Timothy Zahn - Angelmass

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."

"The purpose of this meeting," High Senator Forsythe said, gazing steadily across the Government Building conference room table at Kosta, "is to figure out exactly what we're going to do with you."

His gaze shifted to Kosta's right, where Chandris sat beside him, then to his left, to Hanan and Ornina Daviee. "With all of you," he amended.

"I'm sorry, but I really don't see the problem," Ornina spoke up, a bit hesitantly. "Jereko has already said he wants to stay in the Empyrean. Why can't we just let him?"

Beside Forsythe, Pirbazari stirred. "It's not quite that simple, Miss Daviee," he said. "Mr. Kosta is a self-confessed Pax spy, and the three of you knew it. That can't just be swept into a corner."

"Why not?" Hanan asked. "I mean, he did help us figure out what was happening to Angelmass.

Surely that alone saved a lot of lives. Not to mention that he and Chandris got that big Pax warship off our backs."

"Wrecking Angelmass Central in the process," Pirbazari murmured.

"It would have been destroyed anyway," Chandris pointed out. "You didn't see what Angelmass was doing out there.

"Actually, we have done a quick review of the monitor tapes you brought back," Forsythe said. "I think it's fair to say the station would indeed have been lost."

"So again, what's the problem?" Hanan asked. "Jereko's proved he's on our side."

"Are we not getting through here?" Pirbazari demanded. "The problem is that he's an agent of a government we're at war with."

"Was an agent," Hanan corrected.

"Legally irrelevant," Pirbazari shot back. "And unproven besides."

"Unproven?" Hanan echoed. "Then what—"

"Hanan," Ornina admonished him, putting a warning hand on his arm.

Hanan patted her hand reassuringly. "All right, then," he said in a more reasonable tone. "Why not let him defect? There must be provision for something like that in the legal code."

Forsythe made a face. "Actually... there isn't."

Kosta stared at him. "You're kidding."

"I've been through the whole code, edge to binding and back again," Forsythe said, shaking his head.

"The people who wrote the Covenants a hundred eighty years ago never expected us to be anything more than a single confederation of a few worlds all alone in the middle of deep space. With nowhere to defect to or from, the topic somehow never came up."

"Well, obviously, that needs to be changed," Hanan said. "How do we do that?"

"We don't do anything," Forsythe said pointedly. "What I do is introduce a bill in the High Senate.

Unfortunately, the process takes time; and meanwhile, Mr. Kosta is still an agent of the Pax."

"And the Covenants do make provision for enemies of the Empyrean," Pirbazari said.

At one side of the table, seated where he could see everyone's mouth, Ronyon began signing. "I would love to," Forsythe told him. "But that decision isn't up to me. Or anyone else in the Empyrean."