Authors: C. J. Cherryh
“Which way is he going?”
“Straight up to Blunt at 9th, away from Grozny.”
“Are you watching him now?”
“From across the street.” A picture flashed to his phone, zoomed in on a coatless young man in a black shirt, a young man who didn’t seem to feel the ordinary chill of the street. The view zoomed closer, to a shocked, weary face that, yes, Brazis recognized, and a lime green mark that shimmered faintly gold underneath the fringe of disheveled hair as they passed between neon lights.
The zoom backed off again, giving him the entire disturbing picture.
Procyon, no question. With his sister. With a man called Spider.
Isis. And three ankle-high bots trundling along beside.
Bots, for God’s sake.
Bots.
A malfunction? Three little bots anticipating a cleaning job when this expedition got where it was going?
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t at all right. Bots didn’t just take to the middle of the street.
He tapped keys, coded up his own maintenance manager, typed,
I’ve got some anomalous bots, around 9th and Blunt. Look into activity. Report triple urgent.
That query had to go from Outsider maintenance to station maintenance and back. And he still had Magdallen on the phone.
“Suggestions?” he asked.
“I don’t have any,” Magdallen said. “I’m just tagging along, seeing where they’re going. Michaelangelo’s, if I can hazard a guess.”
His screen flashed up an answer.
No bots within half a block.
“Shit,” he said.
“Sir?”
3 6 8 • C . J . C h e r r y h
Sweep Procyon up now? It was possible Procyon might even go with Magdallen if accosted, if Magdallen let him talk to his office on the phone.
But that
ondat
mark gave him pause.
He’d
contacted Kekellen.
Reaux had asked Kekellen’s help, hadn’t he? He’d passed the damned message along, without knowing what Reaux had been doing with the
ondat
.
And that mark, shimmering like the highest-priced cosmetics in the intervals of shadow, didn’t look cheap or ragged, or bear any of the other hallmarks of illicits that gangs might handle. It didn’t look like gang vengeance.
Neither did three bots that didn’t show on the maintenance schematics.
“Watch him,” he said to Magdallen. “That’s all, watch him.
Don’t stop him.”
“Understood,”
Magdallen said.
Brazis stored the image series Magdallen sent, an absentminded press of his thumb. Self-protection. His mind was on another channel, one he’d rather not think of, but there it was: Kekellen.
Kekellen.
He came around the side of his desk, sat down in his chair and hand-keyed a fast draft of a message.
Brazis to Kekellen. I see Kekellen mark on man. Yes no? What cause?
He sent it with an entirely uneasy feeling, a second message without consulting his experts.
He drafted a rapid written order to his security department.
Immediately and with all courtesy contact Jeremy Stafford Sr.
Never mind the damn address. Today, they knew it by heart.
Inquire what he
knows about his son’s current situation and offer him the PO’s assistance.
Likewise contact the mother, at work or at the residence. Report any findings with all speed.
That inquiry had a snowflake’s chance of turning up anything useful. The parents weren’t street people. They wouldn’t have a clue what was going on at this moment with their son and their daughter.
He appended another note:
Also check the phone system stat. See whether any call’s gone out on
Procyon Stafford’s card.
Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 6 9
The tap system being shut down, Procyon might have gone low-tech. He might have contacted his mother or father with some sort of explanation, might have called one of his friends.
Like hell they were that lucky.
So what now? What in hell did they do?
D O RT L A N D WA S I N T H E O U T E R O F F I C E , quietly so, with Ernst, when Reaux walked in.
“Inside,” Reaux said, not even stopping. He entered his office and held the door for Dortland, who had an apprehensive look.
“Sir.”
Reaux let the door shut, sealing them in. “Mr. Dortland, the ambassador has a tap. What do you think of that?”
Honest dismay. He saw that register on Dortland’s face. He walked past Dortland to the desk, flung himself down in the chair, leaned back and scowled.
“Where’s my daughter, Mr. Dortland? Any ideas?”
“Actually, sir, yes.” Dortland drew a deep breath, set his feet. “In a particularly difficult situation, at the moment, in a Freethinker den on Blunt.”
Shot for shot. Dortland was trying to unsettle his stomach. And succeeded in making him very, very angry.
“Are you only observing, then, Mr. Dortland? Or do you intend to do something about her situation?”
“Governor, the place is suspect in the attack on Mr. Gide.”
“Don’t hand me that,” Reaux snapped. “I know who attacked Mr. Gide. Is the tap he’s got
your
installation, or have enemies gotten to him? The doctors think it’s a nanocele.”
Dortland’s face rarely registered anything. Now it registered worry.
“I think the same,” Reaux said, “and I’m not amused, Mr. Dortland. Neither is Mr. Gide. Was it his own agency that planned to strand him here, or was it yours? And why
haven’t
you been forward to get my daughter back?”
Dortland didn’t say a thing for a moment. He walked over to the life-globe, gave it a cursory look, and looked back. “Your daughter, Governor, has fallen into the company of one Algol, a Freethinker, 3 7 0 • C . J . C h e r r y h
a grotesque, a perennial problem on the street. It was not a chance meeting. Where she is now—greatly concerns me.”
Not a word on the Gide matter. A diversion. A diversion very much on topic.
“And you are doing . . . what, about the situation?”
“I hesitate to say I’ve been called off the case, sir. I’d like to get back down there.”
“And Mr. Gide. The matter of Mr. Gide. An honest answer. Who set him up?”
“I’m not at liberty to say, sir.”
“Your own authority, then. You’d answer me, if you could blame some other chain of command than your own.”
“Governor—”
“Mr. Dortland, you’re not in good favor with me, at the moment, and not with Mr. Gide, either. Did you implant a tap in him?”
“No.
No,
Governor, I assuredly did not.”
“Were you first to the scene?”
“No. The civil police were first, on record. Someone else—”
“Someone else knew you were planning to attack the ambassador and capitalized on the chance, delivering a nanism into an injured man so quickly it anticipated the police. Or perhaps the police themselves were the agency that delivered it.”
“It’s not at all likely. But that someone got to him in hospital . . .
that’s possible. I’d look to the very people he’s here investigating.”
“And
why
did your superiors set him up? To involve the Treaty Board permanently at Concord, to
force
them to establish an office here against their better inclinations?”
One of Dortland’s patented blank looks. A shake of his head. “I have absolutely no knowledge of any such thing.”
“You only got your orders, did you? Are you that low in the stack?”
“I admit to nothing, sir.”
“But you don’t deny it,” Reaux said with a bitter taste in his mouth. “Did you set up my daughter as a diversion?”
“Your daughter’s running off was not an event I planned, I assure you, Governor. I had far rather have come down on these people without a hostage involved.”
Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 7 1
“This boy she’s with. One of them? Or one of yours?”
Dortland shook his head. “A fool. Useless in life. But these people have now contacted
her,
Governor.”
“Before or after she ran?”
“That, I don’t know. But once she was there, she was not discreet in her identity. She used your card all up and down Blunt. They had no trouble finding her.”
His own bright idea, encouraging use of that card. He found himself short of breath, short of accusations. “If you want me to solve this mess with Gide, if you want me to show any forbearance with you, Mr. Dortland, achieve a success on Blunt.”
A small, taut silence. “I’d better get back down there.”
“Mr. Dortland.”
Dortland stopped on his way to the door.
“Awkwardly for us both, at this moment, you can’t possibly board that ship to leave this station: being from Earth, it doesn’t take on passengers. Gide knows what you are, and he knows what happened, and he will recover. Having a culpable look when one branch of government sandbags a watchdog agency is not, I repeat,
not
a comfortable position to be in.”
“No, sir, it can’t be.”
“I don’t want you transferred. I don’t know what they’d replace you with. So become faithful to me, Mr. Dortland, and you may find Concord is your one place of safety. Even Mr. Gide may forgive you.”
“Brazis’s boy is walking down Blunt with an
ondat
keepaway on his forehead and a handful of common service bots following him, and I don’t know why.” Dortland’s face at this precise instant had an uncharacteristic vulnerability. “You should know that. And it’s in the vicinity of the place where these people are holding your daughter.”
“An
ondat
keepaway.” Reaux sat frozen at his desk, remembering his message to that entity.
“An
ondat
keepaway, apparently tattooed onto Procyon Stafford, Marak’s tap. The
ondat
venerate Marak above all else, don’t they?
Looks to me as if they’ve made a statement about Mr. Gide’s actions.”
The memory of Gide’s face flashed into memory, the pale face, 3 7 2 • C . J . C h e r r y h
the red flush of fever spreading from the ear to the jaw. He was looking, however, at Dortland, at a traitor only half reclaimed.
“I wouldn’t advise you get too close to Mr. Gide, now, sir,” Dortland said, “just in case.”
He hadn’t liked Dortland that much before this. The man’s bid to retain power was evocative of a good many reasons not to snuggle close to him. Worse, he’d lay any sum of money on the bet that Dortland’s agency had aimed to get inside Gide’s, aided and abet-ted by that ship out there.
“Get my daughter out,” he said to Dortland. “Do it. Fast.”
“ R E P LY F RO M K E K E L L E N ,” Dianne reported. “On your desk, sir.”
Brazis punched the button. It said, with Kekellen’s script above and the autotranslation below:
Procyon Kekellen. Kekellen send.
Kekellen mark.”
And:
“Kekellen hear Procyon.”
Gooseflesh crept up Brazis’s arms. He reflexively sipped the hot caff he had on his desk.
So the mark was real.
And, Kekellen
hear
Procyon?
Hear
wasn’t a common verb in
ondat
context, was it? Not one he’d ever run into.
He’d shut the tap system down, and no other taps had gone to hospital since. But he couldn’t risk keeping it shut down forever.
Hand trembling over the buttons, once and twice hesitating, he called System Control, encoded an order with a furious set of taps, first to warn the techs and then to order them to bring the local system back up. The downlink to the planet only awaited his order.
A graph showed on his screen.
Red to yellow.
Yellow to green. Local was coming on-line.
“Procyon,” he said, tapping in quickly, laying himself wide open to whatever was amiss with the tap. “Procyon, do you hear me?”
Flash of light. Pain. The system moderated it, fast.
“What in hell’s going on?”
he heard from downworld. Never mind his initiating the downlink: the uplink was in Ian’s hands, and Ian had come through on it, instantaneously, and loud.
Fo r g e o f H e a v e n • 3 7 3
But from the one he was trying to contact, and from the
ondat
themselves, nothing but that flash.
Second sip of caff. He keyed an order, opened the downlink.
“Brazis?”
“Ian. Sorry about that little glitch. We’ve been trying to regulate the situation up here. We have a slight emergency. I had the downlink shut down to protect you.”
“Incompetence.”
That was the Ila.
“The
ondat
are involved,” he fired back at that ageless presence.
“The
ondat
have kidnapped Marak’s tap and maybe asked questions of him, for what little he could answer. They may have infiltrated the tap system itself.
They
may be your intruder in the system. So now what can anyone suggest we do?”
There was an unwelcome moment of silence. He so wished that one of the long-lived entities receiving at the moment did have an experience to offer, some ages-old piece of wisdom to moderate the situation.
“Brazis?”
Worse. Marak had just heard them.
“Marak-omi. It is not a good situation. I appeal to you—use restraint. Procyon is physically free. The
ondat
is talking about
hearing
Procyon at the moment. Considering everything else that we know about trouble in the system, we cannot afford another spike.
What you say or do may reach the
ondat,
possibly even wound them, to no one’s good.”
“Through Procyon,”
the Ila said—who demonstrably knew all about pirating a connection.
“He has become a leak in the system.”
“Isolating Procyon will not solve our problem,” Brazis said. “He may not be the only one up here that the
ondat
have laid hands on.”
Taps were forbidden to discuss station politics or structure with the planet, but the Project Director at his discretion from time to time had to do it, in a limited way, with these few lords of downworld. “The
ondat
have witnessed the intrusion of an uninvited Earth mission in our midst, investigating a possible export of technology that violates the Treaty.
Ondat
have snatched Marak-omi’s tap and demonstrated an ability to intrude into our communications system. I strongly suggest—I
strongly
suggest that, whatever our personal innocence in this situation, we have to signal the 3 7 4 • C . J . C h e r r y h