"There you are," Kosta said, stepping inside. "What are you doing here?"

She didn't jump in her seat or spin around or do any of the other things people were supposed to do when they were caught doing something wrong. But it seemed to Kosta that she took a fraction of a second too long before turning her head to look at him. "What does it look like I'm doing?" she countered mildly. "I'm working."

"Now?" he asked, moving to her side and leaning over to look at the grinder. Held snugly in an electronics clamp was a small lens-shaped piece of crystal. "With the ship about to hit the catapult?"

"Why not?" she said with a shrug. "Hanan and Ornina can handle the ship without me. Anyway, it felt a little crowded up there."

"Uh-huh," he said, frowning down at the crystal. There was something about the size and shape that seemed familiar somehow...

"Don't you have some work of your own to do?" she interrupted his musings. "Calibrating your equipment or something?"

"No, everything's done," he said absently. He had seen something just like that crystal—he knew he had. Recently, too. If he could just chase down the memory...

"Okay, then, to hell with politeness," Chandris said. "Go away and let me work."

"Fine," Kosta said, straightening up. "You don't have to get huffy." He gave the crystal one last look—

And suddenly the mental picture he'd been searching for dropped neatly into place. High Senator Forsythe, outside the Gazelle, offering his hand for the respect gesture. And fastened to a chain around his neck, the delicate gold filigree and crystal of—

Kosta focused sharply on Chandris; and in her face he could see she knew he'd figured it out.

"Okay," she growled. "So?"

"So?" Kosta hissed. "Are you crazy?"

"They need the money," she said. "They need it for the ship; they especially need it for Hanan. He's got a degenerative nerve disease, in case you haven't bothered to notice."

"That was unfair," Kosta said coldly. "I was the one who carried him down to the medpack, remember?"

She looked at him a moment... and for a wonder, nodded agreement. "You're right," she acknowledged. "It was a cheap shot."

"Yes, it was," Kosta nodded back, some of his anger draining away. "Look, I'm sorry about Hanan.

I'd like to see him get fixed up, too. But this isn't the way to do it."

She gazed evenly up at him. "How are you going to stop me? Without getting me in trouble, that is?"

Kosta grimaced. So she thought that it was her he was trying to avoid getting into trouble. If she only knew. "I'll tell the Daviees," he said, turning back toward the door. "I'm sure they can find a way to keep you away from Forsythe's angel."

"Forsythe doesn't have the angel," Chandris called after him. "Ronyon does."

Kosta turned back. "What are you talking about?" he demanded. "Ronyon isn't wearing an angel."

"No, he's carrying it in his pocket," she said. "That's why I spilled machine oil on him and sent him to the shower. So I could find it and get a close look."

Kosta frowned at her. Could they be issuing angels even to High Senators' aides now?

No—ridiculous. "They don't give angels to aides," he told Chandris. "Just to the High Senators themselves."

"Well, then, he's got Forsythe's angel," Chandris insisted. "Maybe he stole it."

"But Forsythe's wearing—"

"He's wearing a fake," Chandris said. She gestured to the unfinished crystal in the clamp. "Just like this one."

A cold chill ran up Kosta's back. A High Senator, with a fake angel? "There has to be a mistake," he said between suddenly stiff lips.

"Not a chance," Chandris said. "I know what an angel feels like up close."

Kosta thought back to his own first encounter with one of the Institute's angels. He hadn't felt a thing, and he'd really been trying to. "I didn't know angels felt like anything in particular," he said.

"Some people can't tell the flavors of different mushrooms apart either," Chandris said tartly. "I don't know how I can tell if an angel's there. I just can. The High Senator's wearing a fake. Period."

Kosta's gaze drifted away from her face, his mind spinning with sudden uncertainties. The underlying basis of this whole mission had been the Pax assertion that the Empyreal leadership was coming under the influence of alien intelligences. But if that wasn't true—if the High Senators were not, in fact, wearing angels—then that threat evaluation was way off target.

Unless Forsythe had engineered this deception on his own. In which case, he was blatantly defying Empyreal law, for some reason of his own. Having second thoughts about the angels, perhaps?

Either way, it was a situation worth following up on. Which meant, unfortunately, that he was again going to have to avoid rocking the boat. "I won't tell the Daviees about it," he said, knowing full well that Chandris was going to take this wrong. "Not now, anyway. But I'll be keeping an eye on Ronyon; and if you grab that angel, I will turn you in."

Turning his back on her, he left.

Chandris stared after him, her work on the crystal momentarily forgotten. It had happened again.

Kosta had cracked her red-handed doing something illegal... and had just walked away rather than get involved.

But it wasn't just a dislike of getting involved, she saw now. It was more specific than that. It was an attempt to avoid situations where he would be drawing attention to himself.

Or more specifically, where he would be drawing official attention to himself.

Slowly, she turned back to her crystal. Kosta wasn't who he pretended to be—that much she'd concluded his first time aboard the Gazelle. But he wasn't a normal con artist, either.

So what was he?

She leaned back in her chair, frowning at the ceiling. There was something he'd said to her a long time ago, an off-handed comment that had sounded odd at the time but which she'd never gotten around to checking out for herself.

That strange comment about aphrodisiac perfumes.

Swiveling around, she reached for the machine room's computer terminal. But even as she did so, the intercom pinged. "Chandris?" Ornina's voice said. "Where are you?"

Chandris hesitated a split second, old ingrained reflexes whispering at her to come up with a quick and convincing lie. Suppressing the impulse, she tapped the switch. "Machine shop," she said.

"We'll be hitting the catapult in about three minutes," Ornina told her. If she wondered what Chandris could possibly be doing in the machine shop, it didn't show in her voice. "You want to come up?"

"Sure. I'll be right there."

"Thank you."

Chandris keyed off the intercom and set to work freeing her rough crystal from its clamp. She'd hoped to have the duplicate finished before they reached Angelmass and people started wandering around the ship again. But no problem. There would be plenty of time to get it done before the Gazelle got back to Seraph.

And if Kosta didn't like it, he could go jump.

She made it to the control room and into her seat with maybe twenty seconds to spare. Kosta was already there, sitting tight-lipped in Forsythe's earlier seat and doing his best to ignore her. The High Senator himself was nowhere to be seen. "Systems all okay?" she asked, keying back into her board.

"Running smooth as can be," Hanan said. "High Senator Forsythe left a couple of minutes ago to go find Ronyon."

"He's probably still in the shower," Chandris said. "I was showing him around the ship and accidentally squirted some machine oil on him."

Ornina frowned at her. "How in the world did you manage to do that?"

Chandris was saved the necessity of answering by the alert signal from the control board and the start of the catapult's five-second countdown. She ran her eyes over her board, confirmed that everything was ready; and with the usual not-quite jerk the spider-shape of Angelmass Central appeared in the center of her display.