Angelmass

"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 pla

"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."

For a moment the room was silent, and Forsythe could almost see his father standing there in front of him. Laughing and joking one minute, teaching him some little secret of politics the next. "Speaking of speeches," Pirbazari said into the quiet, "you're scheduled for a broadcast in half an hour. Shall I go down to the studio and make sure everything's ready?"

The vision faded, and his father was once again just an image on a display screen. "No," Forsythe said. "I'd rather you go take another stab at talking EmDef into doing that landing check we asked for. If the Pax ship did drop a spy, he's got to come down sometime."

"Yes, sir," Pirbazari said, his tone markedly less than enthusiastic.

"I know it's probably a waste of time," Forsythe agreed with the other's unspoken thought. "I've already had it politely explained to me that EmDef hasn't got the manpower to sand-sift all the mining and cargo ships buzzing around Lorelei system. But if we nag them enough they may agree to at least a partial check. If only to get us off their backs."

Pirbazari smiled faintly. "It's nice to work for someone who understands how people operate, sir.

What about the studio prep?"

"Ronyon can do that," Forsythe told him, picking up his call stick and tapping Ronyon's button three times. "Let me know how it goes with EmDef."

"Yes, sir." With a little bow, Pirbazari turned with military precision and left the room.

Forsythe looked back at the display, his frustration with EmDef shading—as frustrations always seemed to do these days—into an echo of old bitterness. Yes, he understood how people operated; but then, he'd learned about people and politics from a master. A man so able and competent at working through the system that by the end of his second term he was already being called the most effective High Senator Lorelei had ever sent to Uhuru.

And then, without warning, the system had been pulled out from under him.

His father had fought it, of course. Had argued long and hard that the newly discovered angels were far too incompletely understood to be loosed on anyone, let alone those men and women most directly responsible for the Empyrean's well-being. But the reformers were too strong, the optimism too soaring, and the tales of rampant political dishonesty and greed too deeply entrenched in popular mythology. The public clamor for the Angel Experiment had grown steadily louder... and as it did, all those who had originally opposed the plan quietly melted to the other side. Even the media, who normally salivated over the slightest hint of a controversy, just as quietly mutated into an Empyreanwide cheering squad for the experiment.

Until, at the end, his father had stood alone. And when they'd handed him his angel, he'd handed it back. Along with his resignation.

It was the last hard, no-win decision of his political career. Perhaps the last hard, no-win decision that had been made in the High Senate chambers in the eighteen years since then.

Few people seemed to have noticed that. But Forsythe had; and this whole net-and-catapult method of dealing with the Pax's increasingly impatient thrusts into Empyreal territory was just the latest example of the High Senate's collective vagueness. It was all very well to claim, as they frequently did, that the Pax mentality was one of conquest instead of destruction; that it would prefer to absorb the Empyrean as it had all the other far-flung Earth colonies that had been sent out over the past three hundred years. It was a reasonable assessment, as far as it went.

But to then assume that such territorial ambitions would be discouraged simply by having some of their ships 'pulted away and trapped out in space for a few months was naive in the extreme. The only way to stop a bully was to give him a bloody nose.

And the perfect chance to do just that had been sitting in Lorelei system three days ago. A tiny change in the catapult vector, and that huge Pax warship could have been sent straight through the center of a star and been gone forever. A serious bloody nose, indeed.

But the High Senators who wrote EmDef's policies wore angels around their necks, as did the local commanders who carried those policies out... and men who wore angels never lowered themselves to something as crude as killing.

So they had taken their time, and done their calculations carefully, and sent the Pax warship somewhere where it would be safe. Someday, it would be back.

But before then, Forsythe would be a High Senator himself. A High Senator, with an angel of his own hanging around his neck.

Or perhaps not.

There was a diffident tap on the door. "Come," Forsythe called.

There was no response. Forsythe looked up, a

Yes, Forsythe signed back. Deaf since birth, Ronyon could read lips reasonably well, but one of Forsythe's standing rules was that his i