Timothy Zahn - Angelmass

"Yes," Chandris muttered.

"Good." Ornina took a deep breath, the momentary anger fading from her face. "And one more thing. Like it or not, Chandris, you were a godsend to us. We need you here. More than that, we want you here. In five years of taking in everyone from outcasts to thieves to fugitives we've never found anyone who clicked even remotely as well with us and the ship as you have."

A ripple of old fear twisted through Chandris's heart. "I can't stay here forever," she said. "I never said I would."

"I know." Ornina turned back to her board. But not before Chandris saw that her eyes were shiny wet. "You're free to leave anytime you want to, of course. I just wanted you to understand how we felt."

The board beeped. "Looks like the bottleneck's clearing up," she said. "We'd best get moving."

"Right," Chandris murmured, the word coming out with difficulty around the knot in her throat. Yes, she understood, all right. Understood that, for all the old fears and habits that still haunted her, she didn't want to leave the Gazelle, either. Understood that, for probably the first time in her life, she had found something that was worth fighting for.

She might not be a thief anymore. But she hadn't forgotten how to fight.

The almost-felt jerk came, and in a blink the Seraph catapult was replaced by the spidery arms of Angelmass Central's tethered net poles. "Approach vector?" Ornina asked, all business again.

"Vector logged in," Chandris confirmed crisply, matching the other woman's tone. "There seems to be a lot of traffic ahead, though. We might want to swing our approach a little wider than usual."

"Good idea," Ornina nodded, fingers playing across her keys. "Let's see... let's try this."

Chandris gave the projected course a quick study. "Looks good," she agreed. "Want me to implement, or confirm it with Central?"

"I'll call Central," Ornina said, reaching for the comm section of her board. "Go ahead and plug it in so we'll be ready when they give us clearance."

Chandris had just started keying in the new course when the door hissed open behind her. She turned, expecting to see Hanan—

"I see we've arrived," Kosta commented, drifting in.

"Quiet—we're working," Chandris growled, turning back to her board.

"Sorry," Kosta stage-whispered.

He headed over to his seat, busying himself with something. Chandris took her time, checking and rechecking the course and her inputting of it, with the desired result: Ornina finished her part of the task first. "All cleared," she told Chandris, switching off the comm. "Go ahead and execute. Hello, Jereko," she added, turning to Kosta. "Everything all right with your equipment?"

"Yes, thanks," he replied. "Better than all right, actually—I thought I was going to have to sit down there with it the whole time, but Hanan helped me tie the outputs into one of the Gazelles spare command lines so I can operate it from up here."

Chandris felt her lip twist. Kosta settling down in the control cabin. Terrific. "He's supposed to be working on a fuel pump down there," she told Kosta tartly. "Not fiddling around with your stuff."

"Hey, he insisted," Kosta shot back. "It's not my fault if he's the kind who likes to be helpful."

"He is that," Ornina murmured.

Chandris clenched her teeth; but they were both right. Much as she'd love to do so, she really couldn't blame Kosta for this one. "Well, next time make sure he's not already doing something, all right?" she growled.

"For whatever it's worth to you, there probably won't be a next time," he reminded her stiffly. "By the time we get back to Seraph my credit line ought to be untangled, and we can go our separate ways."

"Good," Chandris muttered. She glanced at Ornina; went back for a closer look. The older woman was gazing studiously at her displays, a slight but unmistakable smile playing around her lips.

"What?" Chandris demanded.

"Nothing," Ornina said, the smile vanishing into the same sort of innocent look Hanan always used when he was about to close the trap on one of his jokes. "I must say, Jereko, that your work sounds fascinating. What exactly is this particular experiment supposed to do?"

"I'm going to be sampling several small bandwidths of Angelmass's radiation spectrum," Kosta told her. "Hopefully, it'll give me some clues as to why the angel emission has been increasing over the past few months."

"It's been increasing?" Ornina frowned.

"That's what my numbers tell me," Kosta said. "And yours, too, for that matter." He looked at Chandris. "Didn't Chandris tell you?"

Ornina looked at Chandris, too, eyebrows raised. "It didn't seem important," Chandris said with a shrug.

"Probably isn't," Ornina agreed. "Still, you can't always tell what's going to wind up being important down the line." She turned back to Kosta. "But enough shop talk. Tell us something about yourself, Jereko."

Kosta took a deep breath, and Chandris turned back to her board, permitting herself a tight smile.

The same territory she'd just gone over with Kosta below, territory she now knew by heart. This could, she decided, be very interesting.

It was, too, though not in the way she'd expected. Kosta never contradicted any of what he'd told her, never slipped up on historical events or on the physical details of the places he said he'd lived. He was articulate enough, accurate enough, and apparently sincere enough for all of it to be true.

But it wasn't.

There was plenty of evidence she could point to, at least to someone who knew the drill. A few flowery phrases that sounded like they'd been pulled from a Balmoral Visitors' Guide; an occasional exact quote from their conversation below, something she knew from experience was exceedingly rare; an underlying preciseness in his voice that showed he was watching every single word he said.

It was definitely puff-talk. Detailed and well rehearsed, but puff-talk just the same.

But at the same time, there was something missing, something that any scorer good enough to have worked up such an elaborate background ought to have had. A sense of daring, perhaps, or some of the oily arrogance that had been a part of all the really expert puff-talkers she'd known back in the Barrio. Kosta played more like an actor parroting someone else's lines.

Which made Kosta... what?

Chandris still didn't know. But she intended to find out.

And so she sat at her board, listening to every word he said and letting the Gazelle more or less fly itself toward Angelmass.

And with her full attention on Kosta, she completely missed the first subtle clue that something had gone terribly wrong.

"...and so, rather to my amazement, the Institute accepted my application," Kosta concluded. "I didn't give them time to change their minds. I booked passage on a liner and—" he shrugged "—here I am."

"Here you are, indeed." Ornina shook her head—in wonderment, Kosta hoped, not disbelief. "That's quite a story, Jereko. I certainly hope you can get your finances straightened out quickly. It'd be a shame if such a promising career was derailed by something as trivial as a clerical error."

"I'm sure it will be," he assured her. He threw a glance at the back of Chandris's head, feeling some of his tension draining away. He'd poured a lot of hours into memorizing his cover story, but it had been time well spent. He'd gotten through it without making any errors, and with a certain degree of panache besides. Maybe he was finally starting to adapt to this spy stuff.

And just then, in the back of his mind, a quiet alarm went off.

He froze, searching frantically through what he'd just said. Had he, at the very end, made some kind of fatal blunder in his story?

And then he got it. The gamma-ray sparks—those damned noisy ubiquitous gamma-ray sparks—had stopped.