Timothy Zahn - Angelmass

"Good." Hanan closed his hand on the shocker and yawned prodigiously. "So are we finished for the night?"

"As far as I'm concerned." Kosta looked at Chandris. "You have anything else?"

She shook her head. "And I have a busy day tomorrow. I'd better get back to the ship and get some sleep."

"Sleep fast," Ornina warned her. "Ship repair services open at six in the morning, and I hope to have someone at the Gazelle by seven. Did you happen to pull up a damage survey, by the way?"

Chandris nodded. "I can transmit it here to you if you want."

"Yes, please," Ornina said. "It'll save time in the morning if I can tell them what exactly they'll need to do." For a moment her eyes searched Chandris's face. "You know, we can probably scrape up the money from somewhere else."

"I said I'd take care of it," Chandris told her, standing up. "You just concentrate on getting the ship ready to fly."

"All right, dear," Ornina said, giving Chandris a small and clearly forced smile. "You take care, then." She looked up at Kosta. "You, too, Jereko."

"We will," Kosta promised her. "Come on, Chandris, let's get going."

"High Senator Forsythe?"

With a jerk, Forsythe started awake, the muscles in his neck screaming with the sudden movement.

He was, he discovered with some embarrassment, sprawled across one of the couches in the fifthfloor hospital lounge where he'd apparently fallen asleep. "You startled me, Zar," he said reproachfully, blinking his eyes to clear them. The horizon outside the window, he noted, was starting to lighten with the coming of dawn. He'd been asleep for probably the past five hours or so.

"Sorry, sir," Pirbazari apologized. "Are you all right?"

"Sure." Forsythe said, frowning at the tightness of his aide's expression. "What's the matter?

Ronyon?"

Pirbazari shook his head. "A level-one message just came in from Uhuru. Lorelei has gone silent."

Something got a grip on Forsythe's throat. "What do you mean, 'gone silent'?"

"It's been twelve hours since the last scheduled skeeter to anywhere," Pirbazari said. "That puts the last one six hours overdue."

And there were five skeeter-sized catapults in the system, any one of which could fire out the regular capsules if necessary. "Could the planetary catapult have gone down, and for some reason they couldn't get a transmission to any of the ones in the belts?"

"Not likely," Pirbazari said. "For starters, there are six different official transmission systems out to the asteroids, plus all the commercial and private channels the government can commandeer in a pinch. And SOP is to send something on schedule, even if it's just a notice that systems are temporary down."

Forsythe hissed under his breath. "Which means all five catapults have been knocked out."

"Looks that way," Pirbazari conceded. "And fast enough that no one had time to get out a warning."

"How fast would that be?" Forsythe asked, reaching to his throat and tightening his neck clasp back into place.

Pirbazari pursed his lips. "Not much more than an hour. Maybe an hour and a half, depending on how badly the situation caught them napping."

" 'The situation'?" Forsythe bit out. "Is that the official EmDef term for a Pax invasion?"

"We don't know that it was an invasion, sir," Pirbazari warned. "Or that the Pax was involved.

Jumping to conclusions isn't going to get us anywhere with EmDef Command."

"Oh, the Pax is involved, all right," Forsythe said grimly. "I don't know how they did it, but it was them. If EmDef Command hasn't figured that out, they all ought to be fired. What's anyone doing at the moment?"

"Uhuru sent a quick courier to Lorelei four hours ago to look things over," Pirbazari said. "As of my last check, it hadn't yet responded."

"And when it does, it'll report back to Uhuru anyway," Forsythe said, retrieving his jacket from a nearby chair and slipping it on. "Where's the local EmDef HQ?"

"Eastern end of the huntership yards," Pirbazari said, dropping into step beside Forsythe as the High Senator headed for the lounge door. "Far side of the launch dishes."

"Good," Forsythe said as he pushed open the door and hurried out into the quiet corridor, still with its night lighting in place. "I want a courier of our own sent to Lorelei right away, with a collapsed skeeter catapult aboard."

"You think that's a good idea?" Pirbazari asked carefully. "The only way for the Pax to have destroyed the skeeter catapults at all four nets would have been for them to have overwhelmed the defenses there. Those sectors will be crawling with Pax ships."

"True," Forsythe said. "But follow it through. If they've destroyed the defenses at the nets, there's a fair chance they also destroyed the nets themselves."

"Which would mean the whole system would be open to their incoming ships," Pirbazari pointed out.

"And to ours," Forsythe reminded him. "If we can put something small into the system, maybe at a good distance from anything the Pax would be interested in—"

"There's a fair chance it could sit there quietly and put together a skeeter catapult without being noticed," Pirbazari finished for him, the first hint of cautious hope tugging at his voice. "It might work. But what if there's still one net working?"

"Then we'll have lost a courier," Forsythe said. "Hardly worth counting after we've lost a whole system."

"I suppose not," Pirbazari murmured.

Forsythe threw a sideways look at him. "Something?"

"I was just wondering," Pirbazari said slowly. "All those mining ships we armed."

"What about them?"

"We gave them targeting systems," Pirbazari said. "But we never gave them any instruction about tactics or strategy. I hope they've organized themselves into some kind of guerrilla-style resistance among the asteroids instead of just throwing themselves uselessly at incoming Pax ships."

Forsythe grimaced. "Let's hope they were smart and not just brave," he said. "In the meantime, let's see if we can find out what's going on."

The receptionist on the Stardust Metals executive floor was regally seated behind a desk the size of the Gazelles machine shop, working diligently at a petite little computer terminal as Chandris pulled open the heavy door and stepped from the hallway onto a wide expanse of light gray carpet. To the casual observer, she supposed, the receptionist would probably have appeared totally engrossed in her work, oblivious to the newcomer's approach.

But to Chandris's street-trained eye, it was clear the whole thing was an act. The receptionist was fully aware of the younger woman's presence; and from her body language Chandris could guess she was wondering who this intruder was.

Who, or what. Chandris still hadn't really nailed down the proper upper-class clothing styles, and she'd had even less to work with on Seraph than she'd had aboard the Xirrus. Dressed in the best outfit she'd been able to throw together, she probably still looked a mess.

But there was no time for anything better now. And besides, she wasn't going for the sophisticated seductress role now. This time she was going straight for an even more basic human motivation.

Greed.

She was three steps from the desk before the receptionist finally looked up. "Good morning," she said. Her voice was polite enough, but there was a slightly contemptuous edge to the look she sent up and down Chandris's outfit. "May I help you?"

"Yes," Chandris said, nodding toward the five doors set into the curved wall behind the receptionist.

The upper-class voice and gestures, at least, she had down cold, and she could tell the receptionist was taken slightly aback by it. "Please tell Mr. Amberson Toomes that Chandris Adriessa is here to see him. We met on his last flight from Lorelei aboard the Xirrus."