Angelmass

CHAPTER 4

"...But first I'd like to clear up any questions about how I see this new job you're sending me off to do. The first duty of a High Senator, it seems to me, is to the whole Empyrean. Not one district or another, not even one world or another; but to all the people."

The man on the screen paused, and Arkin Forsythe took a moment to let his eyes trace out the other's face. A care-lined, middle-aged face, with receding sandy hair, blue-gray eyes, and an oddly intense set to the square jaw. A serious face; a face whose strong aura of professionalism formed a perfect counterpoint to the casual, common-man pattern of his speech. A face that would inspire loyalty in some and contempt in others, but nothing in between.

Across the room, there was a knock on the door. "Come," Forsythe called, tapping the freeze button and looking up. The door opened, to reveal Ranjh Pirbazari. "Have you a minute, High Senatorelect?"

"Sure, Zar, come on in," Forsythe waved him over, noting the data cyl in the other's hand. "What have we got?"

"The official follow-up report on that Pax incursion out in the belt three days ago," Pirbazari told him, crossing to Forsythe's desk and handing him the cyl. "They've done some more analyses of the ship and the battle, but there's nothing really new in the way of fresh data. They were able to pull a name off the bow, though: the Komitadji. It was the name of some guerrilla or mercenary group in the Balkans, I'm told, sometime in Earth's distant past."

"Mm," Forsythe said, eyeing the slender cylinder distastefully. Official follow-up reports, in his experience, were nearly always a waste of time for everyone concerned. "Any fresh excuses as to why it took them so long to kick the damn thing out of the system?"

Pirbazari shook his head. "They still say the catapult simply wasn't designed for anything that big, and that it took them that long to recalibrate." He hesitated. "I'd have to say, though, that that's probably more an explanation than it is an excuse. There's really no way anyone could have anticipated the Pax having a warship that big. Certainly they never showed anything even approaching that size during the contact negotiations. From everything I've read about the incident, EmDef did as well as could be expected under the circumstances."

Forsythe nodded, still not happy but experienced enough to recognize a dead-end when he found himself driving down one. Finding tails to pin the blame on was standard political instinct; but Pirbazari had twenty years of Empyreal Defense Force service under his belt, and if he said they'd done all they could then they probably had. "Subject closed then, I guess," he grunted. "Any fresh ideas as to what the Pax was trying to prove with this stunt?"

Pirbazari shrugged. "Number one theory is still that they've decided to escalate their little psychological pinprick campaign and wanted to see what kind of reception they could expect if they sent in a warship and started shooting. Second place goes to the possibility that they wanted to map out the net's physical configuration and figured that using a ship outside our normal catapult range would buy them more time to study it."

"Or maybe they wanted to drop something and hoped all the noise and smoke would hide it?"

"If they did, it worked," Pirbazari said dryly. "EmDef had ships quartering the area for several hours afterward and none of them picked up anything but normal asteroids. If anything was dropped, it had to have been pretty small."

"Or else shielded like crazy," Forsythe said.

"True," Pirbazari agreed. "Still, we're talking an awful lot of trouble and risk just to smuggle in a spy or two. Especially given that they've already got either a spy or data-sifter system in place here already."

Forsythe nodded sourly. "One at the very least. I don't suppose there's anything new on that datapulse transmission?"

"Only that the timing of the pulse, with the Komitadji 'pulting in just in time to intercept it, meant they had the whole thing carefully planned out," Pirbazari said.

"Still no idea where on Lorelei the pulse originated?"

"No," Pirbazari conceded. "And if they haven't been able to backtrack it by now, they never will.

Whatever this phase-and-relay scheme is the Pax is using, it's a real charmer."

"It ought to be," Forsythe growled. "They had five months to set it up before we kicked them out.

For all we know they could have smuggled in an entire fifth column."

"Yes, sir," Pirbazari murmured.

Forsythe eyed him, noted the quiet battle of current and former loyalties in his expression. "I'm not blaming EmDef for that," he told the other. "It wasn't their fault that we had Pax ships and people swarming all over the place. The High Senate had no business holding those useless talks in Empyreal space in the first place. They should have insisted on neutral ground."

Pirbazari's face cleared, loyalties back in line again. "None of us liked it very much either," he admitted. "I have to say, though, that I really don't think more than a handful of Pax spies could have gotten past us."

"A handful could be enough." Forsythe looked at the cyl still in his hand, set it down on the desk.

"Well, I'll take a look later. For whatever it's worth."

"Yes, sir." Pirbazari nodded to Forsythe's left. "Your father?"

Forsythe looked over at the still-frozen image on the screen. "Yes. His spaceport speech, the day he left Lorelei to take his own High Senate seat."

"I remember that day," Pirbazari mused. "My parents watched the speech at home, my father grumping the whole time about how he was going to make a hash of the job."

Forsythe snorted gently. "A confident sort, wasn't he?"

"Yes, sir," Pirbazari said. "But he was wrong about a lot of other things, too."

Forsythe smiled, feeling the bittersweet tang of memory in his throat. "He was an expert politician," he said, more to himself than to Pirbazari. "A lot of people never understood that, or else never believed it. But he was. He understood the checks and balances that make a government function—understood them better than anyone I've ever known. He knew that you had to make trades and deals and compromises if you wanted to get things done. And he got things done."

For a moment the room was silent, and Forsythe could almost see his father standing there in front of him. Laughing and joking one minute, teaching him some little secret of politics the next. "Speaking of speeches," Pirbazari said into the quiet, "you're scheduled for a broadcast in half an hour. Shall I go down to the studio and make sure everything's ready?"

The vision faded, and his father was once again just an image on a display screen. "No," Forsythe said. "I'd rather you go take another stab at talking EmDef into doing that landing check we asked for. If the Pax ship did drop a spy, he's got to come down sometime."

"Yes, sir," Pirbazari said, his tone markedly less than enthusiastic.

"I know it's probably a waste of time," Forsythe agreed with the other's unspoken thought. "I've already had it politely explained to me that EmDef hasn't got the manpower to sand-sift all the mining and cargo ships buzzing around Lorelei system. But if we nag them enough they may agree to at least a partial check. If only to get us off their backs."

Pirbazari smiled faintly. "It's nice to work for someone who understands how people operate, sir.

What about the studio prep?"

"Ronyon can do that," Forsythe told him, picking up his call stick and tapping Ronyon's button three times. "Let me know how it goes with EmDef."

"Yes, sir." With a little bow, Pirbazari turned with military precision and left the room.

Forsythe looked back at the display, his frustration with EmDef shading—as frustrations always seemed to do these days—into an echo of old bitterness. Yes, he understood how people operated; but then, he'd learned about people and politics from a master. A man so able and competent at working through the system that by the end of his second term he was already being called the most effective High Senator Lorelei had ever sent to Uhuru.

And then, without warning, the system had been pulled out from under him.

His father had fought it, of course. Had argued long and hard that the newly discovered angels were far too incompletely understood to be loosed on anyone, let alone those men and women most directly responsible for the Empyrean's well-being. But the reformers were too strong, the optimism too soaring, and the tales of rampant political dishonesty and greed too deeply entrenched in popular mythology. The public clamor for the Angel Experiment had grown steadily louder... and as it did, all those who had originally opposed the plan quietly melted to the other side. Even the media, who normally salivated over the slightest hint of a controversy, just as quietly mutated into an Empyreanwide cheering squad for the experiment.

Until, at the end, his father had stood alone. And when they'd handed him his angel, he'd handed it back. Along with his resignation.

It was the last hard, no-win decision of his political career. Perhaps the last hard, no-win decision that had been made in the High Senate chambers in the eighteen years since then.

Few people seemed to have noticed that. But Forsythe had; and this whole net-and-catapult method of dealing with the Pax's increasingly impatient thrusts into Empyreal territory was just the latest example of the High Senate's collective vagueness. It was all very well to claim, as they frequently did, that the Pax mentality was one of conquest instead of destruction; that it would prefer to absorb the Empyrean as it had all the other far-flung Earth colonies that had been sent out over the past three hundred years. It was a reasonable assessment, as far as it went.

But to then assume that such territorial ambitions would be discouraged simply by having some of their ships 'pulted away and trapped out in space for a few months was naive in the extreme. The only way to stop a bully was to give him a bloody nose.

And the perfect chance to do just that had been sitting in Lorelei system three days ago. A tiny change in the catapult vector, and that huge Pax warship could have been sent straight through the center of a star and been gone forever. A serious bloody nose, indeed.

But the High Senators who wrote EmDef's policies wore angels around their necks, as did the local commanders who carried those policies out... and men who wore angels never lowered themselves to something as crude as killing.

So they had taken their time, and done their calculations carefully, and sent the Pax warship somewhere where it would be safe. Someday, it would be back.

But before then, Forsythe would be a High Senator himself. A High Senator, with an angel of his own hanging around his neck.

Or perhaps not.

There was a diffident tap on the door. "Come," Forsythe called.

There was no response. Forsythe looked up, annoyed; and then it clicked, and he reached over to his call stick and tapped Ronyon's button twice. The door opened, and the big man came almost shyly into the room. His thick fingers traced patterns in the air—You want me, Mr. Forsythe?

Yes, Forsythe signed back. Deaf since birth, Ronyon could read lips reasonably well, but one of Forsythe's standing rules was that his inner circle use hand-sign language with Ronyon whenever possible. Like all skills, signing went rusty with disuse, and Forsythe didn't want his people losing this particular ability. It was often very handy to be able to hold a private conversation across a crowded room. I'm going to be giving a speech in half an hour, he told the other, and I want you to go down to the studio and make sure everything's ready. Can you do that?

Ronyon's droopy eyes widened, his slightly slack lips curving into a smile that was pure puppy-dog eager. Yes, Mr. Forsythe, yes, he signed, his fingers moving excitedly. You mean all by myself?

Forsythe suppressed a smile. Yes, Ronyon, all by yourself, he answered. It was one of the few stable points in the otherwise shifting ground of Forsythe's world: no matter how simple or menial the job, you could always count on Ronyon to jump on it with all the enthusiasm his eight-year-old-child's mind could generate.

And that was a lot of enthusiasm. No one had ever figured out whether it was the task itself that excited him so much, or the more subtle concept of having been entrusted to do something right. Mr.

Mils is down there now, Forsythe continued. You know how everything is supposed to be, right?

Ronyon nodded. I can do it, he signed, the child's eagerness changing into a child's determination. I can.

I know, Forsythe signed, and meant it. Unlike many of the more "mature" personalities he'd dealt with over the years, Ronyon had none of that particularly infuriating brand of false pride that kept a person from admitting when he was in over his head. As a general rule, if you sent Ronyon to do a job and didn't hear anything further from him, you could assume it would get done right. Better head downstairs, then. We can't keep the people of Lorelei waiting.

Yes, Mr. Forsythe. With one last happy smile, Ronyon turned and hurried out.

There were still occasional quiet moments when Forsythe wondered why he had kept Ronyon on.

Big and bulky, with a face that was considerably less than photogenic and the mind of a child lurking behind it, Ronyon was hardly someone who fit the usual image of a politician's inner circle.

Originally, it had been little more than a symbolic gesture on Forsythe's part: the big important planetary representative taking the time and effort to reach out to those even modern medicine couldn't do anything to help. As a campaign ploy it had been remarkably successful, despite the loud denouncements from critics who'd proclaimed it to be nothing but shameless emotional manipulation. He'd gone on to win that election, and had never lost one since.

But that had been over fifteen years ago. Why, then, was Ronyon still around?

Shrugging to himself, Forsythe keyed his intercom. "Mils here," a familiar voice answered.

"This is Forsythe. How are things going?"

"Just doing the final lighting checks, High Senator-elect," the other replied, sounding his usual harried self. "We'll be ready in five minutes."

"I hope so," Forsythe warned. "Because I've just sent Ronyon down to make sure you're doing your job right."

Mils chuckled. "Well, we'd better get cracking, then," he said, mock-serious. Mock-serious, but with noticeably less tension in his voice than had been there a moment earlier. "I wouldn't want him mad at us."

"I should say not," Forsythe agreed. "I'll be down shortly."

He shut the intercom off. Perhaps that was it, he thought: the fact that Ronyon was so out of place here. With his childlike enthusiasm and loyalty he was like a gentle breeze blowing through the stagnant sewer gas that so often seemed to be the essence of politics. His father, Forsythe remembered vividly, had utilized that sharp sense of humor of his to break the tension that so often threatened to overwhelm himself and his inner circle. Perhaps Forsythe's subconscious had compensated for his own lack of that particular gift by hiring Ronyon.

For a moment he gazed at the image of his father still frozen on the display, a fresh swell of an old determination flowing through him. Once, a Forsythe had resigned from the High Senate rather than accept the mind-numbing influence of an angel. With ingenuity, and a little luck, perhaps this Forsythe could have it both ways... and in the process prove to everyone that his father's warnings had been right all the time.

Switching off the display, he gathered his notes and headed for the door. The people of Lorelei were waiting.