Timothy Zahn - Angelmass

"I take it no one else agrees?" Hanan suggested.

Chandris grimaced. "I wouldn't know. No one else let me get even that far."

"Can't say I'm surprised," he said. "Huntership crews tend to be an ingrown lot. Not much given to strangers."

"Though there are exceptions, of course," Ornina said. "Where did you go to school?"

"Ahanne University on Lorelei," Chandris said. "My records were supposed to be here already, but I checked this morning and they hadn't yet arrived."

Hanan snorted gently. "Not surprised about that, either," he rumbled. "There are only four regular skeeters a day between here and Lorelei, and Gabriel business probably takes up two and a half of em. Welcome to the real world."

"We'll take editorial comments on the state of the Empyrean later," Ornina told him. "Tell me about Sibastii regulators, Chandris."

Sibastii regulators... "They're a type of voltage regulator used in sensor-to-autonav interfaces," she quoted from the Xirrus's lessons. "Usually used in areas where there's a high ion density." Dimly, she wondered what all that meant.

Ornina nodded. "A samsara switch?"

"A high-stroid device for automatically switching between several different computers, sensors, or navigational pylons."

"Anspala stabilizers?"

"They're used to keep the edges of a hyperspace catapult field from shifting."

"Twitteries?" Hanan asked.

Chandris looked at him, stomach tensing. Twitteries? "Uh..."

"Try to ignore him, child," Ornina said, giving her brother a warning look. "He just talks to keep his jaw in shape for eating."

" 'Twittery' is a perfectly good word," Hanan insisted, that innocent look on his face again. "Not my fault if the schools don't teach these youngsters anything."

Ornina gave him another look, this one half strained patience and half resignation, with a touch of what-am-I-going-to-do-with-you thrown in. Judging from the way her face settled into the deep lines there, Chandris decided, she probably used that expression a lot. "A twittery, Chandris," she said, "is an old and slightly vulgar slang term for a Kelsey's Splitter."

"Oh," Chandris said, relaxing again. "That's a high-speed ion analyzer."

Ornina raised her eyebrows questioningly at Hanan, who shrugged. "Well, you've certainly got the book learning down cold," he said, eyeing Chandris thoughtfully. "I suppose you know what the next question has to be."

She didn't, exactly; but she could take a pretty good guess. "Whether I've had any experience?"

"That's the one," he nodded. "Have you?"

"Not really," Chandris admitted, watching their faces carefully. This was where she was going to find out just how good a puff-talker she really was. "I've done a lot of simulator work, of course, but only a very little real flying. Mostly in—" a quick search of her memory—"Khalkha T-7s."

"Khalkhas?" Hanan gave a puff of contempt. "You mean there's someone out there still using those fossils?"

"Ours was in pretty good shape," Chandris improvised. "They also used it to teach the maintenance classes."

"I'm sure it gave you lots of practice there," he grunted.

Ornina gave him another of her patient looks. "If the editorial department will kindly shut up...?

Thank you." She looked back at Chandris. "I'm sure you realize that a huntership like the Gazelle isn't very much like a Khalkha. What makes you think you could handle it?"

"I'm sure I couldn't, at least not at first," Chandris said, keeping her voice quiet and honest and professional. They were going for it—they were actually going for it. "But I know a great deal about ships and their operation in general. And though I don't want to seem immodest, I'd be willing to bet that I can learn everything I'll need to know about hunterships faster than anyone you've ever met."

An instant later she knew she'd pushed it too far. Hanan's eyebrows went up, and even Ornina seemed taken aback. They looked at each other, communicating in some private code of expressions and tiny movements that Chandris couldn't even begin to read, and she gritted her teeth in silent rage at her stupidity. Nurk it all, she thought, the bitterness she'd been feeling earlier flooding back in through the warmth of the tea in her stomach.

The warmth and, unfortunately, the caffeine as well. Already she was starting to tremble as stimulant hit a stomach that hadn't had anything put in it since breakfast. She looked down at her hands, folded together on the table, cursing the weakness and false hope that had dragged her in here in the first place. Now she'd blown it, and she had exactly two options left: to wait until her hands had calmed down enough to score a track, or just forget about eating until morning.

"How much?" Hanan asked suddenly.

She looked up at him, frowning. "How much what?"

"How much do you bet?" he said.

It took a moment for Chandris to remember what the hell it was he was referring to. Then it connected. "I don't understand," she said carefully, looking back and forth between them. "Are you saying... I'm in?"

"We can't promise we'll take you on permanently," Ornina warned. "Or even for more than a single trip, for that matter. However—" she glanced at Hanan, looked quickly away "—a huntership can always use an extra hand or two aboard. We'll give you a try."

Hanan levered himself to his feet. "Let me show you to your cabin," he said, stepping to the door.

"Dinner will be in about half an hour. In the meantime, you can start reading through the Gazelle's spec manuals."

"She'd do better to go get her things from wherever she's stored them," Ornina pointed out. "You won't have time to do that in the morning, Chandris—we're scheduled for a six o'clock lift."

"Good point," Hanan grunted. "You need a hand carrying anything?"

"At the moment, I don't need any hands at all." Chandris gave her lip a rueful twist. "Unfortunately, my luggage has been, in the words of the spaceline, 'temporarily misplaced.' "

"Lost down the same rabbit hole as your college records, no doubt," Hanan said, shaking his head.

"Probably having a nice little chat together. Like I said, welcome to the real world."

"I'm sure it's not really lost," Chandris told him. It wasn't, either, though she doubted she'd be going back aboard the Xirrus to retrieve it anytime soon. "But they said they probably couldn't track it down before tomorrow."

"Well, never mind," Ornina said, her eyes traveling up and down the white dress Chandris had escaped the spaceport in, a dress now streaked with dust and dirt. "Whatever you had probably wouldn't have been very practical for space, anyway. After dinner we'll go to the outfitters and get you some proper coveralls."

"That would be wonderful." Chandris hesitated. "I really want to thank you—both of you," she added, looking at Hanan, "for giving me this chance. I won't let you down."

"I'm sure you won't," Ornina said softly. "Better go with Hanan, now. You've got a lot of reading to do before we lift in the morning."

"All right." Chandris turned to Hanan, still waiting in the doorway, and smiled. She'd done it; she'd actually done it. "I'm ready."

And as he led the way down the narrow, metal-walled corridor, she smiled again. This time to herself.

The database codes were simple enough to learn, the system itself considerably less so. It took Kosta over an hour to bend his Pax-oriented computer habits enough to use the Empyreal system without mis-keying every second command.

It took him the rest of the day to sort through the index of files on angels and Angelmass. Not the files themselves, just the index.

The sun was disappearing behind the squat buildings of Shikari City when he finally pushed his chair back from his desk, shoulders aching with fatigue and another, far different, tension. The database stretched back nearly thirty years: fifty years after Seraph's colonization, and a hundred fifty since the first group of breakaway colonists had arrived at Uhuru. Back then, Angelmass had been nothing more than a violently radiating quantum black hole, with the angels themselves little more than exotic curiosities for quantum theorists to argue about. It had only been in the past twenty years that all that had changed.