Too good and too well-memorized for an amateur con man, but without the flair a professional would have put into it."

Kosta nodded. "I could tell there was something about it that bothered you. I guess my trainers didn't expect me to run into someone with your expertise."

"But it was that snide comment you made about aphrodisiacal perfumes that finally cracked me into you," Chandris went on. "I'd never heard of anything like that, but I didn't get around to checking up on it until tonight. Turns out they don't exist. At least, not in the Empyrean."

"Aphrodisiacal perfumes," Kosta said ruefully. "I don't even remember making that comment."

"You did. Trust me."

"Oh, I believe you," he said. "I'm not all that surprised I did, either. Too much information was the number-one fatal error on my trainers' list. Given the rest of my record, it was inevitable I'd trip over the most amateurish mistake in the book."

Chandris was still trying to come up with a response to that one that wouldn't sound too sarcastic when the door opened behind them and Gyasi came in. "Anything?" he asked, nodding toward the computer display.

"Not yet," Kosta told him, leaning forward and tapping a key. "Still working the baseline."

"This mass tracer's always been a little slow," Gyasi said as he slid into the chair beside Kosta.

"While we wait, you might want to take a look at the package that just came in for you."

Kosta sat up straighter in his seat. "The huntership data from High Senator Forsythe?"

"I didn't see a name on it," Gyasi said. "Sending address was Angelmass Central, though. I wasn't sure if your files would be accessible, given your funding freeze, so I dumped it into one of mine.

You want me to pull it up for you?"

"Please."

Gyasi swiveled a terminal over and keyed in a command. "So this is from a High Senator, huh? I swear, Jereko, you're getting more interesting stuff done since your funding froze than you ever did when things were purring along."

"You have no idea," Kosta said, hunching a little closer to the display. "Here it comes."

Chandris frowned at the screen. A fuzzy ball made up of short multicolored vector lines had appeared in the center, rotating slowly around its vertical axis. "I was right," Kosta said softly.

"Damn. I was right."

"About what?" Chandris asked, a creepy sensation sending a shiver through her. Kosta's demons seemed to be contagious. "What is all that?"

"It's a global vector map of Angelmass's gravitational shifts during that last radiation surge," Kosta told her. "Those shifts go clear across the board."

"I don't believe this," Gyasi breathed, his voice sounding awestruck. "Look at that scale—those decreases are up to a tenth of a percent in places."

Chandris's mind flashed back to the conversation aboard the Gazelle. "Could it be something statistical?" she asked. "You said the Gazelle didn't give you enough data points."

"There are more than enough data points here," Kosta said. "It's not a mistake, either. Or a malfunction, or—"

"Hang on," Gyasi interrupted, tapping the screen. "What's this coming up?"

A narrow cone of brightly colored red was becoming visible as the vector map rotated, a red cone with a thin white line down its center.

And suddenly Chandris felt her stomach trying to turn inside out. "It's the same picture," she identified it, her voice sounding strange in her ears. "The one you got when you plotted out the surge that killed the Skyarcher. The same picture exactly."

"It's close, anyway," Gyasi said cautiously. "We'd have to run a curve comparison to be sure."

"Don't bother," Kosta told him. His voice, Chandris noticed distantly, was trembling slightly. "If Chandris says it's the same, it's the same. And there it is—there; that blue point that the white line's cutting through. That's where the Gazelle was."

Gyasi shook his head. "This is insane, Jereko," he insisted. "A black hole hasn't got any internal structure. None. What possible theoretical mechanism could exist to explain something like this?"

"Angelmass isn't a normal black hole," Kosta said. "Not anymore."

Chandris eyed him closely. There was a tension around his eyes, a graveyard look to his face. "What do you mean, not anymore?" she asked.

A muscle in Kosta's jaw twitched. "I've got a theory. But you're not going to like it."

"More than I don't like impossible gravity fluctuations?" Gyasi countered. "Come on, let's hear it."

Kosta hesitated, then shook his head. "Let's wait on the mass reading," he said. "This is crazy enough that... no, let's just wait."

"I hate waiting," Gyasi declared, getting to his feet. "I'm going to go check on the tracer."

He left the room. "So which way are you hoping it goes?" Chandris asked.

Kosta rubbed his eyes. "I'm a scientist, Chandris," he reminded her. "We're not supposed to hope data goes one way or the other."

"Yeah," she sniffed. "Right."

"Besides, I'm not even sure it matters anymore," he conceded. "Whether angels are standard quanta or Dr. Qhahenlo's quantum bundles, something weird has definitely happened to Angelmass."

He gestured toward the row of computer terminals on the long lab table beside them. "I wish I could get into the files and check some of the details of her theory. I know it predicts some mass loss here, but I don't know how much."

"Can't you do the calculation on your own?"

"This isn't like looking up the mass of a hydrogen atom or calculating a force vector," he said. "The mathematics involved are way too complicated to do by hand. And with my funds frozen, I don't have access to the computers."

Chandris looked at the terminals. "You want me to get you in?"

He threw her a startled look; suddenly seemed to remember who it was he was talking to. "You can do that?"

"Probably," she said, swiveling the closest terminal over into easy reach. "Want me to try?"

For a pair of heartbeats he stared at her hands as they hovered over the terminal, a battle going on behind his eyes. She waited... "No," he said quietly, reaching over to take one of her hands away from the keyboard. "We can't risk getting caught. Not now."

His hand was cold and rigid; and as she held it, Chandris found herself looking into his face. Into those foreign eyes, into the dark tension behind them.

Earlier, waiting in the darkness of the Gazelles angel storage room, she'd thought a lot about whether confronting a Pax spy alone was really a smart thing to do. He'd persuaded her to give him the benefit of the doubt for now, but she'd been ready to chop and hop the second he showed what he was really up to.

But now, suddenly, she realized her mental preparations had been unnecessary. Kosta had no sinister private plan, because Kosta was exactly what he claimed to be: a simple academic who'd been thrown into the deep end of the tiger pit. "Don't worry," she said. "I'm not going to turn you in."

He shook his head, his gaze drifting outward into space. "I'm not worried about myself, Chandris."

"Then what—?"

She broke off as, behind them, the door opened and Gyasi came back in. "Well?" Kosta demanded, letting go of Chandris's hand.

"It should be finished," Gyasi said, crossing toward them. "See if you can pull it up."

"Right," Kosta said, punching at the keyboard as Gyasi slid back into the seat beside him. The numbers came up...

Gyasi muttered something under his breath. "There it is," he murmured. "You were right again, Jereko."

"It lost mass?" Chandris asked, running her eye down the numbers and trying to make sense of them.

"Mass and charge both," Kosta told her, his voice tight. "Almost three percent each."

"And it lost them right through the outer mass coating," Gyasi added. "You know, if the angel's breaking down, the mass loss ought to show up as high-energy particles leaking through the shell.