Angelmass

CHAPTER 6

"Your attention, please," the voice came from overhead. "Shuttle number one has now docked; repeating, shuttle number one has now docked. All passengers holding debarkation cards for shuttle one may now prepare to board. The officers and crew of the Xirrus thank you for traveling with us, and we hope to see you again in the near future."

Don't hold your breath, Kosta thought back at the speaker as he picked up his travel bag and went over to join the line forming at the shuttle bay door. Not if he could help it would he ever fly this or any other Empyreal spaceliner again. Between that woman and his own superheated imagination his nerves were already shot to hell, and the mission had hardly even begun. When the time came to get back to Lorelei, he vowed, he'd charter a private ship or something and to the laughing fates with the expense.

Unless, of course, Commodore Lleshi and the Komitadji got here before that. Which would leave him stuck on the ground smack the middle of a war zone...

Superheated imagination, he chided himself, and put the thought firmly out of his mind.

The stairway linking the Xirrus to the shuttle seemed steeper going down, somehow, than it had a week ago when he'd been going the opposite way. An illusion, of course; just the same, he took it a shade more carefully than he probably needed to.

He was two steps from the bottom when he saw her.

Sitting between two uniformed men in the front passenger row.

Looking straight up at him.

For a single, horrible instant Kosta's brain froze, momentum alone getting him the rest of the way down to the shuttle deck. Those uniforms the men were wearing—vaguely like those of the Xirrus's officers, but at the same time markedly different from those he'd seen while aboard. And the look the woman was giving him wasn't like anything he'd seen on either crew or passengers. It was cold and hard, and more than a little accusing.

He'd been right all along. She was indeed Empyreal security.

Run, was his first, frantic instinct. But there was nowhere to run to. Fight, then. His right hand twitched around the handle of his travel bag, aching to drop it and haul out the tiny commando-issue shocker hidden in his side pocket. Shoot all three—get to the command deck and hijack the shuttle—

With a supreme effort he forced his hand to hang onto the travel bag. Forced his feet to start walking. Forced his throat to relax. Until they actually haul out their weapons and restraints and tell you you're under arrest, his instructors on Scintara had told him over and over again, always try to brazen it out. Easy enough for them to say, safely tucked away in a Pax military base; but the more his brain unfroze, the more he realized that he really had no alternative.

Directly behind the trio was an empty aisle seat; with only a brief hesitation, he lowered himself into it. You want brazen? he thought darkly back at the memories of those instructors. Fine; I'll give you brazen.

It wasn't until after the shuttle had detached and was on its way down that he remembered on a conscious level something else they'd taught him: Whenever possible, try to get above or behind your opponents.

Perhaps, he thought, they'd trained him better than he'd realized.

The trip seemed to last forever. None of the three people sitting in front of him paid him the slightest attention. For all anyone could tell, they might have been totally unaware he was even there.

Not that that was any comfort. If they didn't feel the need to keep close tabs on him it probably meant they had plainclothes backups somewhere behind him. So much for taking the high ground, he thought once. But there was still nothing to do but sit tight and wait.

Eventually, they reached ground, landing on the kind of glidestrip Kosta had seen back at the Lorelei spaceport. From what he could see through the windows there seemed to be about as much traffic here as there had been at Lorelei, though both ports seemed to have both space- and aircraft sharing the same facilities. That was a new one on Kosta; on even sparsely developed Pax worlds like Scintara the air and space fields were kept strictly separate. The Empyrean, he decided, must have far less of either kind of traffic than the Pax.

Though considering there were five Empyreal worlds to the Pax's thirty-six, that was hardly a startling revelation.

The shuttle came to a slightly bumpy stop at the terminal. A second bump a moment later heralded the arrival of the ramp, and Kosta tried to prepare himself for whatever action was about to be necessary. Another small thump and a whisper of fresh air, and the door was open. Retrieving his travel bag from beneath the seat, swallowing once to clear his ears, he joined the rest of the passengers in standing up and traffic-jamming the aisle.

The woman and her companions were first in motion, the other passengers, not surprisingly, yielding them the right of way. Kosta took advantage of the gap to slide in directly behind them. Travel bag gripped tightly in his left hand, he followed them up the covered ramp, fighting hard to quiet his heart.

They went down the ramp together, the three of them still ignoring him. Kosta felt his back itching, and it took all his willpower to keep from turning around to see if there was a gun pointed at it. They reached the last bend, rounded it—

And came in sight of the two police officers waiting there.

There was no doubt of who they were—the Empyrean used standardized police uniforms, recognition of which had been part of Kosta's second day of training. Nor was there any doubt as to who they were after. Their eyes were pointed his direction, the amused half-smiles creasing their faces clearly meant for him.

Brazen it out. Brazen it out. Clenching his teeth, Kosta forced himself to keep walking toward them, his hand slipping of its own accord into his pocket. His fingers found the flattened half-cylinder of the shocker; clicked off the safety...

"So, Lieutenant," one of the police said, stepping up to the three people walking ahead of Kosta.

"This is your ghost stowaway, eh? Looks solid enough to me."

Kosta nearly ran the group down as the universe abruptly tilted around him. Somehow, he managed to sidestep them without a collision and kept walking, his face burning with equal parts relief, adrenaline rush, and embarrassment. It hadn't had anything to do with him at all—none of it had. She was the one all the official attention was focused on, not him. No wonder her escort hadn't seemed to notice him.

In fact, now that he thought about it, it could very well be that all those strange looks the woman had given him aboard ship might have been her wondering if he was Empyreal security watching her.

So much for the expert spy's first brush with danger, he thought, feeling like a complete fool. It would have served him right if he'd fallen down those last two steps on the shuttle and broken his stupid leg.

His right hand, he noticed suddenly, was still gripping the shocker in his pocket. Carefully, he slid the weapon's safety back on and withdrew his hand, feeling a fresh bead of sweat as he realized what he'd nearly done to himself. If he'd pulled the shocker and started shooting...

Relax, he ordered himself. So you're not an expert spy; you knew that going in. Learn from it, and then forget it.

Ahead, he could see a line of low tables arrayed across the end of the roped-off area he and the other passengers were walking through. Customs, they'd called it at Lorelei; entrypoint formalities, by whatever name. Kosta's own travel papers were forged, of course, and from the beginning of the mission he'd anticipated this moment with a certain dread. Now, with all his adrenaline already used up, he found himself striding almost nonchalantly toward the tables. Even fear, apparently, was a relative thing. Reaching into his inner coat pocket, he pulled out the papers—

And nearly dropped them as a sharp yelp of pain came from behind him.

He spun around, fresh adrenaline flooding back into his bloodstream, suddenly frozen fingers fumbling with papers and travel bag in a mad scramble to get to his shocker. The woman stowaway was charging straight toward him, weaving in and out of the crowd of befuddled passengers with all the skill of a professional linegainer. Behind her, partially blocked by the confusion in her wake, he caught just a glimpse of the two police officers bent over in obvious agony and the other two men belatedly in pursuit.

Should I stop her?—but even as the automatic question popped into his mind it was too late. A flash of blue and silver in his face, a gust of perfume-scented wind, and she was gone, brushing his arm just enough in passing to knock the papers from his hand.

"Hey!" he shouted reflexively, diving for the papers before they could get trampled or lost among all those feet. He got one, and was bobbing for a second—

The heavy body didn't quite slam into him, but it didn't quite manage to stop, either. "Get out of the way!" a voice snarled in Kosta's ear. A pair of hands grabbed his shoulders and pushed, killing what was left of his balance in the process. He managed to let go of his travel bag in time to break his fall, and with a flurry of uniformed pant legs they were gone.

"You okay?" another voice asked as a hand gripped his arm and helped him to his feet.

"Yeah," Kosta said, looking at the man. One of the Xirrus's other passengers, he vaguely recalled the face. "Thanks."

"No problem. What all did you drop?"

"I think this is everything," another man offered into the conversation before Kosta could answer. He held out a fistful of papers.

"Thanks." Kosta took the papers and leafed quickly through them. "Yes, they're all here."

"Craziest thing I ever saw," the first man commented, craning his neck to look over the crowd.

"What was that all about anyway?"

"I heard someone say she was a stowaway," Kosta said, shuffling his papers into some semblance of order and picking up his travel bag. His left wrist stung where he'd broken his fall, but nothing seemed to be broken. "Where'd she go, anyway?" he asked, trying to peer ahead through the crowd flowing around them.

"She jumped over one of the customs tables," the second man told him. "Vaulted, rather. Real nice move."

"Couple of ship's security people took off after her, but they'll never catch up," the first man said.

"Not with the crowds out there."

"Not at the rate she was going," the second added dryly.

"Anyway, thanks," Kosta said, taking a step away. "Both of you."

"No trouble," one of them said with a wave as they retrieved their own cases.

Kosta moved back into the flow of passengers toward the customs tables, feeling a fresh sense of rather limp relief. So now there was an escaped stowaway loose in the terminal attracting the bulk of official police and security attention. If he'd arranged it himself he couldn't have come up with a better diversion. Well worth a sore wrist and a few scattered papers.

A strange tingle went up his back. Those men back there. Those busy, important men, who'd taken the time and trouble to help a stranger...

No. No; surely not. It was the politicians who were supposed to be under angel control. Surely the Empyreals didn't have so many of the things they could afford to hand them out to run-of-theaverage businessmen.

Still, he couldn't help wondering if he'd still be scrambling around on the floor for his papers if this had happened at the Scintara spaceport.

Even without everything else that had led up to it, Kosta decided afterwards, he would probably have found the customs formalities anticlimactic. As it was, they verged on the deathly boring.

There was no baseline computer check of his identity, as would have been done at any Pax spaceport. No retina comparison against the one on his passport; no layer-scan of his papers, his travel bag, his clothing, or his body; no stress-monitored questions about his business in general or his reasons for coming to Seraph in particular. They checked his passport, confirming that his face matched the picture grained into it, glanced over the rest of his travel papers, and ran his travel bag through a simple contents scan.

And that was it.

"Thank you for your patience, Mr. Kosta," the official smiled, doing something to his passport that looked like a standard stamp-encoding procedure and handing everything back across the table. "I hope you have a pleasant stay on Seraph."

"Thank you," Kosta nodded, relief mixing with an odd sense of disappointment. After all the effort that had gone into getting him into Empyreal space, he'd expected their internal security to be a little more impressive. Particularly here in the center of the angel hunting and processing industry, an industry that was supposed to be vital to the Empyreal way of government.

Unless they didn't have any choice in the matter. If indifference to personal safety was in fact a side effect of Seraph's proximity to Angelmass...

He forced the thought from his mind. There was no point in letting his imagination run wild. Not when he would soon be able to start digging out the facts for himself.

He eased into the wide cross corridor beyond the customs tables and joined the flow of pedestrians.

There were more people than he would have expected, clearly a result of the Empyreal habit of combining air and space travel facilities. Not an especially smart configuration, to his mind; it didn't take a military genius to see that it left their entire off-ground transport vulnerable to a single, carefully targeted attack. Peering over the crowd as best he could, he kept an eye on the guidelights leading to the terminal exit and headed off.

It was a longer way than he expected, but a well-designed system of el-ramps and slidewalks made the trip easy enough. Within fifteen minutes he'd reached the main lobby area, a large, highceilinged space that seemed to be mostly glass and tile and a type of stone that reminded him of marble.

And people, of course. Lots of them, streaming in from several corridors like Kosta's as well as in from outside through the wall of glass doors he could just barely see at the far end. Clutching his travel bag tightly, keeping to the less populated strip immediately along the side wall, he worked his way around toward the exit doors.

A group of small shops opened off to his side; beyond them was a long wall decorated by a strange but interesting sort of sculpted mural. After that was a set of Empyreal-style public washrooms: gaping open doorways whose sole concession to privacy was a set of flimsy baffle screens, and Kosta suppressed a shudder as he passed. Of all the adjustments he was still having to make to the Empyreal culture, this was already proving to be the hardest.

He was past the washrooms and walking alongside another sculpted mural when he suddenly became aware that there was someone walking beside him.

He turned his head sharply, his hand twitching at the same time toward his hidden shocker.

Apparently twitched a little too violently. The slender teenaged girl walking there jumped in reaction, startled eyes widening at him as she seemed to sink back into her skin. "Sorry," Kosta apologized, his face warming with embarrassment. "Didn't mean to startle you."

" 'S okay," she said, her expression still tight. Some of her long black hair had fallen across her cheek, and she reached a hand up nervously to brush it back over the shoulder of her white dress.

A nervous, vulnerable type... which made Kosta feel all that much worse. "No, really," he insisted, feeling like a complete fool for the second time in less than an hour. A new personal record. "I'm a little jumpy today, I guess. First time in a new place—you know how it is."

Her face softened, just a little. "Yeah. Guess I do."

"Well... bye." Awkwardly, he turned away and headed again for the distant exit.

He got maybe three steps. Then, to his surprise, she was back beside him. "So, uh, so it's your first time on Seraph, huh?" she asked hesitantly.

"Yes, it is," he confirmed, frowning back at her. And instantly regretting it as she seemed to wince back from the expression. "You?" he added, striving to look less threatening.

She shook her head, a jerky motion. "No. I mean, I was here once before with my parents. But I was only five, so I guess that doesn't count."

He smiled. "Probably not." He glanced up at the people detouring around them. "You know, we're probably blocking the road here."

"Oh! I'm sorry," she breathed guiltily. Hunching over a little, she started toward the exit again.

Taking a long stride, he caught up with her. "I didn't mean we had to run," he said.

She glanced at him, a somewhat sheepish smile on her face. "Sorry," she apologized again. "I guess I'm a little nervous today, too."

"That's okay." For a minute they walked in silence, as Kosta searched furiously for something else to say. "So where exactly are you headed?" he asked at last.

"A little frontier town," she told him. "Safehaven. It's about four hundred kilometers from here.

You've probably never heard of it."

"No, I haven't," he admitted. "What's out there? For you, I mean."

"A new job. I'm going to be helping put in a new catalytic fusion generator."

He cocked an eyebrow at her. "You seem a little young for that."

"Oh, I won't be doing anything important," she shook her head. "Just some of the simple stuff. My uncle runs the project, and my parents thought it would be good experience."

She launched into a complicated and increasingly animated description of family connections... but Kosta wasn't really listening. They were almost to the exit now, and for the first time he saw that each of the glass doors was flanked by a pair of uniformed police officers.

Who were looking carefully at each person who passed them.

Relax, damn it. It was certainly conceivable that they were looking for him, that his travel papers had caught a delayed flag. But the odds were far higher that all they wanted was their escaped stowaway.

The girl beside him had stopped talking, and belatedly he realized that she'd asked him a question.

"I'm sorry," he apologized. "Mind on other things. What'd you say?"

"I asked where you were going," she said."—Ow!"

"What?" Kosta asked as she stopped suddenly, hand groping for his shoulder.

"Bent my ankle," she said with a grimace. "I twisted it two months ago and it sometimes still goes out. Always at the worst times."

"That's usually how it works, isn't it?" Kosta craned his neck, trying to look over the crowd. "Do you want me to try and find you one of those carts?"

"No, I'll be all right in a minute," she said. "If I could—I mean, just hold onto your arm...?"

"Sure," he said, stepping close to her. Her hand groped unsuccessfully for a good grip on his elbow.

"Let's try this," he offered. Bracing himself, he slipped his arm around her shoulders. "Lean some of your weight on me."

"Yes—that's good," she said, putting her own arm around behind his back. "Thank you."

"No problem," Kosta assured her. "In step; let's go."

So; here we are, he thought as they set off, feeling a not entirely uncomfortable heat rising to his face. Not that he'd never been this cozy with a woman before, but there was something embarrassing about holding onto a stranger like this right out in public view. Even when he was just being helpful.

Not that anyone else watching would know that. Her ankle must not have been all that bad; even when he concentrated on it he could hardly detect her slight limp. Anyone else would just assume they were being very, very friendly.

And yet, even as he fought against both the awkwardness and the guilty pleasure of her body pressing against his, he became aware that there was something poking insistently at the back of his mind. Wispy and unidentifiable, but at the same time triggering the skin on the back of his neck.

A breeze ruffled his hair, jerking him out of his concentration. To his mild surprise he found they were outside, with one of the glass doors turning just behind his back. Distracted by too many other things, he'd completely missed their obviously uneventful exit.

"Thank you again," the girl said, deftly disengaging from his arm and giving his hand a quick squeeze. "I really appreciate it."

"No problem," Kosta said again, stumbling over his tongue a little. "Can I—do you need help getting anywhere?"

"No, thank you," she said. "My ankle's fine now. Anyway, don't you have to go back in and get the rest of your luggage?"

He blinked. "Oh. Right. I guess I do."

She smiled, somehow managing to look both shy and impish at the same time. "Thank you again."

She turned to look out over the rows of line cars parked along the curb, the breeze brushing her hair up against Kosta's face as she did so.

And abruptly, it clicked. Her hair—that perfume—

She was already walking away from him. Dropping his travel bag, he took a half dozen quick steps and caught up. She started to turn at the sound of his footsteps; grabbing her arm, he spun her the rest of the way around and took his first real look at her face.

She was the escaped stowaway.

For a handful of heartbeats he just stood there and stared, his hand frozen to her arm, his head spinning with the unreality of the transformation that had taken place.

It wasn't just her hair, though that showed no trace of the fancy braidings he'd invariably seen her wearing aboard ship. It wasn't even her dress, though how and where she'd managed to find a replacement for that blue and silver thing she'd been wearing he couldn't even begin to guess.

It was her; she, herself, had changed. Changed from a serene, confident, pampered upper-class young woman to a slightly helpless, very vulnerable teenage girl. Her posture, her expression, the way she moved her hands, even the texture and lines of her face—all of them were totally different.

"I don't suppose," she murmured into the brittle silence, "there's much point in asking what the hell you think you're doing."

And as her dark eyes gazed into his, the helpless, vulnerable teenager was gone, too. In her place...

Kosta shook his head. "No. No, I..."

"So what now?"

That was a good question. "Why are they after you?" he asked.

She shrugged, her eyes never leaving his face. "I overstayed my welcome."

"Stowed away, you mean."

She shrugged again.

I could do it, Kosta told himself. I could march her straight back inside and hand her over to those police at the doors. It would be the right thing to do—after all, her little joytrip had cost the spaceline a lot of money. And it would serve her right for using him to walk her out straight under security's nose.

But turning her in would mean drawing official attention to himself.

Slowly, almost reluctantly, he let go of her arm. "Get out of here," he muttered. "Just... go."

She stood there for another moment, and he thought he could see some surprise in that expressionless face. Then, without a word, she turned and disappeared into the flow of people heading toward the row of line cars.

Kosta shook his head, a grudging admiration beginning to seep in through the resentment as he made his way back to where he'd dropped his travel bag. Yes, she'd used him, all right. She'd used him neatly and blatantly and probably without a single scrap of shame to any of it.

But talk about brazening it out...