"So do Hova and Rafe—"

"They'll get it," Kosta cut him off, popping the strap on his side of Hanan's seat. "Ornina and Chandris can handle the ship while I get you below. Fair enough?"

A surge of pain came and went across Hanan's face. "All right," he gritted.

Kosta wedged a foot under the edge of the chair and took Hanan's arm, feeling the muscles trembling under his hand as he got the arm around his shoulders. "I'll need a few minutes at half a gee or less," he told Ornina, hauling Hanan bodily out of his seat and fighting hard against the fat man's inertia. "Can you do that?"

"Assuming we have any control at all, yes," she said grimly, wedging herself into Hanan's seat. "You know how to work a huntership medpack?"

"I do," Hanan said before Kosta could answer. "I'll be there with him, remember?"

"Well, then, get there," she snapped, giving her brother one last look before turning back to her board.

Hanan turned slightly watery eyes to Kosta and gave him the ghost of a smile. "The hospital, officer, and step on it."

It took some effort, even at half a gee, to manhandle Hanan onto the medpack table. But Kosta managed it, and under Hanan's guidance got it programmed.

He had completed the procedure, and Hanan was starting to fall asleep, when the gamma-ray cloudburst abruptly dropped off to more or less normal levels again.

The intercom, when he tried it, was inoperable. He considered heading back to the control cabin to find out what was going on, but even though Hanan seemed all right he decided it wouldn't be a good idea to leave him alone.

And so he sat there, watching the glowing green lights on the medpack and listening to Hanan's steady breathing.

And tried to think.

Chandris was sitting in Hanan's usual seat when Kosta arrived in the control cabin. "How are we doing?" he asked her.

She turned to look at him, her eyes flat and dead. "We're going home," she said, turning back to her work. "How's Hanan?"

"He's all right," Kosta told her, moving forward to drop into the seat next to her. "Ornina says he's not in any danger."

"She probably told you, then."

"That the Skyarcher didn't make it?" He nodded. "Yes."

Chandris shook her head slowly. Disbelievingly. "It killed them. Burned all the electronics and optics out of their ship and just... killed them."

Kosta nodded again, looking at the display. At the stars and, just barely visible now, the pattern of lights indicating the Angelmass Central space station. "We stopping at Central or going on to Seraph?"

"Probably the latter," Chandris said. "There's no need to stick around unless either Hanan or the Gazelle need immediate attention. Central isn't set up for major long-term work."

"Yeah." Kosta looked at her. "That radiation surge. From the way Hanan and Ornina were talking, it sounded like this wasn't the first time it's happened. You ever seen one before yourself?"

Chandris gave him a long, cool look. "Two men just died out there," she said, her voice even colder than her eyes. "Is it too much to ask for you to put your scientific curiosity into storage for a while?"

"I'm sorry," Kosta said quietly. "Did you know them well?"

"Hardly at all," she said, turning back to stare at her board. "I only talked to the owner once, back when I was trying to get a job. Before I found Hanan and Ornina." She shrugged, a slight movement of her shoulders. "He wasn't very nice to me. Sarcastic and pretty nasty." She snorted a sound that might have been a sort of laugh. "It's funny, you know. When I first came here I wouldn't have cared a two-ruya reek if a frag like that got himself sliced. Look at me now." She shook her head.

Kosta nodded, searching for something to say. "At least you tried. That has to count for something."

She looked at him again, a faint sheen of contempt in her eyes. "This isn't a university final, Kosta," she growled. "This is real life. There's no partial credit given for effort."

He winced at her tone. "That's not what I meant."

She sighed, the anger fading from her face. "I know."

For a few minutes they sat together in silence. Kosta was just wondering whether he ought to leave when Chandris stirred. "You were asking about the radiation surge."

"Yes," Kosta nodded. "I was wondering—"

"I remember the question," she cut him off. "I've heard stories of things like this happening, but I've never been this close to one before."

"Any idea what might have caused it?"

She shrugged. "You're the expert. You tell me."

"That's the problem," he said. "I can't. According to everything I know about black holes, what just happened should have been impossible."

She frowned at him. "What do you mean, impossible?"

"I'll show you. Come on back to my seat and I'll call up the data from my experiment."

"I can bring it up from here." She fiddled with her board, and a moment later a page of numbers appeared on one of the displays. "Okay, you've got access—that part of the board, there."

"Thank you." Kosta keyed in the plotting/extrapolation program, set it running. "Now, let's see just what this looks like..."

The numbers vanished, to be replaced by a fuzzy pink cone with an equally fuzzy dark blue line down its axis. Kosta gazed at it, a shiver running up his back. "I'll be damned," he murmured.

"What?" Chandris asked.

Kosta pointed, noting vaguely that his finger seemed to be shaking a bit. "The blue line in the middle is the surge of radiation," he explained. "The pink cone is where there was no radiation at all."

Chandris looked at him. "No radiation?"

"None. At least, not in the frequencies my sensors were set for."

She looked back at the display. "But..."

"Yeah. I don't suppose you'd have any records of those other surges aboard, would you?"

"I don't know," Chandris said grimly, reaching for her board. "Let's find out."

The baby was asleep, her eyes pinched shut against the gentle night-light in the room, a delicate pattern of veins crisscrossing her eyelids. Occasionally she stirred, waving her tiny hands around or making them into fists, and once made a series of sucking motions with her mouth.

Sitting in the semi-darkened room, sipping at a mug of cold tea, Kosta watched her sleep.

He'd been there perhaps twenty minutes when the door opened behind him. "Dr. Qha—? Oh, hi, Jereko," Gyasi interrupted himself cheerfully. "Aren't you supposed to be out at Angelmass or somewhere?"

"The trip ended early," Kosta told him. "If you're looking for Dr. Qhahenlo, she's down the hall in the lab."

"No rush. Who's that, baby Angelica?"

Kosta felt his lip twist. "That's her name, is it? I should have guessed."

There was a brief pause. "You all right?" Gyasi asked, his voice frowning.

"Not really." Kosta gestured at the screen with his mug, the movement sloshing a few drops over the rim and onto his fingers. "I don't understand this, Yaezon. What kind of people are you, that you blithely put an angel around the neck of a baby?"

"It's a bit of a gamble, sure," Gyasi agreed, coming over to stand beside Kosta's chair. "It was hardly done blithely, though. Or quickly, either—the argument and discussion lasted nearly a year, with just about the whole Institute getting in on it before it was over. Director Podolak and the others finally decided it was just something we had to do."

"For science."

Gyasi shrugged. "You could put it that way, I guess. Don't forget, though, that we didn't go in entirely cold. We had nearly two decades of experience with the High Senate and others to go on, not to mention a few years of lab studies before that. Even if we don't know exactly what the angels are, we know pretty well what they do."