Forge of Heaven

“Bring him to Ausford and 22nd.” That was dead in front of the Project police station. “We’ll take him from there.”

“Done,”Reaux said. “I’ve got to go. I’ve got to arrange that.”

“Do it,” Brazis agreed, and clicked out.

Theywere going to have Gide on their hands. Not a willing Mr. Gide, he was well sure.

Meanwhile he tapped in on Magdallen’s code, listened for a moment. Didn’t hear anything.

“Agent Magdallen.”

“Sir.”A low voice. “There’s a conference in the middle of the street, our man’s group with sixteen others, three more of the Stylists and their particular followings. That’s Diamant, Minx, and probably Brulant…I’m not sure of him. Diamant and Brulant haven’t spoken to Ardath recently. It’s a famous feud. It seems to be patched, by what I’m seeing.”

Feuds on Grozny were sometimes more smoke screen than fire, masking alliances, confusing external investigation.

“I’ll bet it is. What are they doing?”

“Breaking up their meeting, at the moment. I’m sending you the image.”

He checked the phone. Saw the conference in question, over against a dark green shop frontage, he assumed on Blunt. If that was Brulant, who had been an informant from time to time, the man had had a few mods.

Procyon was among them, standing beside his sister, looking grim.

“Procyon.” He tried to reach the boy. Saw him wince, real-time, shut his eyes and press a hand to his ear. Pain. A still-developing tap.

Did he now instruct Magdallen to grab him? Or did he let the situation run, letting the street do what the street alone had resources to do, finding a way into in places so shadowy and immediately mutable that the police might never penetrate to the core of what was going on.

Dortland’s headed down there.Heavy-footed intervention was the last thing they needed in the matter.

“Sir,”he thought he heard. He couldn’t clearly see Procyon’s face to know if he was the one talking. His head was turned. The whole group was hazy-focused in Magdallen’s image, with distance and bad lighting.

A burst of static cut him off the tap and made Procyon lift a hand to his ear, as if someone had physically struck him. Ardath turned to her brother, laying a cautioning hand on his arm.

He could shut down the local relays again. But seemingly that didn’t stop the rogue.

That meant there was an independent relay station out there. More than one. A thoroughly independent tap system.

If a relay could override his transmission to Procyon, it was either stronger, or nearer. If the ondathad reached out into the main station to install relays independent from theirs—

Ondatdidn’t come onto the human side of Concord, reputedly couldn’t do it, for any long periods. They used robots to handle their occasional foraging, lately making rambling, exploratory forays out of their warmer, ammonia-perfumed level. Acquiring orange juice, and chlorine.

Robots could safely do that sort of thing.

Bots. Three of which were in the image Magdallen gave him.

Any one of those…especially the repair-bot…was conceivably big enough to house the necessary electronics.

Damn. They were looking right attheir rogue relays.

14

“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” Ardath asked Procyon, and: “Braziss,”the tap was saying, intermittently, dragging Procyon’s attention back and forth between worry for his sister and worry for messages he couldn’t get through. They had gathered force. Tap-calls summoned others. Michaelangelo’s was across the street, dark and dim, with a police-closing sign on the door—was he surprised, that the place he had shared with Algol was where they were heading, to deal with him? He remembered the inside, the maze of halls, the common room, the back room where the Freethinkers had met, all of it a brown, dingy warren, the only competing color those faded blue plastic chairs. They’d been saviors of the universe. They’d known everything there was to know.

It was shut, police-sealed. But one of Spider’s men turned up a key-card, legitimate or otherwise, and no great amazement. Keys came on the market daily, and people had been thrown on the street by that police seal. Michaelangelo’s clientele was notoriously low on funds.

“Braziss,”the tap said, and Procyon tried to focus where he was. They were going in. Brulant headed across the street to the service nook with six of his people, and as he moved, Isis was talking to her tap, still calling in favors to bring in others off the street. “This is war,” Isis was saying. “Be here, do you hear me? Be here, as quick as you can.” Diamant, glittering with dust, far from inconspicuous, took her followers across the street, strolling casually into position at the bolthole entrance, at the adjoining shop frontage.

“There’s a rumor out,” Isis said in a low voice, at Ardath’s side, “that they’ve snatched kids, upstairs kids, for hostages. Celeste says he’s coming in with four of his, fast as he can: he’s a block away.”

“Good,” Ardath said. News flew with the speed of tap-calls from one end of the Trend to the other. Procyon had remembered boltholes even Spider had failed to know: “Carew’s, over on White, another at Perle’s—” and he was aware, past his headache, that they had gotten people to those, over on other streets: Cepheus, and Lotus, with their people.

But: “Braziss, Braziss, Braziss,”the voice in his head kept insisting, and he didn’t know what it meant, except the voice thought he was in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. “I’ll go to Brazis,” he promised it quietly, and he would, he’d get there, fast as he could; but getting Algol would get what Gide had come for, and bring down what threatened Ardath’s safety, she being his sister, and at war with him. Getting Algol would get what disturbed the ondat,that no one could reason with. So he resisted the voice, bore down, concentrated, tried to think if he was inside Michaelangelo’s, if there was any other possible way out that he hadn’t remembered, and couldn’t.

“Brulant’s there,” Spider said, near at hand. Traffic on the street hadn’t diminished at all. Bystanders osmosed out of the shops and the side streets, some to see, some to join. It had become a mob around them. Hundreds of them, not coming here for him, Procyon thought: for Ardath, for Ardath, on her say. And he had his own use—to showwhere the trouble in the station was, if Kekellen had failed to find it, to go where the police couldn’t. To stand by his sister’s side in shadowy places and scare hell out of anyone who threatened her. For his own protection he had a knife out of the bar kitchen. Some of Ardath’s allies had more than that. He knew for a fact that Algol did.

Half a minute to draw breath, just enough time for their people to call allies and spread out. “Go,” Ardath said, and no more warning than that.

They moved, Spider and his followers a spatter of ink, Isis’s in gold and silver, Ardath’s young adherents in every shade. Procyon kept by Ardath’s side. His three small robot attendants buzzed along, chrome and silver, all in sudden, purposeful motion—where he went, they went; where he went, Kekellen’s eyes and ears went.

Michaelangelo’s double doors sat catty-angled at the corner of a darkened frontage, and Spider tried the tenant’s key, quickly, economically.