"I don't know," Forsythe said. "But I'm sure that if you ask nicely, Mr. Kosta will be happy to give

you the complete story when he gets back."

Lleshi's reaction to Kosta's name was little more than a lifted eyebrow. Telthorst's was much more dramatic. "Kosta?" he repeated. "Kosta?""Yes," Forsythe said. "I see you know the young man."Telthorst flashed a dumbfounded look at Lleshi, looked back at Forsythe. "Kosta," he muttered.There was a tentative plucking at Forsythe's sleeve. Mr. Forsythe? he signed, an oddly intense expression on his face. Jereko and Chandris didn't go to study Angelma.s.s. They went to throw it away.

Forsythe frowned. "What?""What?" Telthorst asked."Just a minute," Forsythe said, leaning toward Ronyon. "What do you mean, throw it away?""Throw what away?" Telthorst demanded. "What are you talking about?""Just a minute," Forsythe snapped back. "Ronyon, tell me again. What are Jereko and Chandris doing?"Ronyon threw a furtive look at the other end of the table. Jereko said Angelma.s.s is going to try to hurt people, he signed. He said the only thing they could do was use the catapult to throw it out of the system.

"That's crazy," Forsythe said. "He can't be serious."

"Bad news, High Senator?" Lleshi asked calmly.

Forsythe looked over at him, wondering what he should say. The truth? Or something that sounded

at least plausible? "He says Kosta believes Angelma.s.s is too dangerous to stay here," he said. "He says they're going to try to use Central's catapult to throw it somewhere out of the system."

Telthorst inhaled sharply. "Is that even possible?" Lleshi asked. "I was given to understand that the

Seraph and Angelma.s.s nets and catapults were linked together."

"They are," Forsythe murmured, the shutdown of the Seraph net suddenly making sense. "But if he shut down the net at this end... I don't know. He might be able to do it."

"And he has shut it down, hasn't he?" Lleshi asked. "He's shut down both nets, in fact."Forsythe nodded. There was no point in lying; a well-equipped warship like the Komitadji would certainly have picked that up. "We were guessing he didn't want company."

"This is a trick," Telthorst put in, his fingertips rubbing restlessly against the table top. "He's making all this up."

Lleshi pursed his lips. "Mr. Campbell?" he called.

"Crypto Group confirms, Commodore," a disembodied voice replied briskly from one of the upper corners of the room. "He's using a dialect of the old Unislan sign language, and we've got enough for a baseline. Actual message: 'Jereko says Angelma.s.s will hurt everyone. He says they must throw it away out of the area using the catapult.' "

"Thank you," Lleshi said.

"Nonsense," Telthorst insisted, jabbing a finger toward Ronyon. "An idiot like that? No one would trust him with that kind of information. I tell you it's a trick."

"Why are you getting so upset, Mr. Telthorst?" Forsythe asked, frowning at him. "I thought the

whole reason for the Pax coming down on us in the first place was to protect us from the angels. You

should be happy someone wants to get rid of the source."

For a long moment Telthorst just stared at him, his agitation and uncertainty coalescing into something hard and certain and vicious. "So that's how it is," he ground out. "You turned him. Kosta figured it out, and you turned him, and he told you."

"Told us what?" Forsythe asked carefully.

Telthorst turned to Lleshi. "Get the Angelma.s.s net reactivated," he ordered. "Right now. We have to go out there and stop him."

Lleshi blinked. "What in the world are you talking about?"

"You fool," Telthorst bit out contemptuously. "Don't you understand? Angelma.s.s is the reason we're

here. It's the only reason we're here."Lleshi threw an odd look at Forsythe. "But if the angel threat is removed-""To b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l with the angels!" Telthorst snarled. "What do the angels matter? What does anything from this flea-speck group of third-rate planets matter?"

He shot a look around the table. "It's Angelma.s.s that we want," he said, his voice low and brittle. "It blazes out more energy in a second than this entire miserable world probably uses in a year. Terawatts and terawatts of power, just waiting for someone to tap into it."

"And that's what this is all about?" Forsythe asked, staring at him in disbelief. "Energy?""Why not?" Telthorst countered. "Energy is the road to wealth and power. It always has been. And free energy, like this, is nothing less than a gift from the laughing fates. Angelma.s.s could run an entire floating colony, or give us a cheap way to terraform worlds-""Or power a shipyard?" Lleshi asked."Indeed it could," Telthorst said, his eyes suddenly shining. "You've seen what the Komitadji has accomplished already, in a bare handful of years. How much more could you accomplish with a

dozen more ships just like it? Tell me that.""The question isn't what I could do," Lleshi said quietly, his tone that of a man who has suddenly found the solution to a private puzzle. "The question is what the Adjutors could do."

Telthorst's lips compressed into a thin line. "Order the Angelma.s.s net reactivated, Commodore."

"And if I refuse?"

Telthorst drew himself up. "Then I will be forced to take direct command of this vessel," he said, his

voice suddenly stiff and formal as he pulled a folded sheet of paper from inside his jacket. "I have authorization from the Adjutor General himself."

Lleshi looked down at the paper, but made no move to touch it. "Mr. Campbell?"

"Sir?" the voice came again, sounding considerably more subdued than it had been the last time.

"Do we know how to reactivate the Angelma.s.s net?"

"I believe so, sir, yes," Campbell said. "We have the telemetry readings from when it was turned off earlier, plus the signal it sent to deactivate its Seraph counterpart. Comm and Crypto say they can invert the instructions to turn either or both back on."

"Then do so," Lleshi ordered. "Both of them. If the Seraph net goes on, we can a.s.sume the

Angelma.s.s one will, too."

He looked across the table; and suddenly, it seemed to Forsythe, he wasn't carrying his years nearly so well anymore. "Unless there are special codes that would be needed, High Senator?"

Forsythe shook his head. "No codes, Commodore," he said. "No one expected any of this to be of military significance."

Lleshi nodded. "Mr. Campbell?"

"Signal sent," Campbell reported. "Seraph net... is up and running. We're painting a diagnostic, but it seems to be functioning properly. Time to Angelma.s.s net activation, approximately twenty-one minutes."

"We'll want to be ready to jump the minute it's up," Telthorst warned. "We don't want Kosta shutting it down again before we can get through."

"Commodore?" Campbell asked.

"You have your instructions, Mr. Campbell," Lleshi confirmed quietly. "Prepare the Komitadji for catapult. You'll need to recalibrate their equipment for our ma.s.s."

"Already on it, sir."

"And make sure all weapons are standing ready," Telthorst added. "Energy weapons and missiles both."

He looked at Forsythe. "Because I doubt we'll be able to talk the traitor out of this scheme," he added softly. "In fact, I doubt it's even worth trying."

Blindly, his wide eyes fixed on Telthorst, Ronyon clutched at Forsythe's sleeve. What's he talking about, he signed urgently. What does he mean?

"He's talking about shooting at Jereko and Chandris, Ronyon," Forsythe told him. "He's talking about killing them without even offering them a chance to surrender."

Ronyon's mouth fell open, and an odd choking sound escaped from this throat. "Treason to the Pax has always carried the death penalty, High Senator," Telthorst said coolly. "Something you should keep very much in mind."

He again looked around the table. "And as long as we have a few minutes, let's discuss the disposition of the rest of Seraph system."

CHAPTER 44.

The clock was down to fifteen and a half minutes, and the gamma-spark static was becoming deafening by the time everything was finally ready.

"This had better work, Kosta," Chandris shouted as she strapped into her seat, wincing as a particularly loud crack sounded from somewhere in the console in front of her. "If it doesn't, I don't think we're going to have time to get to the Gazelle and get out of here. You sure as h.e.l.l won't have time to apologize."

"It'll work," Kosta shouted back from beside her. Chandris couldn't read his voice over the noise, but the hands clenched into taut fists in front of him didn't exactly inspire her with confidence.

"Well, if it doesn't, it was nice knowing you," she called, reaching over and putting her hand on his closest fist. "I mean that."

For a moment he seemed to hesitate, the hardness of his fist under her hand wavering. Then, abruptly, he unclenched his hand and wrapped it around hers, gripping it tightly as they watched the clock count down to zero.

And as it did so, an entire panel of monitor lights went solid red.

Chandris held her breath, straining to hear what was happening back there. But between the noise of the gamma sparks and the sheer distance from where they were at the far end of the catapult section she couldn't make anything out. She thought back over the steps of her reprogramming job, wondering if she could have frogged it up somewhere. If she'd missed a safety and the escape pods shut down...

"There!" Kosta shouted, squeezing her hand even tighter. "Feel that?"

Chandris frowned. And then she did: a gentle vibration running through the deck beneath her chair. A vibration that was slowly but steadily growing in strength.

She shifted her attention to the midhull visual monitor. Beneath the blizzard of radiation static, she could just make out the double ring of escape pods still attached to the midway tunnel. At the base of one of them, where the pod attached to the hull, she thought she could see a faint flickering of fire from a slightly imperfect seating connection as its drive tried to push it away from the station.

Its drive trying to push it outward, but its attaching clamps continuing to hold it firmly in place. If the pod was a sentient being, the odd thought occurred to her, it would probably be getting extremely frustrated about now. "What happens if the clamps break before the pods burn all the way through the wall?" she asked.

"It should still work," Kosta called. "That much heat alone-"

And then, without warning, the image vanished in a flash of white light. Simultaneously, the deck under Chandris bucked like a scalded cat, there was a bubbling roar from behind her, and she found herself being shoved gently but firmly back into her seat.

"It worked!" Kosta shouted. "Look at that! It worked!"

Chandris squinted at the snow on the monitor. But she didn't have to see anything to know that Kosta's crazy plan had indeed worked. The escape pods, all firing together against the relatively thin hull where they were connected, had burned through or heated through and ignited the fuel canisters she and Kosta had stacked in the midway tunnel. The resulting explosion had broken the station in two, giving their catapult end a solid push forward in their orbit as it simultaneously shoved the net end hard in the other direction.

The essence of a rocket, she remembered from her first page of reading aboard the Xirrus, was to take part of your ship and throw it in the opposite direction from where you wanted to go. Kosta had merely taken the definition to its logical extreme.

Only instead of throwing away the exhaust products of burned fuel, he had thrown away half their ship.

"Look's like we've picked up a slow yaw roll," Kosta reported, peering at another of the snow-covered displays. "Nothing serious, I don't think."

"I think the camera just went out," Chandris added as the faint image on the display was replaced by pure static. The acceleration pressure on her had eased back now, but the inertial readings indicated that they had picked up a nice bit of extra speed. "Either that or the radiation got to it."

"Probably the explosion," Kosta said. "Looks like it took out that whole emplacement."

Chandris swallowed. The camera position in question was a good ways forward of the midway tunnel. "Just how much of the station are you expecting us to lose here?"