Forge of Heaven

A deep breath. Second thoughts. And a desperate commitment. Give information and get information. “Listen, Antonio: Gide is definitely Treaty Board. He’s setting up an office here. I can’t prevent that. He insists there’s First Movement operating on the station, among the Freethinkers, of all places. What you’ve turned up, then…that makes you think he’s not mistaken in his suspicion. Something hasgotten off the planet.”

“Not necessarily the things we would most fear. We doubt she would start with her most valuable commodities. We take it seriously enough. Council is going into session.”It was always Jewel’s voice, incongruously so, Jewel’s eyes that assessed his reactions. “I’m going to be hard to find for the next hour, but my proxy will be handling Council, informing them of what they have to know to deal with Mr. Gide. I have other business, which I can’t talk about. No matter where I am, Jewel can reach me at any time. She’ll stay in your vicinity. I say again, stay entirely away from Stafford. Let me bring him in. We have strong evidence that your chief of security is secretly reporting to the ship, that he’s an agent of some party on Earth, or of the Treaty Board itself. We thinkDortland may have deliberately cracked Gide’s containment and stranded him, on orders Gide knew nothing about. This would mean an overt and a covert operation of the Treaty Board here at Concord simultaneously. Does this alarm you?”

Reaux’s heart accelerated its already rapid beat. Dortland, a spy? It might be a clever lie. It might be a deliberate attempt to isolate him from his own staff, and make him get his information from Outsider sources at the very moment Brazis had just confessed how compromised those sources were.

But exotic equipment, a short-range missile, for God’s sake, smuggled into an exclusive garden court, past tight security—

Two of Dortland’s men had died, in that garden, of neuronics, a close-up kind of weapon, and not one the average criminal could get.

Would Dortland do a thing like that? His own men? Men he could just walk up and touch? Take utterly by surprise?

“What evidence do you have of that?”

“I tell you the barest, unproven information I have. I have yet to confirm it from another source. But I value you as a stable influence in office, and I have no wish to see you replaced or in any way subordinated to the Treaty Board. That would be an unacceptable change in the status quo. Don’t trust Dortland. Above all, I ask youdon’t let him near Stafford. I want you to get Dortland off that case. If he snatches a Project tap, you know what hell is going to break loose, with my government and, for that matter, with theondat. Let’s never forget them, if the peace is violated.”

Where was he going to get a distraction to take Dortland off the hunt for Stafford?

Send him hunting for his own daughter?

That was all the distraction he had to offer. Damn it all to hell, if he couldn’t trust Dortland, he couldn’t trust anybody Dortland had hired. He was utterly isolated, except for Ernst. Except for his Outsider contacts.

And could he use Kathy that cold-bloodedly, even put her in harm’s way, supposing Dortland might have motives to bring him down?

He didn’t know what viable alternative he had. He didn’t know who he had left that he could trust.

He signed off with Jewel and exited their impromptu conference room, gathering up his escort, two of Dortland’s men, as Jewel tagged behind them. He made a phone call as he walked. “Ernst?”

“Sir?”

“I’ve received very alarming news. Call Dortland. I want him to go down to Blunt himself, I want him to find Kathy. Highest priority.”

10

“NOTHING,” Marak reported to Hati, who begged him to silence all the voices and not to attempt the contact again—but he was more than a

No response from Luz, none from Ian. Auguste was ill, incapable of coherent answers if he had any beyond, “I swear I have no idea, omi.”

Now the system had blown up. By all he could determine, the Ila had broken into the system for a momentary contact with Procyon, which he had not managed to join quickly enough. Auguste, close to a relay, had fallen ill, and Ian and Luz were probably still arguing age-old grievances with one another. It was one of those times when the width of the desert was probably a good distance.

It would have been a good thing, except the haze in the west, that they had watched grow and grow—a cloud now towering into the heavens and spreading.

More, the wind had acquired a strange smell, a dank, rotten smell compounded with the tang of wet sand as the wind swept upward from the basin floor. There was no sight of the distant calamity. At any moment the gap might break wide. The sands nearest Halfmoon were being deluged with sea water, a widening pool, by now, churned deeper and deeper by falling water. The heavens failed to advise them how the catastrophe was progressing. Auguste, who had been advising him on his route, and who had promised him a way back no matter the weather, was afflicted and silent.

If the whole of the Wall at Halfmoon should go—suddenly—in one of the frequent aftershocks—what might they see on that horizon?

Much more than a cloud, he was sure, and meanwhile the silly beshti kept zigzagging their way down and down as if they had all the time in the world, ultimately headed to the pans, the sort of terrain that had made their ancestors lords of the desert. Down there was graze. And water. Could they not smell water on the wind?

The fools had no idea what they smelled. That it was all the water in the world threatening to thunder down in a kind of flood no beshta’s instinct could imagine; these beshti had no idea.

In the scales of the worlds above the world, this handful of recalcitrant beshti had become a dire problem. There might well be siege in the heavens. The long peace with the ondatmight be ending. The earth still shuddered from the last cataclysm, the broken pieces of its crust drifting across the heat of hell, and now the heavens threatened to go to war over an Earth lord’s whim and a feud breaking out between the Ila and Ian, one he had wanted no part of in its early stages. Let them shout and threaten, he had said, when it started. Let them spend the first wind of their anger.

He had in mind to spend a great deal of time in the desert. After that he might mediate. He had not pla

They came easily down to the next terrace, he and Hati, following the still recent passage of soft pads on old dust. Beshti hardly went without a trace—but if that cloud went on spreading across the horizon and a deluge came down, adding to their hazards, the tracks would vanish, too. The young bull kept his stolen herd moving just enough. But let him get a head start, let the thunder and the rain add panic to earthquake, and the females, however reluctant now, might take out for the pans for good and all.

The beshti under them smelled change in the wind, too, and there was this about beshti: they stuck tighter together when things went badly. Their own pair sniffed the tracks and smelled the rocks, aware what they were tracking, uneasy in this shift of the wind, Hati’s female seeking others of her kind and his own old bull, smelling the scent of the young rebel, gaining a darker, more combative intent.