"About forty minutes ago."

Qhahenlo's lips puckered. "Occasionally, you'll find I get too engrossed ill my work to be a proper host. My apologies."

"That's all right," Kosta a.s.sured her.Qhahenlo looked back at Gyasi. "Anyway. Let's see; we were about here..."Their heads went back together, already lost in the data again. Kosta watched them, a wisp of worried contempt tugging at him. They were the archetypical crystal-tower scientists, all right, both of them. So completely wrapped up in their research that they didn't notice the rest of the universe.

So single-mindedly confident in what they were doing that not even the slightest doubt ever crossed either of their minds.

So infatuated by the angels that they'd lost all sense of perspective.

They'd put an angel on a baby. How long would it be before they were putting angels on all the babies?

"Yaezon?" he asked suddenly. "What kind of numbers are we talking about to get the Empyrean

properly fitted out with angels?"

Gyasi looked up again. "Well, we need angels for all politicians from regional level on up. Then there are the judges, corporate executives, EmDef officers, trade officials-"

"Yes, but what I want is the total number of angels we're talking about."

Gyasi frowned. "No idea. Doctor?"

"Not offhand," Qhahenlo said. Without looking up she waved at another terminal. "But all that

should be listed under the Empyreal Angel Experiment heading."

The approaching-zero-gee alarm was beginning to sound as Kosta found the proper sublist; and the ship's rotation was nearly at a stop by the time he located the current status information.

It was worse than he'd expected. The original estimate had been that it would take forty years to

achieve the target level of one angel per hundred Empyreals. Now, barely eighteen years later, updated projections were guessing that goal to be only seven more years away. More hunterships, better shielding and detection equipment, the breakthrough invention of the hypers.p.a.ce net-there

were pages and pages of graphs tracing how each new scientific and technological advance had brought the goal closer. Already over eighteen thousand angels had been collected, with that number growing at an ever increasing rate.

Kosta paused, staring at one of the graphs, a quiet alarm bell going off in the back of his mind. He'd studied great quant.i.ties of black hole theory during the astrophysics segment of his tridoctorum degree. But if that graph was correctly drawn...

Strapping himself into the chair, hardly noticing his weightlessness, he got to work.

He was still at it when the announcement came that the ship had landed.

"So. What did you think?"

Kosta looked up from his display, feeling a flicker of annoyance at the interruption. "Of what, Angelma.s.s?"

"Of Dr. Qhahenlo," Gyasi said. "And our project."

"Oh." Kosta shrugged, turning his attention to the display again. "I don't know. Okay, I guess."

Peripherally, he saw Gyasi put down his stylus and scoot his chair over. "Okay, I give up," he said.

"What in the world is so interesting?"

Kosta hesitated. He was sure now. But whether he ought to tell any of the Empyreals about this...

No. Of course he ought to. He was here to save them, after all. "This," he told Gyasi, swiveling the

display around. "It's a graph of number of angels captured per huntership per unit time, shown in one-

year slices. You can see that it's gone up in the past couple of years."

Gyasi glanced at it. "No big surprise," he said. "There have been some major advances in technology and sensor equipment-"

"I've factored those out," Kosta cut him off.

Gyasi stopped. "Oh." He looked at the graph again, more carefully this time. "Well, maybe it's due to the fact that Angelma.s.s is getting smaller. You know-as a quantum black hole gets smaller, it gets

hotter and radiates its ma.s.s away faster." He reached for the keyboard. "Let's see; a hotter effective temperature would shift the mean particle spectrum upwards, creating more angels-"

"I've factored that out, too," Kosta told him.

Gyasi frowned. "You sure?"

Kosta nodded. "It's a simpler calculation even than the technological advancements. Check it

yourself if you want."

"I'll take your word for it." For a long minute Gyasi gazed at the display, lips moving soundlessly. "Interesting and a half," he admitted at last. "What do you think is causing it?"

Kosta shook his head. "I don't know. But it's for sure that something strange is going on out there. Something in the Hawking process that current theory doesn't cover."

"Angels don't come from Hawking radiation," Gyasi said absently, eyes still on the graph. "At least not directly."

Kosta frowned. "What do you mean? I thought all particle radiation from a quantum black hole was Hawking process."

"Not angels, apparently," Gyasi shrugged. "Cla.s.sical Hawking process is a tidal-force creation of particle-antiparticle pairs at the event horizon, one of which escapes while the other falls into the black hole. Right? So if angels are Hawking process, we should see anti-angels too. Only we don't."

"Never?"

Gyasi shrugged again. "No one's ever found one."

Kosta rubbed his chin. "But if it's not Hawking process, then what's the mechanism?"

"The theorists over in the west wing have been trying to answer that one for twenty years," Gyasi said dryly. "So far nothing they've come up with has been solid enough to hold soup." He shook his head. "I wonder why no one's ever noticed this before."

Because you've all got terminal tunnel vision where angels are concerned. "Probably because no one's thought to look," Kosta said instead. "That's why you bring in people like me who don't know what the unspoken a.s.sumptions are."

"I guess," Gyasi conceded. "You ought to get this written up and onto the nets as soon as possible."

Kosta felt his stomach tighten. For a moment there he'd almost forgotten who and what he was. Now, all of that came rushing back like a splash of cold water.

He was a spy in enemy territory. And spies were not supposed to draw attention to themselves by publishing inflammatory academic papers. "Actually, I thought I'd do a little more work on it first," he said cautiously. "Make sure I'm not seeing things that aren't there."

"Bosh," Gyasi snorted. "What are you afraid of, looking silly? No one cares about that." He held up a hand. "Okay, okay, I know you're new here. Tell you what: if it'll make you feel any better, you can have three days to run all the numbers back and forth through the sand sifter. But after that, either you write it up or I will. Deal?"

Kosta hesitated. But he really didn't have a choice. And if it made the Empyreals even slightly more cautious about these angels of theirs, it would be worth the risk. "Deal."

"Good." Gyasi waved a hand imperiously at Kosta. "Well, don't just sit there-get to work. The entire Empyreal scientific community is waiting for this."

"Yeah," Kosta muttered. "I'm sure they can hardly wait."

"That's the spirit," Gyasi said. "Hey, relax-even if you're totally wrong, no one's going to hang

you."

Kosta shivered. If he only knew.

CHAPTER 16.

Ornina looked up from the circuit board, a slightly bemused expression on her face. "Stop me if you've heard this before, Chandris, but you are absolutely amazing. Are you sure you've never done this sort of work before?"

Chandris shook her head, feeling her cheeks warming under Ornina's praise. It was embarra.s.sing to stand here and listen to the woman go on like this. Embarra.s.sing, and pretty stupid besides.

But she had to admit that, down deep, it felt kind of nice. "Not before last week," she said. "You must be a good teacher."

"Fiddlies," Ornina said firmly. "It's sweet of you to say so, but fiddlies nonetheless." She twisted her head around to look across the room at Chandris's a.s.sembly table. "That was the last of them, too, wasn't it? Well, let's see; what else needs doing around here?"

Chandris cleared her throat. "Actually, I was wondering if maybe I could have a couple of hours off. I thought I might go into Shikari City for awhile."

"Why, certainly," Ornina said. "Hanan showed you how to call a line car, didn't he?"

"Yes, but I thought I'd just walk. I feel sometimes like I haven't been outside the Gazelle for more than ten minutes since I first got here."

"It is a hard life," Ornina agreed quietly. "If it helps any, we aren't always going to be quite this busy. It's just that the Gazelle's going to have to have some major overhauling done soon, and we need to get a bit ahead of schedule before then. Time-wise and money-wise both."

"I understand," Chandris said. "I won't be gone long."

"Oh, well, don't worry about that. Though you probably ought to take a phone along-it's possible we might need to get in touch with you." Ornina's forehead creased in thought. "Not to put you off or anything... but should you be wandering the streets this soon after your, ah, trouble aboard the Xirrus?"

Chandris had wondered about that, too. But this whole angel question had been hanging over her head for more than a week, and she was tired of not knowing what she was up against. She needed more information than the Gazelle's library could provide, and going out was the only way to get it. "I can't hide forever," she told Ornina, heading for the door to cut off further argument. "Don't worry, I've had a lot of practice at not being recognized. I'll be back in a couple of hours."

"Okay," Ornina called after her. "See you later. And don't forget the phone."

It was a brisk fifteen minute walk from the Gazelle to the edge of Shikari City proper, and another ten to the huge gla.s.s-and-stone monstrosity that the Gazelle's maps had identified as the Angelma.s.s Studies Inst.i.tute. Circling until she found the front door, she went inside.

"Public access terminals? Right over there." The receptionist pointed past a large stairway to a long room containing rows of low-walled carrels, about half of them occupied. "You have a ship's sign-on, I presume?" the woman added, her eyes taking in Chandris's coveralls.

"Of course," Chandris told her automatically. She got two steps toward the room before it belatedly dawned on her that the lack of privacy in there would keep her from using any of her normal techniques to crack into the computer.

It was another two steps before it likewise dawned that, for a change, cracking wasn't going to be necessary. A quick phone call to Ornina for the Gazelle's sign-on, and she was in business.

Only to realize, forty minutes later, that the whole trip had been for nothing.

"Can I help you?" the receptionist smiled.

"I hope so," Chandris said, smiling back through the best poor/lost/vulnerable expression in her repertoire. "I'm trying to locate some special information on angels, and I can't seem to find it in those files. Have I missed some special access or sign-on or something?"