Timothy Zahn - Angelmass

"Thanks, but that shouldn't be necessary," Kosta said, fumbling his restraints off. "If you don't mind, though, I think I'll go to my room for awhile."

"Sure, go ahead," Ornina nodded.

Carefully, Kosta maneuvered out of his chair, looked once at the main display. "I'll be back before we reach the catapult."

"Don't worry about it," Ornina assured him. "It's not like there's anything you have to do during the operation."

"Okay." Gingerly, Kosta propelled himself across the control cabin to the door.

Carefully avoiding Chandris's eyes the whole way.

Given that there was no particular hurry, Kosta took his time; and he was therefore less than halfway to the crackerbox he'd been given as a cabin when he noticed the trajectory of his floating passage was taking a distinct drift toward one side of the corridors. The Daviees, ignoring his protests, had gone ahead and started the Gazelle rotating.

Typical, he thought, feeling his lip twist as he oriented himself upright against the sense of weight.

Less than an hour into this trip, and already his hosts were showing themselves to be the sort of compulsive do-gooders who insist on showering you with favors whether you want them or not.

He'd known a few people like that back home, and he'd never been able to stand being near any of them for more than fifteen minutes at a time. The laughing fates only knew whether a week here would drive him crazy.

Still, he had to admit that having a solid deck under his feet did make his stomach feel better.

Between that and the drug he'd taken before coming aboard, he was more or less recovered by the time he reached his cabin.

Recovered enough, in fact, that for the first time in several minutes he was able to concentrate on the air around him instead of on his own digestive tract.

He paused, still out in the corridor, taking deep breaths and trying to chase down the memory of where he'd come across that particular aroma before. Somewhere during his brief training, perhaps?

Or at the university?

Abruptly, it clicked: Tech Design 300-something. Sliding open his cabin door, he stepped inside and poked at the intercom switch. "Hanan?" he called.

"Right here," Hanan's voice came. "You feeling any better?"

"I'm fine, thanks," Kosta told him. "But your air system isn't. I think one of the scrubbers is starting to go."

"Thought that was what I smelled," Hanan grunted. "Number three, probably—it's been giving us trouble lately. I'll take a look once we've catapulted."

"Why don't I go look at it now?" Kosta offered. "I haven't got anything better to do at the moment."

He expected to be turned down flat. Compulsive do-gooders, in his experience, were never as good at accepting help as they were at doling it out. But—"Sure," Hanan said. "There's a tool kit in the forward mechanical room. Turn on your cabin display and I'll spot both that and the scrubbers on a schematic for you."

The schematic wasn't nearly as clear as Hanan obviously thought, but the Gazelle was a small ship and it didn't take Kosta more than a few minutes to get the tools and locate the failing scrubber.

Pulling off the front, he took a look inside.

The worlds of the Empyrean had been out of touch with the mainstream of Pax technology for nearly two hundred years, a fact Kosta had had driven home time and again as he worked with the equipment at the Institute. There was, however, only so much anyone could do with a device as simple and basic as an atmosphere scrubber.

As opposed to something exotic like, say, a launch dish.

An unpleasant shiver ran up his back. The launch dish. The Empyreals' hyperspace net had been bad enough, but at least there he'd had a vague sense of how an inspired twisting of catapult equations might possibly give rise to such a thing. The launch dish, on the other hand, might just as well be magic.

Magic his Pax military instructors had never mentioned. Magic that Commodore Lleshi and the Komitadji might not be aware even existed.

But then, theories aside, the angels themselves might as well be magic, too.

Angels.

For a long minute Kosta stared into the humming scrubber, his mind back in the control cabin with Hanan and his strange angel theory. Strange... and yet, the more Kosta thought about it, the harder it was to simply dismiss out of hand.

Because he had a point. History had never been one of Kosta's main interests, but he knew enough to recognize that the pattern Hanan had described had been repeated over and over again on the Pax's other colony worlds. There had indeed been no blooming of culture or tolerance or friendship as humanity moved out among the stars. In fact, as often as not, the exact opposite took place.

"You waiting to see if it's going to fix itself?"

Kosta spun around, the sudden movement in the low gravity skidding him around on the deck. It was Chandris, of course, leaning negligently against the door jamb three meters away.

"You startled me," Kosta told her reproachfully, grabbing the edge of the scrubber to get his balance back. At least he'd tried to sound reproachful, but the words came out sounding merely nervous. "I didn't know you were there."

"You weren't supposed to," she said bluntly. "You going to fix it or not?"

Biting back a retort, Kosta broke open the tool kit. "You always go around sneaking up on people?" he asked over his shoulder as he got to work.

"You always sit around gazing soulfully into machinery?" she countered.

"I was thinking about what Hanan said about the angels," Kosta said. "Especially that bit about Angelmass hosting an alien lifeform. Does he really believe all that?"

"Why don't you ask him?"

So much for trying to be civil. "I can do this myself, you know," he growled. "There's no need for you to stick around. Unless you don't trust me to do it right."

"Me, not trust you?" she said, her voice fairly dripping with sarcasm. "A known thief and stowaway, not trusting the fine upstanding scientist-citizen who stood by and let her get away from the police?

What a ridiculous idea."

Kosta braced himself. There it was, the question he'd known she would eventually ask. "I didn't want to get involved," he said, trying for a combination of embarrassment and sincerity and mentally crossing his fingers. "I was new to Seraph, and I was afraid blowing the whistle on you would get me embroiled in something messy. For all I knew, walking out with you might have been seen as accessory after the fact."

He risked a glance over his shoulder to try to gauge her expression. He might as well have saved himself the effort; her face was an unreadable mask. "What about later, at the Institute?" she demanded.

"It was a little late to start making noise then," he said, turning back to the computer. "I'd already let you go once. The safest thing to do was answer your questions and get you out of there before anyone recognized you."

"Especially while you were with me?"

"That, too."

"Uh-huh. So, of course, when you needed transport to Angelmass, the Gazelle was the first ship you thought of."

Kosta swallowed a curse. "Not that it's any of your business, but the Gazelle was the fifteenth huntership I tried. Most of them wouldn't even hear me out before giving me the toss." He hesitated; but she deserved this. "I figured that any people soft-headed enough to hire you might be willing to give me a ride."

"You're too kind," she said calmly. "Tell me about Balmoral."

He blinked. "What?"

"Balmoral," she repeated. "The place where you grew up, remember?"

"I didn't grow up on Balmoral," Kosta corrected, feeling a thin layer of sweat squeezing out from his neck pores. If she was going to start quizzing him on his fictitious background... "I grew up in a small town called Palitaine on Lorelei. I just went to college on Balmoral."