Timothy Zahn - Angelmass

"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—"