Forge of Heaven (57 page)

ondat
that we are not pursuing whatever actions they took as a severe provocation, or the planet might very soon find an
ondat
authority up here solely in charge. You will not want that.”

“Have we provoked this attack?”
Trust Marak to ask the head-on question.

There followed another moment of silence in the system.

“We
certainly did not transmit technology to the
ondat,” the Ila said sharply.
“They have breached the Treaty, interfering in our communications.”

Damn her.
And he wasn’t the first Director to think that. “The Ila knows how painfully slow and erratic our communications have been with the
ondat,
” Brazis said. “And knows how many centuries we have worked to establish certain useful and peaceful boundaries with the
ondat
on this station. I appeal to you for cooperation. If they have intruded into the tap system, this is a new problem.”

“And did you not send Marak’s watcher to the Earth authority, breaking down certain boundaries?”

Uncomfortable question.

“We did so. It was a serious error.”

“Record it,”
the Ila said, perhaps to an attending au’it.
“We did
not precipitate this crisis. The director did.
Now
do you wish our advice
in the matter?”

No
one rebuked the woman, this eternal prisoner of the onworld establishment, this epicenter of all problems that had ever existed.

“Yes,” Brazis was constrained to say, keenly aware of Marak’s silent presence. “We would be grateful for that, Ila.”

“There is an undocumented stranger on your station. He arrived on a
ship from Orb. So I hear.”

The Ila’s lately brain-dead tap could have given more details than that, he was quite sure.

“There is one I know about.”

“There is another.”

“And where shall we find this person? What is his name, Ila?”

“His name. His name.—Typhon, perhaps.”

“Was he in contact with your senior tap, Ila?”

“He might have been. Acquainted with Argent, yes, but not intimately.”

Zillha Faron. The Ila’s tap. Argent, by chosen name—was brain-

Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 7 5

dead, resurrection officially failed. Argent was no help to them now—except what items security could turn up in her credit cards and the other detritus of a life cut short. If that contact was in there . . . if there was something in Argent’s records that had to do with anyone from Orb . . .

“Thank you,” he said, not without feeling.

“Would this Typhon be tapped in now, Ila, hearing us as we speak?”

This from Ian.
“Might he
be
the provocation of the
ondat
?”

“By no means,”
the Ila said airily.
“We have not shared our technology with this person or his followers. We are innocent. What their ambitions thought they might share—that is all their responsibility. The
official stranger has provoked the
ondat,
has he not? Not our doing. Let
them fall. Let them all fall. Typhon is a fool. We have no part in his fate.”

Typhon. Brazis’s fingers flew on the keyboard.

Typhon. Egyptian name. God of the desert. God of the waste-land. The destroyer of life. The station knew no such legally arrived individual.

“I’ll investigate,” Brazis said. “Best we break off. We’re all exposed, so long as we maintain this link.”

A series of flashes and static. Tap-out—from the uplink itself, Brazis suspected. Ian, likely, had shut it down again, while keeping his own on-planet relays up.

He was on his own up here.

“Dianne. Get in here.”

As fast as it took to leave a desk and open a door.

“Sir,” Dianne said.

“A name. Typhon. T-y-p-h-o-n. From Orb. It may be an alias. It sounds suspiciously like that. Tell the Argent team that’s possibly their target. She knew him. Tell enforcement I want an arrest in the next five minutes.”

“Yes, sir.” As the phone beeped.

Brazis picked it up himself. “Brazis.”

“Antonio.”
Reaux. “
Antonio, the ambassador’s been tapped. Infected.

They think it’s a nanocele.”

Brazis’s heart did a skip and a thump. Dianne had vanished back out the door. Jewel was not there. And being an Earther, damn him, Reaux talked with names on a compromised communications system.

3 7 6 • C . J . C h e r r y h

“Not our doing. I assure you,” Brazis said.

“I don’t think it is. But can one of your hospitals take him? Can they
do anything for him?”

“We’re certainly willing to try.” That offer was a leap over a chasm of red tape and negotiation. “The faster the better.” Damned right he wanted the ambassador in his hands. He wanted to trace the source of that nanocele . . . as if he didn’t have a terrible, sinking feeling he knew what it was and from what source it came. He committed an indiscretion himself, aware that ship out there might be listening. He hoped they did hear. “
Ondat. Ondat
may be our source. Handle this with extreme caution.”

A little silence on the other end—from the man who’d instigated the message to the
ondat, asking
their intervention.
“Why do you
think that?”

“Because my man is walking Blunt at this moment with an
ondat
sign branded on his forehead.”

“I have the same information. What are you doing about it?”

“I don’t want to answer that on-line.”

“Dortland’s headed down there. My daughter is somewhere down on
Blunt. He knows where she is.”

A father’s desperation. A hostage. A desperate request that a governor couldn’t ethically make.

“I’ll bear that in mind.” Damn, he thought. Complications.

“If we get a containment team to bring Gide to your level, where
should we take him?”

“Bring him to Ausford and 22nd.” That was dead in front of the Project police station. “We’ll take him from there.”

“Done,”
Reaux said.
“I’ve got to go. I’ve got to arrange that.”

“Do it,” Brazis agreed, and clicked out.

They
were going to have Gide on their hands. Not a willing Mr.

Gide, he was well sure.

Meanwhile he tapped in on Magdallen’s code, listened for a moment. Didn’t hear anything.

“Agent Magdallen.”

“Sir.”
A low voice.
“There’s a conference in the middle of the street,
our man’s group with sixteen others, three more of the Stylists and
their particular followings. That’s Diamant, Minx, and probably Brulant . . . I’m not sure of him. Diamant and Brulant haven’t spoken to
Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 7 7

Ardath recently. It’s a famous feud. It seems to be patched, by what I’m
seeing.”

Feuds on Grozny were sometimes more smoke screen than fire, masking alliances, confusing external investigation.

“I’ll bet it is. What are they doing?”

“Breaking up their meeting, at the moment. I’m sending you the image.”

He checked the phone. Saw the conference in question, over against a dark green shop frontage, he assumed on Blunt. If that was Brulant, who had been an informant from time to time, the man had had a few mods.

Procyon was among them, standing beside his sister, looking grim.

“Procyon.” He tried to reach the boy. Saw him wince, real-time, shut his eyes and press a hand to his ear. Pain. A still-developing tap.

Did he now instruct Magdallen to grab him? Or did he let the situation run, letting the street do what the street alone had resources to do, finding a way into in places so shadowy and immediately mutable that the police might never penetrate to the core of what was going on.

Dortland’s headed down there.
Heavy-footed intervention was the last thing they needed in the matter.

“Sir,”
he thought he heard. He couldn’t clearly see Procyon’s face to know if he was the one talking. His head was turned. The whole group was hazy-focused in Magdallen’s image, with distance and bad lighting.

A burst of static cut him off the tap and made Procyon lift a hand to his ear, as if someone had physically struck him. Ardath turned to her brother, laying a cautioning hand on his arm.

He could shut down the local relays again. But seemingly that didn’t stop the rogue.

That meant there was an independent relay station out there.

More than one. A thoroughly independent tap system.

If a relay could override his transmission to Procyon, it was either stronger, or nearer. If the
ondat
had reached out into the main station to install relays independent from theirs—

Ondat
didn’t come onto the human side of Concord, reputedly couldn’t do it, for any long periods. They used robots to handle their occasional foraging, lately making rambling, exploratory for-

3 7 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h

ays out of their warmer, ammonia-perfumed level. Acquiring orange juice, and chlorine.

Robots could safely do that sort of thing.

Bots. Three of which were in the image Magdallen gave him.

Any one of those . . . especially the repair-bot . . . was conceivably big enough to house the necessary electronics.

Damn. They were looking right
at
their rogue relays.

14

“ A R E YO U A L L R I G H T ? ” Ardath asked Procyon, and:
“Braziss,”
the tap was saying, intermittently, dragging Procyon’s attention back and forth between worry for his sister and worry for messages he couldn’t get through. They had gathered force. Tap-calls summoned others. Michaelangelo’s was across the street, dark and dim, with a police-closing sign on the door—was he surprised, that the place he had shared with Algol was where they were heading, to deal with him? He remembered the inside, the maze of halls, the common room, the back room where the Freethinkers had met, all of it a brown, dingy warren, the only competing color those faded blue plastic chairs. They’d been saviors of the universe. They’d known everything there was to know.

It was shut, police-sealed. But one of Spider’s men turned up a key-card, legitimate or otherwise, and no great amazement. Keys came on the market daily, and people had been thrown on the street by that police seal. Michaelangelo’s clientele was notoriously low on funds.

“Braziss,”
the tap said, and Procyon tried to focus where he was.

They were going in. Brulant headed across the street to the service nook with six of his people, and as he moved, Isis was talking to her tap, still calling in favors to bring in others off the street. “This is war,” Isis was saying. “Be here, do you hear me? Be here, as quick as you can.” Diamant, glittering with dust, far from inconspicuous, took her followers across the street, strolling casually 3 8 0 • C . J . C h e r r y h

into position at the bolthole entrance, at the adjoining shop frontage.

“There’s a rumor out,” Isis said in a low voice, at Ardath’s side, “that they’ve snatched kids, upstairs kids, for hostages. Ce-leste says he’s coming in with four of his, fast as he can: he’s a block away.”

“Good,” Ardath said. News flew with the speed of tap-calls from one end of the Trend to the other. Procyon had remembered boltholes even Spider had failed to know: “Carew’s, over on White, another at Perle’s—” and he was aware, past his headache, that they had gotten people to those, over on other streets: Cepheus, and Lotus, with their people.

But:
“Braziss, Braziss, Braziss,”
the voice in his head kept insisting, and he didn’t know what it meant, except the voice thought he was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. “I’ll go to Brazis,”

he promised it quietly, and he would, he’d get there, fast as he could; but getting Algol would get what Gide had come for, and bring down what threatened Ardath’s safety, she being his sister, and at war with him. Getting Algol would get what disturbed the
ondat,
that no one could reason with. So he resisted the voice, bore down, concentrated, tried to think if he was inside Michaelangelo’s, if there was any other possible way out that he hadn’t remembered, and couldn’t.

“Brulant’s there,” Spider said, near at hand. Traffic on the street hadn’t diminished at all. Bystanders osmosed out of the shops and the side streets, some to see, some to join. It had become a mob around them. Hundreds of them, not coming here for him, Procyon thought: for Ardath, for Ardath, on her say. And he had his own use—to
show
where the trouble in the station was, if Kekellen had failed to find it, to go where the police couldn’t. To stand by his sister’s side in shadowy places and scare hell out of anyone who threatened her. For his own protection he had a knife out of the bar kitchen. Some of Ardath’s allies had more than that. He knew for a fact that Algol did.

Half a minute to draw breath, just enough time for their people to call allies and spread out. “Go,” Ardath said, and no more warning than that.

They moved, Spider and his followers a spatter of ink, Isis’s in Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 8 1

gold and silver, Ardath’s young adherents in every shade. Procyon kept by Ardath’s side. His three small robot attendants buzzed along, chrome and silver, all in sudden, purposeful motion—where he went, they went; where he went, Kekellen’s eyes and ears went.

Michaelangelo’s double doors sat catty-angled at the corner of a darkened frontage, and Spider tried the tenant’s key, quickly, eco-nomically.

Click. Click-click.

It didn’t work.

“We have a problem,” Spider said on a deep breath, a breath doubled in the gathered crowd. Then someone among the spectators laughed, that most deadly of sounds in the Trend.

Whirr-click. The repair bot, right at Procyon’s elbow, hummed.

Click-click, went the lock.

“Well,” Isis said with a nervous laugh. “So Procyon brought a key.”

Spider tripped the latch, softly, then flung the door open on light, on a common room full of laughter and riot—that died as they walked right into Michaelangelo’s bar and the bots zipped to one side and the other.