Angelmass

CHAPTER 44

The clock was down to fifteen and a half minutes, and the gamma-spark static was becoming deafening by the time everything was finally ready.

"This had better work, Kosta," Chandris shouted as she strapped into her seat, wincing as a particularly loud crack sounded from somewhere in the console in front of her. "If it doesn't, I don't think we're going to have time to get to the Gazelle and get out of here. You sure as hell won't have time to apologize."

"It'll work," Kosta shouted back from beside her. Chandris couldn't read his voice over the noise, but the hands clenched into taut fists in front of him didn't exactly inspire her with confidence.

"Well, if it doesn't, it was nice knowing you," she called, reaching over and putting her hand on his closest fist. "I mean that."

For a moment he seemed to hesitate, the hardness of his fist under her hand wavering. Then, abruptly, he unclenched his hand and wrapped it around hers, gripping it tightly as they watched the clock count down to zero.

And as it did so, an entire panel of monitor lights went solid red.

Chandris held her breath, straining to hear what was happening back there. But between the noise of the gamma sparks and the sheer distance from where they were at the far end of the catapult section she couldn't make anything out. She thought back over the steps of her reprogramming job, wondering if she could have frogged it up somewhere. If she'd missed a safety and the escape pods shut down...

"There!" Kosta shouted, squeezing her hand even tighter. "Feel that?"

Chandris frowned. And then she did: a gentle vibration running through the deck beneath her chair.

A vibration that was slowly but steadily growing in strength.

She shifted her attention to the midhull visual monitor. Beneath the blizzard of radiation static, she could just make out the double ring of escape pods still attached to the midway tunnel. At the base of one of them, where the pod attached to the hull, she thought she could see a faint flickering of fire from a slightly imperfect seating connection as its drive tried to push it away from the station.

Its drive trying to push it outward, but its attaching clamps continuing to hold it firmly in place. If the pod was a sentient being, the odd thought occurred to her, it would probably be getting extremely frustrated about now. "What happens if the clamps break before the pods burn all the way through the wall?" she asked.

"It should still work," Kosta called. "That much heat alone—"

And then, without warning, the image vanished in a flash of white light. Simultaneously, the deck under Chandris bucked like a scalded cat, there was a bubbling roar from behind her, and she found herself being shoved gently but firmly back into her seat.

"It worked!" Kosta shouted. "Look at that! It worked!"

Chandris squinted at the snow on the monitor. But she didn't have to see anything to know that Kosta's crazy plan had indeed worked. The escape pods, all firing together against the relatively thin hull where they were connected, had burned through or heated through and ignited the fuel canisters she and Kosta had stacked in the midway tunnel. The resulting explosion had broken the station in two, giving their catapult end a solid push forward in their orbit as it simultaneously shoved the net end hard in the other direction.

The essence of a rocket, she remembered from her first page of reading aboard the Xirrus, was to take part of your ship and throw it in the opposite direction from where you wanted to go. Kosta had merely taken the definition to its logical extreme.

Only instead of throwing away the exhaust products of burned fuel, he had thrown away half their ship.

"Look's like we've picked up a slow yaw roll," Kosta reported, peering at another of the snowcovered displays. "Nothing serious, I don't think."

"I think the camera just went out," Chandris added as the faint image on the display was replaced by pure static. The acceleration pressure on her had eased back now, but the inertial readings indicated that they had picked up a nice bit of extra speed. "Either that or the radiation got to it."

"Probably the explosion," Kosta said. "Looks like it took out that whole emplacement."

Chandris swallowed. The camera position in question was a good ways forward of the midway tunnel. "Just how much of the station are you expecting us to lose here?"

"Not enough to worry about," Kosta assured her, swiveling his chair around to another station. "All that's back there is long-term supplies and crew living quarters. We can afford to lose those."

"I was thinking more about general station integrity," Chandris said. "There are only so many blast doors and supporting bulkheads in a place like this, you know."

"We'll be fine," Kosta insisted. "Hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"The gamma sparking," he said. "It's quieter."

Chandris paused, listening. He was right: the noise intensity had definitely gone down. "So we're definitely pulling away?"

"Looks like it," Kosta said, leaning close to one of the displays. "Not all that fast, really, but the difference in speed vectors is definitely on our side now. And of course, the upward bump in speed means we're also moving into a slightly higher solar orbit."

"That's going to make it a bit tricky to 'pult Angelmass out of here, isn't it?" Chandris pointed out. "If it's in a lower orbit than we are?"

"I think we can count on it to figure things out and change course after us," Kosta said grimly. "The point is that we've now bought ourselves some extra breathing space to get the reprogramming done.

So that, hopefully, when it does come after us we'll be ready."

"Right," Chandris said, swiveling around toward a data display. "Let's hold onto that thought, shall we?"

Because there was still one tiny little problem that Kosta didn't seem to have thought about yet. Still, with any luck, she would have that one covered by the time it occurred to him.

Pulling up another of the station's operations manuals, she got to work.

"Ten minutes to catapult, Commodore," Campbell's voice came over the speaker. "We're ready to move into position."

"Very good," Telthorst called before Lleshi could answer, pushing back his chair and standing up.

"Commodore Lleshi, perhaps you'd like to invite our guests to join us on the command deck."

Lleshi looked down the table at Forsythe. "Unauthorized civilians—"

"Yes, yes, I know the drill," Telthorst cut him off impatiently. "But High Senator Forsythe is hardly in the same class as someone's girlfriend who wants to be shown around the ship, now, is he?"

He gave Forsythe a hard look. "Besides, a tour might help convince him that these scare tactics of his are both pointless and ridiculous."

"They're not scare tactics," Forsythe insisted. "I've offered to turn over all the data we have on Angelmass—"

"I never liked ghost stories as a child, High Senator," Telthorst cut him off contemptuously. "I like them even less now that I'm an adult. We're going to Angelmass; and you're going with us to watch how we deal with traitors to the Pax. You might find it instructive."

He gestured to the guards at the doorway. "Escort High Senator Forsythe and his aide to the command deck. On your feet, High Senator."

"A favor if I may, Commodore," Forsythe said, his eyes on Lleshi as he slowly stood up. "My aide Ronyon had a bad panic reaction to Angelmass the last time we were in the area. Somehow, I think, he was able to sense what was out there. There's no reason to put him through that again. I'd like to request that he and my pilot be allowed to leave."

"Absolutely not," Telthorst said firmly as the two guards moved into escort position behind Forsythe. "No one leaves this ship until we have your signature on the surrender papers."

Forsythe's eyes hadn't left Lleshi's face. "Commodore?"

Deliberately, Lleshi stood up, looking at each of the two guards in turn. In his own mind, Telthorst clearly already considered himself the commander of the Komitadji.

It was high time he was disabused of that notion.

"Escort High Senator Forsythe and his aide to his shuttle," he ordered the guards. "They'll be leaving the Komitadji before we catapult."

Telthorst spun to face him, his mouth dropping open. "What in—?"

"I trust you'll make yourself available to continue this conversation when we return, High Senator?"

Lleshi added.

Forsythe lowered his head briefly in a slight bow. "Of course, Commodore. Thank you."

Lleshi nodded back. "Lieutenant, you have your orders."

"Yes, sir," the senior of the two guards said, snapping a salute. "This way, High Senator."

The group circled the table and walked out the door, Forsythe looking grave, Ronyon merely looking troubled and a little confused. "That was foolish, Commodore," Telthorst said as the door slid shut on them, his voice rigid as an icicle. "Criminally foolish. You do not let a senior enemy official simply walk away when you have him in your hands."

Lleshi looked up at the hidden speaker. "Time check, Mr. Campbell?"

"Seven minutes to catapult, sir," Campbell's voice came.

"I presume you've run an analysis on Angelmass's orbit?"

"Yes, sir, but it's inconclusive," the other said. "We don't have enough of a data baseline to either confirm or refute Forsythe's claim that it's changing speed and orbit. If it is, though, it certainly can't be doing it very fast."

"So it should be safe for us out there?"

"Yes, sir," Campbell assured him. "We'll be well within radiation distance tolerances."

"Good," Lleshi said. "Then move the Komitadji into catapult position. I'll be right there."

He turned to Telthorst. "And as for holding onto enemy officials, Mr. Telthorst," he added quietly,

"this ship is manned by soldiers, not terrorists. We do not take hostages."

"You'll live to regret this, Commodore," Telthorst hissed.

"Yes," Lleshi murmured, turning his back on the little man and striding toward the door. "I'm sure I will."

"Ha!" Chandris called, slapping her hand on the edge of the control panel in triumph. "Okay. I got it."

"Got what?" Kosta called from beside her.

"How we're going to 'pult Angelmass without getting fried in the process," she said, her throat aching with all the shouting she'd been doing. The gamma sparks had subsided now from painful to merely annoying, but she still had to speak loudly to be heard over them. "There's a remote-control setting here we can use to trigger the catapult. That way we can be out in the Gazelle, as far away as we have to be—"

"Don't bother."

"What?" She turned to look at him.

Kosta was slumped back in his chair, staring with dead eyes at the monitors and displays in front of him. "What's the matter?" she demanded, her heart suddenly thudding in her ears.

"We can't do it," he said. "We don't have enough power."

She followed his gaze to the displays. None of the numbers and graphs meant anything to her. "What do you mean, not enough power?"

"The station can't generate enough energy to 'pult Angelmass outward," he said. "The thing's just too massive."

She looked at the numbers again. No. Not after all this. This cord couldn't pop now. "What about inward, then?" she asked. "Could we send it inward?"

"Inward?" Kosta echoed, frowning at her. "You mean toward Seraph?"

"No, further in than Seraph," Chandris said, thinking furiously. "Whatever games Angelmass is playing with grav fields, it's got to be easier for it to move down a gravity well than back up one. If we put it into a low enough solar orbit, we at least ought to be able to keep it away from Seraph.

Right?"

"But that'll just give it a stronger grav field to play with," Kosta argued. "It might still be able to work its way up that far. Or worse, it might just go straight into the sun where we'll never be able to get to it."

"I hadn't thought of that," Chandris confessed, wincing at the thought. "Could it eat up the whole sun?"

"I don't know," Kosta said. "Probably not—its cross-section is only a few atoms' width. But it could still do some nasty things in there, either accidentally or on purpose. We can't risk it without running some numbers first."

"So that's it? We just give up and go home?"

Kosta shook his head tiredly. "I'm sorry. I don't see what else we can do."

Chandris shifted her gaze to the forward display. The slow yaw rotation they'd picked up in the station's disintegration had turned them to face Angelmass now, though most of the black hole's blaze of light and energy was currently being blocked by what was left of the net section drifting toward it. After all this time and effort and sweat and risk; and now there was nothing they could do but run home?

"If we leave now, we won't get another crack at it," she warned him. "At least, not easily. Without a net out here, we're talking a mighty long trip to even get close. In fact, they'll probably have to build a whole new Angelmass Central and ship it out—"

She broke off. "Oh, my God," she breathed.

"What?" Kosta demanded, sitting up straight.

Chandris shifted her view to the telescope display, hoping her eyes had been playing tricks on her.

But there was no mistake. "The net section," she said, hearing her voice suddenly trembling as she pointed to the display. "The running lights just came on.

"Someone's reactivated it."

For a second they both sat there, frozen. Then, simultaneously, both of them dived for their control panels. "We've got to stop them," Chandris said, trying to pull up the remote control program she'd just found. Her fingers slipped on the keys, stumbling in their frantic haste. "Oh, God, Jereko!"

"I know," he barked back, his fingers beating their own staccato across his board. "I'm trying to shut it down."

"What are they doing?" Chandris asked. There was the file; now access the system. "Don't they know what they're doing?"

"That's just it—they don't," Kosta bit out. "It's only been nineteen minutes since we blew the station.

Twenty light-minutes out—they don't realize the net's headed straight for Angelmass."

Chandris bit at her lip, forcing her fingers to function. The display flickered with gamma sparks and threatened to crash; then it cleared, and she found herself in the system. She pulled up a list of commands, searching for those pertaining to net operations. It had to be somewhere in here...

Kosta folded his hand over hers. "Too late," he said quietly.

Chandris looked up... and felt her mouth fall open.

She'd expected it would be Forsythe coming after them, probably in one of the hunterships sitting idly in their maintenance yards. Or at the very most, one of the EmDef ships they'd seen crowding around Seraph.

But the ship that had suddenly appeared was something unbelievably and terrifyingly huge. Bigger even than the vast spaceliner Xirrus, its bulk filling the entire telescope display, utterly dwarfing the partially shattered half of the station lying beside it.

And as she watched in horror, Angelmass caught up with it.

The emergency hull-breach alarms split the air like enraged banshees screaming of death, their wailing only barely louder than the horrible hail-storm crackle that seemed to come from all around them. "Hull breach in Sectors G-7, 8, and 9," a voice bellowed from the speaker. "All three hulls have collapsed—"

Abruptly, the voice cut off, leaving only the violent chattering. "Seal all airtight doors!" Lleshi ordered, his eyes darting to G-Sector's monitor cameras. What in the name of the laughing fates was happening to them? The Empyreals couldn't have a weapon of such power. They simply couldn't.

But all the sensor nodes had gone black. All of them, over the entire starboard-aft quarter of the ship.

From the speaker came a sudden scream, just as suddenly cut off. "Engine control has lost air,"

Campbell snapped. "Main drive chambers all open to space."

"Do something!" Telthorst snarled. "Fight back, damn you!"

"Against what?" Lleshi snarled back.

A sudden and horribly familiar blare erupted across the command deck. "Radiation!" Campbell announced. "Lethal doses from starboard-aft quarter."

And then, suddenly, Lleshi understood.

It must have entered the ship near the stern, its blaze of heat and radiation charring everything in sight. As it did so, the gigantic ship seemed to twist aside, and Chandris's first impression was that it was making a desperate attempt to escape. But even as that thought occurred to her she realized that it wasn't so; that if anyone was still alive in there they were in no shape to bring the vessel under power. What was happening instead was that the once-smooth lines of the ship were bending and distorting as Angelmass traced out a leisurely path of destruction through bracing girders and supporting bulkheads, twisting and tearing them out of line and crumpling them like thin foil.

"Massive destruction in all aft areas," Campbell shouted. "Communications gone; power gone; sensors gone; air integrity gone. All personnel in aft areas presumed dead."

He was no longer barking the news quickly, Lleshi noticed with a sort of detached interest. There was no longer any point. Timely information implied that there was something that could still be done about a given situation.

But there was nothing any of them could do about this one. The Komitadji was sliding rapidly toward her death, and there was no power in the universe that could stop it. "Structural integrity is failing throughout the ship," Campbell went on. "Central-area bulkheads are bleeding air. Heat and radiation oft" the scale; firewalls collapsing from metal degradation."

"This can't be happening," Telthorst insisted desperately. His eyes were darting all around him, as if he were expecting to discover this was nothing more than an elaborate practical joke being played on him by a vindictive captain and crew. "It can't. Not to the Komitadji."

He spun back to Lleshi, slamming a fist down on the arm of his seat. "This ship is indestructible, damn you," he snarled. "We built it that way. We spent billions—"

He cut off as the deck suddenly shook beneath them, a violent creaking sound screaming across the command deck as it did. "Forward structural integrity is failing," Campbell said. "It won't be long now."

"There's your prize, Adjutor," Lleshi told Telthorst bitterly. "There's your precious Angelmass. It's not waiting for you and the other Adjutors to go and milk it. It's coming to us.

"It's coming for you."

Another screech ripped through the room.

And on Telthorst's face was a look of absolute horror.

Beside Chandris, Kosta was muttering something wordless over and over again. A few seconds later, and the ship nearly vanished in the glare behind the sudden flash of brilliance as Angelmass burned its way out the near side. The station's sunshields activated; and on the telescope display, right at the edge of the artificial black spot marking Angelmass's position, Chandris could see the charred hull metal flowing like ash-filled water as Angelmass's tidal forces ripped apart its molecular structure.

Again the big ship moved ponderously around in the grip of the black hole's gravitational field, the bow turning with a sense of fatalism back into its executioner's path. Again the metal of the hull broke and flowed, further forward this time, and again Angelmass casually burned its way through and disappeared inside.

Lleshi could feel the chair starting to melt beneath him as he looked across the bridge balcony one last time. Telthorst was sitting there, his face contorted almost beyond recognition. "You were wrong about one other thing, Mr. Telthorst," he managed over the screams of the Komitadji's final death throes. "I won't live to regret it, after all."

It seemed to go on forever, a nightmare of death and awesome destruction. Angelmass went in and out at least three more times, like a needle tracing an intricate path for its following thread.

And when it finally emerged for the last time, the ship had been crushed and twisted and warped nearly beyond recognition.

Kosta's hand on her arm made her jump. "Come on, Chandris," he said quietly, his eyes still staring in dull horror at the view. "Come on. Let's go home."