Timothy Zahn - Angelmass

"Damn. I was right."

"About what?" Chandris asked, a creepy sensation sending a shiver through her. Kosta's demons seemed to be contagious. "What is all that?"

"It's a global vector map of Angelmass's gravitational shifts during that last radiation surge," Kosta told her. "Those shifts go clear across the board."

"I don't believe this," Gyasi breathed, his voice sounding awestruck. "Look at that scale—those decreases are up to a tenth of a percent in places."

Chandris's mind flashed back to the conversation aboard the Gazelle. "Could it be something statistical?" she asked. "You said the Gazelle didn't give you enough data points."

"There are more than enough data points here," Kosta said. "It's not a mistake, either. Or a malfunction, or—"

"Hang on," Gyasi interrupted, tapping the screen. "What's this coming up?"

A narrow cone of brightly colored red was becoming visible as the vector map rotated, a red cone with a thin white line down its center.

And suddenly Chandris felt her stomach trying to turn inside out. "It's the same picture," she identified it, her voice sounding strange in her ears. "The one you got when you plotted out the surge that killed the Skyarcher. The same picture exactly."

"It's close, anyway," Gyasi said cautiously. "We'd have to run a curve comparison to be sure."

"Don't bother," Kosta told him. His voice, Chandris noticed distantly, was trembling slightly. "If Chandris says it's the same, it's the same. And there it is—there; that blue point that the white line's cutting through. That's where the Gazelle was."

Gyasi shook his head. "This is insane, Jereko," he insisted. "A black hole hasn't got any internal structure. None. What possible theoretical mechanism could exist to explain something like this?"

"Angelmass isn't a normal black hole," Kosta said. "Not anymore."

Chandris eyed him closely. There was a tension around his eyes, a graveyard look to his face. "What do you mean, not anymore?" she asked.

A muscle in Kosta's jaw twitched. "I've got a theory. But you're not going to like it."

"More than I don't like impossible gravity fluctuations?" Gyasi countered. "Come on, let's hear it."

Kosta hesitated, then shook his head. "Let's wait on the mass reading," he said. "This is crazy enough that... no, let's just wait."

"I hate waiting," Gyasi declared, getting to his feet. "I'm going to go check on the tracer."

He left the room. "So which way are you hoping it goes?" Chandris asked.

Kosta rubbed his eyes. "I'm a scientist, Chandris," he reminded her. "We're not supposed to hope data goes one way or the other."

"Yeah," she sniffed. "Right."

"Besides, I'm not even sure it matters anymore," he conceded. "Whether angels are standard quanta or Dr. Qhahenlo's quantum bundles, something weird has definitely happened to Angelmass."

He gestured toward the row of computer terminals on the long lab table beside them. "I wish I could get into the files and check some of the details of her theory. I know it predicts some mass loss here, but I don't know how much."

"Can't you do the calculation on your own?"

"This isn't like looking up the mass of a hydrogen atom or calculating a force vector," he said. "The mathematics involved are way too complicated to do by hand. And with my funds frozen, I don't have access to the computers."

Chandris looked at the terminals. "You want me to get you in?"

He threw her a startled look; suddenly seemed to remember who it was he was talking to. "You can do that?"

"Probably," she said, swiveling the closest terminal over into easy reach. "Want me to try?"

For a pair of heartbeats he stared at her hands as they hovered over the terminal, a battle going on behind his eyes. She waited... "No," he said quietly, reaching over to take one of her hands away from the keyboard. "We can't risk getting caught. Not now."

His hand was cold and rigid; and as she held it, Chandris found herself looking into his face. Into those foreign eyes, into the dark tension behind them.

Earlier, waiting in the darkness of the Gazelles angel storage room, she'd thought a lot about whether confronting a Pax spy alone was really a smart thing to do. He'd persuaded her to give him the benefit of the doubt for now, but she'd been ready to chop and hop the second he showed what he was really up to.

But now, suddenly, she realized her mental preparations had been unnecessary. Kosta had no sinister private plan, because Kosta was exactly what he claimed to be: a simple academic who'd been thrown into the deep end of the tiger pit. "Don't worry," she said. "I'm not going to turn you in."

He shook his head, his gaze drifting outward into space. "I'm not worried about myself, Chandris."

"Then what—?"

She broke off as, behind them, the door opened and Gyasi came back in. "Well?" Kosta demanded, letting go of Chandris's hand.

"It should be finished," Gyasi said, crossing toward them. "See if you can pull it up."

"Right," Kosta said, punching at the keyboard as Gyasi slid back into the seat beside him. The numbers came up...

Gyasi muttered something under his breath. "There it is," he murmured. "You were right again, Jereko."

"It lost mass?" Chandris asked, running her eye down the numbers and trying to make sense of them.

"Mass and charge both," Kosta told her, his voice tight. "Almost three percent each."

"And it lost them right through the outer mass coating," Gyasi added. "You know, if the angel's breaking down, the mass loss ought to show up as high-energy particles leaking through the shell.

Let me go see if there's a radiation detector setup free."

"Don't bother," Kosta said. "This isn't any spontaneous breakdown. The damage has already been done."

"Yes," Chandris murmured, a sudden ache in her heart as she stared at the numbers. She'd tried so hard to convince herself that the angel's presence hadn't been what had kept Hanan and Ornina working so peaceably together all these years. Apparently, that had been nothing but wishful puffthink.

"Chandris?"

She started out of her thoughts. Kosta was frowning at her. "What?" she said, turning her face away from him.

"It's not the Daviees who did this to it," he said quietly.

Did I say it was? the defensive retort bubbled automatically up into her throat. To her vague surprise, it stayed there. "Then who did?" she asked instead. "You? Me?"

"No," Kosta said. "Angelmass."

She turned back, half expecting to see something on his face that would show he was making some stupid joke. But his expression was deadly serious. "What do you mean, Angelmass? What does Angelmass have to do with it?"

"It's the source of the angels," Kosta said. "Hawking radiation, remember? A particle-antiparticle pair are created at the event horizon. One falls in, the other escapes outward."

"But there aren't any anti-angels," Gyasi objected.

"Yes, there are," Kosta said. His voice was firm, and just as serious as his expression. "We just haven't found them yet. But they're there."

He waved toward the display. "That alone proves it, as far as I'm concerned. Dr. Qhahenlo's theory allows for both quantum bundles and field effects, remember? Angelmass has a huge field—the corrosion of the Daviees' angel shows that much. If that field isn't being generated by an equally huge mass of anti-angels inside the black hole, where's it coming from?"

"Maybe from the Daviees?" Gyasi suggested. "I don't know these people. Maybe they're—" He waved a hand helplessly.

"What, evil incarnate?" Kosta scoffed. "Come on, Yaezon. Anyway, there's an easy way to check.

Remember that mass murderer you've got on the grounds with the angel in his cell? When was the last time that angel was checked?"

Gyasi made a face. "It's checked every six weeks," he conceded. "You're right; if there'd been any change the whole Institute would have heard about it. But if there are anti-angels, why hasn't anyone ever seen them?"