Forge of Heaven

by C. J. Cherryh

  Spate of rain. Water from the heavens, precursor of an advancing sea. Cold rain, rain like half-melted ice.

  The winds of the calamity had reached them. Time was up.

  The whole system was under assault. Taps reported in left and right by physical line, taps made ill and disoriented by a strike, this time on every channel. Brazis sat at his desk trying to keep nausea at bay, and Dianne, in no better shape, tried to reach Reaux's office through a physical phone system momentarily jammed by unaccustomed traffic focused on this office.

  "I have the governor on, sir. Go ahead."

  "Setha? Setha, we've been hit, dammit. Something's hit the whole tap system. Are you doing anything?"

  "Antonio? No. Nothing that I know. What's going on?"

  "Hell if I know. Luz is claiming there's an outlaw tap. Assure me it's not yours."

  "No. No, emphatically not."

  "Damned thing's amped to hell and back; it's blown systems, God knows what it's done to flesh and blood."

  "I'm not on a secure phone. I'm in my office. I sent Jewel to you with a message."

  "The message got here."

  "Have you read it?" Reaux asked.

  He had the transcript on his desk. Reaux said he wanted it sent to Kekellen, preemptive strike against Gide and party. Scary as it was, it wasn't a bad idea, in Brazis's opinion, but events were moving too fast to give him time to think about it.

  "I've got it, I'm considering it. Where's Gide at this moment? Still in hospital?"

  "In hospital, sedated and under watch-for his own safety."

  "So he's not the one with the illicit tap."

  "Couldn't be. Couldn't possibly. You say your system's damaged? Has the problem got onto the public tap? Or only the Project system?"

  Good question. He didn't have an answer. "I don't know. It's ongoing. We don't know how or what or even if it's located up here and not down on the planet. We're trying to run down a source."

  "My message is extremely urgent."

  "I'll think about it." He tried not to get testy about it. Got a breath. "I'll do what I can."

  "Listen. Listen. Antonio, I have information on the launcher. The lab believes it's from Orb. There've been similar attacks against the police there. We're trying to track that down. Unfortunately-you know the problem here."

  The Ila had broken in, warning them of a rogue tap, the system was on the brink of collapse, the head of local security might be a Treaty Board agent firing Orbish shells at a Treaty Board ambassador and now the governor wanted to bring Kekellen into it.

  He sipped caff, trying to subdue the nausea, and his hand shook.

  "I'll look into that on my end. With all my resources."

  "I'll do what I can from this one."

  Including keeping Gide quiet, he hoped. Including monitoring moves Dortland might make, if Dortland had any clue they were onto him.

  The contact went dead.

  The message for Kekellen, Dianne said, had come through Jewel, who was still here, a message hand-carried, not read aloud. Reaux was clearly desperate to send it, equally desperate not to have his fingerprints on it.

  It looked like a clean message. More to the point, the message wanted exactly what he wanted, which was Gide out of their systems, and if he kept the physical message as evidence in case of any blowup, it had Reaux's fingerprints on it. All Apex could hit him with was being too foolishly accommodating.

  But he wasn't, himself, an expert with the ondat. The PO had the planet in its charge. Negotiations with Kekellen were much more the domain of the governor's office and his experts.

  Experts licensed by the Treaty Board.

  He took a strong gulp of caff, summoned up his personal note with Magdallen's tap-code, and tapped in, taking his life in his hands.

  "Brazis here. The system is under assault. Can you hear me?"

  There was a lot of cross-chatter. Nonsense flashes, like an electrical short somewhere in the system. Foolhardy to be using the system at the moment, but other options were equally scary.

  "Your man is walking down Blunt Street," Magdallen said, "with an ondat mark on his forehead."

  "Repeat that."

  "It's the ondat keep-away. It's on his skin, and it glows in any dim light."

  God. "Is it authentic?"

  "I have absolutely no idea. It's scared hell out of the street. Nobody's making a move, except staying out of his way and staring, when he goes into shadow, where it glows-you can't see it, else. The boy looks badly shaken up. His movements are erratic. I had my hands on him once. I could grab him again, but I'm not sure you want that to happen in public. The crowd might take its own action. Worse, we don't know where that mark came from."

  An ondat mark. An ondat mark. It could be a human enemy, somebody who wanted the worst kind of trouble.

  "Are you hearing me, sir?"

  "I hear you," Brazis said. "Keep him in sight. Inform me what he does."

  The malfunction on the system created a hell of a headache. He felt a rush of fever near his right ear, which might mean damage to the blood vessels, a chance of stroke. A very great risk of stroke, with spikes and surges running freely through the system.

  An ondat mark.

  And he had that message on his desk.

  God, what was Reaux up to? An entity they could only marginally talk to, an entity that could abrogate the Treaty without appeal and reopen the Gene Wars with the whole human species.

  He should get his own, unlicensed, communications experts in here immediately. He should rely on his committee-

  But they weren't administrators, didn't have his clearance, didn't have a clue what had been going on, didn't have a background on the situation, and briefing them adequately was damned near impossible, as fast as events were running. Reaux was much more in the know, at least with the ondat.

  The mark someone had set on their tap-provocation? Deliberate provocation of a force that could destroy Concord, with all attendant consequences?

  The ondat were already involved, either challenged by this move or, or, God help them, already taking action within the station, on their side of the environmental barrier.

  He numbed himself to any thoughts of before and after. He made an executive decision, called up Kekellen's restricted codes with another keypunch, and transmitted Reaux's message over the lines entire, unreviewed by his experts.

  Afterward, his hand shook.

  He could be right to have trusted Reaux. He could also have just made a mistake that all their experts combined might be unable to get them out of.

  12

  Wind, wind that howled, tore at the canvas, wind that picked up wet sand and hurled it. Beshti hunkered down, moaning above the gusts. Marak hugged Hati to him, as canvas flattened against his back, poles bowing-it was well lapped under them, and driven down with deep-stakes into the rock, and it held, but his back turned cold, and the insistent headache throbbed with the howl of the gusts.

  "Like one of the old storms," Hati shouted against the racket.

  "That it is," he said, holding fast to his wife, trusting the beshti, sheltered, like them, behind a sandstone spire, would stay down until the gust-front passed. The wind stank of rot, chilled with antarctic cold-might wear through the canvas, it carried so much sand up from the pans. It rained up, at this edge of the cliffs. Water whipped up from the pans, upward on the gale. Thunder cracked and deafened them and the lightnings were a steady flickering light through the canvas.

  It was not a time to try to see, or hear, or do anything but hold fast, breathe only through the weave of the aai'fad, venture no skin exposed, no more than they had to. Fabric would abrade, skin would gall, eyes would be blinded if they faced such a wind.

  Like one of the old storms, it was, except this sand blast had an edge of melting sleet, except this presaged a lasting change in the world, no simple march of dunes, but upheaval of the climate itself.

  He hugged Hati's face against him, and they breathed in the hollow their shoulders
made. His other hand clenched the rope that he had made fast about the spire itself, in the chance the wind should try to sweep them off the ledge, and well he had, he thought. Very well he had.

  "Antonio."

  Brazis reached spasmodically for the desktop control and physically knocked the amp way down on the tap. It was Ian.

  "Ian, what in hell's going on down there?"

  "An outlaw tap, the Ila confirms it. She denies all responsibility, and says look to those who want war in her name."

  "What's she talking about?"

  "Movement, apparently. Third Movement, on Concord."

  At least he was ahead of the game on one thing. "Third Movement, is it? I already have a report to that effect on my desk, but I'd profoundly hoped not to hear that word from you."

  "The Ila expresses extreme indignation, insisting she has no relation to these persons, whoever they are."

  He'd believe that when the sun burned blue. "I'm pursuing this illicit tap with all resources. Which are now very scant, Ian. Her blowing through here has put a significant number of taps on the sick list or in hospital. Some may not recover. Her own will not recover. This doesn't fill me with great confidence about her intentions. Be careful." He didn't mention the ondat.

  "We'll take precautions."

  "What about Marak?"

  "Marak is well out of this."

  "Is he safe?"

  "Safe as a man can be with a sea rushing through the gap. Madder than hell about his tap being taken without his consent. That was not approved, Antonio."

  "I would have been pushing it, to explain the background of the situation without breaching security. I couldn't gain his consent without explaining more than he wants to know."

  "Maybe you can convince him of that. I marginally suspect he knew the Ila was doing something illicit, and that's why he took this crazy notion to ride out and watch the west coast slide into the sea. Maybe he wanted to get out of the Ila's reach, but that's nothing I can prove."

  Incredible theory. But one never said incredible, in Refuge history. "Can he have any concept of this Third Movement business?"

  "He has his sources. At least for what touches us."

  Memnanan. The Ila's longtime head of staff. Those two had passed warnings before. He'd bet on Memnanan having said something, if anyone.

  "Are we going to have a feud between them, next?"

  "He's not angry at her. But annoyed. That's how I'd describe it. Massively annoyed. When you live this long, Antonio, you have a strangely patient perspective on other immortals' doomed enterprises. There's very little you haven't seen before. If he was in on it, he knew he could only make trouble for Memnanan by spoiling her venture out of hand."

  Not angry at her for provoking the governments aloft, yet mad about a personal inconvenience.

  Or maybe about what he considered a security lapse and a threat to their safety. He had never thought of Marak as keeping secrets of that nature from his office.

  Maybe he was just very good at keeping his secrets.

  "A doomed enterprise, in the Ila's case? Do you dismiss it with that?"

  "I'm sure the Ila herself thought so from the beginning, but someone at your end decided to act in her name, and it was, yes, a diversion for her. I think so. I still think it's minor and that she didn't instigate it, only took advantage of it to see what would happen. If certain fools wanted to play out their game to your detriment, she certainly wouldn't prevent them doing it."

  "I'll accept we're being spied on," he said to Ian, "and I don't know if you know more than you're saying, or if you say what you're saying now with her full knowledge. but I have an immediate need for facts up here, Ian. This is all going to hell on us. I do know of one unauthorized tap on station, sent here from Apex, who may be what she's complaining of with this illicit-tap business, but I'm not betting that answers the whole question, not considering what we're dealing with. Has anyone contacted you at all, that I don't know about?"

  "No."

  "Can you make it clear to the Ila in some reasonable way that trouble is proliferating up here, that people have died needlessly, and if she knows anything, or if she's in contact with any illicit tap in our area, she should tell us and give us identities. This Third Movement group has taken her name as their cause, if what you suspect is true, Earth's heard about it, and they're trying to insinuate its own investigation onto the station. They've subverted the governor's security, and the ondat may be making some move, and if they haven't yet, they're likely to. Doesn't anything in that set of facts catch her notice? It had damned well better, Ian, or I don't know what comes next up here."

  "I'll inform her of all that. And I'm trying to prevent another such outburst on the system. As you point out, Marak is likely going to throw the next hell-fit. He's cold, it's raining, he thought he had the beshti, but they took out to another terrace, just out of his reach, while he was incapacitated with that tap-spike, and his area is becoming more and more hazardous. He's well out of patience."

  "I can't help him. He's put himself where we haven't even got good overhead image and we can't get through to him reliably. If we start trying to direct him up that maze and then lose contact, he could be worse off than he is. Best he uses his own instincts."

  "He wants the boy back, Antonio. If you could just do that, you could do a great deal toward getting communication calmed down all round."

  "I assure you I'm trying to get him back. Ask the Ila, while you're at it. Is there something else she hasn't told us? Has she been passing notes to this illicit tap source, or has she been fighting it? I'd estimate she hasn't been fighting it, if the whole system hasn't blown up. I need to know if that illicit tap is her doing."

  "I'll try to get your answer. It all depends on the Ila's goodwill, which may be extremely ruffled at the moment. In any case, I'll be back as soon as I have any information."

  "Thanks, Ian."

  What else could he say? An honest answer depended on the Ila's personal comfort and how far she thought she could annoy them. It depended on her idea of how much damage she could safely cause them and then back off untouched. He knew of incidents in the past, long before his lifetime, that had wreaked havoc on the powers of Concord, all thanks to her.

  And what could they do with her if she'd violated quarantine? Isolate her? She was already isolated. They'd bet everything they held dear that she was isolated.

  Now she'd found a way to evolve her tap and God knew what other nanotech into something they hadn't detected until she did it with someone who wasn't even on the planet. His technicians said the thing had hopped frequencies. They'd never seen the like.

  And if she was passing notes to conspirators up here-

  If there was a cell here, if she'd found her way into the common taps, or if a rogue tap in the Project had helped her-she could have communicated all sorts of technology elsewhere. Her frequency-hopping nanocele, this recent innovation, could be on Orb by now. It could be all the way to Earth.

  Wobble and wobble. Procyon knew he didn't hew a straight line down the street. He stopped and rubbed his eyes, trying to drive the lights out of them.

  Buzz. Buzz.

  And voices. "Brazisss," one said, and he tried to answer it.

  "Sir?"

  "Procyon!" Not from the tap, from behind him. He turned awkwardly, caught his balance, seeing a haze of blue and gold, a presence that reached out and held his arms.

  "Brother."

  It was Ardath, Ardath, in public, on the street. "I've got troubles," he began to say. "No. Don't be here."

  But Ardath had help, one dark, and one gold, who took him each by an arm and told him come along, now, no argument.

  Direction, from someone who could see clearly, someone he knew was on his side.

  "He's fevered," one said, the darkness. "You can feel the heat in him."

  "It's a mod." A female voice, the gold. "No question it's a mod taking hold."

  Light flash. The terrible pain in his head made
his eyes water as he tried to walk with them. He couldn't coordinate an objection. He just breathed, and walked, and hoped they would get him home.

  They went through a doorway, into shadow, a relief, at least for his eyes. He could smell alcohol, old beer, not his sister's ordinary level of establishment. He heard synth-wood chairs moving on a synth-wood floor, voices that echoed around and around. It was Auntie Murphy's, he thought. He knew the older, rougher bars up and down the street. It smelled like Auntie Murphy's.