Angelmass

CHAPTER 20

"...and this, obviously, is the control cabin," Ornina said, ushering Kosta in.

"Hello again," Hanan greeted him, barely looking up from his final pre-flight check.

Chandris, helping from her own board, didn't look up at all. But she made sure to keep Kosta visible in the corner of her eye. "Everything all right below?" Hanan added.

"Yes, thanks," Kosta said. "The package is secure and—"

"He was talking to Ornina," Chandris told him, giving him an exaggeratedly patient look.

She had the minor satisfaction of seeing him blush. "Sorry," he muttered.

"That's all right," Hanan assured him cheerfully. "You know how it is. Big ship and all, makes for mass confusion all around. Ornina?"

"Everything's fine," she said, showing Kosta to one of the two normally unused seats off to the side.

"You'll have to excuse my brother's warped sense of humor, Jereko; he was dropped on his head when he was a baby and hasn't been the same since."

"Except for the two o'clock feedings," Hanan offered. "I still rather like those. Donuts, especially, or sometimes sausage. But I can't seem to get Ornina to—"

"Hanan—"

"Anyway, better strap down," he added blandly. "We're tenth in line to launch. Five minutes, the way they're running today."

It took just over half that time for Ornina to show Kosta how to work his seat's restraint system and then to strap in herself. "So, Jereko," Hanan said when everyone was finally settled. "How long have you been with the Institute?"

"Just a few weeks," Kosta told him. "Actually, I'm not exactly with the Institute; I'm just a visiting researcher."

"Visiting from where?" Ornina asked.

"Clarkston University," Kosta said. "Cairngorm, on Balmoral."

"Never been to Balmoral," Hanan said. "Pretty rocky place, I understand. So tell us about angels."

The sudden shift in subject seemed to catch Kosta off guard. "What do you mean?"

"Angels," Hanan repeated, waving a hand airily. "Weird little particle things everyone's crazy to get their hands on."

"Yes, I know what they are," Kosta said, his voice sounding cautious. Trying to get a feel for Hanan, Chandris decided, and not doing too well. Though from what she'd seen of Kosta that was probably about normal for him.

"Good," Hanan said. "Then you can tell us what they—oops; wait a minute. Here we go."

Keeping half an eye on Kosta, Chandris gave her board one last check. The Gazelle lifted into the air, flew out over the launch dish—

"Friz!" The word that exploded from Kosta's mouth was half bark, half hiss. And on his face...

"I take it, Jereko," Hanan said without turning around, "that you've never watched a launch dish operate."

Kosta's eyes jerked away from the display to the back of Hanan's head... and for a single instant all the normal defenses were gone.

And in his face Chandris saw complete confusion.

The moment passed. "As a matter of fact, I haven't," he said with a fair imitation of calm. "It's... rather spectacular."

"You get used to it," Hanan shrugged, ramping up the Gazelle's drive and making a slight adjustment to the ship's vector. "You were about to tell us about angels."

"I was?" Kosta glanced at Chandris, his expression suddenly wary. Maybe remembering how easily she'd drawn him out on the subject back at the Institute. "I doubt I could tell you anything you don't already know—"

"Tell them about the Acchaa theory," Chandris said.

Kosta looked visual knives at her. She held his gaze, reminding him with lifted eyebrows that she could tell them about it herself.

For a wonder, he got the message. "Acchaa is one of the theories currently in vogue at the Institute," he growled. "Basically, it says that angels are quantized chunks of good."

"Of what?" Ornina asked, frowning.

"Of good," Kosta repeated. "You know: the stuff behind ethics and justice." He looked pointedly at Chandris. "And honesty."

"Doesn't work," Hanan shook his head decisively. "The theory, I mean."

Back when she'd talked to him at the Institute, Chandris remembered, Kosta had seemed to have his own doubts about it. But the challenge in Hanan's tone was apparently too much for him. "I don't think it's all that obvious," he said, bristling a bit.

"Sure it is," Hanan said. "I suppose the idea is that all the quantum black holes that have evaporated since the Big Bang have scattered these angels around the universe like cosmic rays?"

"That's one possibility," Kosta said. He seemed surprised that Hanan had picked up on the idea so quickly. "Another is that the Big Bang itself created the bulk of them."

"Okay," Hanan said. "Either way, we wind up with a fairly even distribution. Right?"

"Right," Kosta said cautiously.

"Fine. So. I presume you're also assuming that the angels that landed on Earth were the cause of all that was good and fair and noble throughout human history."

"Not necessarily all of it," Kosta said. "Individual human beings may be able to add to or subtract from their effect, too. That's how, historically, an overall pattern of good and evil can fluctuate within an area or group."

"You have a mechanism for that?"

"Not yet," Kosta said. "But there's at least one theory about field effects that might allow for humans to affect the angels."

"What about the biochemistry of the angel/personality interaction?"

Kosta pursed his lips. "They're working on that, too."

Hanan nodded. "So we agree there's still a lot to learn. So let me ask you a question. When mankind invented the hyperspace catapult and moved out onto new planets, was there any noticeable change in their behavior?"

He paused, but Kosta didn't reply. "Because there should have been, you know," Hanan added, twisting half around in his chair to look at the other. "Fresh worlds—lots of untouched primordial angels lying around—"

"Yes, I understand the question," Kosta said, his forehead wrinkled in thought. In slightly worried thought, if Chandris was reading him right. "I'm afraid I don't know enough history to answer that."

"Well, I do," Hanan said.

And for the first time since she'd met him Chandris heard a trace of genuine bitterness in his voice.

"The answer is a loud, flat no," he said. "The people who arrived on Uhuru spouted all kinds of pious pronouncements about peace and freedom and equality when they landed. But less than thirty years later they were already on the way back to the class separation and elitist power structure they'd originally turned their backs on."

"Maybe the old patterns were too hard to break," Kosta suggested slowly.

"In which case they should be too strong to break now," Hanan said, a note of decisiveness in his voice. "But they are breaking. Slowly and from the top down, maybe; but they are breaking." He shook his head. "Eventually, Jereko, you people at the Institute are going to have to accept the fact that Angelmass is unique."

"I'm sorry, but I don't see how that can be," Kosta disagreed. "Black holes have the most limited set of parameters of anything in the known universe: mass, spin, charge, and one or two others that are still being debated. I don't see how any combination of those could give rise to angels."

"Ah." Hanan lifted a finger. "But that assumes the angels are a purely natural phenomenon. What if, instead, they're a form of life?"

Kosta seemed to shrink into himself, just a little. "You mean like a wormhole alien invasion?" he asked warily.

"Not at all," Hanan shook his head. "You know anything about hyperspace catapult theory?"

Kosta took the abrupt change in subject better this time. "I know a little."

"Okay. Suppose you threw a ship across space via catapult and its vector passed through a quantum black hole like Angelmass. What would happen?"

"No one knows," Kosta said. "The equations break down at too steep a gravity gradient."

"Exactly." Hanan turned from his board again to look Kosta square in the eye. "And I think that's just what happened. Sometime in the past, a ship—human or alien—tried to go through Angelmass.

And in the process left one or more lifeforms trapped at the event horizon."

He paused, and Chandris waited for the inevitable grin and punchline. But Hanan's expression remained serious, and after a long moment Kosta spoke. "If this is supposed to be better than the Acchaa theory," he said, "it isn't. How are these fragments of a nonphysical lifeforce supposed to have been changed into solid particles, for starters?"

The endburn alert pinged. "I'd guess it's a piggyback sort of arrangement," Hanan said, turning back to his board. "The lifeforce attaching itself to the angel for some reason. Or possibly the angel forms around it, the way a raindrop coalesces around a dust particle." He tapped a few keys and the dull roar of the Gazelles drive faded to a whisper.

And suddenly Kosta didn't look so good. "Trouble?" Chandris asked him.

"I'll be fine," the other said between clenched teeth. "These anti-nausea drugs always seem to take their time with me, that's all."

"Some tea might help," Ornina offered. "Chandris or I could get you some, if you'd like to try it."

"No, thanks," Kosta said. "It should clear up in a few minutes."

"Or we could put a little spin on the ship," Ornina continued, looking at Hanan. "Not too much; we'll be hitting the catapult in half an hour. But it would give your inner ear some sense of direction."

"Thanks, but that shouldn't be necessary," Kosta said, fumbling his restraints off. "If you don't mind, though, I think I'll go to my room for awhile."

"Sure, go ahead," Ornina nodded.

Carefully, Kosta maneuvered out of his chair, looked once at the main display. "I'll be back before we reach the catapult."

"Don't worry about it," Ornina assured him. "It's not like there's anything you have to do during the operation."

"Okay." Gingerly, Kosta propelled himself across the control cabin to the door.

Carefully avoiding Chandris's eyes the whole way.

Given that there was no particular hurry, Kosta took his time; and he was therefore less than halfway to the crackerbox he'd been given as a cabin when he noticed the trajectory of his floating passage was taking a distinct drift toward one side of the corridors. The Daviees, ignoring his protests, had gone ahead and started the Gazelle rotating.

Typical, he thought, feeling his lip twist as he oriented himself upright against the sense of weight.

Less than an hour into this trip, and already his hosts were showing themselves to be the sort of compulsive do-gooders who insist on showering you with favors whether you want them or not.

He'd known a few people like that back home, and he'd never been able to stand being near any of them for more than fifteen minutes at a time. The laughing fates only knew whether a week here would drive him crazy.

Still, he had to admit that having a solid deck under his feet did make his stomach feel better.

Between that and the drug he'd taken before coming aboard, he was more or less recovered by the time he reached his cabin.

Recovered enough, in fact, that for the first time in several minutes he was able to concentrate on the air around him instead of on his own digestive tract.

He paused, still out in the corridor, taking deep breaths and trying to chase down the memory of where he'd come across that particular aroma before. Somewhere during his brief training, perhaps?

Or at the university?

Abruptly, it clicked: Tech Design 300-something. Sliding open his cabin door, he stepped inside and poked at the intercom switch. "Hanan?" he called.

"Right here," Hanan's voice came. "You feeling any better?"

"I'm fine, thanks," Kosta told him. "But your air system isn't. I think one of the scrubbers is starting to go."

"Thought that was what I smelled," Hanan grunted. "Number three, probably—it's been giving us trouble lately. I'll take a look once we've catapulted."

"Why don't I go look at it now?" Kosta offered. "I haven't got anything better to do at the moment."

He expected to be turned down flat. Compulsive do-gooders, in his experience, were never as good at accepting help as they were at doling it out. But—"Sure," Hanan said. "There's a tool kit in the forward mechanical room. Turn on your cabin display and I'll spot both that and the scrubbers on a schematic for you."

The schematic wasn't nearly as clear as Hanan obviously thought, but the Gazelle was a small ship and it didn't take Kosta more than a few minutes to get the tools and locate the failing scrubber.

Pulling off the front, he took a look inside.

The worlds of the Empyrean had been out of touch with the mainstream of Pax technology for nearly two hundred years, a fact Kosta had had driven home time and again as he worked with the equipment at the Institute. There was, however, only so much anyone could do with a device as simple and basic as an atmosphere scrubber.

As opposed to something exotic like, say, a launch dish.

An unpleasant shiver ran up his back. The launch dish. The Empyreals' hyperspace net had been bad enough, but at least there he'd had a vague sense of how an inspired twisting of catapult equations might possibly give rise to such a thing. The launch dish, on the other hand, might just as well be magic.

Magic his Pax military instructors had never mentioned. Magic that Commodore Lleshi and the Komitadji might not be aware even existed.

But then, theories aside, the angels themselves might as well be magic, too.

Angels.

For a long minute Kosta stared into the humming scrubber, his mind back in the control cabin with Hanan and his strange angel theory. Strange... and yet, the more Kosta thought about it, the harder it was to simply dismiss out of hand.

Because he had a point. History had never been one of Kosta's main interests, but he knew enough to recognize that the pattern Hanan had described had been repeated over and over again on the Pax's other colony worlds. There had indeed been no blooming of culture or tolerance or friendship as humanity moved out among the stars. In fact, as often as not, the exact opposite took place.

"You waiting to see if it's going to fix itself?"

Kosta spun around, the sudden movement in the low gravity skidding him around on the deck. It was Chandris, of course, leaning negligently against the door jamb three meters away.

"You startled me," Kosta told her reproachfully, grabbing the edge of the scrubber to get his balance back. At least he'd tried to sound reproachful, but the words came out sounding merely nervous. "I didn't know you were there."

"You weren't supposed to," she said bluntly. "You going to fix it or not?"

Biting back a retort, Kosta broke open the tool kit. "You always go around sneaking up on people?" he asked over his shoulder as he got to work.

"You always sit around gazing soulfully into machinery?" she countered.

"I was thinking about what Hanan said about the angels," Kosta said. "Especially that bit about Angelmass hosting an alien lifeform. Does he really believe all that?"

"Why don't you ask him?"

So much for trying to be civil. "I can do this myself, you know," he growled. "There's no need for you to stick around. Unless you don't trust me to do it right."

"Me, not trust you?" she said, her voice fairly dripping with sarcasm. "A known thief and stowaway, not trusting the fine upstanding scientist-citizen who stood by and let her get away from the police?

What a ridiculous idea."

Kosta braced himself. There it was, the question he'd known she would eventually ask. "I didn't want to get involved," he said, trying for a combination of embarrassment and sincerity and mentally crossing his fingers. "I was new to Seraph, and I was afraid blowing the whistle on you would get me embroiled in something messy. For all I knew, walking out with you might have been seen as accessory after the fact."

He risked a glance over his shoulder to try to gauge her expression. He might as well have saved himself the effort; her face was an unreadable mask. "What about later, at the Institute?" she demanded.

"It was a little late to start making noise then," he said, turning back to the computer. "I'd already let you go once. The safest thing to do was answer your questions and get you out of there before anyone recognized you."

"Especially while you were with me?"

"That, too."

"Uh-huh. So, of course, when you needed transport to Angelmass, the Gazelle was the first ship you thought of."

Kosta swallowed a curse. "Not that it's any of your business, but the Gazelle was the fifteenth huntership I tried. Most of them wouldn't even hear me out before giving me the toss." He hesitated; but she deserved this. "I figured that any people soft-headed enough to hire you might be willing to give me a ride."

"You're too kind," she said calmly. "Tell me about Balmoral."

He blinked. "What?"

"Balmoral," she repeated. "The place where you grew up, remember?"

"I didn't grow up on Balmoral," Kosta corrected, feeling a thin layer of sweat squeezing out from his neck pores. If she was going to start quizzing him on his fictitious background... "I grew up in a small town called Palitaine on Lorelei. I just went to college on Balmoral."

"Ah," she said. She didn't seem at all bothered by her mistake. If it had, in fact, been a mistake. "So tell me about college on Balmoral."

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything," she said... and there was no mistaking the hard edge to her voice. "The landscape, the climate, the university, the people you met there. Everything."

And if I make a mistake... Taking a deep breath, Kosta gathered his thoughts and plunged in.

It took him nearly twenty minutes to fix the scrubber, talking almost nonstop the whole time.

Chandris occasionally interrupted with questions, but for the most part she just stood there and listened. And, no doubt, kept a sharp eye on his repair work.

He was putting the cover back on, and trying to describe mountain peaks he'd only seen in pictures, when relief finally came. "Chandris?" Ornina's voice called over the intercom. "We're going to be hitting the catapult in a few minutes. Do you want to come up and give me a hand?"

"I'll be there in a minute," Chandris told her. "I'm just watching Kosta finish up here."

"Okay. Thanks, Jereko—you've saved Hanan a messy job."

"No problem," Kosta called.

The intercom clicked off. "I guess I'll see you later," Chandris said, turning toward the door.

"Leaving me here all alone?" he asked pointedly. "I must have passed the test."

Slowly, deliberately, she turned back. "You already called it, Kosta," she said. "I don't trust you.

There's too much about you that doesn't fit. You're too smart—too well educated, anyway—to be an ordinary scorer. But you're not a typical blank-tower science-type, either."

His first instinct was to deny it. But looking into those eyes... "All I want from you and the Daviees is transport to Angelmass," he told her quietly. "Nothing more."

For a long moment she gazed at him, her face still giving away nothing. "We'll see," she said at last.

She turned back to the door. Hesitated. "You were right, by the way," she said over her shoulder. "I checked the Gazelle's records last night. For the past six months it's taken an average of just over three days to capture each angel, even though Gabriel's pay scale still figures on an average of four."

It took a second for Kosta to catch on to what she was talking about. "Interesting," he murmured.

"Could some of that be more advanced equipment?"

She shook her head, her back still toward him. "They haven't gotten anything really new in over a year. Actually, it's worse—a lot of their old stuff is overdue for replacement. I just thought you'd like to know." She glided through the door and was gone.

Kosta stared after her, an unpleasant shiver running up his back. So it wasn't just his imagination coupled with some kind of rogue statistical construct. Angelmass really was emitting more angels.

A week ago he would have been quietly excited by the confirmation. Now, with Hanan's theories echoing in the back of his mind...

"Friz," he growled, annoyed with himself. He was a scientist, and so far this was a purely scientific problem. The implications, if any, would be up to other people to worry about.

Dropping lightly to his knees in the decreasing gravity, he began collecting his tools together. And tried to shake off the vague fears.