Forge of Heaven

by C. J. Cherryh

  "Come," it said.

  He thought it was Drusus who was supposed to find him. And here he was hearing voices from a cleaner-bot.

  "Come." It butted him in the ankle. Hard. And moved off.

  What was he supposed to do? Was this thing under someone's personal control? He tried hard to tap in.

  Senses exploded, a flare of light that hit his aching head right behind the eyes, sound that buzzed in his ears. He crouched down on the street, making himself a human ball, trying to shut it out. He pressed his hands hard against his eyes, trying to stop the flashes, trying to order his blood flow past the headache to send a clear signal on the tap, before his head exploded.

  Cleaner-bots were all around him. If a man went down the bots were supposed to call the hospital. But these seized on him, gripped his clothing, gripped his arms painfully, and extruded lift-arms under him.

  "Let me go!" he cried. But they dragged him away into the adjacent service nook, rapidly, rapidly. He couldn't kick, he couldn't move his arms. A clicking of wheels on tiles marked their passage, and tugs at his limbs indicated a certain AI randomness in their movement-autonomous units cooperating, robots deaf to his protests.

  He was swept up with the damn garbage, was what. He couldn't break free. He yelled for help, and no one on Blunt gave it.

  A low metal gate gaped ahead, affording scant clearance for the machines dragging at his limbs. It was dark inside. He tried desperately to free a hand or bend a knee and catch the edge of the opening, but with a concerted whirr and a buzzing of wheels, they dragged him painfully past the gate.

  They were in a cleaning chute. He was headed straight for disposal.

  "Help!" he yelled, in total darkness, and the tap got only wild signal, flashes of white shock.

  "Help!"

  Down and down. He didn't know whether they combusted the trash or chopped it to bits or compacted it before they did any of that. He fought, he yelled, he tried to kick. He felt joints in the metal passage as they dragged him along, faster and faster. His skull banged over the seams until the small impacts began to distract him, a misery unto themselves.

  They took a turn, and another turn, clattering along in absolute dark, where bots obeyed impulses that had nothing at all to do with sight or human senses, and the only measure of it was the seams in the chute. He yelled. He fought as hard as he could in the narrow chute, until the pain in his skull overpowered his coordination.

  Then they were free of the chute, wide enough to bend his knees, to try to roll over. The air was choked with ammonia. His eyes began to water with it, and he made out a dim green light, illusory, like phosphor glow. He tried to tear free and turn and get a knee or a foot on the surface.

  Something dark and insubstantial wisped over his face, a horrid contact. The robots froze, holding him in their unbreakable grip as that presence loomed over him.

  Something spidery and soft and alive touched his face. He heard a sound, muttering, clicking.

  "Let me go!" he yelled. Reason began to tell him where he was, what he felt, was real. That he had met the ondat. "Let me go. Human. Let go. Let go!"

  It muttered and clicked. That wispy touch pressed down on his skull, on his forehead, with increasing force.

  Pain, then. Sharp pain. He yelled at it to make it let him go, before his skull broke.

  He couldn't breathe. His skull was bursting. He couldn't yell any longer. Couldn't move. Couldn't ask it to let him go. It just did. Finally.

  It said something. He didn't know what. Something huge drifted past the source of the glow, something that moved, away from him, and blotted out all light, all sound.

  Magdallen had reacted to that unexpected intrusion in the tap system-Magdallen had been talking to Dianne, in fact, and fallen quite ill in the outer office. Dianne had gotten him a cup of water and a shot of vasodilator. Luz's call and the Ila's pirating of the contact had blasted through the entire system like a nuclear device.

  Brazis hadn't personally felt the attack. He'd had channels opened up all over the station trying to make contact with Procyon, and left them open for Drusus. That had possibly widened the disaster. He wasn't regularly on that channel, but the Project taps who happened to be on the system were all affected. One of the Ila's senior taps had suffered a stroke, and was in medical right now, at risk of her life and future health-

  Not that the Ila gave an effective damn.

  Luz had started it-Luz had had a long and uneasy relationship with Concord, being inclined to push a situation and push it hard. Ian was the reasonable voice. But then the Ila had gotten into it, and had gotten Procyon's attention-the one benefit: so had he, though without being able to pinpoint Procyon's whereabouts.

  But now he couldn't get Drusus, who would have been wide open to that blast through the tap system, if he had been trying to contact Procyon. Drusus could be lying unconscious on the street, for all he knew. Could have gone down like the Ila's tap.

  He'd called Council into emergency session, under the vice chairman, while he stayed in his office. He'd just sent agents out looking for Drusus. and now he wanted to see Magdallen, as soon as Magdallen got out of the restroom.

  Meanwhile he tended his orchids, which had received an inordinate amount of care in the last couple of days. He let his mind concentrate utterly on the gloss of the common phalaenopsis and its new growth: its bloom stem had yellowed, and he had soon to take the critical step of separating the parent and the offshoot on that yellowing stem. Those two lovely leaves were doomed. It was about to suffer stress, and those leaves, too, would yellow, as new growth appeared. Depend on it, he had far rather think about that than about Magdallen-or the Council at Apex, which, yes, he now knew, and not too remarkably so, had kept alive its own store of the highly classified nanisms, the biological base of the down-world taps, that never should have left Concord, nanoceles that were supposed to be confined to the Project from the making of the Treaty onward. Magdallen had been affected by the Ila's intrusion. Therefore Apex had inserted Project nanoceles into one of its agents and sent him here to spy on the Project-a plan more than a year in the making, since learning to interpret the taps was not instantaneous.

  So if Concord should be taken out, if some utter disaster should happen here, some hiccup of the sun or some hostile action that destroyed the station, yes, it was only prudent, he conceded it, that the Council at Apex keep the Project nanoceles secretly in reserve, a means to reconstitute this last spaceborne link to Movement technology and the downworld team of Ian and Luz. The Project tap was Movement technology, all told.

  And that highly classified knowledge had always worried Earth.

  Was it Magdallen Earth had heard about? Had it sent its ill-timed investigation in to find an illicit use of Project technology?

  That Apex had let someone carrying that technology loose on Concord, to eavesdrop on official taps without telling him. that, as far as he knew, was unprecedented. That he had only now found it out, when a burst through the system had dropped their previously covert agent on his ass along with the rest of the taps, made him madder than hell. Gide might be from the Treaty Board, and they were likely stuck with him, a situation that also made him madder than hell. That was a problem they would have to handle. And Gide was convinced they had unregulated First Movement operating on the station, which he had denied, while someone tried to blow up Mr. Gide.

  So now, in this very hour, they had had the Ila walking roughshod over their security systems, a flaming advertisement to all who could possibly touch those systems that First Movement tech wasn't always under control. Marak was refusing to abandon his chase after their transportation, was refusing just to go straight down to be picked up, had his own plan, which he was following to the edge of perdition, and now Luz and the Ila were irate about the disturbance that had pulled Marak's taps out of sequence and so irritated him that he wasn't taking their advice. Luz was angry with Ian, the Ila was angry and broke into the system he'd left wide open.

  A
nd it all happened with an Earth ship to witness, while the ambassador was lying in hospital. The whole damned fiasco sent him incandescent, and he would soon have to explain it all to involved parties, including the ondat.

  To cap it all, Marak himself might have been affected by the latest outburst, since he had been in contact with Auguste, as best he gathered, who was in his own apartment's lavatory puking his guts out.

  He wanted answers. He wanted them now.

  "Magdallen is mostly recovered at this moment," Dianne reported, "but pleads intense headache. He wishes to go back to his apartment."

  "The hell he will," he said. Damned right Magdallen had suddenly changed his mind about wanting to see him. Likely Magdallen never wanted to visit his office again, and wished he were safe back on Apex. But it was far too late for Magdallen to pretend he didn't have that tap. "Send him in," he told Dianne. Hell, he supposed he could tap in and call the damned snoop in, if he knew his tap code.

  Which he didn't. Which he meant to get forthwith, and not have to hunt noisily through the system.

  With a careful fingertip, he wiped a fleck of shed plant matter from the spotless lighted shelf, then stalked to his desk and sat down behind that solid fortification before the door opened and Magdallen walked in.

  White-faced, Magdallen dropped into the interview chair.

  "Feeling better?" he asked Magdallen.

  "Yes, sir. A little indigestion."

  "There's a damper in place to cut the top off the spike, or I can guarantee your indigestion would have been much worse." Brazis made up his mind to level with Magdallen to a certain degree: truthers could only get so much. He hoped to shake the truth out of an already-shaken man. "We moved a particular agent off the tap, and Luz is mildly annoyed. More, the Ila is annoyed. Marak, who is out there in a situation, short of his mission goal, I'm sure is beyond annoyed at this point, if not injured, and his sole remaining tap is, at this very moment, in his own bathroom, trying to get back on duty and communicate with him despite the shock to his nervous system. Gide is in hospital, madder than hell, and we know his opinion of all of us before this even started. I've carefully explained to Ian that there's an Earth envoy up here, and Ian said that they weren't pleased about having this ambassador talk to Marak's tap, but he did agree that we've done as well as we could under the circumstances. Patently we don't have Luz on our side in this business, however, and a little two-person cabal we've had concern us before may have just re-created itself: two women I assure you it isn't good to argue with have now formed a society of mutual reinforcement. The Ila and Luz are irritated extremely at Earth's interference, and probably at me. So, bluntly asked, Agent Magdallen, what was Apex intending to do? Why in hell are you on my station? What lunacy let loose someone who can eavesdrop on the Project and involve himself with Marak's World without clearance from me, and why do you just happen to coincide with Mr. Gide's arriving from the other end of space? And while we're at it, give me your tap code. I won't have taps wandering around the station without their codes in my system."

  Sweat stood on Magdallen's face. "You forgot the cracking of the Southern Wall, to lay to my account."

  He ordinarily admired humor under fire. Not at this precise moment. He fixed Magdallen with a cold stare.

  "I assure you," Magdallen said, "that's far beyond my abilities."

  "Nothing else seems to be. Your hidden tap code. If you please."

  "Three space two-one-four."

  He wrote it down. The deliberate act calmed him, let him think twice about simply tapping in and blasting hell out of the man.

  "Thank you, Agent Magdallen."

  "Yes, sir." Much more meekly.

  "So spill it. Why are you here? The truth this time. I can tell you if the Ila thinks she's been spied on, or that you're responsible for her being spied on, you may be dead before next shift. Or worse. Her on-shift tap's in hospital, fried. She may never recover. Do you understand me? In fact-you may have gotten her and Luz on your neck, in which case you won't be safe again, waking or sleeping."

  Magdallen stared at him, absorbing that information.

  In silence.

  Brazis's carefully cultivated patience ran out. "Talk, damn you."

  "I assure you we're on the same side in this affair, Mr. Chairman."

  "Then you'd better figure from here on to cooperate with me, to hell with your orders. The situation is mutating by the hour. You can't communicate with Apex fast enough, so start communicating with me. I am protecting you from the Ila. I have all the taps damped down, way down, to the detriment of our supporting Marak, who's currently in a nasty situation. I'm not sure how long our damp-down is going to resist a skilled hack from downworld. So for starters, I'd suggest you tap completely out."

  "I have."

  "So what brought Gide here? What have you got to do with it? And why am I having to get my information from an Earthborn governor, who seems far more informed on this business than anybody else?"

  A frown knit Magdallen's brows. "The information can put you and me both in jeopardy with Council."

  "Right now, let me tell you, the Council is in dire jeopardy with me. And I will spill what I know to Ian and Luz and let them use their judgment how far to take it to the Ila and to Marak, because right now, this could look like an attempt by Earth to get their hands on one of Marak's taps for no friendly purposes, and they may still be trying. I'll tell you another tidbit of information. We don't have readout from Marak at the moment. He's either shut down to protect himself or he's lying unconscious or dead somewhere in chancy terrain. Hati, thank our lucky stars, had lost patience with us and tapped out well before this happened. But in the general damp-down, we can't get to her to find out. We daren't reestablish contact until we know what Luz and the Ila have gotten up to and until we're assured they're not going to blast through again. So the Council's displeasure looms small in my path, Agent Magdallen. Talk, and talk in depth and detail."

  "All right, all right, sir. The theory is, there is First Movement on the station. That's why I think Earth's come in. They theorize-they theorize the Ila has been passing tech up here via one or more of the taps. The Treaty Board on Earth contacted Apex, advising Apex they were sending a mission here. Apex sent me. I was under orders to burrow deep in advance and not to say what I know."

  "Did you attack the ambassador?"

  "No. I didn't."

  Truthers still greenlighted on the desk rim said that was the truth. But a little yellow also flickered there. Magdallen was hedging, or nervous about that question.

  "You know who did hit him?"

  "I don't. By all evidence and circumstances, it could have been the black market."

  "The smugglers? That would be a damned fool thing, way too much public notice."

  "On one level, yes. But creating confusion, government hearings, a lot of finger-pointing. we go into hysterics, so does Earth, the politicians are busy creating greater security, and they cover their tracks and explore whatever protective system we devise to detect them."

  "If they were that bright, they'd be running the station."

  "That's the point, sir. They may have very good direction. They may have tap communications they shouldn't have, not down-world, but at least office-level."

  "The system has safeguards."

  "You didn't find me before I blew my own cover out there in the outer office. You didn't find the Ila until she blew through like a solar flare. Your alarms aren't working, sir, have you figured that?"

  The burglary alarm hacked. Undetected. A leaden cold settled in Brazis's gut-and a sense of profound embarrassment chased after it.

  Not that Magdallen seemed to be enjoying his moment: sweat still glistened on his face.

  "All right, Agent Magdallen. Points to your side. So you damn well knew we hadn't picked you up in the system. You were operating in that shadow. It would have been civilized and prudent to warn us there was a problem with our alarm system."

  "I wasn't sure wh
ether you hadn't detected the breach, or whether you'd consented to it. I wasn't sure, sir, that you weren't in collusion."

  Infuriating on the surface. But logical. He had to ask the next question. "Have you reason to be sure now, that I'm not in collusion, as is?"

  "I think I know who hacked the system. The Ila did, no telling how long ago. I believe you didn't know. Whether she knows about me at this moment is another matter. If she finds out-she may try to kill me. And I'm not that confident your systems can take the top off the spike if she decides to take the taps out entirely."

  "Go on."

  "There is a lab on Orb working on a medical illicit of a very worrisome nature, that may be an advanced tap, or at least something complex. Apex is extremely concerned. But nothing is going to leave Orb. Someone will see to that. There may have been a fire at that lab already. When there is, there will be arson arrests-on the lab staff."