Angelmass. Part 32

thing, and he'd really been trying to. "I didn't know angels felt like anything in particular," he said.

"Some people can't tell the flavors of different mushrooms apart either," Chandris said tartly. "I don't know how I can tell if an angel's there. I just can. The High Senator's wearing a fake. Period."

Kosta's gaze drifted away from her face, his mind spinning with sudden uncertainties. The

underlying basis of this whole mission had been the Pax a.s.sertion that the Empyreal leaders.h.i.+p was coming under the influence of alien intelligences. But if that wasn't true-if the High Senators were not, in fact, wearing angels-then that threat evaluation was way off target.

Unless Forsythe had engineered this deception on his own. In which case, he was blatantly defying Empyreal law, for some reason of his own. Having second thoughts about the angels, perhaps?

Either way, it was a situation worth following up on. Which meant, unfortunately, that he was again going to have to avoid rocking the boat. "I won't tell the Daviees about it," he said, knowing full well that Chandris was going to take this wrong. "Not now, anyway. But I'll be keeping an eye on Ronyon; and if you grab that angel, I will turn you in."

Turning his back on her, he left.

Chandris stared after him, her work on the crystal momentarily forgotten. It had happened again. Kosta had cracked her red-handed doing something illegal... and had just walked away rather than get involved.

But it wasn't just a dislike of getting involved, she saw now. It was more specific than that. It was an attempt to avoid situations where he would be drawing attention to himself.

Or more specifically, where he would be drawing official attention to himself.

Slowly, she turned back to her crystal. Kosta wasn't who he pretended to be-that much she'd concluded his first time aboard the Gazelle. But he wasn't a normal con artist, either.

So what was he?

She leaned back in her chair, frowning at the ceiling. There was something he'd said to her a long time ago, an off-handed comment that had sounded odd at the time but which she'd never gotten around to checking out for herself.

That strange comment about aphrodisiac perfumes.

Swiveling around, she reached for the machine room's computer terminal. But even as she did so, the intercom pinged. "Chandris?" Ornina's voice said. "Where are you?"

Chandris hesitated a split second, old ingrained reflexes whispering at her to come up with a quick and convincing lie. Suppressing the impulse, she tapped the switch. "Machine shop," she said.

"We'll be hitting the catapult in about three minutes," Ornina told her. If she wondered what Chandris could possibly be doing in the machine shop, it didn't show in her voice. "You want to come up?"

"Sure. I'll be right there."

"Thank you."

Chandris keyed off the intercom and set to work freeing her rough crystal from its clamp. She'd hoped to have the duplicate finished before they reached Angelma.s.s and people started wandering around the s.h.i.+p again. But no problem. There would be plenty of time to get it done before the Gazelle got back to Seraph.

And if Kosta didn't like it, he could go jump.

She made it to the control room and into her seat with maybe twenty seconds to spare. Kosta was already there, sitting tight-lipped in Forsythe's earlier seat and doing his best to ignore her. The High Senator himself was nowhere to be seen. "Systems all okay?" she asked, keying back into her board.

"Running smooth as can be," Hanan said. "High Senator Forsythe left a couple of minutes ago to go find Ronyon."

"He's probably still in the shower," Chandris said. "I was showing him around the s.h.i.+p and accidentally squirted some machine oil on him."

Ornina frowned at her. "How in the world did you manage to do that?"

Chandris was saved the necessity of answering by the alert signal from the control board and the start of the catapult's five-second countdown. She ran her eyes over her board, confirmed that everything was ready; and with the usual not-quite jerk the spider-shape of Angelma.s.s Central appeared in the center of her display.

Behind her, the door whispered open, and she turned to see Forsythe come in. "Everything all right back there, High Senator?" Hanan asked.

"Yes, thanks," Forsythe said. He glanced at Kosta, in his earlier seat, and for a moment Chandris wondered if he was going to demand it back. But instead he went over to one of the fold-down jumpseats. "I found Ronyon in his room," he added, strapping himself in. "He'd gotten some oil on himself and was showering it off."

He said it offhandedly, and the glance he threw at Chandris was equally casual. But for someone who'd been reading people as long as she had, it was more than enough.

Forsythe knew exactly who she was. Who she was, and what she was.

She turned back to her board, heart pounding in her ears. So it had happened, as she'd known someday it would. Lulled by the warmth and comfort of the Daviees, she'd let herself believe she could stay here forever.

Now, instead of just getting herself in trouble, she was going to drag them into it, as well.

"I hope he's almost finished," Hanan commented. "We'll have to drop the s.h.i.+p's rotation down to near zero soon."

"He's all finished," Forsythe said. "Just drying and getting dressed again. I let him borrow one of your s.h.i.+rts-I hope you don't mind."

"No trouble at all," Hanan a.s.sured him. "I guess I should have made it clear earlier that everything on the Gazelle is at your disposal."

"You made it perfectly clear," Forsythe said. "As I hoped I made clear that I don't want our presence here disrupting your normal working routine. Any progress yet, Mr. Kosta?"

"Yes, but it's mostly negative," Kosta said, studying something on his display. "There have been a few delays at the catapult due to hunters.h.i.+p ma.s.s discrepancies, but all of them were traceable to errors at the launch dish. Nothing seems to be from material that fell off the s.h.i.+ps along the way."

"Though that may not mean anything," Ornina pointed out. "As you said earlier, the catapult may have enough tolerance built into its programming."

"Agreed." Kosta shook his head. "The more I think about it, the less I like the whole theory. Angelma.s.s just isn't ma.s.sive enough to pull that much gravitational energy out of infalling paint chips or whatever."

Behind Chandris, the door slid open... and she turned just as Ronyon stumbled into the room, his fingers tracing agitated patterns in the air in front of him.

A look of absolute terror was on his face.

"What's wrong?" she demanded.

"He's frightened of something," Forsythe said, making quick finger gestures of his own. Ronyon replied-"I can't get any sense out of him," Forsythe said, starting to sound concerned. "He just keeps saying he's afraid."

"Is it the low gravity?" Ornina asked, starting to unstrap. A pair of gamma-ray cracks snapped through the room, making Chandris jump. "If he's never been in free-fall before-"

"He been in free-fall hundreds of times," Forsythe said shortly. He had a hand on Ronyon's shoulder now, his other hand still going through their complicated motions. "I don't understand this at all."

"Perhaps we should get him back to his cabin," Ornina suggested. She was at Ronyon's side now, holding his arm in a rea.s.suring grip as she studied his face.

More hand motions, a violent shake of Ronyon's head-"He doesn't want to leave," Forsythe said. "Says he's afraid to be alone."

Chandris looked at Hanan. "Are there any sedatives in the medpack's drug dispenser?"

"There should be," he said, his eyes on Ronyon. "You know how to get the dispenser open?"

She nodded, reaching for her restraints. "Back in a minute."

It took her a little longer than she'd expected to get to the medpack, take the cover off the dispenser, locate the proper ampule, put everything back together again, and return to the control room. The others had gotten Ronyon strapped into Kosta's chair by the time she returned, but otherwise not much had changed. The big man still looked pretty miserable. "Thank you, Chandris," Ornina said, taking the sedative from her and reaching for Ronyon's arm.

He pulled the arm away from her, his eyes turning frantically to Forsythe. "It's all right," the High Senator told him, gesturing the words as well as saying them. "It's just something to help you relax a little."

Reluctantly, Ronyon put his arm back on the armrest. Ornina touched it with the ampule and gave him an encouraging smile. "You'll feel better in just a few minutes," she said. "High Senator Forsythe and I will stay right here with you until you do."

Ronyon nodded, already seeming to sag a little in the low gravity. Leaving the two of them to look after Ronyon, Chandris made her way forward and climbed into Ornina's seat. In the time since she'd gone to get the sedative, the gamma-ray sparks had worked their way up to a gentle but insistent rain, and she keyed her board for a location check.

The result came up. She looked at it, a frown starting to crease her forehead.

"It's accurate," Hanan said quietly from beside her.

She looked at the tight expression on his face, a creepy sensation working its way up through her. "You sure?" she asked, keeping her own voice low.

"I've run it three times in the past fifteen minutes," he told her. "No mistake."

Chandris turned back to her board, the creepy sensation getting stronger. If they were really still this far away from Angelma.s.s... "The radiation's getting stronger," she murmured. She glanced back at Kosta, sitting in one of the jumpseats watching Forsythe and Ornina hovering around Ronyon. "Just like Kosta said."

"Yes," Hanan agreed. "I just hope the Gazelle's hull can take the extra-"

He broke off, the last echo of his words vanis.h.i.+ng into the silence.

Into the complete silence...

"Kosta?" Chandris snapped, twisting around to look at him.

"I know," Kosta said grimly, already out of his jumpseat and heading for Chandris's usual seat and control board. "The gamma sparks have stopped."

Chandris turned back to her display, stomach tightening as she keyed for radiation sensor readings.

A memory flashed back: someone in the Barrio telling her a story about how a big wave had once swept in from the sea and wrecked a big part of Uhuru's main port city. And before the wave had come, the whole sea had pulled back from the sh.o.r.e, like it was getting itself ready to hit.

"Hanan, get on the radio," Kosta said. "Warn everyone there's a radiation surge coming."

"Right," Hanan said, reaching for the comm section of his board.

He never got there. Without warning, the eerie silence was shattered by a sudden violent burst of

gamma-ray crackling.The surge had hit... and the Gazelle was caught in the middle of it.

CHAPTER 26.

Hanan screamed, a long, agonized wail almost inaudible above the violent sleet-storm of gamma-ray crackling that filled the control cabin. "What's happening?" Forsythe shouted over the din.

"Radiation surge!" Chandris shouted back. Ornina was at Hanan's side, fumbling under his s.h.i.+rt for the exobrace cutoff switches. Chandris reached for her restraints- "Chandris, get us some rotation," Kosta called from behind her. "If you don't, the hull's going to get cooked."

Ornina found the switch, and Hanan collapsed trembling in his seat. "He's right, Chandris," Ornina shouted to her. "Do it."

Cursing under her breath, Chandris turned back and keyed in the command. The displays were unreadable through the multicolored snow that had suddenly appeared on them, and for a moment she wasn't sure whether or not the command had made it through. "You got it?" Kosta shouted.

"Hang on," she shouted back, trying to see through the snow on the displays. The numbers were still impossible to read, but she could feel her weight starting to increase. "Okay," she said. "Rotation's speeding up."

She turned back to Hanan. Ornina and Forsythe had gotten him out of his seat now and were supporting his weight between them. And the look on Ornina's face... "Ornina?"

Ornina turned a pale face to Chandris. "He's very bad," she said, her voice nearly lost in the gamma-ray noise. "We've got to get him to the medpack right away."

"I'll help you," Chandris said, popping her restraints.

"No," Forsythe said sharply. "We can handle him. You and Kosta get us out of here."

"But-"

"Don't argue!" the High Senator snapped. "You want to end up like that other s.h.i.+p?"

Chandris swallowed, the image of the burned and battered Hova's Skyarcher flas.h.i.+ng through her mind. "We'll try. Kosta, get up here."

"Right." Kosta scrambled past the others and dropped into Hanan's seat. "What's working?"

"I'm guessing the major control lines are okay," Chandris told him, toggling through the Gazelle's sensor packs. "They've got a lot of redundancy and extra s.h.i.+elding. But I can't get anything out of the sensors."

"Burned out," Kosta grunted. "That, or the data lines are down."

"Must be the lines," Chandris agreed. "I don't get any response from the feedback register circuits, either."

"You don't need registers to fly the s.h.i.+p," Kosta pointed out impatiently. "If the control lines still work, fire up the engines and get us out of here."

"Yeah, well, there's just one problem," Chandris snarled. Her throat was beginning to hurt from the need to keep shouting over the gamma-ray noise. "I don't know where Angelma.s.s is anymore."

"Is that a problem? We were heading more or less toward it. Just turn around and go."

"We could; except that with the registers gone I won't be able to tell when we've done a one-eighty." Or maybe it wasn't just the shouting that was hurting her throat. Maybe it was plain, simple fear. "You said yourself that the Hova's Skyarcher must have gone in pretty deep."

For a long minute the only sound in the control room was the roar of the gamma-ray static. Chandris kept toggling through the sensor packs, searching for something-anything-that could still be read. But it was all uniform snow. "What about the s.h.i.+p's inertial nav equipment?" Kosta asked. "Does it have an external case display?"