Forge of Heaven

Remediationthus became a word of hot political debate between Earth and Outsiders.

So did self-rule.

Meanwhile the Second Movement appeared as a political organization on several Outsider stations. Clearly it was a name chosen for shock value: it shared neither perso

Freethinkers, with their music, their occasional prankish demonstrations against Earth government, and their flouting of station zoning laws, particularly—eventually provided a springboard and a backdrop for that other splinter, the radical chic, the Style, with its music, its fetish for nanotech creativity and personal embellishment. Both splinters thrived in illicit trade of various physical goods—smuggling, in other words, an activity that incidentally provided cover for the more dangerous radical underground, which began to call itself the Third Movement.

Like its predecessor, the Third Movement was well hidden in its outer shells of legitimate demands for freedom and self-rule. But it, too, died, in an attempted violent takeover of the remediation labs on Arc. Earth and Outsider forces fortunately prevented calamity there, and the last of the Third Movement leaders committed suicide with their followers.

The border tension between Earth and the ondat,meanwhile, continued, with occasional shots fired. Ondatdid not communicate with humans, did not trade with, did not approach, did not tolerate humans. No one even knew what they looked like.

Then the ondatmade a radical shift in behavior.

The Unspoken Treaty: Events Just Prior toHammerfall

Ondatnever had communicated with Earth’s ships, except to indicate, by firing at them, just where they thought their border was. Now the ondatbegan a program of nonviolent approach to Earth’s warships inside human space, perhaps testing their peaceful resolve, or, some began to think, wishing them to follow their route.

Taking the risk, Earth did follow an ondatship—to a hitherto unguessed First Movement base…on a world on the ondatside of the border. By all evidence, it had been there for centuries, and the ondathadn’t destroyed it; but they signaled that they were about to do so, with the implication, Earth judged, that they thought this newly discovered base represented Earth’s enemies as well, and they were invited to join in the attack.

Or perhaps, someone said in a hastily called council, the ondatwanted to know what Earth would do about this find, so that they could judge Earth’s behavior toward these human outlaws, and thus judge whether Earth had secretly supported this base in ondatspace for all these years.

The situation on the one hand could lead to renewed war, which Earth was by no means confident of wi

The ondatwaited. Earth hesitated. And desperately consulted.

Earth’s ethicists were aghast at the situation, on purely moral grounds—while certain Outsider experts who had long studied ondatbehavior raised another objection: that meekly committing an act of murder the ondatdirected could set a bad precedent for the ondat-human future. A second set of experts from the Earth Federation also raised the point that this was a First Movement base, and that it might contain biological bombs that even today’s Outsider science couldn’t stop: the place was possibly more dangerous to them than to the ondat,if that population broke containment.

This was the surface debate. But certain other Outsiders, siding with the ethicists and those in favor of rescue, saw their chance at getting their hands on First Movement technology not only intact, but advanced centuries beyond their last information—because there seemed to be a high-tech establishment on the planet that still functioned. The planet represented a potential informational windfall, possibly even the key to the long-sought provable remediation.

Bitter accusations of Movement sympathies flew back and forth in the subtext of communications between the outermost Earth authority at Orb and the Outsider Council at Apex. But the strange coalition held, aided by a peculiar fact: Earth’s military was powerful, but its bioscience had stagnated over centuries, under the quarantine laws. Earth functioned on faith that if the ondatever mounted a bioneered threat in retaliation, Outsiders would be the ones to meet that threat, while Earth’s powerful military pounded hell out of the ondat. And Earth joined the ones who favored study, which Earthsaw as the moderate course.

The ondatwaited through this debate, observed by one lone humanship—and eventually shoved a few small rocks out of orbit, their machines begi

Time was ru

Earth and the Outsiders attempted to present the proposal to the ondat,who sat, encased in their ship, still faceless, operating their robotics.

The ondatbalked, while a few more rocks dropped. The ondat,through symbol transmission, apparently wanted assurances that the Movement ship on the planet wouldn’t take off again, that there wasn’t a conceivable means for Movement technology to escape the gravity well.

Negotiations dragged on. Outsiders took a new intellectual tack with Earth’s representatives: most of all, they indicated, they needed to gain knowledge of the place and monitor its biology, along with any adaptive replication machines. They could help target the strikes.