"A few days," Ornina said, digging into her own meal with an enthusiasm that belied her apology for it. Maybe she'd eaten worse in her lifetime, too. "Gabriel's pay scale presupposes that it'll take an average huntership four days out here to capture one."

Four days. Chandris felt her stomach tighten up at the thought. Eleven hours out here and already she was falling apart. And she was supposed to do three and a half more days of it? "What happens if you don't find one in that time?" she asked, though she had a pretty good idea what the answer was going to be.

She was right. "We stay until we do," Ornina said around a mouthful of food. "Sometimes you hit an angel the first hour out of the net; other times you don't find one for a week. It all evens out."

"I see," Chandris murmured. With a sigh, she scooped another mouthful of the paste onto her spoon—

And, abruptly, a wailing siren split the air.

Chandris's teeth spasmed down on the spoon, sending a jolt of pain through her jaw. "What—?"

"Acceleration alarm," Ornina snapped, already on her feet. She slapped the lid down on her cup and charged for the door. "Come on—we've got one."

The Gazelles rotation was gone by the time they reached the control cabin. "Strap in," Hanan barked over his shoulder as Chandris got a grip on her chair and jammed her butt ungracefully down into it.

Ornina, with farther to go to her own seat, was already strapped in. "Here we go—"

The Gazelle's engines roared, and Chandris had to struggle for a second to get the last strap fastened.

Swinging her display over in front of her, she keyed for an echo of Ornina's board. "What do you want me to do?" she called over the engine noise.

"Get on the backup tracker," Ornina said, her voice taut. "I'll figure the vector—you double-check me."

"Right." Another gamma-ray crack flashed momentary white on Chandris's display; this time, she hardly noticed it. On the main display was what looked like a blizzard of white, with hundreds of computer-calculated spirals superimposed on top of it. And in the very center, its trace still being drawn...

"Got it," she muttered under her breath. The procedure, memorized from the Gazelle's manuals, was clear enough in her mind. But her fingers were inexperienced, and she found herself fumbling at the keyboard. Sweating, she tried to keep up with Ornina.

Abruptly, the engines cut back, and Chandris's ribs were squeezed against the side of her seat as the Gazelle swung to the right. "Losing charge fast," Ornina said tightly. "Neutral in maybe fifteen seconds."

"Almost there," Hanan told her. "Chandris?"

"I'm on it," Chandris called back. An arrow had appeared at the growing end of the angel's spiral now, its direction constantly changing even as the spiral began to both fade and straighten out. A

pseudo cloud-chamber effect, the manual had called this, with ultra-sensitive detectors utilizing Angelmass's own particle radiation as background; but Chandris didn't have to understand it to know what it meant. The angel was picking up lots of other particles, losing the electrical charge that made it detectable. If that happened before they could figure out its final direction, they would lose it.

"Scoop's ready," Hanan said. "Time?"

"Five seconds," Ornina told him. "Four, three, two, one—"

The trace, a straight line now, disappeared from Chandris's display.

"—neutral."

"Right," Hanan muttered. "Scooping now."

Chandris listened hard, but the only sound she could hear was the hum of the magnetic field generators and the cracks of gamma-ray sparks. "What happens if we don't get it on the first try?" she asked. "Is there any way to get a second shot at it?"

"Not usually," Ornina said, hunched tautly over her board. "Between the tidal forces, gravity, and the solar wind, most neutralized angels eventually end up falling back into Angelmass."

Beside her, Hanan straightened up. "Did we get it?" Chandris asked.

"Don't know," he said. "We scooped about a hundred meters along its last trajectory, but with all the other particles and radiation out there for it to have scattered off of there's no guarantee it was still there."

"We picked up just under four micrograms of material in the scoop," Ornina added, turning to face Chandris. "The analyzer is running through all of it now. If the angel's in there—"

She was interrupted by a sudden two-toned beep from her board. "There'll be a beep," Hanan finished for her as Ornina spun back around. "Something like that one." He smiled at Chandris, some of the lines in his face smoothing out as he did so. "We have it?"

"We have it," Ornina confirmed, undoing her straps. "If you want to come down with me, Chandris," she added as she floated free of the chair, "I'll show you how to extract it from the collection bin and stow it in a storage box for transport."

"Thanks, but I think I'll save that for next time," Chandris said, unfastening her own straps.

"Someone ought to head back to the kitchen and clean up what's left of our dinner."

"You don't have to do that," Hanan told her.

"No," Ornina agreed, pausing at the control cabin door. "We can tackle that together later."

"I insist," Chandris said firmly. "I haven't been a lot of help to you so far. The least I can do is a little manual labor."

Ornina glanced at Hanan, shrugged. "Okay," she said. "See you later."

It would have been extremely useful, Chandris thought regretfully as she left the control cabin, to see the actual procedure used for storing these angels. But in this case it was a luxury she couldn't afford. Back on the Xirrus she'd always assumed she'd have at least a couple of days to worm through whatever security they had around the angel and score it. But with Seraph only a couple of hours away by catapult, her first and only chance was going to be right now.

She bypassed the kitchen, heading instead down the corridor to a small room the floorplans had identified as a machine shop. It took only a minute to find a multiscrewdriver and small wrench and slip them down her coveralls. However the angel box was set up, those two tools ought to be enough to get into it.

And if they weren't...

For a long moment she stared at the small cutting torch, a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She'd used a similar one once before, and knew it made a good weapon. But for some reason...

The sudden roar of the Gazelles engines startled her out of her thoughts. "Nurk," she muttered to herself, grabbing the torch and stuffing it into her coveralls with the other tools. There were, she knew, two ways to approach the angel collection section at the Gazelle's underside. Acting on the assumption that Ornina would have taken the most direct route from the control cabin, Chandris went the other, longer way.

She approached cautiously, alert for sounds. But the entire section seemed to be deserted. A good sign; it implied that the storage procedure was a simple one.

Of course, if Ornina had headed to the kitchen afterwards instead of back to the control cabin...

Impatiently, Chandris shook the thought out of her mind. In two hours it wouldn't matter in the slightest what the Daviees thought of her.

The collection bin was right where the floorplans had put it: a massive and oddly complicated looking thing built into one of the inner walls of the storeroom. Digging the tools out of her coveralls, she laid them on the floor and started looking for the best way in.

"It won't do you any good, you know."

Chandris spun around, the sudden movement in the Gazelle's low gravity throwing her off balance and dropping her to one knee. Her hand lanced out blindly to snatch up the torch.

They were there: Hanan and Ornina both, standing just inside the door. "Stay back," Chandris ordered.