Forge of Heaven

Nanoceles, complex biounits of the Movement’s creation, were a sort of life. They responded to evolutionary pressure, and would fit themselves for any changed environment. If the planet was devastated, they would go off program and become, in effect, true new life, at a bottleneck of evolution—not inherently more dangerous, Outsider scientists argued, than life that evolved naturally. Certain capabilities would be trimmed off in a process of natural selection, and they would no longer be fitted to do what the Movement had designed them to do. In short, remediation might be possible for this and other worlds, including the ondathomeworld.

To do anything scientifically useful, however, scientists on the Outsider team needed at least a century to work on the planet, to get their hands on that tech and understand the original design before it mutated wildly under the scouring the ondatproposed.

And if they got that century, Outsiders swore they would share that knowledge with Earth and the ondat.

Earth joined Outsiders in last-ditch negotiations with the ondat,who had already chosen their missiles to crack the planet.

The Outsiders got forty years to work.

The Events ofHammerfall

An Outsider team went down, a dive to prison without escape and, ironically, the assumption of a godlike power over a whole planet’s future. The two scientists promised to report as long as they could, implying they expected to die in the scouring of the planet.

But the mission they intended was to get First Movement tech into their hands, build deep, and survive the destruction with part of the native population, and with their own laboratories intact. Their landing craft was capable of withstanding anything but a direct hit from one of the planetkillers or direct involvement in the consequent volcanics; and the Outsiders left not even that matter to chance, since Outsiders were helping target the strikes. The Outsider team onworld hastily burrowed a deep refuge, created surface modifications, took their samples, and set to work.

Foremost concern, Outsiders suspected Movement was still active on the planet: their first priority was to get any such highly trained persons into their own hands along with their lab records.

They were dismayed to discover that, indeed, not a successor, but an original member of the First Movement was still alive and still ruling after so many centuries. The Ila, as the locals called her, had intended to refurbish the Movement, build an ecology and an economy, rule a devoted population, and live quite well here. A new war? Possibly. A new culture? Slowly. Spaceflight? She certainly had the plans. Her science gave her the longevity. She just needed the industry.

But her plans hadn’t gone utterly smoothly: the planet was short on metals and certain other key elements, making the synthesis of essential materials more difficult. More, the inhabitants, as generations spread out and adapted to the new planet, not only adapted to the harsh conditions, but developed self-interest and rebelled against her. The inhospitable planet itself hammered her other creations, destroyed them if they were slow to mutate and mutated them into problems if they were rapid to respond.

The Outsiders were right. Even with Movement active and in charge, it was becoming a new world.

The Outsider team saw the Ila and her records as key to their problem: and both resided in her ship, the half-buried center of the establishment the locals called the Holy City. Clearly that ship and that city were the one place on the planet from which they absolutely couldn’t divert the ondatstrike. They had to get that information out of the target zone.

The forty years was almost gone. Last-moment negotiations to stall the planetkillers fell apart. The Outsider team attempted to use the planet’s own rebels to draw the Ila out or crack that citadel. That failed. As a last resort, they began to call in certain human residents of the world, in whom they had implanted communication nanisms, to save them and gather their knowledge.

But again the Ila thwarted them. She heard rumors of odd goings-on, and brought the affected people to her capital, endangering a major element of the Outsiders’ plan.

But her bringing those particular people in brought the Outsider team an unexpected chance. Marak Trin Tain, a young man with leadership abilities as well as political importance, reached the Ila in person. Through him, using the implanted tech, the Outsider team delivered a warning to her, to evacuate her base and seek shelter in the east.

It was a warning Marak Trin Tain didn’t wholly understand, but the Ila certainly did. She evacuated the city and saved her records as a bargaining leverage, exactly what the Outsider mission wanted.

The ondatattack had already begun. The Outsider team continued to try to stall the planetkillers, claiming one of their team was out in the desert and in trouble. Whether or not their appeal actually delayed events, or that the larger planetkillers, coming from farther out in the solar system, lagged behind others that served as ranging shots, Marak and his party, including the Ila, reached the Refuge before the first true planetkiller fell on the other side of the world.

So the Outsiders got their hands on the Ila, on hundreds of years of records, and on a great number of refugees.

The hammer came down. And the world became a volcanic hell.

The Outsiders continued to transmit new discoveries to ships in orbit—and the ondatseemed to accept their presence on the world so long as that stream of knowledge flowed. Earth didn’t leave the vicinity, nor did the Outsider ship break contact with their team from orbit. Nor did the ondatleave. There were things to learn. There was a lingering threat here to keep an eye on.

The ondatunderstanding of humans was insufficient to let them reason out quite what humans were up to, after everything that had happened. But humans were perfectly willing to indicate that they would not lift the team off the planet, nor visit them, and that they would establish a permanent base in orbit to guarantee that permanent state of affairs.

The ondatevidently believed this—as long as ondatstayed to guarantee it, too. A station grew. Earth naturally moved in an official to govern it. The Outsider Council established a matching governmental structure aboard. The ondat,still unseen, set aside a section of the station and moved in a capsule which became incorporated in the structure, and ultimately integrated with it.

The name of the new station was, hopefully chosen, Concord. A trade route was set up, from Arc, to supply it.

Below, the planetkillers had done their work. The impacts had sent shock waves through to the other side of the planet: volcanic plumes melted hot spots in areas of weakened crust. Vast lava flows choked the sunlight planetwide in thick clouds of noxious vapors. The planetkillers had vaporized undersea carbonates in the sea off the west coast of the inhabited continent, killing the food chain planetwide.

The hardiest life survived in the depths of the seas and the crevices of the earth, along with extremophiles of various sorts, some of which were likely foreign, imported by the Ila, some native, both unpredictable in their potential, given the conditions that prevailed.

The world had a lengthy course to run before the atmospheric balance reasserted itself…not, however, as lengthy a course as might have been without the nanisms that now played their part in an accelerated evolution.

Observers up on Concord remained hopeful, but highly skeptical.