Angelmass

CHAPTER 10

With a jerk, Chandris woke to find herself moving.

For a second she lay there in the dark, panic bubbling in her throat as she tried furiously to break through the fog of sleep and confusion. The unfamiliar bed beneath her jolted to the side; and as it did so, the disorientation cleared.

The Gazelle, and the Daviees... and Angelmass.

Twisting around on the narrow cot that took up half the tiny cabin's floor space, she fumbled in the dark for the light switch. The ceiling went on, a low night-level glow that didn't burn her eyes as she swung her legs out of bed and planted her feet on the icy metal floor. A six o'clock lift, Ornina had said; but the clock built into the computer desk read only four thirty-five. Either Ornina had gotten her wires crossed, or something was wrong.

The Gazelle jerked again. Gritting her teeth, Chandris reached for her new coverall jumpsuit and started pulling it on.

The narrow corridors were silent and night-level dim as she made her way along them toward the front of the ship, occasionally bumping into walls as the Gazelle continued its rocking movement.

Amid the occasional creaking of metal she could hear a faint whine, nothing at all like the dull background roar that had been a constant part of life aboard the Xirrus.

Her original goal had been the forward control cabin, but she was barely halfway there when she began to hear traces of what sounded like music over the whine. Following the sound, she came upon an open door spilling light into the corridor. Moving as stealthily as she could on the unstable floor, she eased up to the door and looked inside.

"Well, good morning," Ornina said, looking up from a mess of disassembled electronics spread out on a lab table in front of her and throwing Chandris a smile. "What are you doing—just a second," she interrupted herself, turning toward the expensive-looking sound system in the corner. "Music command: volume down two," she ordered.

The music obediently went softer. "One of our few luxuries," Ornina confessed, looking back at Chandris. "But we both love music, and it's so nice to be able to fiddle with it when both hands are full. Don't just stand there—come on in. What in the world are you doing up this early?"

"I thought something was wrong," Chandris told her, feeling a little foolish as she stepped into the room. "We weren't supposed to leave until six, were we?"

"To leave Seraph, yes," Ornina nodded. "But we can hardly launch from our service port, now, can we?"

"No, of course not," Chandris agreed, annoyed that she hadn't figured that out on her own. "I guess I just assumed you meant we'd leave the service port at six or so."

Ornina shook her head, turning back to the equipment spread out in front of her. "No 'or so' about it," she said, picking up a tiny block and peering closely at it. "When Shikari launch control gives you a slot, you'd better be on the launch strip at that time and not a minute later. Otherwise, you go to the end of the roster and maybe don't even get off that day. Ach."

Shaking her head, she handed Chandris the block. "Be a dear and tell me what the number on this strytram is, will you?"

"Uh..." Chandris frowned at the faded gray printing, wondering uneasily if she was supposed to know what a strytram was. "It looks like CR 57743. Or maybe CR 57748—the last one's not all there."

"It's a 48," Ornina nodded, taking it back. "It was the 77 I wasn't sure of. Thank you."

"You're welcome." Chandris looked around at the other pieces. "What's all this from, anyway?"

"A Senamaec high-end sampler," Ornina identified it. "Our backup, fortunately, or we'd be in trouble. I don't suppose you've ever worked on one before?"

"Afraid not," Chandris said, forcing her voice to remain casual. The Xirrus's files had never mentioned Senamaec high-end samplers. Belatedly, she was starting to realize that those files hadn't been nearly as complete as she'd thought. "Where's Mr. Daviee?" she asked, to change the subject.

"Hanan, please," Ornina chided her gently. "And I'm Ornina. There's not nearly enough room on a huntership for unnecessary formalities. Besides, it makes us feel older than either of us likes."

"Sorry," Chandris murmured.

"That's all right. To answer your question, he's still in bed. Hopefully still asleep, too—he'll be handling the actual lift, and that's not a job for someone low on sleep." She glanced up at Chandris.

"You were up pretty late last night, too, weren't you."

"I was trying to get through all the spec manuals," Chandris told her. "There are a lot of things about the Gazelle that I'm not used to."

"Hunterships are a unique breed of fish," Ornina agreed. "Have to be. You send an ordinary ship into the Angelmass region and you'd fry everything inside it to a crisp. Electromagnetic radiation, particle fluxes, magnetic twist fields—the works. But of course you know all that."

"Of course," Chandris murmured, a chill running up her back. Somehow, in all her studying, she'd never run across anything on Angelmass itself. If it was as dangerous as it sounded, she'd better correct that omission, and fast. "Well, unless you need me, I guess I'll go get some breakfast," she told Ornina, starting back toward the door.

"Go ahead," Ornina said. "But when you're finished, I'd appreciate it if you'd come back and give me a hand here. I want to get this put back together before Hanan wakes up."

Chandris clenched her teeth. "Sure," she said. "I'll be right back."

So much for more study time, she groused to herself as she swayed her way back down the jostling corridors. But still, that was more annoying than dangerous. After all, the Daviees had been doing this angel collecting thing for eleven years now. Surely they knew what they were doing.

No matter how bad Angelmass was, she could certainly handle a single trip out there. And a single trip was all she was going to need.

More from curiosity than any other reason, Chandris watched the control cabin chrono as she sat waiting; and at exactly 6:00:02 the Gazelle lifted.

It felt pretty much the way the shuttle launch to the Xirrus had felt, back when she'd first left Uhuru: a mostly smooth sense of movement along the thick concrete strip and up into the sky, with a steady roar of engines coming from behind.

But back then she'd been in a passenger cabin, without the monitors and displays and the running conversation between Hanan, Ornina, and the controllers... and it was quickly clear that a space ship launch was more interesting than it felt.

The sound of the engines wasn't just a single roar, for one thing. It was a mixture of several different roars, each coming from a different engine, with only the combination remaining steady. The sky was anything but empty, either: there must have been a hundred other vehicles flying around the area, all of them looking much too close for comfort.

"We're coming up on the launch dish, Chandris," Ornina announced from her seat. "Pelvic camera, if you want to watch."

Chandris shifted her eyes to the display showing the underside of the ship. There it was, or so she assumed, moving into view as the Gazelle flew over the landscape. It was almost fragile looking, shaped like a giant dinner plate... and looked like it was about to explode.

It really did. From a hundred places around the edge sparks were spitting, and she could see that the dish's surface was shimmering with a haze of light. Beneath the haze, the whole nurking thing seemed to be coming apart—

And then, without warning, it was gone. Along with the whole city.

Chandris blinked, eyes flicking between the displays... and gradually it dawned on her that the city was gone because the Gazelle was suddenly way off the ground.

Way off the ground.

"First launch dish lift?"

Chandris turned to find Ornina looking back at her. "Not really," she said, wondering uneasily whether it should be her first. There hadn't been a word about launch dishes in the material she'd read aboard the Xirrus, either. Was it something specific to hunterships? "First one where I've had a chance to watch what was happening, though," she added, hoping that would cover all the edges.

Apparently it did. "Pretty spectacular, isn't it?" Hanan commented. "Especially when the dish looks like it's about to come apart. I've never yet gotten a clear answer from a tech on what exactly causes that illusion."

"You want to double-check our vector, Chandris?" Ornina asked. "We should be on an orbital intercept for the catapult."

"Sure," Chandris nodded, swiveling the comp arm into position in front of her and getting her mind back on business. This part, at least, she'd studied like crazy. The Gazelle's course vector... there it was. To calculate the orbital intercept all she had to do was to call up the proper display and superimpose the lines... "Looks good," she reported. "Maybe just a little on the short side."

"Short side, right," Hanan said. The roar of the engines deepened for a moment, then slackened off again. "No surprise there—Lift Two's always tended to kick a little short," he commented. "Maybe someday they'll get around to fixing it."

"Not till Lift Four's on line, though," Ornina said. "What was ETA on the catapult, Chandris?"

Chandris glanced across her display, located the proper number. "About fifteen minutes," she said.

"Good." She cocked her head a little to the side. "We'll be all right here now if you'd like to go back to your room and catch up on your sleep. Even after we hit Central it'll be another couple of hours before we're close enough to start looking for angels."

Chandris hesitated. She was tired—that was for sure. But she was supposed to be an expert at this stuff; and wherever she went next it would undoubtedly help her puff-talk if she knew what a catapulting looked and felt like. Most people, after all, weren't so gullible as to believe every lame thing she said. "Thanks," she told Ornina. "But I'd rather stay."

The catapult didn't have nearly the same class of light show as the launch dish had had. All Chandris could see as they approached, in fact, were five widely spaced clusters of multicolored lights, all of them flickering crazily, that seemed to match with the catapult pole markings on the navigation display. Hanan maneuvered the Gazelle into the middle of the lights, signaled someone that they were ready, and listened as the radio gave him a short, five-number countdown. An almost-felt jerk; and in an instant the flashing lights on the display had changed to—

Chandris's whole body lurched in a sudden spasm of shock. "Nurk!" she gasped.

"What?" Ornina snapped.

For a horrible second Chandris couldn't even speak; her body stiff with horror, her eyes frozen on the thing centered on the display. It was a spider—a huge, monstrous, impossible spider. In the distance she could see the massive hourglass-shaped body glistening evilly in an eerie light. Its spindly rear legs were almost invisible as they trailed out behind it; but the front legs, stretched out to grab the Gazelle—

"Welcome to Angelmass Central," Hanan said, his voice sounding distant alongside the pounding in her ears. "Often called the ugliest space station ever built. I take it from your reaction that you agree?"

With a supreme effort Chandris tore her eyes away from the horror on the display. "What?" she managed.

His eyebrows raised, just a bit. "It's a space station," he said gently.

For another minute she just looked at him, the words slowly registering through the fear. Then, steeling herself, she looked back at the display.

The spider was gone. In its place was, indeed, a space station.

The two halves of the hourglass body were two squat cylinders with tapering ends, their central sections rotating slowly to create an artificial gravity. Connecting them was a slender section that looked like a double choker composed of large pearls, pearls painted the bright orange of emergency escape pods.

She took a deep breath, exhaled it through quivering lips. "Sorry," she muttered, her face hot with shame. "I thought I saw... something else."

"At a guess, I'd say a giant spider," Hanan said.

Chandris took another deep breath. It seemed to help a little. "That's it," she nodded, forcing her mind and voice back into the proper role. "I'm sorry. I've never been very fond of spiders."

"Join the club," Ornina said. "There are some days I still get a chill myself when I see the place."

The Gazelle had pulled away from the outstretched spider legs now, enough so that the slowly flashing lights on the ends of each could be seen. "Those are the poles for the net, then?" Chandris asked tentatively.

"Right," Ornina said. "The other end of the station is the catapult for getting us back to Seraph."

"And the spider-leg connectors are there to tether both of them to the operations center and power plant in the middle," Hanan added. "Can't leave them floating free like you can in a normal planetary orbit—the particle wind from Angelmass would have the whole thing disassembled before you knew it, and then we'd all have to go back to Seraph the long way. Twenty light-minutes may not be all that much in the galactic scheme of things, but it would make for a very long ride home."

"True," Chandris murmured, searching her memory. A light-minute?—right, the distance light traveled in sixty seconds. At three hundred thousand kilometers a second...

Surreptitiously, she tapped at the calculator on her board. Three hundred thousand times sixty times twenty... three hundred sixty million kilometers.

She stared at the number, a chill running through her. The Barrio had extended maybe two kilometers at its widest; the whole of New Mexico City had stretched only thirty. Only once before in her life had she ever been further from home than she could walk if she had to, and even then it had only been a hundred-kilometer plane flight to Ankh.

Three hundred sixty million kilometers. For the first time, it was beginning to sink in just how different this world was she'd puff-talked her way into.

"I'll get some spin going," Ornina said. "Course vector check, Chandris?"

"Right away," Chandris said, shaking off the strangely depressing sense of not belonging. She keyed her comp arm, glanced at the main display—

And looked back again. Centered in the display, all alone in pitch blackness, was the brightest star she'd ever seen.

Angelmass.

"Impressive, isn't it?" Hanan said.

Chandris started; she hadn't realized she'd so obviously been staring at it. "Very," she agreed. "I didn't expect it to be so bright."

"It's a lot brighter than that," Ornina told her soberly. "At this distance it would blind you in a second if the sunscreens didn't automatically crank the gain down to tolerable levels. On Seraph you can sometimes see it in the daytime. Pretty impressive, especially for something that's only a few atoms'

widths across."

Chandris frowned. Angelmass was that tiny? Somehow, she'd had the vague idea that black holes were huge things, big masses of nothingness that could eat up the whole centers of galaxies, or suck in stuff from hundreds of kilometers away.

Were those just a different kind of black hole? Or was Angelmass something totally unique?

Beside her, the display board suddenly beeped. "What was that?" she asked, starting.

"High-energy gamma ray, probably," Hanan told her. "The ones at the high end of the spectrum can punch right through the hull, and of course they're not bothered by the magnetic deflectors."

"What did it do?" Chandris asked, eying the display warily. It seemed all right now.

"Probably kicked a false signal through one of the optical switches," Hanan shrugged. "Nothing serious. After a while you get used to the equipment pinging and flickering and burping at odd times."

"There's no need to be worried," Ornina added. "Remember that these hunterships were designed to handle all the radiation and heat out there. The only real dangers are from those high-energy gammas and the occasional antiparticle that might get through the magnetic fields."

Chandris blinked. "Antiparticles?" she asked.

"From Angelmass's Hawking radiation," Hanan explained. "The tidal forces at the edge of a black hole this small are strong enough to create particle/antiparticle pairs. Like proton and anti-proton, or electron and positron. Anyway, sometimes one of the particles escapes while the other falls back in.

That's what's called Hawking radiation; and in fact it's where almost all of the particle flux out here comes from."

"Everything except some radiation from gravitational infalling," Ornina said. "And the angels, of course. No one's quite sure where they come from."

Chandris gritted her teeth. "Of course," she agreed, knowing even as she said it how stupid she sounded. She was supposed to know this stuff. Instead, she was totally lost.

And she'd nurking well better correct that, and fast. This track was far from solid... and if it popped, there was nowhere to run. "Speaking of angels," she said, "you said we wouldn't start hunting for them for another hour?"

"Oh, we'll fire up the detectors in about half an hour," Hanan said. "But we're not likely to get anything for awhile after that. An angel picks up a coating of positive ions really fast, and you have to be pretty close in to spot 'em before that happens."

Chandris nodded. "In that case, maybe I'll go back to my cabin for awhile. Unless you need me, of course."

"No, go ahead," Ornina said. "Anyway, it may be days before we spot an angel—you might as well start learning now how to pace yourself."

"Thank you," Chandris said, unstrapping and getting gingerly to her feet. "I'll be back in half an hour."

"No hurry," Ornina called after her.

Chandris stepped to the door, slid it open... and paused, looking back into the control cabin as an odd thought struck her. If the radiations from Angelmass could affect the Gazelles electronic gear, could they also affect Hanan's exobrace system? And if so, what would it do to him?

Impatiently, she shook the thought aside. Considering what she was planning, the state of Hanan's health was hardly something she needed to be concerned with.

Stepping through the door, she closed it behind her and headed back toward her room. With any luck at all, the Gazelles computer would have a fair amount of information on Angelmass. She had just half an hour to learn it all.