Forge of Heaven

Security called a lift car. Reaux rode up to the isolation level, fretting at the ordinary speed, and exited with his minimal escort, the two building security guards Ernst had commandeered for him. No training, no special skills—but no commitment to Dortland, either.

God, what was he into?

The look of crisis manifested the moment he exited onto the Gide’s floor and turned the corner toward the isolation units. Hospital security was in plain sight, armed not with guns but with detector wands and hose-down kits. He’d seen the precautions in drill. He’d never seen the reality in his life. He didn’t know where the safe limit might be, and pulled up short with his unprotected staff.

“What are we up against?” he asked.

“Governor, sir.” The hazmat leader in charge spoke jargon to a collar-com, and a moment later, having heard some sort of answer:

“Containment’s maintained, sir. It’s safe right here.”

“Can I see him?”

He didn’t particularly want to see Gide, but it was what he’d come to the hospital to do. The first report had said Gide could die. Reaux was a civilized man—but he had fervently hoped for that event. What he had heard on the way here, however, indicated something far less satisfactory.

He knew the drill with the suit, now. He went into the adjacent room and suited, making the seals tight, checking them twice. When he came out, the men opened the door for him, and he went into the restricted area, leaving his escort in the safe zone.

Faceless, behind another mask, the physician in charge met him as he came through into containment. Waiting for him, clearly.

“Governor.”

“Doctor. What’s the story here?”

“We’ve got a problem, but not as life-critical a medical problem as we initially feared. There’s a nanism at work, organizing fast. A sitednanism, not general.”

“Where is it?”

The doctor touched the side of his masked head.

“Are you saying it’s a tap, then?” A tap was good news. A tap was a limited involvement, a known mod, with a known progress, a known limit.

“Not commercial. No chance it’s commercial. It’s a large area of involvement. It’s got the ear, the jaw, and the nerves and vessels there, and it’s developed faster than anything I’ve seen.”

“Any chance it’s contagious? How in hell did he get it?”

“Any breach in the skin. Which he certainly has. Even ingested. It wouldn’t matter. The usual administration of the common tap is in a capsule. But we can’t readily identify it and we’re taking no chances until it’s finished doing whatever it’s going to do. He, on the other hand, wants out of here immediately. He’s furious. And I take it this infection isn’t within your knowledge, Governor.”

“No,” he said, aghast that the doctor had even suggested it, as if his government could have done it.

But Dortland? He could hardly believe it. But he supposed it was possible.

And meanwhile his brain spun its wheels on that word tap,getting nowhere he wanted to go. “No, I assure you this is nothing my administration knows about.”

“It happened somehow.”

“Is he still conscious?”

“Too conscious. Sedation isn’t taking. That’s one thing that very much worries us. He’s got a hellacious headache, understandable with a new mod, and whatever it is, the nanism’s sopping up any drug we give him—not uncommon. It’s been doing that. But, on the not entirely positive side, his wounds are healing extremely fast. It acts—” A little hesitation. “And this is what makes me nervous—it acts like a general nanism. It acts, in fact, complex.”

Complex. Complexwas not at all a good word. Complexput it far beyond the sort of monopurpose illicit the occasional teenaged idiot met and had to have purged out of his system.

If it was a complex nanism, if it was worse than that, sending it to specialists who understood things that didn’t have to do with a little body-sculpting…that might be a good idea, and, far from offending the doctor, he was sure the doctor would support that move.

Except it bounced Gide, with all the classified things in his head, down to Brazis’s territory. All the experts in this sort of thing were Outsiders.

But the facts were, somebody had infected a body too pure to walk Concord streets with a mod he began to fear no hack parlor down on Blunt would dare handle—something that came precapsuled, maybe, that an ordinary hand could handle. Or something injected. Probably not contagious. But it had effects in the bloodstream, by what the doctor said, and that meant it might potentially travel.

“I’ll see him,” he said.

“Go right ahead,” the doctor invited him, more than anxious, he suspected, to get some official order to send Gide anywhere as long as it was out of his containment ward.

Complex,kept echoing in Reaux’s brain. Nanocele. The sort of thing only Project labs understood.

Gide had come here to trace smuggling in the PO. Well, he’d found it, hadn’t he?

He heard, through the containment suit, Gide shouting at a nurse down the hall. Cursing. He heard some object bang and fall, as if thrown at a wall. A suited nurse exited Gide’s sealed door, shaking his head.

He put out a hand to forestall the nurse’s resealing that door. Went in.

Gide was sitting up in bed, feet tucked up, hair standing up at angles, hands clenched on the sheets. Whatever had just fallen, a medical bot had nabbed the contaminated article and retreated into the baseboards.

“Mr. Ambassador,” Reaux said calmly, “I’m here.”

“The hell you say!” Gide tore at his own hair, clamped his hands over his ears, grimacing. “There’s something in my head, damn you! There’s something in my head!”

“I’m truly afraid there is,” Reaux said, with honest compassion. “I wish I could tell you otherwise.”

“It buzzes!”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“You stand there in that suit, all holy and sanctimonious! This is worse than dead!”

“I wish I could offer you some honest comfort in your situation, Mr. Gide, but the doctors up here are at a loss. I personally recommend you transfer down to Outsider level. Their hospitals have a greater expertise in handling illicits, and the faster they get on it, the better a chance they can do something.”

“Damn you! Is that the care I get from my own people? My own doctor doesn’t come to tell me this! And now he wants to ship me off to the Outsiders? My God, my God!”

“I sincerely wish I had something better to offer. But I’m sure official Outsider levels didn’t do this. There’s an outside chance they might even recognize this item and be able to remediate, if you don’t delay…”

“Considering it was clearly one of their minions that did this, they should know what it is, shouldn’t they? Oh, God, the pain!”

“Doctors in this hospital aren’t expert at this sort of thing. But by all I understand, by what the doctor believes, the thing is likely a tap, a communication device.”

“Communication!”

“Hence the noise I suspect you’re complaining of, Mr. Gide, as it infiltrates the ear and the jaw, as a resonance device. It communicates with exterior relays that support whatever system it’s tuned to. Whoever did this to you can hear what you say and to some degree hear sounds around you…ultimately, can communicate with you, once you habituate to the thing. That’s the way they work—which you may know, but I didn’t, when I first met Outsider systems.”

Gide had a thoroughly distracted look, utter panic, or a spate of activity had just happened in the device.

“It’s not lethal,” Reaux said further. “Quite the contrary, the doctor says your wounds are healing very quickly, probably through its action.”

“It’s complex,is what you’re saying?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what the doctor fears. It’s one thing for it to draw nutrients from your bloodstream, to build on. They do that. It’s quite another to reach out and correct damage elsewhere, in cooperation with the body’s own cells.”