And on Telthorst's face was a look of absolute horror.

Beside Chandris, Kosta was muttering something wordless over and over again. A few seconds later, and the ship nearly vanished in the glare behind the sudden flash of brilliance as Angelma.s.s burned its way out the near side. The station's sunshields activated; and on the telescope display, right at the edge of the artificial black spot marking Angelma.s.s's position, Chandris could see the charred hull metal flowing like ash-filled water as Angelma.s.s's tidal forces ripped apart its molecular structure. Again the big ship moved ponderously around in the grip of the black hole's gravitational field, the bow turning with a sense of fatalism back into its executioner's path. Again the metal of the hull broke and flowed, further forward this time, and again Angelma.s.s casually burned its way through and disappeared inside.

Lleshi could feel the chair starting to melt beneath him as he looked across the bridge balcony one last time. Telthorst was sitting there, his face contorted almost beyond recognition. "You were wrong about one other thing, Mr. Telthorst," he managed over the screams of the Komitadji's final death throes. "I won't live to regret it, after all."

It seemed to go on forever, a nightmare of death and awesome destruction. Angelma.s.s went in and out at least three more times, like a needle tracing an intricate path for its following thread.

And when it finally emerged for the last time, the ship had been crushed and twisted and warped nearly beyond recognition.

Kosta's hand on her arm made her jump. "Come on, Chandris," he said quietly, his eyes still staring in dull horror at the view. "Come on. Let's go home."

CHAPTER 45.

"The purpose of this meeting," High Senator Forsythe said, gazing steadily across the Government

Building conference room table at Kosta, "is to figure out exactly what we're going to do with you."

His gaze shifted to Kosta's right, where Chandris sat beside him, then to his left, to Hanan and Ornina Daviee. "With all of you," he amended.

"I'm sorry, but I really don't see the problem," Ornina spoke up, a bit hesitantly. "Jereko has already

said he wants to stay in the Empyrean. Why can't we just let him?"

Beside Forsythe, Pirbazari stirred. "It's not quite that simple, Miss Daviee," he said. "Mr. Kosta is a self-confessed Pax spy, and the three of you knew it. That can't just be swept into a corner."

"Why not?" Hanan asked. "I mean, he did help us figure out what was happening to Angelma.s.s. Surely that alone saved a lot of lives. Not to mention that he and Chandris got that big Pax warship off our backs."

"Wrecking Angelma.s.s Central in the process," Pirbazari murmured.

"It would have been destroyed anyway," Chandris pointed out. "You didn't see what Angelma.s.s was doing out there."Actually, we have done a quick review of the monitor tapes you brought back," Forsythe said. "I think it's fair to say the station would indeed have been lost."

"So again, what's the problem?" Hanan asked. "Jereko's proved he's on our side."

"Are we not getting through here?" Pirbazari demanded. "The problem is that he's an agent of a

government we're at war with.""Was an agent," Hanan corrected.

"Legally irrelevant," Pirbazari shot back. "And unproven besides."

"Unproven?" Hanan echoed. "Then what-"

"Hanan," Ornina admonished him, putting a warning hand on his arm.

Hanan patted her hand rea.s.suringly. "All right, then," he said in a more reasonable tone. "Why not

let him defect? There must be provision for something like that in the legal code."

Forsythe made a face. "Actually... there isn't."

Kosta stared at him. "You're kidding."

"I've been through the whole code, edge to binding and back again," Forsythe said, shaking his head.

"The people who wrote the Covenants a hundred eighty years ago never expected us to be anything more than a single confederation of a few worlds all alone in the middle of deep s.p.a.ce. With nowhere to defect to or from, the topic somehow never came up."

"Well, obviously, that needs to be changed," Hanan said. "How do we do that?"

"We don't do anything," Forsythe said pointedly. "What I do is introduce a bill in the High Senate. Unfortunately, the process takes time; and meanwhile, Mr. Kosta is still an agent of the Pax.""And the Covenants do make provision for enemies of the Empyrean," Pirbazari said.At one side of the table, seated where he could see everyone's mouth, Ronyon began signing. "I would love to," Forsythe told him. "But that decision isn't up to me. Or anyone else in the Empyrean."

"What did he say?" Kosta asked.

"He asked why we couldn't just stop the war," Forsythe translated. "In that case, you wouldn't be an enemy and you could stay here."

"Makes sense to me," Ornina murmured.

"Wait a minute," Kosta said, frowning. "Is it really that simple? If we weren't at war with the Pax would that solve the problem?"

Forsythe gazed across the table at him, forehead wrinkled with thought. "Not entirely," he said at

last. "But it would certainly be a start. The automatic categorization of you as an enemy of the

Empyrean would become moot, and we could shift the focus purely to your various activities here."

"Why?" Pirbazari put in, his tone edged with sarcasm. "You know a way to make the Pax go away and leave us alone?"

"As a matter of fact," Kosta said slowly, "I do."

Forsythe and Pirbazari exchanged looks. "We're listening," Forsythe invited cautiously. "What do we have to do?"

"And how much is it going to cost us?" Pirbazari added.

"It won't cost you anything at all," Kosta said. "Do you have the coordinates for the Scintara system? It's in the Garland Group of worlds."

"I'm sure we can find it," Forsythe said. "Why?"

"That's where the operations for this mission are centered," Kosta explained. "Most of the top Pax commanders are there monitoring the invasion, plus probably a scattering of government officials waiting to take credit for your surrender."

"So what do we do, send them an amba.s.sador?" Pirbazari scoffed.

"No," Kosta said quietly. "We send them the Komitadji."

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Chandris twitch her head around to look at him. "What?" she demanded.

"It was the glory of the Pax Fleet," Kosta said, a hard lump in his throat as his mind flashed back to his single brief trip aboard the ma.s.sive warship. To the awe and excitement he had felt at being aboard a legend... "The ship that couldn't be defeated. To see it not just defeated, but completely wrecked, is going to shake them straight to their boots."

"But they'll know it wasn't actually defeated," Pirbazari objected. "Surely they'll be able to figure out it was destroyed by Angelma.s.s."

"Doesn't matter," Kosta said. "Whether we've figured out how to use Angelma.s.s as a weapon or whether we conned them into running into it themselves, the point is still that we managed to destroy it."

"No, the point is that dropping it on their doorstep is an invitation to dance," Pirbazari retorted. "They'll want to move in quick and slap us down hard before we can use Angelma.s.s against them again."

Kosta shook his head. "You're thinking like a military man," he said. "Or like a politician, who has to worry about prestige and public opinion. But that's not who's running the Pax. The Adjutors give the orders; and all the Adjutors care about is money."

"That doesn't make sense," Pirbazari growled. "Are you saying they'll leave us alone simply because we've cost them a lot of money? That's not warfare. That's..." He groped for words.

"That's balance-sheet economics," Kosta agreed. "But that really is all they see. They'll leave us alone because the Empyrean has already become a negative number on the profit-loss scale. Because with the Komitadji destroyed, they've already spent more here than they could ever hope to gain.

Why waste more time and money conquering us when they know they won't break even anyway?"

Hanan stirred in his seat. "I think our entire civilization has just been insulted," he muttered under his breath to Ornina."No, your entire civilization just has no idea how much the Komitadji cost to build," Kosta countered. "And if there's one thing the Adjutors simply do not do, it's throw good money after bad."

"Maybe not normally," Forsythe said. "But you're forgetting Angelma.s.s itself. The Adjutor I spoke to-Telthorst-was spinning great and lofty plans for using Angelma.s.s's energy output to build an

entire fleet of ships the size of the Komitadji. That may be an a.s.set they'll still consider worth fighting for.""No," Pirbazari said thoughtfully. "Not any more. Not after they see what it did to their fancy birthday-cake warship. They won't dare risk putting a shipbuilding facility anywhere near the thing.""He's right," Kosta said. "Even if they decide to rebuild the Komitadji, they won't do it here.""What if they rebuild it in the Pax?" Ornina asked."They might," Kosta conceded. "After all, there are still a few other wayward colonies out there waiting to be conquered. But even if they do, you'll never see it in Empyreal s.p.a.ce."

"You really believe this is how they'll react?" Forsythe asked, his forehead wrinkled uncertainly.

"I'm sure of it." Kosta hesitated. "But if you think it would help, I'm willing to go back with the

Komitadji and spell it out for them."

"No," Chandris said firmly before Forsythe could respond. "You leave now and they'll never let you come back."

Kosta blinked. There had been an unexpected intensity in her tone. "That would bother you?"

For that first split second she actually looked fl.u.s.tered. It was, in Kosta's experience, a new look for

her. "Of course it would," Hanan jumped smoothly into the gap. "It would bother all of us. You're our friend."

"He won't have to go, will he?" Ornina asked anxiously. "Please?""I don't think it will be necessary," Forsythe said. "The Komitadji should deliver the message clearly enough without Mr. Kosta's a.s.sistance."

"A recorded message from you might be useful, though," Pirbazari suggested. "Especially if they interpret it as you being turned to our side by the angels. It might discourage them from sending in more spies."

Kosta nodded. "No problem."

Hanan chuckled. "There's a potful of soul-searching for you," he commented. "Angels make people good; and now they've turned Jereko against the Pax. Wonder what the Adjutors will make of that?"

"You know what they say," Ornina reminded him. "The love of money is the root of all evil." "That is what they say." Hanan leaned forward a little to look at Kosta. "So is that what angels do, Jereko? Take away the love of money?"

"Well..." Kosta paused, wondering if he should be talking about this now. But if not now, when? "Actually, I think they work one layer beneath that."

"You sound like you know something the rest of us don't," Forsythe said, eyeing him closely.

"I have a theory," Kosta said. "Not about what the angels are, exactly, but about what they do to people."