Angelmass

by Timothy Zahn

  She reached one of the empty staterooms without incident and let herself in. The place wasn’t as flat-out luxurious, somehow, as she’d expected it to be, but it stomped the snot out of her own cramped cabin. More important to her plans at the moment was the fancy computer system built into the entertainment center, a system that should give her access to the ship’s public library. Pulling out her pocket knife, she stepped over to it—

  And stopped short. “Nurk,” she muttered. She’d expected it to be a floating nexus-connect type like the hand-held job she’d used earlier. Instead, it was hard-wired in through the entertainment lines.

  Which pretty much popped the cord on the uncoupling trick she’d used earlier. If she wanted to get into the library without the computer howling up a stink, she was going to have to do it from a room that wasn’t supposed to be vacant.

  Mentally, she shrugged. No big deal—she’d planned on mingling with the paying passengers anyway. It was high time she got started.

  The room had been fully made up, with an impressive selection of fluffy towels laid out in the bathroom. Taking two of the larger ones, she folded and stacked them for carrying and slipped out of the room. Given the crowd in the lounge she’d passed earlier, it seemed likely that most of the rooms along here would be vacant. An ideal time to go shopping.

  It was a more difficult search than the hunt for her maid’s uniform had been. Not only did she have to find clothes that would fit her, she also had to find them in closets so bulging that there would be a good chance the owner would never notice the loss. Upper-class people, she’d always heard, were so rich that they threw their money away on everything they saw. Unfortunately, the image didn’t seem to apply to spaceliner passengers. Up and down the corridors she went, hitting stateroom after stateroom: knocking, apologizing about having the wrong room if there was an answer, letting herself in if there wasn’t. And she was just about to concede defeat and move down to the middle-class section when she finally scored.

  It was a huge room, easily twice the size of the vacant one she’d moved into an hour earlier. With twice the storage space, too; and every bit of it stuffed to the throat. A family of five, judging from the various sizes represented, with the teenage daughter taking more than her fair share of the closet space. Chandris sorted through the dresses, chose two of the plainest layer-style ones, and folded them up inside her towels. An equally bulging jewelry box beckoned from the top of one of the dressers, and for a moment she was tempted. But only for a moment. An upper-class teen might not miss a dress or two; but everyone kept tabs on their jewelry.

  She took the dresses back to her borrowed room, added a third towel to her pile, and returned to the hunt. Her newly changed luck held: the very next stateroom she tried contained not only too many dresses, but too many shoes as well. Neither set was exactly her size, but close enough. Again selecting a layer-style dress, she hid it and a pair of shoes inside her stack of towels and went back to her room.

  There, using her knife and the compact sewing kit she’d brought from her luggage, she set to work stripping the various layers of the dresses apart. There’d been a girl from the Barrio once who’d swiped a fancy outfit during a score and gotten cracked two days later when the original owner spotted her wearing it on the street, and Chandris had no intention of doing something that puff-headed herself. The alterations took her nearly two hours; but when she was finished she had combined parts from the three dresses to form three entirely new and—hopefully—unrecognizable ones.

  Altering herself was next. First step was to get the damn blonding out of her hair, returning it to its natural shiny black. She cleaned her face and hands next, getting rid of both the cosmetic stuff and the underbase that had lightened her skin into line with the blonded hair. Redoing the makeup was easy enough—from what she’d seen, the upper-class women aboard the Xirrus used far less makeup than was common among middle-class or even Barrio women. Possibly because they didn’t need to try and make themselves attractive; more likely because they could afford to go with cosmetic surgery instead. Still, as Trilling used to say, vanity had its uses, provided it was in other people.

  Redoing her hair was a little harder. Most of the women she’d seen while hunting for clothes had been pretty free with the frostsprays, fancy holdings, and jeweled clips, none of which Chandris had available even if she’d known how to fasten them in. Fortunately, she’d also spotted a few who had simply put their hair into elaborate braidings, and she’d passed close enough to one of them to get a good look at the pattern. Actually recreating it was trickier than she’d expected, but with persistence and several false starts she finally got it more or less right.

  And now came the easy part. Giving herself a careful examination in the long foyer mirror, she keyed off the lights and left the stateroom. With the outer woman transformed from lower-class scorer to upper-class leech, it was time to do the same for the inner woman.

  Earlier, she’d given herself a leisurely half hour to learn how to play a newly middle-class college student. Now, wandering between the various upper-class lounges, she had her new role down in half that time. Part of that was sheer necessity—she hadn’t eaten since late morning, and was starting to feel the familiar pangs of hunger—but mostly it was that the mannerisms of these people were genuinely less complicated. Perhaps, she thought once, their money and power did their talking for them.

  A fresh rumble ran through her stomach; but fortunately the solution was already close at hand. He was hovering not quite obviously at the edge of her vision, and had been there since the second of the lounges she had visited. Around fifty years old, he was wearing an expensive-looking jacket and jeweled neck clasp and the look of a man on the hunt.

  Under other circumstances she would probably have let him make the first move. With her stomach starting to hurt, she wasn’t in the mood to be patient. Drifting toward him, her eyes turned elsewhere, she shifted direction with smooth suddenness and bumped gently into him. “Oh!—excuse me,” she said, looking up into his eyes. “That wasn’t very graceful of me, was it?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said, smiling a hunter’s smile back at her. “Spaceliner travel does that all the time to people. Shifting engine thrusts throw the pseudogravity off, and all.”

  She raised her eyebrows fractionally and returned the smile. “You sound like someone who travels a lot.”

  It was an obvious setup line, and he grabbed it with both hands. “More than I wish, sometimes,” he said. “My company’s headquartered on Seraph, but we’re also heavily involved in Lorelei asteroid mining and Balmoral orbital refining. Makes for a busy schedule. Stardust Metals—you might possibly have heard of us.”

  “Don’t be modest,” she chided gently. “Of course I’ve heard of you.” She hadn’t, actually, until she’d caught a passing reference ten minutes earlier. But he didn’t need to know that. “And what is it you do for them?”

  He grinned, the hunter’s smile again. “Mostly try to keep them as profitable as possible,” he said, offering his hand. “I’m Amberson Toomes; part owner and CMD.”

  She raised her eyebrows, higher this time. “Really!” she said, wondering what the hell a CMD was. “I’m impressed.”

  He shrugged modestly. “Don’t be. Most of the people here are considerably more important than I am.”

  “If importance is judged by how well you ignore strangers, they’re definitely more important than you,” she said ruefully, dropping her eyes a bit. “I’ve been walking around for—oh, I don’t know how long—and you’re the first person who’s bothered to speak with me.”

  He patted her shoulder. “Don’t judge them by first night out,” he warned. “Anyway, you haven’t exactly been working hard to elbow your way into conversations.”

  She let her lip twitch in a coquettish smile. “And how would you know that?” she challenged. “Unless you’d been watching me, that is.”

  He smiled back. “I might have noticed you,” he ac
knowledged. “But only because I happen to like looking at beautiful women.”

  “Flatterer.”

  “Connoisseur,” he corrected with a slight bow.

  She laughed. “My name’s Chandris Adriessa,” she told him. “I don’t suppose that in and around all that looking you happened to find the dining room?”

  “I did indeed,” he said, gently but firmly taking her arm. Not big-brotherly, like the engineer had, but like a hunter who’s caught his prey. “All six of them, in fact. Come; I’ll show you which one’s the best.”

  He insisted from the start on charging her dinner to his bill, a gallantry she accepted with a maximum of verbal gratitude and a minimum of token protest. The issue had never been in doubt, of course; no one at this end of the ship seemed to use money or cards, and she could hardly charge her meal to an unoccupied stateroom. But by making the offer up front he saved her the trouble of maneuvering him into doing so later.

  The food was good enough, though not as filling as she might have wished. As they ate she worked at getting her companion talking about himself, with an eye toward filling in some of her ignorance about upper-class life.

  No hard task, as it turned out. Toomes was a braggart—a refined and cultured braggart, but a braggart just the same— and after the first couple of questions all Chandris had to do was listen and nod and act fascinated by it all. By the time he remembered his manners and began asking her about herself, she had everything she needed to puff him a convincing spider web of lies, right down to a convoluted story about how her parents’ manufacturing firm on Uhuru had made enough the past year on superconductor contracts to send her to college on Seraph.

  Not that he was in any shape to notice small slips anyway: It was clear even before they got to the dining room that Toomes had gotten an early start on the Xirrus’s supply of reeks, giving him a slight mental haze that the alcoholic drinks he’d washed his dinner down with had made even hazier. It was a personality type Chandris had had more than her fill of back in the Barrio: men who measured themselves by how much they could drink or sniff or swallow before their brains were so nurked they couldn’t see straight.

  She’d lost track of how many evenings Trilling and his friends had ruined for her with those stupid contests of theirs. It was only fair that, just this once, it should work to her advantage.

  And so she talked, and listened, and kept the floaters and relaxers and drinks coming; and by the time they headed back to his stateroom he needed to hold onto her arm to keep upright. She got the door unlocked and maneuvered him to the bed, sitting him down there and helping him off with his jacket and neck clasp.

  He was fumbling with the fasteners on her dress when he fell asleep.

  She took his shoes off and, with some effort, managed to get him straightened out on the bed. For a moment she considered stripping him all the way down, then decided against it. If he woke up thinking he’d already scored he might drop her back at square one and go looking for someone more challenging. Better to keep him dangling, at least for another day or two, before considering any alterations to the script.

  Kicking off her own ill-fitting shoes, she snared a chair and pulled it over to the room’s computer terminal. A minute later she’d pulled up the Xirrus library’s complete index of articles pertaining to spaceship operation. With Toomes snoring gently behind her, she called up the first article on the list and began to read.

  CHAPTER 4

  “… But first I’d like to clear up any questions about how I see this new job you’re sending me off to do. The first duty of a High Senator, it seems to me, is to the whole Empyrean. Not one district or another, not even one world or another; but to all the people.”

  The man on the screen paused, and Arkin Forsythe took a moment to let his eyes trace out the other’s face. A care-lined, middle-aged face, with receding sandy hair, blue-gray eyes, and an oddly intense set to the square jaw. A serious face; a face whose strong aura of professionalism formed a perfect counterpoint to the casual, common-man pattern of his speech. A face that would inspire loyalty in some and contempt in others, but nothing in between.

  Across the room, there was a knock on the door. “Come,” Forsythe called, tapping the freeze button and looking up. The door opened, to reveal Ranjh Pirbazari. “Have you a minute, High Senator-elect?”

  “Sure, Zar, come on in,” Forsythe waved him over, noting the data cyl in the other’s hand. “What have we got?”

  “The official follow-up report on that Pax incursion out in the belt three days ago,” Pirbazari told him, crossing to Forsythe’s desk and handing him the cyl. “They’ve done some more analyses of the ship and the battle, but there’s nothing really new in the way of fresh data. They were able to pull a name off the bow, though: the Komitadji. It was the name of some guerrilla or mercenary group in the Balkans, I’m told, sometime in Earth’s distant past.”

  “Mm,” Forsythe said, eyeing the slender cylinder distastefully. Official follow-up reports, in his experience, were nearly always a waste of time for everyone concerned. “Any fresh excuses as to why it took them so long to kick the damn thing out of the system?”

  Pirbazari shook his head. “They still say the catapult simply wasn’t designed for anything that big, and that it took them that long to recalibrate.” He hesitated. “I’d have to say, though, that that’s probably more an explanation than it is an excuse. There’s really no way anyone could have anticipated the Pax having a warship that big. Certainly they never showed anything even approaching that size during the contact negotiations. From everything I’ve read about the incident, EmDef did as well as could be expected under the circumstances.”

  Forsythe nodded, still not happy but experienced enough to recognize a dead-end when he found himself driving down one. Finding tails to pin the blame on was standard political instinct; but Pirbazari had twenty years of Empyreal Defense Force service under his belt, and if he said they’d done all they could then they probably had. “Subject closed then, I guess,” he grunted. “Any fresh ideas as to what the Pax was trying to prove with this stunt?”

  Pirbazari shrugged. “Number one theory is still that they’ve decided to escalate their little psychological pinprick campaign and wanted to see what kind of reception they could expect if they sent in a warship and started shooting. Second place goes to the possibility that they wanted to map out the net’s physical configuration and figured that using a ship outside our normal catapult range would buy them more time to study it.”

  “Or maybe they wanted to drop something and hoped all the noise and smoke would hide it?”

  “If they did, it worked,” Pirbazari said dryly. “EmDef had ships quartering the area for several hours afterward and none of them picked up anything but normal asteroids. If anything was dropped, it had to have been pretty small.”

  “Or else shielded like crazy,” Forsythe said.

  ‘True,” Pirbazari agreed. “Still, we’re talking an awful lot of trouble and risk just to smuggle in a spy or two. Especially given that they’ve already got either a spy or data-sifter system in place here already.”

  Forsythe nodded sourly. “One at the very least. I don’t suppose there’s anything new on that data-pulse transmission?”

  “Only that the timing of the pulse, with the Komitadji ’pulting in just in time to intercept it, meant they had the whole thing carefully planned out,” Pirbazari said.

  “Still no idea where on Lorelei the pulse originated?”

  “No,” Pirbazari conceded. “And if they haven’t been able to backtrack it by now, they never will. Whatever this phase-and-relay scheme is the Pax is using, it’s a real charmer.”

  “It ought to be,” Forsythe growled. “They had five months to set it up before we kicked them out. For all we know they could have smuggled in an entire fifth column.”

  “Yes, sir,” Pirbazari murmured.

  Forsythe eyed him, noted the quiet battle of current and former loyalties in his expression. “I
’m not blaming EmDef for that,” he told the other. “It wasn’t their fault that we had Pax ships and people swarming all over the place. The High Senate had no business holding those useless talks in Empyreal space in the first place. They should have insisted on neutral ground.”

  Pirbazari’s face cleared, loyalties back in line again. “None of us liked it very much either,” he admitted. “I have to say, though, that I really don’t think more than a handful of Pax spies could have gotten past us.”

  “A handful could be enough.” Forsythe looked at the cyl still in his hand, set it down on the desk. “Well, I’ll take a look later. For whatever it’s worth.”

  “Yes, sir.” Pirbazari nodded to Forsythe’s left. “Your father?”

  Forsythe looked over at the still-frozen image on the screen. “Yes. His spaceport speech, the day he left Lorelei to take his own High Senate seat.”

  “I remember that day,” Pirbazari mused. “My parents watched the speech at home, my father grumping the whole time about how he was going to make a hash of the job.”

  Forsythe snorted gently. “A confident sort, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir,” Pirbazari said. “But he was wrong about a lot of other things, too.”

  Forsythe smiled, feeling the bittersweet tang of memory in his throat. “He was an expert politician,” he said, more to himself than to Pirbazari. “A lot of people never understood that, or else never believed it. But he was. He understood the checks and balances that make a government function—understood them better than anyone I’ve ever known. He knew that you had to make trades and deals and compromises if you wanted to get things done. And he got things done.”