Forge of Heaven (53 page)

“Who am I talking to?”

“Hannah Trent,” the contact said. Head of Systems. “We’ve been hacked, sir, major hack. We’re on it. We’ll get it back. The hack is mutating on us, hopping left and right, not from the uplink. It’s coming from somewhere near 10th and Blunt. Shall we send out the emergency vehicles, show of force? We need to find the source.”

“Do it,” he said.

Their intruder had hit the system.

Stop the Ila from her provocations? Impossible.

Ian take preemptive action against another of their small frater -

nity? Never yet.

Marak. Never forget Marak, or Hati, or Memnanan—you rule the heavens, they’d say. We rule the earth. Don’t read us lessons.

Don’t
give us orders.
Don’t
bring us your troubles.

Brazis raked his fingers through his hair, wondering if he dared Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 4 7

leave the office and go out himself—wondering if he should rely on Magdallen or if he suspected Magdallen of a consummate double cross, maybe even
being
the problem he was hunting.

Magdallen had been ill in the office in the prior incident, as powerfully affected as the rest of them when the Ila came blasting through the system.

Dammit.

“Dianne.” He started to ask her questions by tap, as he did a thousand times a day. And stopped himself from what had become a life and death risk. He hurled himself to his feet and went to the door. “Dianne.”

Dianne was tight-lipped, alarmed. “Sir?”

“Relay to Langford. Shut the taps down. Shut it all down, common and private. Turn all the relays off. Now, before we have more dead!”

“Contact with the planet, sir—”

“Shut it all down! Now!”

The relays had
never
been shut down from the station, not for two seconds, in all Concord’s several existences.

But it would protect the taps they had left.

It meant that Ian and Luz were on their own, except the local planetary net.

If they, in reaction, shut
that
down, then everybody was on his own.

“ B ROT H E R ,” P RO C YO N H E A R D, felt the table under his face, felt the close physical press around him, a hand holding his against the surface. He tightened his fingers, gripped that hand, got a breath.

“I’m all right.” Deeper breath.

“Get those damned things out of here.” Ardath’s voice. With fear. That wasn’t accustomed.

“How?” someone asked.

Procyon lifted head and shoulders, freed his hand and propped himself on his elbows. Ardath was there, with Isis and Spider and a couple of others whose names he didn’t know. He wiped his face, hearing a nightmare click-click-click, and looked down, beside the table.

3 4 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h

Two bots, two little lumps of metal and plastics, with winking lights, sat right at his feet.

“Braziss,”
whispered the new voice in his head.

“Yeah,” he said to it, just him and it, alone, in an inner nightmare. “Yeah, I hear you.”

“Procyon?” Ardath leaned into his frame of vision, attracted his attention with a touch on his hand. She was sitting in the chair across the table. “You stay here.”

“You’re not leaving.”

“I’m not waiting for you to die. Or be swept up into some government hospital. I’m not having it.”

“You don’t remotely know what you’re getting into.”
Brazisss,
the inner voice said. And:
Marak. Marak.

“And
you
know?”

And what good was he? What good was he, with whatever had gone wrong with him?

Marak,
the inner voice said, but he couldn’t reach Marak. He was branded with the
ondat
keepaway. People were scared of the sight of him, that was what good he was.

That was something.

“I think this thing is real,” he said to her. “I think this mark is real. There’s a war going on. And I’m in the middle of it.”

“You stay here. We’ll fix Algol, we’ll settle with him, and then we’ll talk to Brazis, if he wants you back. We’ll negotiate.”

Brazis wouldn’t give a damn for his personal wants.

Marak might.
Marak
would want his own information. Somewhere between Brazis, the Ila, and Marak, there would be hell to pay.

But if the mark was real, if that dark place was real, there was something else. Something with its hand on him. Its voice buzzing in his head.

Something with an interest in him. Keepaway. Keepaway. Set aside.
Claimed.

Maybe he was still dizzy. Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly. But there
was
something going on in the understructure of the Trend, the shadowy places that fed the Trend with illicits and legitimates alike. The Ila, Gide, Marak, and now him,
him,
become an intruder in his own circles—it was Ardath’s whole fragile world about to Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 4 9

come under scrutiny because of him. And she
would
be involved.

She was in that elite class that rested, like a thin, fragile skin, on the questionable things that, all of a sudden, would be the object of conflict and furor around, of all people who had never intended it, her brother.

But if the Trend could purge itself, if he could keep her and him from being killed, there there was a chance Marak himself, given information, could find him. Could negotiate with the
ondat,
who regarded Marak, Brazis said, as the only honest human, the only one. He had his little robots, his link with that dark place. They blinked and buzzed beside him. They found him, where he went.

He had that straight, now.

Where he was, very powerful entities had ears and eyes.

“If you’re going, I’m going,” he said, trying for steadiness in his voice. “If you’re going onto the street, little sister, so am I.”

WAT E R FA L L S P O U R E D O F F the heights, and the beshti, on their feet now, in the passing of the gust-front, bawled protests about the weather—justified protests, with the racket of thunder. Marak held on to the tarp from one side, Hati from the other, and they kept the worst of the storm off, warming each other, but the beshti remained on their own, outside, in the lightning-lit downpour.

Whether the cliffs above them or under them were stable—that was beyond any precaution they could take, but to stay clear of overhangs.

The momentary confusion in the heavens of Brazis’s domain seemed to have settled. That moment when they all, all, from the least to the highest, could hear each other—that was unique in Marak’s experience, and not something he wanted to experience again.

But it had passed as quickly as the front itself, leaving the thunder, the storm, and solitude—a sense of quiet for the first time since he was very young indeed.

He hoped the boys up on the ridge had paid attention to the deep-stakes. The gust-front that had run ahead of this storm, particularly up on the exposed ridge, was a test of their skill. There was a knack to tuning the tent to the wind that gave it stability in 3 5 0 • C . J . C h e r r y h

weather. It had never been this sorely tested. He hoped the boys had learned what he had taught them.

Equally, he worried about his youngest watcher, who he feared was isolated now in a different kind of storm in the heavens, and who had to fend for himself in the mess up there. He had made his opinions known to Brazis. But in this silence even from Ian, now, his watchers had to watch out for each other. He could no longer reciprocate the favor.

He sat snug against his wife and listened to the beshti. Somewhere near them, loose rock gave way and crashed down the slopes.

“I almost had him,” he said to Hati, thinking still of Procyon, and that moment that everything had crashed open. “I almost had him. Then it seemed I heard another voice. It made no sense at all.

If I tried, I might still reach Ian. That way seems open, still.”

“Leave Ian to sort it out,” Hati said, hugging his chilled limbs.

“Clearly the boy is alive. Folly to move in this downpour. We might at least get some sleep, husband.”

Hati was never one to batter herself against the impossible. She snuggled close, and he shifted to increase the warmth.

He heard the other beshti complaining in the distance below their perch, a trick of the wind, an echo, it might be.

“Marak.”

Clear and cold. The very man he wanted to hear. “Ian. What happened? What is the sudden racket and silence up there?”

“We have no idea.”

“We have every idea,”
the Ila’s voice interposed over Ian’s.
“We
have a perfectly adequate understanding of what happened up there. The
fool director has completely cut us off.”

“Ila,”
Luz interjected.

He had been worried because the tap had been silent. Now he had no patience for this bickering. The width of the desert was not enough to insulate him and his wife from the Refuge and its petty politics. “All of you,” he said sharply. His arm had gone to sleep under Hati’s shoulder, and tingled as she stirred. “Settle your differences. I have no interest in all of this, except the safety of my watchers, two of whom are dangerously affected, if not dead, and one of whom is pursued by Brazis’s enemies and now held from Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 5 1

talking. Break the system open. Tell Brazis stop this nonsense, use his resources and pull Procyon back to safety. Now.”

“That is the very point, Marak-omi,”
Luz said,
“that the station
wants no contact with us at the moment. Brazis apparently detected a
Movement cell active on the station. We believe Brazis is the one who shut
the link down, for defensive reasons.”

“We are far from certain,”
Ian said.

“Folly,” Hati said disgustedly. She had sat on the periphery of this conversation. But she clearly heard what Ian and Luz said, all on her own. “My husband says it all. We are wet, we are cold, we are at this moment in very ill humor on a cliff that may pitch us down into the basin, and when we get off it, trust my husband will not rest until Brazis accounts for this boy. Ila, we appeal to
you.
Tell us the truth behind all of this.”

“About fools who call themselves Movement? Who engage in illicit
trade and infiltrate new technology into the system? I know nothing at all
substantive.”

“We have our deep suspicions,”
Ian said.

“Enough!” Marak said, beyond angry at this sniping and bickering and insinuation.
“Is
it Brazis who shut us off, or is there some other agency?”

A crack of thunder. A gust of wind carried rain under their shelter, threatening to tear the canvas away from the three irons they had embedded.

“We have not the least idea,”
the Ila said carelessly. Marak could see the gesture in his imagination, a lift and wave of the fingers, dismissing his strong hint of other interference—or some enemy diverting their attention elsewhere.

“Hati,”
Luz said,
“Marak-omi, we need you. We need you both. We
ask you stay with us.”

Oh, doubtless Luz needed their support in the situation now, Marak thought. Doubtless Luz now repented her bickering with Ian and even more bitterly repented her period of friendship with the Ila. Doubtless Ian and Luz alike dreaded being deserted to the Ila’s society without his mediation. Half a year was already wearing on their close, three-sided society . . . without him in the Refuge. They were ready to call him back. And if his and Hati’s absence had driven Ian to the far end of the Paradise and actually 3 5 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h

precipitated this event, he regretted it, but he much doubted that was the case.

Dared he raise the thorny matter of Brazis’s personal faults with Ian now? They all had ears to hear. They all would have heard what he had heard in the system, if they had been listening at all.

The three of them at the Refuge had all known, if he had not imagined it entirely, that there was something seriously wrong on the system. They had failed to raise the issue or warn him. Subtlety and subterfuge was at work, and he had no desire to fling sand in the soup before he knew what the new alliances were.

“We have no choice but tend to our own affairs, our way,”

Marak said. “We expect others to do what they can.”

With that, he shut the voices down himself, definitively, and possessed a thunderous and rainy silence he had chosen. Let them worry what he knew, and what he might do about it.

He gripped the slit of the tarp against the wind, with his wife warm and close against him, and they looked out on the lightning-lit rain, on rock spires and new streams of water pouring past them—well calculated, where those storm-made streams would run.

The heavens quarreled. At least they knew the relay the boys had set up on the ridge was functioning very well, even in the weather, since the Refuge had come in clear and strong.

This, the thunder and the rain and the constant shivering of the earth, this was reliable and real. The grinding war of shattered sections of the earth were producing something he and Hati had never seen, and despite their danger, even this far away, they shared it. Let the Ila and Ian battle it out with Brazis and the rest.

Watchers came and went, sorry as they might be for the loss of three innocents. They could never touch the heavens. They had the earth to watch.

But, then—a small thought slithered back into Marak’s mind—if there was in fact someone new in the network, then perhaps something in the long maneuvering in the world above
had
truly changed. Like the cracking of the earth’s plates under the hammerfall, like the rupture of the Southern Wall, an event that, over time sufficient to lift mountains, and bring this weather down on them—change could happen up there. They had feared the water Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 5 3

rising from below, and instead were half-drowned by water falling down on them from the sky and the cliffs. Surprise could still happen, on the world’s scale.

And if something up in the heavens had finally cracked, then they were no longer in an endless loop, one set of known forces against another. If something up there had cracked, then, up there, as below, plates might have begun to shift, bringing chaos and real change in the heavens.