Forge of Heaven

Spate of rain. Water from the heavens, precursor of an advancing sea. Cold rain, rain like half-melted ice.

The winds of the calamity had reached them. Time was up.

THE WHOLE SYSTEM was under assault. Taps reported in left and right by physical line, taps made ill and disoriented by a strike, this time on every cha

“I have the governor on, sir. Go ahead.”

“Setha? Setha, we’ve been hit, dammit. Something’s hit the whole tap system. Are you doing anything?”

“Antonio? No. Nothing that I know. What’s going on?”

“Hell if I know. Luz is claiming there’s an outlaw tap. Assure me it’s not yours.”

“No. No, emphatically not.”

“Damned thing’s amped to hell and back; it’s blown systems, God knows what it’s done to flesh and blood.”

“I’m not on a secure phone. I’m in my office. I sent Jewel to you with a message.”

“The message got here.”

“Have you read it?”Reaux asked.

He had the transcript on his desk. Reaux said he wanted it sent to Kekellen, preemptive strike against Gide and party. Scary as it was, it wasn’t a bad idea, in Brazis’s opinion, but events were moving too fast to give him time to think about it.

“I’ve got it, I’m considering it. Where’s Gide at this moment? Still in hospital?”

“In hospital, sedated and under watch—for his own safety.”

“So he’s not the one with the illicit tap.”

“Couldn’t be. Couldn’t possibly. You say your system’s damaged? Has the problem got onto the public tap? Or only the Project system?”

Good question. He didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know. It’s ongoing. We don’t know how or what or even if it’s located up here and not down on the planet. We’re trying to run down a source.”

“My message is extremely urgent.”

“I’ll think about it.” He tried not to get testy about it. Got a breath. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Listen. Listen. Antonio, I have information on the launcher. The lab believes it’s from Orb. There’ve been similar attacks against the police there. We’re trying to track that down. Unfortunately—you know the problem here.”

The Ila had broken in, warning them of a rogue tap, the system was on the brink of collapse, the head of local security might be a Treaty Board agent firing Orbish shells at a Treaty Board ambassador and now the governor wanted to bring Kekellen into it.

He sipped caff, trying to subdue the nausea, and his hand shook.

“I’ll look into that on my end. With all my resources.”

“I’ll do what I can from this one.”

Including keeping Gide quiet, he hoped. Including monitoring moves Dortland might make, if Dortland had any clue they were onto him.

The contact went dead.

The message for Kekellen, Dia

It looked like a clean message. More to the point, the message wanted exactly what he wanted, which was Gide out of their systems, and if he kept the physical message as evidence in case of any blowup, it had Reaux’sfingerprints on it. All Apex could hit him with was being too foolishly accommodating.

But he wasn’t, himself, an expert with the ondat. The PO had the planet in its charge. Negotiations with Kekellen were much more the domain of the governor’s office and his experts.

Experts licensed by the Treaty Board.

He took a strong gulp of caff, summoned up his personal note with Magdallen’s tap-code, and tapped in, taking his life in his hands.

“Brazis here. The system is under assault. Can you hear me?”

There was a lot of cross-chatter. Nonsense flashes, like an electrical short somewhere in the system. Foolhardy to be using the system at the moment, but other options were equally scary.

“Your man is walking down Blunt Street,”Magdallen said, “with anondat mark on his forehead.”

“Repeat that.”

“It’s theondat keep-away. It’s on his skin, and it glows in any dim light.”

God. “Is it authentic?”

“I have absolutely no idea. It’s scared hell out of the street. Nobody’s making a move, except staying out of his way and staring, when he goes into shadow, where it glows—you can’t see it, else. The boy looks badly shaken up. His movements are erratic. I had my hands on him once. I could grab him again, but I’m not sure you want that to happen in public. The crowd might take its own action. Worse, we don’t know where that mark came from.”

An ondatmark. An ondatmark. It could be a human enemy, somebody who wanted the worst kind of trouble.

“Are you hearing me, sir?”

“I hear you,” Brazis said. “Keep him in sight. Inform me what he does.”

The malfunction on the system created a hell of a headache. He felt a rush of fever near his right ear, which might mean damage to the blood vessels, a chance of stroke. A very great risk of stroke, with spikes and surges ru

An ondatmark.

And he had that message on his desk.

God, what was Reaux up to? An entity they could only marginally talk to, an entity that could abrogate the Treaty without appeal and reopen the Gene Wars with the whole human species…

He should get his own, unlicensed, communications experts in here immediately. He should rely on his committee—

But they weren’t administrators, didn’t have his clearance, didn’t have a clue what had been going on, didn’t have a background on the situation, and briefing them adequately was damned near impossible, as fast as events were ru

The mark someone had set on their tap—provocation? Deliberate provocation of a force that could destroy Concord, with all attendant consequences?

The ondatwere already involved, either challenged by this move or, or, God help them, alreadytaking action within the station, on theirside of the environmental barrier.

He numbed himself to any thoughts of before and after. He made an executive decision, called up Kekellen’s restricted codes with another keypunch, and transmitted Reaux’s message over the lines entire, unreviewed by his experts.

Afterward, his hand shook.

He could be right to have trusted Reaux. He could also have just made a mistake that all their experts combined might be unable to get them out of.

12

WIND, WIND THAT HOWLED, tore at the canvas, wind that picked up wet sand and hurled it. Beshti hunkered down, moaning above the gusts. Marak hugged Hati to him, as canvas flattened against his back, poles bowing—it was well lapped under them, and driven down with deep-stakes into the rock, and it held, but his back turned cold, and the insistent headache throbbed with the howl of the gusts.

“Like one of the old storms,” Hati shouted against the racket.

“That it is,” he said, holding fast to his wife, trusting the beshti, sheltered, like them, behind a sandstone spire, would stay down until the gust-front passed. The wind stank of rot, chilled with antarctic cold—might wear through the canvas, it carried so much sand up from the pans. It rained up, at this edge of the cliffs. Water whipped up from the pans, upward on the gale. Thunder cracked and deafened them and the lightnings were a steady flickering light through the canvas.