Angelmass

CHAPTER 25

Outside, the tow car took up the slack; and with a jerk, the Gazelle started rolling. Ronyon, still carrying the bedding, was caught off-guard by the sudden motion and staggered slightly, bumping into the corridor wall.

It was the opportunity Chandris had been waiting for. In an instant she was at his side, steadying his arm and pressing against him.

A couple of seconds were all she got before he was back on balance again and she had to pull away.

But a couple of seconds were all she needed. Her senses had not, in fact, played her false during that conversation a minute ago with Kosta and High Senator Forsythe.

Ronyon was carrying an angel.

An angel. She repeated the word silently to herself, her thoughts spinning with old plans and fresh possibilities. An angel. Not the Daviees' spare, which she'd promised herself not to take, but a government angel. One of thousands. One that would probably never be missed.

All it would take, Hanan had told her, would be some highly specialized neural surgery and six months of intensive treatment... and two million ruya to pay for all of it.

I'm reformed, she reminded herself. But the words sounded hollow and meaningless. And anyway, she'd never said she was reformed. The only reason she hadn't stolen anything lately was that she hadn't happened across anything worth the effort.

Until now.

They reached Hanan's cabin and Ronyon went inside, smiling cheerfully at Chandris as he set the bundle of bedding on the desk. "You want me to do the beds?" Chandris asked before remembering he couldn't hear her. But even as she tried to think of how best to act out the question, Ronyon shook his head and tapped his own chest. Turning to the bunk, he began to strip it.

So he could read lips. Interesting that Forsythe had neglected to mention that fact. In fact, he'd strongly implied exactly the opposite, that Ronyon could only communicate through sign language.

For a long moment she stood in the doorway, gazing at Ronyon's broad back while he worked, the old juices starting to flow again as she considered how to make the approach. Picking his pocket would be the simplest if she knew where he was carrying it. But she didn't; and anyway, out here in the middle of nowhere she wouldn't exactly have the option of chop-hopping if he noticed the loss.

The best way would be for him to give it to her, for whatever reason she could concoct. A man of his obvious limitations should be easy to score.

Ronyon finished the cot and turned back, seemingly surprised to see her still there. But he smiled again as he collected the other set of bedding. She smiled back, moving out of the doorway to let him pass. The smile faded as he crossed the corridor and went into Hanan's room. An easy score...

except for one minor detail.

The track in this case was deaf.

Chandris bit at her lip, a swirl of uncertainty like she hadn't felt in years swishing through her stomach. She'd never scored a deaf person before; and up to now she'd never properly appreciated just how much of her talent was tied up in her voice. Her tone, her vocabulary, the texture of her phrasings—those were what made the tracks see someone who wasn't really there. Even more than basic disguise and body language, it was what had given her her edge through the years.

Only here, that edge was gone.

Across the room, the intercom pinged. "Chandris?" Ornina's voice called. "Where are you?"

She stepped to the desk and tapped the switch. "I'm in your room," she said. "Helping Ronyon get the bed changed."

"Ron—? Oh, right—the High Senator's aide," Ornina said. "I hadn't caught his name. I wanted to let you know we're almost to the launch strip."

Chandris grimaced. "I'll be right up."

The intercom clicked off. For a moment Chandris just stood there, staring some more at Ronyon's back and trying furiously to come up with a scheme she could run within the next sixty seconds. If she let this chance slip away...

She took a deep breath. Relax, she told herself firmly. Don't push it. There'll be time enough later.

She touched Ronyon on the shoulder. "I have to go to the control cabin," she said when he turned around, being careful to enunciate her words clearly. "Do you want to go with me so that you know the way?"

He looked down at the half-made bed, forehead wrinkled in thought, and shook his head. His hands began to trace out a pattern in the air in front of him—

"I don't understand that language," Chandris said, reaching out to gently stop his hands. "Maybe later you can teach me. Are you going to stay here?"

He nodded. "All right," Chandris said. "I'll see you later."

The roar of the Gazelle's drive faded into a dull rumble, weight fading away with it. Kosta set his teeth carefully together, focused on the back of Hanan's head directly across from his jumpseat, and concentrated on not being sick.

"We're on course now for the Seraph catapult, High Senator," Hanan said, half turning. "It'll take about an hour to get there. I've started the Gazelle spinning—we should have enough for at least a little gravity in a couple of minutes."

"Thank you," Forsythe said. Kosta risked a look that direction, saw no trace of freefall sickness in the High Senator's face. As usual, Kosta seemed to be the only one having trouble. "How much of a wait will there be at the catapult?"

"Ideally, there shouldn't be any wait at all," Hanan said. "Turnaround is usually pretty much as we get there."

"Even with three launch dishes feeding one catapult?" Forsythe countered. "That sounds like a situation begging for a logjam."

"You're right, it does," Hanan agreed. "Oddly enough, though, that doesn't usually happen. For one thing, there's no problem with coordinate-setting; the catapult and Central's net are binary linked. As long as they're both functioning, you can't go anywhere else. Same thing coming home, too."

"What about mass settings?"

"The readings are taken by the launch dish," Hanan explained. "They're then transmitted directly to the catapult. That's usually the only time problems crop up, come to think of it: when ships get out of order and the mass settings are therefore scrambled."

"Interesting." Forsythe looked at the doorway. "I'd very much like to go over more of the operational details with you later, Mr. Daviee. But first, I should probably go and find Ronyon."

"Actually, I can just—no, I can't," Hanan interrupted himself. "He can't hear the intercom, can he?"

"No," Forsythe said. "I have a call stick, but that won't do any good unless he knows where I am."

"He was making the bed in Ornina's cabin when I left him," Chandris offered. "Shall I go get him?"

Forsythe shook his head. "Thank you, no."

"It's no trouble—"

"I said no," Forsythe repeated; and this time Kosta heard a slight edge in his voice. "It'll be better if I—"

He broke off as a sound Kosta had never heard came from Ornina's control board. "What was that?" he asked.

"EmDef ID," Ornina said, turning back to her board. "Someone with high priority is coming through... oh, God," she added, very quietly.

"What?" Kosta asked.

"It's Hova's Skyarcher," she said in the same quiet voice. "They're bringing it home."

"What, only now?" Forsythe frowned, leaning forward as if he would get a better look that way.

"It wasn't easy to retrieve," Hanan said. "Very close in to Angelmass. They had to send an autobooster in to push it out to where the towship could get it without frying the crew."

"Can we get a look?" Kosta asked.

"I'm trying," Hanan said. "They're pretty far away and going the opposite direction. Let's see..."

And suddenly, on all the displays, there it was.

Ornina inhaled sharply, and Kosta found himself feeling a little sicker than he already was. The Hova's Skyarcher was a wreck: its shape noticeably warped, its vaunted Empyreal sandwich-metal hull blackened and pitted. "It must have really gone deep to have taken that much damage," he heard himself say.

"Yes," Hanan agreed. He sounded a little sick, too. "Far deeper than it should have. The radiation surge must have scrambled all the control settings before it..." He trailed off.

Before it killed them, Kosta finished the thought silently. With an effort, he tore his gaze from the wrecked ship.

To find Forsythe watching him.

Briefly, he held the High Senator's gaze before turning away, wondering dimly what was going on behind that stolid face. But he wasn't especially concerned about it. For the moment, all his thoughts were tied up in the implications of what had happened to that ship out there.

"Getting out of range," Hanan murmured.

Kosta turned back to the displays. The dead hulk and the sleek EmDef ships towing it were becoming hazy as they pushed the limits of the Gazelle's telescope and optical enhancement system.

"They taking it to the Institute?" he asked.

"Probably to a decon center first," Hanan told him. "It's got to be blazing with secondary radiation—you saw the length of cable the tow ship was using."

Forsythe shifted in his seat. "Mr. Daviee, you said you normally only get logjam problems when the hunterships get out of order," he said. "Do you ever get logjams otherwise?"

"What do you mean?" Hanan asked.

"For the Institute's self-focusing theory to be right, hunterships have to occasionally drop bits of mass into Angelmass," Forsythe said. "If they drop things there, it follows that they should also sometimes drop things during other parts of the trip, too."

"Which could show up as recalibration problems when catapulting," Hanan said, nodding slowly.

"Huh. I never thought of that. Jereko?"

"I don't know if anyone else has thought of it, either," Kosta said, glancing at Forsythe with newly heightened respect. In his admittedly limited experience, he'd never found government types to be exactly brimming with creative thought. Either Forsythe was an exception, or the Empyrean had found a way to attract a smarter class of people into public service than the Pax had.

Or else it had something to do with the fact that Empyreal politicians carried angels.

The others, he realized suddenly, were still waiting. "I don't know if the mathematics would work out, either," he added, forcing his mind back to the question. "It could be that the amount of mass necessary to start a self-focusing surge is still within catapult tolerances. Worth checking out, though."

"I've got a list here of all the catapult delays we've been involved in over the past year," Ornina spoke up.

"How do I get it?" Forsythe asked, fingers hovering over the control board in front of his seat.

"Allow me," Kosta said, unstrapping and stepping carefully in the low gravity to the High Senator's seat. He keyed for an echo of Ornina's screen, gave it a fast once-over. "I don't see anything obvious," he said.

"Me, neither," Hanan agreed. "Though that may not mean anything. One huntership for one year isn't much of a sample."

"Let's try anyway," Kosta suggested. "If you'll allow me, High Senator...?"

"Certainly." Forsythe swiveled the panel around to where Kosta could more easily operate it.

The Gazelle's computer library contained two different statistical packages. Kosta called them up for a quick look. "I don't think either of those can handle a sample this small," Hanan said, watching the echo of Kosta's work on his own display.

"No," Kosta agreed. "But I know of one that might be able to. Let's see if I can remember how it works."

It was a highly esoteric program he'd learned in his first year at the university, and he wound up with two false starts before he got it right. But finally it was ready. Feeding in Ornina's data, he set it running. "Interesting program," Forsythe said. "How long until it's done?"

"A couple of minutes," Kosta told him. "Speed is not its primary virtue." He let his eyes drift around the room, relaxing from the close-focus work of the display screen.

Chandris's seat was empty.

He glanced surreptitiously around the room, heart suddenly thudding in his ears. She was gone, all right. Sometime in the last few minutes, without anyone noticing, she'd just slipped away.

He opened his mouth to announce his discovery; bit down gently on his tongue instead. She'd probably just gone to find Ronyon, that was all. Or something equally innocent.

Except that Forsythe had already told her not to go after Ronyon. If she was up to something else...

The program beeped notice that it was done. Reaching to the board, Kosta keyed for the results.

He might as well not have bothered. "You're right," he said to Hanan as he dumped the screen. "One ship and one year just aren't enough."

"The catapult itself should have complete records, though," Ornina pointed out. "Perhaps you could ask them to send us a data copy, High Senator."

"I'm sure I could," Forsythe said. "However, as I told Mr. Daviee, I'm here on a strictly unofficial basis. I'd like to keep it that way."

"I see." Ornina looked at Hanan, and in her face Kosta could see that that bit of information had somehow missed getting passed to her. "I'm sorry. Ah—"

"The Institute should also have them," Kosta spoke up quickly. "When we get back I'll get Yaezon to look them up for me."

"There might be another way to get the information now, though," Hanan said, an odd tone to his voice as he tapped keys. "If they happen to have a new trainee or two on station at Control..."

He cleared his throat; and he was launching into a very official-sounding speech as Kosta quietly slipped out of the room.

He went first to Hanan's and Ornina's cabins, not from any real expectation of finding Chandris there but merely as a reasonable place to start his search. To his surprise, however, he heard the faint sound of running water as he approached. Someone inside Ornina's cabin was apparently taking a shower.

For a long moment he hesitated outside the door, a half dozen scenarios—some of them decidedly discomfiting—scrambling through his mind. But if Chandris was up to something underhanded, it was his duty to intervene. Bracing himself, he opened the door and went in.

No one was in the main living area, but there was a neat stack of clothes on the bed—Ronyon's, Kosta tentatively identified them. At the back of the room, through the open bathroom doorway, he could see back to the shower.

The shower door was only slightly translucent, but that was enough. The size and shape of the shadow showed that it was Ronyon in there. Alone.

Quickly, Kosta backed out into the corridor, cheeks hot with embarrassment and annoyance. The Chandris Effect, all right: give him half an hour with her and he'd make a fool of himself somehow.

But at least she wasn't pulling some scam on Ronyon.

So where was she?

He looked up and down the corridor, wondering if there was any point in continuing the search.

She'd probably left on some perfectly innocent ship's business, after all. For all he knew, Ornina or Hanan might even have openly sent her away while he was preoccupied with his statistics program.

Then, from down the corridor, he heard a faint grinding sound.

The sound came and went three more times before he located its source: the machine shop. Inside, hunched intently over a grinder, was Chandris.

"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.

Behind her, the door whispered open, and she turned to see Forsythe come in. "Everything all right back there, High Senator?" Hanan asked.

"Yes, thanks," Forsythe said. He glanced at Kosta, in his earlier seat, and for a moment Chandris wondered if he was going to demand it back. But instead he went over to one of the fold-down jumpseats. "I found Ronyon in his room," he added, strapping himself in. "He'd gotten some oil on himself and was showering it off."

He said it offhandedly, and the glance he threw at Chandris was equally casual. But for someone who'd been reading people as long as she had, it was more than enough.

Forsythe knew exactly who she was. Who she was, and what she was.

She turned back to her board, heart pounding in her ears. So it had happened, as she'd known someday it would. Lulled by the warmth and comfort of the Daviees, she'd let herself believe she could stay here forever.

Now, instead of just getting herself in trouble, she was going to drag them into it, as well.

"I hope he's almost finished," Hanan commented. "We'll have to drop the ship's rotation down to near zero soon."

"He's all finished," Forsythe said. "Just drying and getting dressed again. I let him borrow one of your shirts—I hope you don't mind."

"No trouble at all," Hanan assured him. "I guess I should have made it clear earlier that everything on the Gazelle is at your disposal."

"You made it perfectly clear," Forsythe said. "As I hoped I made clear that I don't want our presence here disrupting your normal working routine. Any progress yet, Mr. Kosta?"

"Yes, but it's mostly negative," Kosta said, studying something on his display. "There have been a few delays at the catapult due to huntership mass discrepancies, but all of them were traceable to errors at the launch dish. Nothing seems to be from material that fell off the ships along the way."

"Though that may not mean anything," Ornina pointed out. "As you said earlier, the catapult may have enough tolerance built into its programming."

"Agreed." Kosta shook his head. "The more I think about it, the less I like the whole theory.

Angelmass just isn't massive enough to pull that much gravitational energy out of infalling paint chips or whatever."

Behind Chandris, the door slid open... and she turned just as Ronyon stumbled into the room, his fingers tracing agitated patterns in the air in front of him.

A look of absolute terror was on his face.

"What's wrong?" she demanded.

"He's frightened of something," Forsythe said, making quick finger gestures of his own. Ronyon replied—"I can't get any sense out of him," Forsythe said, starting to sound concerned. "He just keeps saying he's afraid."

"Is it the low gravity?" Ornina asked, starting to unstrap. A pair of gamma-ray cracks snapped through the room, making Chandris jump. "If he's never been in free-fall before—"

"He been in free-fall hundreds of times," Forsythe said shortly. He had a hand on Ronyon's shoulder now, his other hand still going through their complicated motions. "I don't understand this at all."

"Perhaps we should get him back to his cabin," Ornina suggested. She was at Ronyon's side now, holding his arm in a reassuring grip as she studied his face.

More hand motions, a violent shake of Ronyon's head—"He doesn't want to leave," Forsythe said.

"Says he's afraid to be alone."

Chandris looked at Hanan. "Are there any sedatives in the medpack's drug dispenser?"

"There should be," he said, his eyes on Ronyon. "You know how to get the dispenser open?"

She nodded, reaching for her restraints. "Back in a minute."

It took her a little longer than she'd expected to get to the medpack, take the cover off the dispenser, locate the proper ampule, put everything back together again, and return to the control room. The others had gotten Ronyon strapped into Kosta's chair by the time she returned, but otherwise not much had changed. The big man still looked pretty miserable. "Thank you, Chandris," Ornina said, taking the sedative from her and reaching for Ronyon's arm.

He pulled the arm away from her, his eyes turning frantically to Forsythe. "It's all right," the High Senator told him, gesturing the words as well as saying them. "It's just something to help you relax a little."

Reluctantly, Ronyon put his arm back on the armrest. Ornina touched it with the ampule and gave him an encouraging smile. "You'll feel better in just a few minutes," she said. "High Senator Forsythe and I will stay right here with you until you do."

Ronyon nodded, already seeming to sag a little in the low gravity. Leaving the two of them to look after Ronyon, Chandris made her way forward and climbed into Ornina's seat. In the time since she'd gone to get the sedative, the gamma-ray sparks had worked their way up to a gentle but insistent rain, and she keyed her board for a location check.

The result came up. She looked at it, a frown starting to crease her forehead.

"It's accurate," Hanan said quietly from beside her.

She looked at the tight expression on his face, a creepy sensation working its way up through her.

"You sure?" she asked, keeping her own voice low.

"I've run it three times in the past fifteen minutes," he told her. "No mistake."

Chandris turned back to her board, the creepy sensation getting stronger. If they were really still this far away from Angelmass... "The radiation's getting stronger," she murmured. She glanced back at Kosta, sitting in one of the jumpseats watching Forsythe and Ornina hovering around Ronyon. "Just like Kosta said."

"Yes," Hanan agreed. "I just hope the Gazelle's hull can take the extra—"

He broke off, the last echo of his words vanishing into the silence.

Into the complete silence...

"Kosta?" Chandris snapped, twisting around to look at him.

"I know," Kosta said grimly, already out of his jumpseat and heading for Chandris's usual seat and control board. "The gamma sparks have stopped."

Chandris turned back to her display, stomach tightening as she keyed for radiation sensor readings.

A memory flashed back: someone in the Barrio telling her a story about how a big wave had once swept in from the sea and wrecked a big part of Uhuru's main port city. And before the wave had come, the whole sea had pulled back from the shore, like it was getting itself ready to hit.

"Hanan, get on the radio," Kosta said. "Warn everyone there's a radiation surge coming."

"Right," Hanan said, reaching for the comm section of his board.

He never got there. Without warning, the eerie silence was shattered by a sudden violent burst of gamma-ray crackling.

The surge had hit... and the Gazelle was caught in the middle of it.