It was definitely puff-talk. Detailed and well rehearsed, but puff-talk just the same.

But at the same time, there was something missing, something that any scorer good enough to have worked up such an elaborate background ought to have had. A sense of daring, perhaps, or some of the oily arrogance that had been a part of all the really expert puff-talkers she'd known back in the Barrio. Kosta played more like an actor parroting someone else's lines.

Which made Kosta... what?

Chandris still didn't know. But she intended to find out.

And so she sat at her board, listening to every word he said and letting the Gazelle more or less fly itself toward Angelmass.

And with her full attention on Kosta, she completely missed the first subtle clue that something had gone terribly wrong.

"...and so, rather to my amazement, the Institute accepted my application," Kosta concluded. "I didn't give them time to change their minds. I booked passage on a liner and—" he shrugged "—here I am."

"Here you are, indeed." Ornina shook her head—in wonderment, Kosta hoped, not disbelief. "That's quite a story, Jereko. I certainly hope you can get your finances straightened out quickly. It'd be a shame if such a promising career was derailed by something as trivial as a clerical error."

"I'm sure it will be," he assured her. He threw a glance at the back of Chandris's head, feeling some of his tension draining away. He'd poured a lot of hours into memorizing his cover story, but it had been time well spent. He'd gotten through it without making any errors, and with a certain degree of panache besides. Maybe he was finally starting to adapt to this spy stuff.

And just then, in the back of his mind, a quiet alarm went off.

He froze, searching frantically through what he'd just said. Had he, at the very end, made some kind of fatal blunder in his story?

And then he got it. The gamma-ray sparks—those damned noisy ubiquitous gamma-ray sparks—had stopped.

Which meant... what?

He was just opening his mouth to ask when an electronic scream split the air.

He jerked hard in his seat, pressing himself up against the restraints. Ornina spun back to her board, jabbing at it—

The wailing cut off as suddenly as it had begun."—hell was that?" Chandris snapped in the ringing silence.

"Emergency call," Ornina said tightly. "Get on the tracker and locate the signal. I'll try to raise them."

Chandris was already busy at her board. "Got it... no. No, it's wavering."

"Must be heavy radiation out there," Ornina muttered, her hands dancing across her board. "Let's see if this helps. This is the Gazelle, calling distress ship; Gazelle, calling distress ship. Can you respond?"

There was a roar of static from the speaker, a roar punctuated by an incredible rapid-fire stutter of gamma-ray sparks. "Gazelle, this is Hova's Skyarcher," a barely audible voice came through the noise. "We're caught in a radiation surge—losing control of everything. We need help."

"Chandris?" Ornina asked.

"I can't get a fix on them," Chandris said, her voice strained. "The radiation's messing up the calibration."

"You got anything even approximate?"

"Yes, but—"

"That'll do for now," Ornina cut her off. "Hova's Skyarcher, we're on our way. ETA, maybe ten minutes."

A sound that might have been a word, and then the static and signal were gone. "What did he say?"

Kosta asked.

"He said 'hurry,' " Ornina said grimly. The Gazelles engines, which had been idling softly, roared to full life. "Keep trying to get a fix on him, Chandris."

"I am." Chandris glanced over her shoulder. "Make yourself useful, Kosta—get on the intercom and get Hanan up here."

"Don't bother," Hanan said from the doorway even as Kosta moved to comply. "You can hear that siren all the way down at the pumps. What's going on?"

"Radiation surge," Ornina told him, getting out of her chair as Hanan slid into it. "It's got Hova's Skyarcher."

"Damn," Hanan muttered, hands running over the board as Ornina and Chandris also played musical chairs, switching back to their usual seats. "Anyone else in range?"

"I don't know," Ornina said. "Not even sure anyone else heard the call—signals don't cut too well across radiation lines."

"Have you alerted Central yet?"

"Haven't had time. I'll do it now." Ornina busied herself with her board.

The Gazelle began to move, pressing Kosta back into his seat. "Can I do anything to help?" he asked.

"I don't think so," Hanan said over his shoulder. "Just sit tight."

Kosta squeezed his hands into fists. Wonderful. Another ship was getting roasted by radiation out there, and all he could do was sit tight. And not roasted slowly, either, if that chatter of gamma-ray sparks he'd heard had been any indication.

He stiffened. Gamma-ray sparks? Reaching to his board, he keyed for a real-time display from his detectors below.

Nothing.

For a long minute he stared at the result, not believing it. Even given that the package was selecting only a few narrow bandwidths, there still should be something coming in. He keyed for a more sensitive reading—

"Kosta!" Chandris snapped.

He jerked around. "What?"

"Get on the comm," she ordered. "Try and raise the Skyarcher—tell them we're on our way but can't get a solid fix on them. See if they can give us some location data."

"Right." Kosta turned back to his board. A minute later, he had them.

"Gazelle," a voice called through the roar of static and gamma-ray stutter. "Gazelle, are you there?"

"We're here," Kosta called back. "Hang on, we're coming. Can you give us your location and velocity vectors?"

"We don't have them." Even through the noise, Kosta could hear the fear in that voice. "The whole damn ship is falling apart. You gotta help us."

"We're trying to get there," Kosta told him, an icy shiver running up his back. "Just hang on and try to relax—"

He broke off as something went crack behind him. For an instant he thought his ears were playing tricks on him, that the sound had come from the comm speaker. But it was followed by another, and another—

"Hanan!" he shouted over the roar of the engines and the increasingly noisy crackling. "We're getting into radiation."

"I know," Hanan called back. "No choice—it's our only intercept vector. Don't worry, the hull can handle—"

The rest of his statement was swallowed up in a sudden cloudburst of gamma-ray sparks.

And all hell broke loose.

Hanan screamed, a cry of pain that sent Kosta's teeth locking together. Ornina shouted something and grabbed for her restraints; Kosta got to Hanan first, without any clear memory of having left his seat. "What's wrong?" he shouted over the din, dimly aware that he was once again weightless—the Gazelle, clearly, was no longer under power.

"His exobraces," Ornina shouted back, trying to get her hand into Hanan's shirt. "They're misfiring—overloading the sensory nerves. Got to shut everything down."

Kosta swore, trying to remember everything he'd learned at the Institute about Empyreal electronics.

There wasn't anything that even remotely touched on this sort of thing. Helplessly, holding Hanan's pain-curled arms as steady as he could, he watched as Ornina finally got to whatever cutoff switch she was trying for. The arms went limp, and Hanan gave a long, trembling sigh. "God," he muttered, the word just barely audible. "God, that hurt."

"You'll be all right," Ornina told him, her face tight. "Jereko, help me get him down to the medpack."

"Never mind me," Hanan insisted, trying to shrug their hands off. He succeeded only in flailing uselessly against Kosta's shoulder. "We've got to get the Skyarcher before it's too late."

"Stop that!" Ornina snapped, pushing his arm away from the restraint release. "You need help."