Angelmass

CHAPTER 21

The rotational gravity had all but vanished by the time Chandris reached the control cabin. To her mild surprise she found that Ornina was alone, seated in Hanan's usual chair at the main command board. "Where's Hanan?" she asked, glancing around as she maneuvered herself toward her chair.

"No—up here, please," Ornina told her, indicating her own usual backup command seat. "We got a red light on one of the maneuvering-jet fuel pumps; Hanan's gone back to take a look."

Chandris nodded grimly. Just one more sign of how fast the Gazelle was falling apart. "Do we have any spares?" she asked.

Ornina looked at her in mock surprise. "You mean you haven't gotten around to memorizing our inventory list yet?"

"I've been busy," Chandris said with her best imitation of wounded pride. "I'm only down to the M's—haven't reached 'pump' yet."

Ornina smiled. "Actually, we do have a spare aboard if we need it. Whether he could actually get it mounted before we reach Angelmass is another question entirely."

Chandris pursed her lips. "Well, if it comes to that, Kosta could probably be pressed into service."

"Capable?"

She shrugged. "He knows his way around a wrench, anyway."

The intercom pinged. "Ornina?" Hanan's voice came. "Can you shut down power on the AA-57-C

circuit for me? I need to get back into the coupling area and would just as soon not get singed."

"Right," Ornina said, punching in a command. "Okay; it shows clear."

"You need any help with that, Hanan?" Chandris asked. "I could come down and—"

"No, I'm fine," he assured her. "It's fixable; just going to take a bit more time than I thought.

Speaking of time, why haven't we hit the catapult yet?"

"It'll be another few minutes," Ornina told him. "They're having some trouble with one of the supply ships going through to Central, and it's got things backed up."

"Typical," Hanan sniffed. "Well, keep me informed."

"And let me know if you want any help," Chandris added.

"I won't, but thanks." The intercom clicked off. Chandris turned to Ornina—

And paused. On her face... "You all right?" Chandris asked.

Ornina turned to look at her, the lines trying to smooth out as she did so. "I'm fine," she said.

A cold knot settled into Chandris's stomach. "Something's wrong with Hanan, isn't it?" she asked. "Is he getting worse?"

Ornina shook her head tiredly. "He has no choice but to get worse," she said. "It's a degenerative disease. Degenerative diseases by definition get worse."

"Then he shouldn't be down there alone," Chandris said, reaching for her restraint release.

"No, don't go," Ornina said, shaking her head. "You can't help him. Not any more. You're too much like family now."

Chandris stared at her. "I don't understand."

"Neither do I, really," Ornina said quietly. The lines of pain were back in her face now. As if, having said this much, there was no longer any point in trying to hide them. "He's funny that way, Chandris.

It's pretty easy for him to accept help from strangers and acquaintances, but very hard to accept it from family and close friends. Pride, or some strange form of denial, I don't know which."

Chandris thought back to when she'd first come aboard the Gazelle; compared Hanan's face and words then to how he'd looked and acted during her most recent lessons in ship's maintenance.

Thought about the brief conversation half an hour earlier, and Hanan cheerfully giving Kosta permission to fix the air scrubber. "That's why you don't sell your extra angel, isn't it?" she said slowly. "So you can make sure there's a steady stream of strangers like me who he can accept help from."

She locked eyes with the older woman. "Except that I'm not a stranger anymore."

"No, you're not," Ornina agreed. "You're far more valuable to us than a stranger would be."

"Right—except that I can't help you anymore," Chandris retorted, a frustrated anger beginning to stir within her. "That's real valuable."

"You know the ship as well as the two of us put together," Ornina countered, her eyes taking on a firmness and a frustrated anger of their own. "You're an extra pair of hands—an extra pair of skilled hands—and the way Hanan is going we're going to need those hands if we're going to keep the Gazelle flying."

"Oh, wonderful," Chandris shot back. "I keep the Gazelle flying, and in the process grind Hanan's pride into the dirt."

Ornina leveled a finger at her. "I want you to get one thing straight, young lady. You are not responsible for Hanan's quirks and flaws and bouts of false pride. Yes, it hurts him to have to be dependent on people. But that's reality, and denying it just makes things harder on himself and everyone else around him. Eventually, he's going to have to bite the stick and learn that, and he never will if people always cave in to him. Understand?"

"Yes," Chandris muttered.

"Good." Ornina took a deep breath, the momentary anger fading from her face. "And one more thing. Like it or not, Chandris, you were a godsend to us. We need you here. More than that, we want you here. In five years of taking in everyone from outcasts to thieves to fugitives we've never found anyone who clicked even remotely as well with us and the ship as you have."

A ripple of old fear twisted through Chandris's heart. "I can't stay here forever," she said. "I never said I would."

"I know." Ornina turned back to her board. But not before Chandris saw that her eyes were shiny wet. "You're free to leave anytime you want to, of course. I just wanted you to understand how we felt."

The board beeped. "Looks like the bottleneck's clearing up," she said. "We'd best get moving."

"Right," Chandris murmured, the word coming out with difficulty around the knot in her throat. Yes, she understood, all right. Understood that, for all the old fears and habits that still haunted her, she didn't want to leave the Gazelle, either. Understood that, for probably the first time in her life, she had found something that was worth fighting for.

She might not be a thief anymore. But she hadn't forgotten how to fight.

The almost-felt jerk came, and in a blink the Seraph catapult was replaced by the spidery arms of Angelmass Central's tethered net poles. "Approach vector?" Ornina asked, all business again.

"Vector logged in," Chandris confirmed crisply, matching the other woman's tone. "There seems to be a lot of traffic ahead, though. We might want to swing our approach a little wider than usual."

"Good idea," Ornina nodded, fingers playing across her keys. "Let's see... let's try this."

Chandris gave the projected course a quick study. "Looks good," she agreed. "Want me to implement, or confirm it with Central?"

"I'll call Central," Ornina said, reaching for the comm section of her board. "Go ahead and plug it in so we'll be ready when they give us clearance."

Chandris had just started keying in the new course when the door hissed open behind her. She turned, expecting to see Hanan—

"I see we've arrived," Kosta commented, drifting in.

"Quiet—we're working," Chandris growled, turning back to her board.

"Sorry," Kosta stage-whispered.

He headed over to his seat, busying himself with something. Chandris took her time, checking and rechecking the course and her inputting of it, with the desired result: Ornina finished her part of the task first. "All cleared," she told Chandris, switching off the comm. "Go ahead and execute. Hello, Jereko," she added, turning to Kosta. "Everything all right with your equipment?"

"Yes, thanks," he replied. "Better than all right, actually—I thought I was going to have to sit down there with it the whole time, but Hanan helped me tie the outputs into one of the Gazelles spare command lines so I can operate it from up here."

Chandris felt her lip twist. Kosta settling down in the control cabin. Terrific. "He's supposed to be working on a fuel pump down there," she told Kosta tartly. "Not fiddling around with your stuff."

"Hey, he insisted," Kosta shot back. "It's not my fault if he's the kind who likes to be helpful."

"He is that," Ornina murmured.

Chandris clenched her teeth; but they were both right. Much as she'd love to do so, she really couldn't blame Kosta for this one. "Well, next time make sure he's not already doing something, all right?" she growled.

"For whatever it's worth to you, there probably won't be a next time," he reminded her stiffly. "By the time we get back to Seraph my credit line ought to be untangled, and we can go our separate ways."

"Good," Chandris muttered. She glanced at Ornina; went back for a closer look. The older woman was gazing studiously at her displays, a slight but unmistakable smile playing around her lips.

"What?" Chandris demanded.

"Nothing," Ornina said, the smile vanishing into the same sort of innocent look Hanan always used when he was about to close the trap on one of his jokes. "I must say, Jereko, that your work sounds fascinating. What exactly is this particular experiment supposed to do?"

"I'm going to be sampling several small bandwidths of Angelmass's radiation spectrum," Kosta told her. "Hopefully, it'll give me some clues as to why the angel emission has been increasing over the past few months."

"It's been increasing?" Ornina frowned.

"That's what my numbers tell me," Kosta said. "And yours, too, for that matter." He looked at Chandris. "Didn't Chandris tell you?"

Ornina looked at Chandris, too, eyebrows raised. "It didn't seem important," Chandris said with a shrug.

"Probably isn't," Ornina agreed. "Still, you can't always tell what's going to wind up being important down the line." She turned back to Kosta. "But enough shop talk. Tell us something about yourself, Jereko."

Kosta took a deep breath, and Chandris turned back to her board, permitting herself a tight smile.

The same territory she'd just gone over with Kosta below, territory she now knew by heart. This could, she decided, be very interesting.

It was, too, though not in the way she'd expected. Kosta never contradicted any of what he'd told her, never slipped up on historical events or on the physical details of the places he said he'd lived. He was articulate enough, accurate enough, and apparently sincere enough for all of it to be true.

But it wasn't.

There was plenty of evidence she could point to, at least to someone who knew the drill. A few flowery phrases that sounded like they'd been pulled from a Balmoral Visitors' Guide; an occasional exact quote from their conversation below, something she knew from experience was exceedingly rare; an underlying preciseness in his voice that showed he was watching every single word he said.

It was definitely puff-talk. Detailed and well rehearsed, but puff-talk just the same.

But at the same time, there was something missing, something that any scorer good enough to have worked up such an elaborate background ought to have had. A sense of daring, perhaps, or some of the oily arrogance that had been a part of all the really expert puff-talkers she'd known back in the Barrio. Kosta played more like an actor parroting someone else's lines.

Which made Kosta... what?

Chandris still didn't know. But she intended to find out.

And so she sat at her board, listening to every word he said and letting the Gazelle more or less fly itself toward Angelmass.

And with her full attention on Kosta, she completely missed the first subtle clue that something had gone terribly wrong.

"...and so, rather to my amazement, the Institute accepted my application," Kosta concluded. "I didn't give them time to change their minds. I booked passage on a liner and—" he shrugged "—here I am."

"Here you are, indeed." Ornina shook her head—in wonderment, Kosta hoped, not disbelief. "That's quite a story, Jereko. I certainly hope you can get your finances straightened out quickly. It'd be a shame if such a promising career was derailed by something as trivial as a clerical error."

"I'm sure it will be," he assured her. He threw a glance at the back of Chandris's head, feeling some of his tension draining away. He'd poured a lot of hours into memorizing his cover story, but it had been time well spent. He'd gotten through it without making any errors, and with a certain degree of panache besides. Maybe he was finally starting to adapt to this spy stuff.

And just then, in the back of his mind, a quiet alarm went off.

He froze, searching frantically through what he'd just said. Had he, at the very end, made some kind of fatal blunder in his story?

And then he got it. The gamma-ray sparks—those damned noisy ubiquitous gamma-ray sparks—had stopped.

Which meant... what?

He was just opening his mouth to ask when an electronic scream split the air.

He jerked hard in his seat, pressing himself up against the restraints. Ornina spun back to her board, jabbing at it—

The wailing cut off as suddenly as it had begun."—hell was that?" Chandris snapped in the ringing silence.

"Emergency call," Ornina said tightly. "Get on the tracker and locate the signal. I'll try to raise them."

Chandris was already busy at her board. "Got it... no. No, it's wavering."

"Must be heavy radiation out there," Ornina muttered, her hands dancing across her board. "Let's see if this helps. This is the Gazelle, calling distress ship; Gazelle, calling distress ship. Can you respond?"

There was a roar of static from the speaker, a roar punctuated by an incredible rapid-fire stutter of gamma-ray sparks. "Gazelle, this is Hova's Skyarcher," a barely audible voice came through the noise. "We're caught in a radiation surge—losing control of everything. We need help."

"Chandris?" Ornina asked.

"I can't get a fix on them," Chandris said, her voice strained. "The radiation's messing up the calibration."

"You got anything even approximate?"

"Yes, but—"

"That'll do for now," Ornina cut her off. "Hova's Skyarcher, we're on our way. ETA, maybe ten minutes."

A sound that might have been a word, and then the static and signal were gone. "What did he say?"

Kosta asked.

"He said 'hurry,' " Ornina said grimly. The Gazelles engines, which had been idling softly, roared to full life. "Keep trying to get a fix on him, Chandris."

"I am." Chandris glanced over her shoulder. "Make yourself useful, Kosta—get on the intercom and get Hanan up here."

"Don't bother," Hanan said from the doorway even as Kosta moved to comply. "You can hear that siren all the way down at the pumps. What's going on?"

"Radiation surge," Ornina told him, getting out of her chair as Hanan slid into it. "It's got Hova's Skyarcher."

"Damn," Hanan muttered, hands running over the board as Ornina and Chandris also played musical chairs, switching back to their usual seats. "Anyone else in range?"

"I don't know," Ornina said. "Not even sure anyone else heard the call—signals don't cut too well across radiation lines."

"Have you alerted Central yet?"

"Haven't had time. I'll do it now." Ornina busied herself with her board.

The Gazelle began to move, pressing Kosta back into his seat. "Can I do anything to help?" he asked.

"I don't think so," Hanan said over his shoulder. "Just sit tight."

Kosta squeezed his hands into fists. Wonderful. Another ship was getting roasted by radiation out there, and all he could do was sit tight. And not roasted slowly, either, if that chatter of gamma-ray sparks he'd heard had been any indication.

He stiffened. Gamma-ray sparks? Reaching to his board, he keyed for a real-time display from his detectors below.

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."