Forge of Heaven

FORGE of

HEAVEN

C. J. Cherryh

Contents

REFERENCE

i

History

ii

Positional Map

iii

Power

FORGE OF HEAVEN

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CREDITS

BOOKS BY C. J. CHERRYH

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Reference

i History

CONSIDER TWO BUBBLES in space, one the shape of ondatterritory, the other the shape of what is human. Earth sits, not at the center of its bubble, but off center, at the farthest side.

This is the shape of things. The bubbles forever overlap, thanks to a human action. They forever overlap, since humans let the Gene Wars reach the ondathomeworld…since ruin overtook the heart of ondatculture, and the ondatwent to war with humankind.

Concord Station sits in that zone of overlap. At Concord, humans and ondatkeep anxious truce and watch, a situation older than all extant governments, all extant culture, all extant languages but one, in both spheres of influence. Time moves incredibly slowly here. But since ondatare patient, humans are compelled to be.

The Gene Wars ended here, ages ago, in a cold peace. The ondat maintain one observer at Concord Station—perhaps one. Humans, sharing the same station, have no way to be sure.

Cross deep space, now, to the deep places of human territory.

In the I

Go back to the begi

In the larger bubble, and long, long ago, within that region of human territory that Earth calls the Outside, an anti-Earth splinter called the Movement broke from local authority, and broke in a way that forever alienated them from Earth. The Movement bioengineered humans, livestock, and agriculture—specifically to fit colonists for three difficult planets it hoped to claim.

Movement science had joined nanotech with biotech. It changed humans in ways that could be passed on. The Movement claimed worlds, and it meant to govern Outsider territory.

Earth quickly slammed down a total quarantine against everything Outside.

That meant that the far greater number of Outsiders who wanted Earth’s help in this ongoing crisis were abruptly, and without consultation, cut off from direct trade. The next decades were a struggle for moderate Outsider governments to keep their own settlements alive, to organize some sort of government without Earth—and simultaneously to fight the Movement, which was mobile and difficult to track down. Earth began to use Outsider assistance in its own hunt for Movement bases, and reasserted its unifying authority over Outsider governments, but still refused any direct personal contact with places it considered contaminated, and that by then included the entire Outside.

It was not love of mother Earth that kept the beleaguered Outsiders fighting against the Movement. It was pure self-preservation, the knowledge that if biochange produced a disaster, it would happen in their laps. They formed a union of their own, centered at a station named Apex, and laid down laws that would keep trade going, independent of Earth and the I

Driven farther out by a series of Outsider military successes, the outlaw Movement spread nanotech to another world, to secure a base there.

But another species existed here, previously suspected, but never encountered. Ondatlanded on the world during this period, contacted these aggressively adaptive Movement nanisms, and unknowingly let loose disaster on their own species, a calamitous runaway that spread from them to their homeworld.

Ondatwent to war, seeing no species or behavioral difference in Movement, Outsiders, or Earth.

Earth and Outsider forces understood at least that Movement actions, specifically the Movement intrusion into ondatterritory, had touched off this war—and they moved quickly to dissociate themselves from the Movement. They joined the ondatattack on the Movement in space, they hunted Movement bases down to the last, and gradually the ondatseemed to accept that not all humans were hostile.

But in the economics of the war, badly hammered by the ondatattacks and Movement alike, the Outside had lost its newfound autonomy. In the process of protecting the Outside from infiltration by the Movement, Earth had maintained tight control of key Outsider sites, despite the new authority at Apex, and despite Outsider trade agreements. Earth ultimately asserted its old rights to install governors at every surviving Outsider colony, in the name of defense and negotiation with the ondat.

The Movement gained a number of recruits as irate Outsiders reacted to what they considered a betrayal, but it was a last flourish. The Movement fought a couple of sharp actions against the ondatand the Earth Federation, but they lost heavily, and this led to the suicide of three of its leaders.

The ondat,mollified by the fact human forces had helped defeat the Movement, drew back into their original borders, and conducted a shoot-on-sight but nonpursuit relationship with Earth Federation patrols.

That shaky border situation defined human and ondatrelations for over three hundred years.

Federation law maintained a tight grip on Outsider colonies. Earth governors were there to stay. Ironically, however, the absolute isolation that pure Earthers maintained from Outsider worlds and stations (from which they took fuel and electronic information, but little else) allowed Outsiders under those Earth-run administrations the freedom to do pretty much as they wished in nanotech and genetics, synthesizing materials, creating life, creating whole servant ecosystems in limited environments—and simultaneously striving to fine-tune and limit these same systems. The Outsiders’ stated intention was to rein in biological change on the several contaminated worlds, where, certainly, some Outsider descendants lived. They intended to prove that such worlds could be cleaned up.