Angelmass

"Don't bother."

"What?" She turned to look at him.

Kosta was slumped back in his chair, staring with dead eyes at the monitors and displays in front of him. "What's the matter?" she demanded, her heart suddenly thudding in her ears.

"We can't do it," he said. "We don't have enough power."

She followed his gaze to the displays. None of the numbers and graphs meant anything to her. "What do you mean, not enough power?"

"The station can't generate enough energy to 'pult Angelmass outward," he said. "The thing's just too massive."

She looked at the numbers again. No. Not after all this. This cord couldn't pop now. "What about inward, then?" she asked. "Could we send it inward?"

"Inward?" Kosta echoed, frowning at her. "You mean toward Seraph?"

"No, further in than Seraph," Chandris said, thinking furiously. "Whatever games Angelmass is playing with grav fields, it's got to be easier for it to move down a gravity well than back up one. If we put it into a low enough solar orbit, we at least ought to be able to keep it away from Seraph.

Right?"

"But that'll just give it a stronger grav field to play with," Kosta argued. "It might still be able to work its way up that far. Or worse, it might just go straight into the sun where we'll never be able to get to it."

"I hadn't thought of that," Chandris confessed, wincing at the thought. "Could it eat up the whole sun?"

"I don't know," Kosta said. "Probably not—its cross-section is only a few atoms' width. But it could still do some nasty things in there, either accidentally or on purpose. We can't risk it without ru

"So that's it? We just give up and go home?"

Kosta shook his head tiredly. "I'm sorry. I don't see what else we can do."

Chandris shifted her gaze to the forward display. The slow yaw rotation they'd picked up in the station's disintegration had turned them to face Angelmass now, though most of the black hole's blaze of light and energy was currently being blocked by what was left of the net section drifting toward it. After all this time and effort and sweat and risk; and now there was nothing they could do but run home?

"If we leave now, we won't get another crack at it," she warned him. "At least, not easily. Without a net out here, we're talking a mighty long trip to even get close. In fact, they'll probably have to build a whole new Angelmass Central and ship it out—"

She broke off. "Oh, my God," she breathed.

"What?" Kosta demanded, sitting up straight.

Chandris shifted her view to the telescope display, hoping her eyes had been playing tricks on her.

But there was no mistake. "The net section," she said, hearing her voice suddenly trembling as she pointed to the display. "The ru

"Someone's reactivated it."

For a second they both sat there, frozen. Then, simultaneously, both of them dived for their control panels. "We've got to stop them," Chandris said, trying to pull up the remote control program she'd just found. Her fingers slipped on the keys, stumbling in their frantic haste. "Oh, God, Jereko!"

"I know," he barked back, his fingers beating their own staccato across his board. "I'm trying to shut it down."

"What are they doing?" Chandris asked. There was the file; now access the system. "Don't they know what they're doing?"

"That's just it—they don't," Kosta bit out. "It's only been nineteen minutes since we blew the station.

Twenty light-minutes out—they don't realize the net's headed straight for Angelmass."

Chandris bit at her lip, forcing her fingers to function. The display flickered with gamma sparks and threatened to crash; then it cleared, and she found herself in the system. She pulled up a list of commands, searching for those pertaining to net operations. It had to be somewhere in here...

Kosta folded his hand over hers. "Too late," he said quietly.

Chandris looked up... and felt her mouth fall open.

She'd expected it would be Forsythe coming after them, probably in one of the hunterships sitting idly in their maintenance yards. Or at the very most, one of the EmDef ships they'd seen crowding around Seraph.

But the ship that had suddenly appeared was something unbelievably and terrifyingly huge. Bigger even than the vast spaceliner Xirrus, its bulk filling the entire telescope display, utterly dwarfing the partially shattered half of the station lying beside it.

And as she watched in horror, Angelmass caught up with it.

The emergency hull-breach alarms split the air like enraged banshees screaming of death, their wailing only barely louder than the horrible hail-storm crackle that seemed to come from all around them. "Hull breach in Sectors G-7, 8, and 9," a voice bellowed from the speaker. "All three hulls have collapsed—"

Abruptly, the voice cut off, leaving only the violent chattering. "Seal all airtight doors!" Lleshi ordered, his eyes darting to G-Sector's monitor cameras. What in the name of the laughing fates was happening to them? The Empyreals couldn't have a weapon of such power. They simply couldn't.

But all the sensor nodes had gone black. All of them, over the entire starboard-aft quarter of the ship.

From the speaker came a sudden scream, just as suddenly cut off. "Engine control has lost air,"

Campbell snapped. "Main drive chambers all open to space."

"Do something!" Telthorst snarled. "Fight back, damn you!"

"Against what?" Lleshi snarled back.

A sudden and horribly familiar blare erupted across the command deck. "Radiation!" Campbell a

And then, suddenly, Lleshi understood.

It must have entered the ship near the stern, its blaze of heat and radiation charring everything in sight. As it did so, the gigantic ship seemed to twist aside, and Chandris's first impression was that it was making a desperate attempt to escape. But even as that thought occurred to her she realized that it wasn't so; that if anyone was still alive in there they were in no shape to bring the vessel under power. What was happening instead was that the once-smooth lines of the ship were bending and distorting as Angelmass traced out a leisurely path of destruction through bracing girders and supporting bulkheads, twisting and tearing them out of line and crumpling them like thin foil.

"Massive destruction in all aft areas," Campbell shouted. "Communications gone; power gone; sensors gone; air integrity gone. All perso

He was no longer barking the news quickly, Lleshi noticed with a sort of detached interest. There was no longer any point. Timely information implied that there was something that could still be done about a given situation.

But there was nothing any of them could do about this one. The Komitadji was sliding rapidly toward her death, and there was no power in the universe that could stop it. "Structural integrity is failing throughout the ship," Campbell went on. "Central-area bulkheads are bleeding air. Heat and radiation oft" the scale; firewalls collapsing from metal degradation."

"This can't be happening," Telthorst insisted desperately. His eyes were darting all around him, as if he were expecting to discover this was nothing more than an elaborate practical joke being played on him by a vindictive captain and crew. "It can't. Not to the Komitadji."

He spun back to Lleshi, slamming a fist down on the arm of his seat. "This ship is indestructible, damn you," he snarled. "We built it that way. We spent billions—"

He cut off as the deck suddenly shook beneath them, a violent creaking sound screaming across the command deck as it did. "Forward structural integrity is failing," Campbell said. "It won't be long now."

"There's your prize, Adjutor," Lleshi told Telthorst bitterly. "There's your precious Angelmass. It's not waiting for you and the other Adjutors to go and milk it. It's coming to us.