Angelmass

CHAPTER 2

"Your attention, please," the cool, middle-class voice came over the spaceport softspeaker system.

"The twelfth and final shuttle for the spaceliner Xirrus has now arrived at Gate Sixteen. All remaining passengers should come to the check-in counter at this time for pre-flight confirmation and boarding. Repeating: your attention, please—"

Seated at the far end of the waiting lounge, half hidden behind a large decorative vase, the girl hunched a little deeper into a contour chair that felt too large for her and watched as the last group of passengers gathered their things and walked over to join the line at the check-in counter. She brushed the freshly blonded hair carefully away from her face, feeling a familiar tightness squeezing her throat. In a minute she would have to get up and join them. And if Trilling Vail was watching from hiding, like she was...

She took a deep breath, an acid tightness swirling in her stomach. It was the same feeling she always got when she was getting ready to score a track and suddenly had the impression that the targ was onto her. The horrible demand of a crucial decision: whether to keep going, and hope her twitches were wrong, or to pop the cord, lose all the prep time, and look for a targ who would more easily part with his spare cash.

Should she pop the cord on this whole crazy idea? It still wasn't too late to do that, she knew. She could get up right now and walk out of the spaceport and try to bury herself somewhere on Uhuru instead of going off to a whole new world.

Only she couldn't. Trilling had friends everywhere on Uhuru. Sooner or later, he'd catch up with her.

On Lorelei... well, at least she'd have a head start.

Maybe. Reaching into her pocket, feeling the same tingling in her fingertips that she always got when handling merchandise that had cost her blood and sweat to get hold of, she slid out the precious piece of threaded plastic. Chandris Lalasha, the name at the top said, and for probably the hundredth time she wished she had had the time and money to have a new ID made up. She hadn't used the Lalasha surname since she was thirteen, a year before she met and moved in with Trilling.

But if he got into the spaceline data listings the Chandris part would be a dead giveaway.

She snorted to herself. If he got in, hell. When he got in. Trilling was the one who'd taught her how to crack into fancy computer systems. Her only chance was that he wouldn't expect her to do something this crazy, or at least that he wouldn't think she could get enough money together this quickly to spring for a spaceliner ticket.

But, then, who knew how Trilling's mind worked these days?

Unconsciously, Chandris tightened her grip on the plastic card. She'd heard a kosh brag once about how he'd killed someone with a spaceliner ticket. She wondered if any of that story had been true.

The line was beginning to shrink now, the passengers showing their tickets to the reader display and attendant and disappearing down the boarding tunnel. Chandris licked her lips, wincing at the unfamiliar tart/sweet taste of expensive lipglow, and got to her feet, heart thudding in her ears as she went over and joined the line. This was it; and it was Trilling's last chance to stop her. She'd sat over in that corner for four hours straight, watching every single batch of passengers as they headed down the tunnel, making sure that Trilling hadn't slipped aboard. If he didn't make this last shuttle she would be safe. At least for now.

She reached the reader and the attendant standing beside it. "Hello," the man greeted her. For just a second his eyes skipped down across her, taking in her bright blonded hair, her even brighter lipglow, her probably botched attempt at an upper-class outfit.

And when he looked back up she could sense his quiet amusement. "And you are...?"

"Chandris Lalasha," she growled, thrusting her ticket at his face and then waving it over the reader.

"Nice to have you aboard, Miss Lalasha," he smiled. "You heading off to college?"

"That's right," Chandris said shortly. "On Lorelei." The reader pinged acceptance of her ticket, and she stuffed the plastic back into her pocket.

The attendant shook his head, a smile on his face. "Thought so. I never cease to be amazed at how inventive you college kids get with your travel outfits. Have a nice flight."

"Thanks," Chandris muttered, heading down the boarding tunnel and hoping the sudden heat in her cheeks didn't show. She'd done it again, damn it all—taken offense at an insult that wasn't even there. The same touchiness that had kept her stuck in the Barrio and out of the upper-class areas in New Mexico City where the really major tracks were. Or so Trilling had always told her—

The muscles in her back stiffened, mind suddenly snapping back to where she was. She twisted around, half expecting to see Trilling walking behind her, his shining eyes glowing, his scarred lips grinning their crazy animal grin at her.

But there were only a couple of last-minute passengers in sight, and no sound or commotion coming from the check-in counter around the corner.

She turned back, breathing again, and continued down the tunnel. At the end of it waited the shuttle, an oversized plane sort of thing with rows and rows of contour chairs. Choosing one that would allow her a clear view of the door, she let the straps curve into position around her and waited.

Trilling's absolute last chance...

Five minutes later, the door was slammed shut with a dull thud... and as the shuttle rolled away from the terminal, she felt her muscles unknotting for the first time in hours. For the first time in months.

Finally—finally—she could dare to hope that she was free of Trilling Vail.

And all it had cost was leaving the only home she'd ever known.

The trip up to the spaceliner took about an hour. An hour, for Chandris, of absolute magic.

She had ridden on a regular plane once before, but at the time had been too preoccupied with keeping inconspicuous to really appreciate it. Now, though, it was different. The wispy clouds breaking in front of the shuttle like white nothing; the buildings and hills and forests beneath them; the sensation of flying itself—she drank it all in, pressing her face tightly against the cold plastic of the window so as not to miss any of it. The ground kept receding, the highest clouds cutting off most of the view, and presently she noticed the deep blue of the sky above them was fading into black.

The dull roar of the engines faded away to a throaty whisper, leaving her bouncing gently against her straps.

She spent the next few minutes with fists and teeth clenched tightly, fighting a gut-twisting nausea and a horrible feeling that she and the shuttle were falling back toward the ground. Then, strangely, both stomach and brain relaxed and she was able to concentrate again on the view outside her window. Overhead, stars were visible in the black sky, even though the sun could still be seen off to one side. She marveled at the novelty of that for a while, shifting her attention back and forth between sun and stars.

Presently, above and ahead of them, she got her first glimpse of the Xirrus.

It didn't look like much at first; a sort of toy or model, its shadowy shape outlined by strings of little lights. But as the shuttle kept getting closer, and the shape kept getting bigger, it finally dawned on her that calling a ship like that a flying city wasn't nearly as much puff-talk as she'd always thought.

Pressing her nose against the cold window, she smiled to herself. If there was one thing the Barrio had taught her, it was how to survive in a city.

They arrived at the Xirrus a few minutes later, to the accompaniment of a lot of clanking and the sudden return of weight. Joining the other passengers, she climbed a steep set of fold-down stairs through the roof of the shuttle and found herself in a large room with a huge layout diagram of the Xirrus covering one wall. Her ticket listed her cabin number; glancing once at the diagram to get its location, she headed toward the rear of the ship.

Her roommates were already there when she arrived: three of them, middle-class as all get out, chattering away about college and other middle-class things as they moved around the room stuffing lockers full of clothes and generally checking the place out. Silently, Chandris stepped through the activity toward the fourth bed, where her small suitcase had already been deposited, and the conversation waffled a little as the others checked her out. What they saw made the conversation waffle even more. "Nice travel outfit," one of them commented from behind her, the dry tone sparking umphs of not-quite giggles from her companions. "Design it yourself?"

Chandris turned to look her straight in the eye. "Sure," she said coolly. "Had to. It's one of the requirements."

The other seemed taken aback. "Requirements for what?" she asked.

"Where are you going to school?" Chandris countered.

"Uh—Ahanne University on Lorelei," the other said, looking even more confused.

Chandris shrugged. "Well, there you have it, then."

She turned back to her unpacking, watching their quiet confusion out of the corner of her eye and revising her class estimate downward a little. Real middle-class types—or at least the middle-class types she'd scored tracks on—would have dumped right away on that kind of skidly-talk. These puffheads must be freshly moved up, smart enough to imitate middle-class mannerisms and speech but too dumb to really know what the hell they were doing.

For what she needed now, they would do nicely.

"Oh, come on, Kail," one of the others said into the silence, giving a little snort of derision. The proper reaction, Chandris thought scornfully, only about a year too late. "Look at her luggage, for gritty'sake. Probably paid for her ticket with table tips."

The third girl giggled. "Yeah," she said slyly. "Or else a more personal kind of service work."

She gave a warbling whistle, a pretty good imitation of the come-on hookers sometimes used in the Barrio, and all three laughed. "Girls, girls," the first admonished, her voice mock-severe. "I'm sure we've got her all wrong. I'll bet she's just so incredibly smart that she doesn't even care that she dresses like a sfudd. Probably gonna major in catalytic nuclear drive or politics or something equally frizzly."

Chandris kept quiet, fighting back the awful temptation to turn around and pull the little puff-head's face off by the roots. One of the girls whispered something else, eliciting another mass giggle, and the conversation resumed where it had left off. With Chandris pointedly excluded.

She stayed in the room another half hour, pretending to arrange and rearrange her meager wardrobe in her locker and enduring the snide comments not quite directed her direction... and by the time she left, she had it down pat. All of it: every repetitious bit of slangy, every silly gesture, every bad joke, every word of gossip and school talk and clothes talk.

Everything that would let her pass herself off as one of them.

For a while she just wandered, poking around the edges of her section's public areas—dining rooms, lounges, recreation rooms and the like—and just generally getting a feel for the ship. The corridors themselves were pretty well deserted, most of the passengers who were out and about seated in the lounges getting a head start on their socializing. The delicate aromas of alcohol and other traditional reeks tugged at her, and more than once she was sorely tempted to join in and put off her exploring until morning. It wasn't like she was short on time—they'd told her when she bought the ticket that it would take the Xirrus six or seven days to get to Lorelei.

But she resisted the temptation. Long experience had taught her that mass confusion was the best cover for scoring tracks; and the day when twelve shuttles ungorged themselves of new passengers was probably going to be as confused as things got up here.

Besides which, if she didn't get busy and make other arrangements, she was going to be stuck spending at least one night with those puff-headed snobs back in her room.

From the different sizes of staterooms and cabins that the big floorplan had shown, it had been pretty obvious that the upper-class sections were the ones furthest forward. Directly behind them had been a narrow blank area; behind that the middle-class cabins, another blank area, and finally Chandris's own lower-class section. Another blank area ran up through the core of the ship, connecting with the ones separating the passenger sections.

Blank areas on floorplans and maps were almost always worth checking out. Giving herself a quick orientation, she headed off toward the nearest to take a look.

It was surprisingly well hidden. There were no abrupt flat walls or red-lettered warnings anywhere advertising forbidden territory; nothing but smoothly curving corridors that kept passengers moving along in blissful ignorance that there was anything else lurking behind the scenes.

Without having seen the floorplan, it might have taken Chandris all of ten minutes to find a way in.

With the floorplan, it took her two. Sometimes the tracks scored themselves.

She'd expected it to be either a section of crew quarters or else part of the Xirrus's functional areas. It was, in fact, a combination of the two: a large room filled with machinery and pipes and bundles of wires, but with a pair of short door-lined corridors leading off of it. A handful of men and women were visible scattered around the room, moving around the machines or sitting at consoles, their conversation masked by the dull hum that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

For a moment Chandris watched the activity, gauging her chances of getting past them without being seen. If she could, it ought to give her a way into the middle- and upper-class sections without having to use the usual connecting passageways. That could be useful, especially as the passageways had probably been designed to keep nowies like her back here where they belonged.

It was worth a try, anyway. Keeping close to the wall, trying to watch all the workers at once, she started forward.

"You, there—miss?"

Chandris's heart skipped a beat; but her face was all innocence as she turned around to face the man walking toward her. About forty, she estimated his age, with an open, unsuspicious kind of face.

"Yes?" she said.

"Sorry, miss, but passengers aren't allowed in here," he said. "This part of the ship is for crewers only."

"Oh," Chandris said, letting her face fall a little. Not the kind of man who'd accept a sexual advance, she decided, at least not from a sixteen-year-old girl. But he might fall for the right mix of kid sister and eager student. "I'm sorry," she said, face and voice in her newly acquired middle-class college student role. "I just thought that—well, you see, I'm going to be studying catalytic nuclear drive in college and—" she waved at the room with a self-conscious shrug—"well, I just wanted to see what it was like in here."

Dead center score. His eyes widened, just noticeably, and when he spoke there was a new admiration in his voice. "You're kidding. Really? Which college are you going to?"

"Ahanne University on Lorelei," she told him, watching his face closely. His forehead seemed on the edge of wrinkling—"At least to start with," she added before he could say anything. "I'm hoping to transfer somewhere else after a couple of years."

"I'd hope so," he said with a little snort. "Ahanne's starship engineering program isn't worth beansprouts. You'll want to do your last two years at either Lanslant University or else Dar Korrati on Balmoral."

"I tried to get into Dar Korrati," Chandris said. "But they said the only scholarships they had left were for transfer students with high enough grades." She gazed into his face for a split second, then looked down, letting her shoulders sag slightly. "It's kind of scary," she confessed.

"Yeah," he agreed, and she could hear the sympathy in his voice. She held her pose, waiting for him to flip his mental coin... "Well, look, I guess it'd be okay, just this once. Come on—I'll give you a quick tour."

She gushed some appropriate words of thanks and then shut up, letting him do all the talking as he led her around the room, pointing out this and that and gabbing about a lot of stuff that made no sense whatsoever. But that was okay. Every word he said was going into her general mental grab bag of useful information, maybe to be pulled out someday.

"—but since they decay within a few microseconds, we have to keep making new ones," he commented as they passed an untended console. "The actual equipment is a little further forward, but we've got a monitor here to keep tabs on it." He pointed to a free-standing display a few meters away.

"I see," Chandris said; but her eyes were on the console right beside her. Lying on top of it, looking as if it had been casually dropped there by someone with more urgent things on his mind, was a flat plate that looked like a hand computer. Worth maybe a couple hundred on the open market... and she was going to be hitting Lorelei flat broke. "Which one of those lines is the actual production rate?" she asked her guide, gesturing toward the distant display.

"The blue one on top is flux rate," he said, pointing. "Red is particle temperature, green is interface transfer, and that heavy black line shows the confinement profile. Now, this thing over here..."

Taking her upper arm in a big-brotherly sort of way, he led her toward yet another giant incomprehensible machine. It was, Chandris reflected, just as well she hadn't tried a sexual approach on this one. A hand around her waist, instead of on her arm, would hardly have failed to notice the hard lump that had suddenly appeared hidden beneath the waistband of her skirt.

In all the tour took nearly twenty minutes. When it was over Chandris thanked the engineer profusely, let him escort her back through the door to the lower-class section, and said a warm and grateful good-bye.

Two minutes later she was back, slipping in through a second entrance she'd spotted across the room during the tour. Hidden from view of the crewers by a long thick pipe he'd called a catalytic-balance slifter, she made her way forward. The other end of the room opened onto a short corridor lined with unlocked doors; choosing one, she went inside.

The room was small and, inevitably, filled to the ceiling with equipment—pipes and pumping sorts of stuff this time. Turning on the dim overhead light, she pulled out her newly acquired toy and sat down cross-legged on the floor to take a closer look.

It was a hand computer, all right. An expensive one, too, from the look of it. She turned it over—

"Nurk it," she muttered to herself. Stamped into the back of the casing was the Xirrus's logo. A

ship's computer, then, tied into the Xirrus's central nexus and hard-programmed only with ship's data and business. On the open market, worth just fractionally above zero.

For a moment she glared at the flat little plate, letting her annoyance at it subside. It wouldn't have brought in that much money; and anyway, it would probably have taken her forever to locate a safe buyer in an unfamiliar market. Besides, it wasn't like the thing was completely useless.

It took her a minute to locate a wall power plate, and another minute to pry the back off the computer with her little pocket multi-knife. The computer's ID register... there it was. Snapping out two of the knife's blades and the specially insulated screwdriver, she eased one of the blades into the lowest voltage socket on the plate and brought the computer's ID register up to lightly touch the other blade. There was a small spark, hardly visible; carefully, she shifted the knife point to two other spots on the instrument, with similar results. She gave it a quick examination, then pulled the blade from the socket and folded the knife back up. Assuming she'd done it right, the computer would now still have full access to the ship's central nexus, but the nexus wouldn't be able to either identify the particular computer she was using or to keep any record of which files she pulled up.

It was a trick that for years she'd had to pay Trilling or someone else to do for her. One day he'd foolishly let her watch.

She replaced the back cover and keyed the computer on. First on her list of things to do was to pull up a set of the Xirrus's floorplans—a real set, including all the crew and equipment areas. She leafed through them, memorizing each with a glance, and by the time she was through she'd found half a dozen ways to get from one end of the ship to the other without anyone having a ghost's chance of spotting her.

Second on her list was to find a place to stay, preferably one that would be a step up from her present cabin and roommates. Hunting around a little, she found a passenger accommodations list, which after a little study yielded the information that there were sixteen empty cabins on the ship, three of them fancy staterooms in the upper-class section. A crewer roster was next, with particular attention given to which servitors were on duty at the moment and which cabins they were assigned to.

And finally came the triskiest part: coaxing the nexus to give her the general passcode for servitor entry into the passenger rooms.

It took awhile, but the people who'd set up the Xirrus's security hadn't been very bright. In the end, she got it.

And that was that. She could return the computer now, her tampering a cinch to be missed until long after she disappeared into the barrios of Lorelei. And in the meantime she could mingle with the people in the upper-class section whenever she liked, scoring whatever tracks she could. Preferably with people who wouldn't be stopping at Lorelei; if they didn't notice their losses until afterwards, it would take that much longer for them to howl the police onto her tail.

On idle impulse, she keyed the computer for the Xirrus's itinerary. Not that it really mattered; but the next stop after Lorelei was—

Seraph system.

She stared at the display, stomach suddenly fluttering. Seraph system. The place where angels came from.

She leaned against the wall, watching all her neat plans twisting themselves into skidly-talk with new possibilities. Angels. Things only politicians and rich people could get—she remembered a news story once that had talked about them, with a big security type from the Gabriel Corporation opening up a box and handing over a chain and pendant to a High Senator type, who turned around and put it around another High Senator type's neck. The chain had looked pretty classy, at least from the one close-up she'd seen, and she remembered trying to sit down and watch more. But then Trilling had started yelling about something, and she'd yelled back, and somehow she'd never gotten around to finding out more.

But the angels came from Seraph system—that much everyone knew. They were made out in space by something called Angelmass, and a whole bunch of little ships went out there every day to bring them back.

Little ships. With little crews...

Don't be stupid, she growled at herself. They'd been turning out angels for years. By now they must have filled in every single gap in their security.

But if they hadn't, and if she could somehow crack into the system...

She rubbed her finger over her lower lip, stomach acid swirling again with indecision. It might be a total waste of time, sure; but even if scoring an angel turned out to be a popped cord it might still be worth continuing on to Seraph just to throw Trilling that much farther off her trail. And it would be easy enough to do. With the stuff she'd already pulled out of the computer—

The thought stopped short. The computer, whose circuits she'd just scorched, secure in the knowledge that no one was likely to notice for the six or seven days till they got to Lorelei.

But if she continued on to Seraph, which the computer said would take another five or six days after that...

She smiled tightly. No one ever gets anywhere if they never take chances. Trilling had said that a lot, usually when puffing some particularly trisky job he wanted her to do. But even Trilling was right sometimes. And if she really could pull this off...

Abruptly, she got to her feet. First thing would be to get the computer back without being seen. Not necessarily to the same spot; people never remembered where they left things, and in a place like this they'd probably assume someone else had borrowed it.

And after that, it would be time to rearrange her accommodations. Before, getting access to the upper-class section had just been something she wanted to do. Now, it was something she needed to do.

Trilling had always said that her touchiness would never let her fit in with upper-class society. She was about to find out if that was true.