asked, moving to her side and leaning over to look at the grinder. Held snugly in an electronics clamp was a small lens-shaped piece of crystal. “With the ship about to hit the catapult?”

  “Why not?” she said with a shrug. “Hanan and Ornina can handle the ship without me. Anyway, it felt a little crowded up there.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, frowning down at the crystal. There was something about the size and shape that seemed familiar somehow …

  “Don’t you have some work of your own to do?” she interrupted his musings. “Calibrating your equipment or something?”

  “No, everything’s done,” he said absently. He had seen something just like that crystal—he knew he had. Recently, too. If he could just chase down the memory …

  “Okay, then, to hell with politeness,” Chandris said. “Go away and let me work.”

  “Fine,” Kosta said, straightening up. “You don’t have to get huffy.” He gave the crystal one last look—

  And suddenly the mental picture he’d been searching for dropped neatly into place. High Senator Forsythe, outside the Gazelle, offering his hand for the respect gesture. And fastened to a chain around his neck, the delicate gold filigree and crystal of—

  Kosta focused sharply on Chandris; and in her face he could see she knew he’d figured it out. “Okay,” she growled. “So?”

  “So?” Kosta hissed. “Are you crazy?”

  “They need the money,” she said. “They need it for the ship; they especially need it for Hanan. He’s got a degenerative nerve disease, in case you haven’t bothered to notice.”

  “That was unfair,” Kosta said coldly. “I was the one who carried him down to the medpack, remember?”

  She looked at him a moment … and for a wonder, nodded agreement “You’re right,” she acknowledged. “It was a cheap shot.”

  “Yes, it was,” Kosta nodded back, some of his anger draining away. “Look, I’m sorry about Hanan. I’d like to see him get fixed up, too. But this isn’t the way to do it.”

  She gazed evenly up at him. “How are you going to stop me? Without getting me in trouble, that is?”

  Kosta grimaced. So she thought that it was her he was trying to avoid getting into trouble. If she only knew. “I’ll tell the Daviees,” he said, turning back toward the door. “I’m sure they can find a way to keep you away from Forsythe’s angel.”

  “Forsythe doesn’t have the angel,” Chandris called after him. “Ronyon does.”

  Kosta turned back. “What are you talking about?” he demanded. “Ronyon isn’t wearing an angel.”

  “No, he’s carrying it in his pocket,” she said. “That’s why I spilled machine oil on him and sent him to the shower. So I could find it and get a close look.”

  Kosta frowned at her. Could they be issuing angels even to High Senators’ aides now? No—ridiculous. “They don’t give angels to aides,” he told Chandris. “Just to the High Senators themselves.”

  “Well, then, he’s got Forsythe’s angel,” Chandris insisted. “Maybe he stole it.”

  “But Forsythe’s wearing—”

  “He’s wearing a fake,” Chandris said. She gestured to the unfinished crystal in the clamp. “Just like this one.”

  A cold chill ran up Kosta’s back. A High Senator, with a fake angel? “There has to be a mistake,” he said between suddenly stiff lips.

  “Not a chance,” Chandris said. “I know what an angel feels like up close.”

  Kosta thought back to his own first encounter with one of the Institute’s angels. He hadn’t felt a thing, and he’d really been trying to. “I didn’t know angels felt like anything in particular,” he said.

  “Some people can’t tell the flavors of different mushrooms apart either,” Chandris said tartly. “I don’t know how I can tell if an angel’s there. I just can. The High Senator’s wearing a fake. Period.”

  Kosta’s gaze drifted away from her face, his mind spinning with sudden uncertainties. The underlying basis of this whole mission had been the Pax assertion that the Empyreal leadership was coming under the influence of alien intelligences. But if that wasn’t true—if the High Senators were not, in fact, wearing angels—then that threat evaluation was way off target.

  Unless Forsythe had engineered this deception on his own. In which case, he was blatantly defying Empyreal law, for some reason of his own. Having second thoughts about the angels, perhaps?

  Either way, it was a situation worth following up on. Which meant, unfortunately, that he was again going to have to avoid rocking the boat. “I won’t tell the Daviees about it,” he said, knowing full well that Chandris was going to take this wrong. “Not now, anyway. But I’ll be keeping an eye on Ronyon; and if you grab that angel, I will turn you in.”

  Turning his back on her, he left.

  Chandris stared after him, her work on the crystal momentarily forgotten. It had happened again. Kosta had cracked her red-handed doing something illegal … and had just walked away rather than get involved.

  But it wasn’t just a dislike of getting involved, she saw now. It was more specific than that. It was an attempt to avoid situations where he would be drawing attention to himself.

  Or more specifically, where he would be drawing official attention to himself.

  Slowly, she turned back to her crystal. Kosta wasn’t who he pretended to be—that much she’d concluded his first time aboard the Gazelle. But he wasn’t a normal con artist, either.

  So what was he?

  She leaned back in her chair, frowning at the ceiling. There was something he’d said to her a long time ago, an off-handed comment that had sounded odd at the time but which she’d never gotten around to checking out for herself.

  That strange comment about aphrodisiac perfumes.

  Swiveling around, she reached for the machine room’s computer terminal. But even as she did so, the intercom pinged. “Chandris?” Ornina’s voice said. “Where are you?”

  Chandris hesitated a split second, old ingrained reflexes whispering at her to come up with a quick and convincing lie. Suppressing the impulse, she tapped the switch. “Machine shop,” she said.

  “We’ll be hitting the cat
apult in about three minutes,” Ornina told her. If she wondered what Chandris could possibly be doing in the machine shop, it didn’t show in her voice. “You want to come up?”

  “Sure. I’ll be right there.”

  “Thank you.”

  Chandris keyed off the intercom and set to work freeing her rough crystal from its clamp. She’d hoped to have the duplicate finished before they reached Angelmass and people started wandering around the ship again. But no problem. There would be plenty of time to get it done before the Gazelle got back to Seraph.

  And if Kosta didn’t like it, he could go jump.

  She made it to the control room and into her seat with maybe twenty seconds to spare. Kosta was already there, sitting tight-lipped in Forsythe’s earlier seat and doing his best to ignore her. The High Senator himself was nowhere to be seen. “Systems all okay?” she asked, keying back into her board.

  “Running smooth as can be,” Hanan said. “High Senator Forsythe left a couple of minutes ago to go find Ronyon.”

  “He’s probably still in the shower,” Chandris said. “I was showing him around the ship and accidentally squirted some machine oil on him.”

  Ornina frowned at her. “How in the world did you manage to do that?”

  Chandris was saved the necessity of answering by the alert signal from the control board and the start of the catapult’s five-second countdown. She ran her eyes over her board, confirmed that everything was ready; and with the usual not-quite jerk the spider-shape of Angelmass Central appeared in the center of her display.

  Behind her, the door whispered open, and she turned to see Forsythe come in. “Everything all right back there, High Senator?” Hanan asked.

  “Yes, thanks,” Forsythe said. He glanced at Kosta, in his earlier seat, and for a moment Chandris wondered if he was going to demand it back. But instead he went over to one of the fold-down jumpseats. “I found Ronyon in his room,” he added, strapping himself in. “He’d gotten some oil on himself and was showering it off.”

  He said it offhandedly, and the glance he threw at Chandris was equally casual. But for someone who’d been reading people as long as she had, it was more than enough.

  Forsythe knew exactly who she was. Who she was, and what she was.

  She turned back to her board, heart pounding in her ears. So it had happened, as she’d known someday it would. Lulled by the warmth and comfort of the Daviees, she’d let herself believe she could stay here forever.

  Now, instead of just getting herself in trouble, she was going to drag them into it, as well.

  “I hope he’s almost finished,” Hanan commented. “We’ll have to drop the ship’s rotation down to near zero soon.”

  “He’s all finished,” Forsythe said. “Just drying and getting dressed again. I let him borrow one of your shirts—I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No trouble at all,” Hanan assured him. “I guess I should have made it clear earlier that everything on the Gazelle is at your disposal.”

  “You made it perfectly clear,” Forsythe said. “As I hoped I made clear that I don’t want our presence here disrupting your normal working routine. Any progress yet, Mr. Kosta?”

  “Yes, but it’s mostly negative,” Kosta said, studying something on his display. “There have been a few delays at the catapult due to huntership mass discrepancies, but all of them were traceable to errors at the launch dish. Nothing seems to be from material that fell off the ships along the way.”

  “Though that may not mean anything,” Ornina pointed out. “As you said earlier, the catapult may have enough tolerance built into its programming.”

  “Agreed.” Kosta shook his head. “The more I think about it, the less I like the whole theory. Angelmass just isn’t massive enough to pull that much gravitational energy out of infalling paint chips or whatever.”

  Behind Chandris, the door slid open … and she turned just as Ronyon stumbled into the room, his fingers tracing agitated patterns in the air in front of him.

  A look of absolute terror was on his face.

  “What’s wrong?” she demanded.

  “He’s frightened of something,” Forsythe said, making quick finger gestures of his own. Ronyon replied—“I can’t get any sense out of him,” Forsythe said, starting to sound concerned. “He just keeps saying he’s afraid.”

  “Is it the low gravity?” Ornina asked, starting to unstrap. A pair of gamma-ray cracks snapped through the room, making Chandris jump. “If he’s never been in free-fall before—”

  “He been in free-fall hundreds of times,” Forsythe said shortly. He had a hand on Ronyon’s shoulder now, his other hand still going through their complicated motions. “I don’t understand this at all.”

  “Perhaps we should get him back to his cabin,” Ornina suggested. She was at Ronyon’s side now, holding his arm in a reassuring grip as she studied his face.

  More hand motions, a violent shake of Ronyon’s head— “He doesn’t want to leave,” Forsythe said. “Says he’s afraid to be alone.”

  Chandris looked at Hanan. “Are there any sedatives in the medpack’s drug dispenser?”

  “There should be,” he said, his eyes on Ronyon. “You know how to get the dispenser open?”

  She nodded, reaching for her restraints. “Back in a minute.”

  It took her a little longer than she’d expected to get to the medpack, take the cover off the dispenser, locate the proper ampule, put everything back together again, and return to the control room. The others had gotten Ronyon strapped into Kosta’s chair by the time she returned, but otherwise not much had changed. The big man still looked pretty miserable. “Thank you, Chandris,” Ornina said, taking the sedative from her and reaching for Ronyon’s arm.

  He pulled the arm away from her, his eyes turning frantically to Forsythe. “It’s all right,” the High Senator told him, gesturing the words as well as saying them. “It’s just something to help you relax a little.”

  Reluctantly, Ronyon put his arm back on the armrest. Ornina touched it with the ampule and gave him an encouraging smile. “You’ll feel better in just a few minutes,” she said. “High Senator Forsythe and I will stay right here with you until you do.”

  Ronyon nodded, already seeming to sag a little in the low gravity. Leaving the two of them to look after Ronyon, Chandris made her way forward and climbed into Ornina’s seat. In the time since she’d gone to get the sedative, the gamma-ray sparks had worked their way up to a gentle but insistent rain, and she keyed her board for a location check.

  The result came up. She looked at it, a frown starting to crease her forehead.

  “It’s accurate,” Hanan said quietly from beside her.

  She looked at the tight expression on his face, a creepy sensation working its way up through her. “You sure?’ she asked, keeping her own voice low.

  “I’ve run it three times in the past fifteen minutes,” he told her. “No mistake.”

  Chandris turned back to her board, the creepy sensation getting stronger. If they were really still this far away from Angelmass … “The radiation’s getting stronger,” she murmured. She glanced back at Kosta, sitting in one of the jumpseats watching Forsythe and Ornina hovering around Ronyon. “Just like Kosta said.”

  “Yes,” Hanan agreed. “I just hope the Gazelle’s hull can take the extra—”

  He broke off, the last echo of his words vanishing into the silence.

  Into the complete silence …

  “Kosta?” Chandris snapped, twisting around to look at him.

  “I know,” Kosta said grimly, already out of his jumpseat and heading for Chandris’s usual seat and control board. “The gamma sparks have stopped.”

  Chandris turned back to her display, stomach tightening as she keyed for radiation sensor readings. A memory flashed back: someone in the Barrio telling her a story about how a big wave had once swept in from the sea and wrecked a big part of Uhuru’s main port city. And before the wave had come, the whole sea had pulled
back from the shore, like it was getting itself ready to hit.

  “Hanan, get on the radio,” Kosta said. “Warn everyone there’s a radiation surge coming.”

  “Right,” Hanan said, reaching for the comm section of his board.

  He never got there. Without warning, the eerie silence was shattered by a sudden violent burst of gamma-ray crackling.

  The surge had hit … and the Gazelle was caught in the middle of it.

  CHAPTER 26

  Hanan screamed, a long, agonized wail almost inaudible above the violent sleet-storm of gamma-ray crackling that filled the control cabin. “What’s happening?” Forsythe shouted over the din.

  “Radiation surge!” Chandris shouted back. Ornina was at Hanan’s side, fumbling under his shirt for the exobrace cutoff switches. Chandris reached for her restraints—

  “Chandris, get us some rotation,” Kosta called from behind her. “If you don’t, the hull’s going to get cooked.”

  Ornina found the switch, and Hanan collapsed trembling in his seat. “He’s right, Chandris,” Ornina shouted to her. “Do it.”

  Cursing under her breath, Chandris turned back and keyed in the command. The displays were unreadable through the multicolored snow that had suddenly appeared on them, and for a moment she wasn’t sure whether or not the command had made it through. “You got it?” Kosta shouted.

  “Hang on,” she shouted back, trying to see through the snow on the displays. The numbers were still impossible to read, but she could feel her weight starting to increase. “Okay,” she said. “Rotation’s speeding up.”

  She turned back to Hanan. Ornina and Forsythe had gotten him out of his seat now and were supporting his weight between them. And the look on Ornina’s face … “Ornina?”

  Ornina turned a pale face to Chandris. “He’s very bad,” she said, her voice nearly lost in the gamma-ray noise. “We’ve got to get him to the medpack right away.”

  “I’ll help you,” Chandris said, popping her restraints.

  “No,” Forsythe said sharply. “We can handle him. You and Kosta get us out of here.”