NORTHWORLD
By David Drake
 

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 1999 David Drake

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Book

Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com

ISBN: 0-671-57787-5

Cover art by Patrick Turner

First Baen printing, March 1999

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020


Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America
Chapter One
Hansen saw the blast bubble like an orange puffball above the building roofs three kilometers away. He stuck his head out the side-window of his chauffeured aircar and heard the whump! over the rush of wind.
“Don’t get us above-” Hansen started to say, but the car was already sideslipping to lose altitude and take them the rest of the distance to the crime site in the shelter of the buildings. The drivers who rotated through Commissioner Hansen’s duty list were the best in Special Units. This one, a human named Krupchak, didn’t want to enter the sight radius of the bandits’ heavy weaponry any more than Hansen did.
Hansen’s visor was split into three screens: the top showing the view from one of the units already at the crime site; the center clear for normal sight; and the bottom running a closed loop from the incident that set up the current situation. Hansen’s own viewpoint showed nothing but faces from the ground traffic gaping upward at the aircar which howled above them with its emergency flashers fluttering at eye-dazzling speed.
The Civic Patrolmen on-site were busy blocking streets and trying to evacuate civilians already in what was clearly a combat zone. They weren’t interested in the building at 212 Kokori Street where the bandits had holed up, except to keep from being blown away by the shots spitting-and sometimes slamming-from the top story of that structure.
Hansen set his remote to one of his own Special Units teams which had already arrived. Hansen’s people (some of them female and not a few of them inhuman despite the complaints from bigots) were for the moment setting up fields of fire to block the bandits if they tried to escape. They were ready and willing to make a frontal assault if the Commissioner gave them that order.
The target was a fortress. Special Units would make a frontal assault on it over Commissioner Hansen’s dead body.
Literally.
The structure was part of a row of cheap two- and three-story apartment buildings built long before the twenty-nine-year old Hansen was born. The windows of the top floor now bulged with the soap-bubble iridescence of a forcefield. A white Civic Patrol hoverscoot stood abandoned outside the building’s front entrance.
Kokori Street wasn’t a slum. The Consensus of Planets didn’t permit slums in or around the capitals of any of its 1200 worlds; and besides, there were few real slums anywhere on Annunciation. Still, though there wasn’t any trash in the street, the buildings’ cast facades were dingy and sculpted in curves which flowed according to tastes superseded decades before.
The district’s residents generally staffed the lower tiers of the city’s service industries-but they had jobs, because residence in a planetary capital for periods longer than three months required that a household member be gainfully employed. Here on Annunciation, the Consensus fiat was enforced by the Civic Patrol-backed up by Special Units if necessary.
Ousting unemployed squatters could be a nasty job, but the worst casualties were usually a broken nose or a wrenched knee. This job was uniquely dangerous, but there was nobody in Hansen’s section (and few enough in the Civic Patrol) who wasn’t glad to have it.
The Solbarth Gang. It had to be Solbarth, the criminal whose genius was equalled by his ruthlessness. Inhuman ruthlessness, the news reports said; and this time the news reports were precisely correct.
One of Hansen’s people was trying to get an update on the situation within 212 Kokori. Behind a Civic Patrol forcefield barricade parked a nondescript van. A SpyFly the size, shape and color of a large cigar burred from within the vehicle.
The little reconnaissance drone was scarcely visible until it arced to within a meter of the building’s sidewall. There it exploded as ropes of scintillance.
Whoever was inside had an electronic flyswatter; which figured, if it was Solbarth.
A man jumped from a second-floor window, stumbled, and ran three steps toward the portable forcefield one of Hansen’s units had set up at the intersection kitty-corner from the target building. A black sphincter dilated in the villains’ protective screen. A blue-white flash cut the runner’s legs from under him, long before he reached safety.
The body thrashed.
Just a civilian caught in something that was none of his business. Would’ve been smarter to hide under the bed until it was all over. But then, if Special Units opened up with the kind of firepower necessary to overwhelm the gang’s forcefield, the whole block would melt into a bubbling crater.
That wasn’t going to happen.
“Support,” Hansen said, cueing the artificial intelligence in his helmet. “Is the building’s climate control in metal ducts?”
A green light winked even as the Commissioner’s last syllable rose in an interrogative.
The AI had accessed the data from Central Records; probably out of Building Inspection, but the exact provenance of the information didn’t matter. Every scrap of data about this building, its residents-and the villains believed to be holed up here-had been sucked into a huge electronic suspense file within seconds of when the shooting started. Any extant knowledge that Hansen might need waited at the tip of his tongue.
The trouble was, quite of lot of what Hansen needed to know would be available only in the after-action report on the operation; and Commissioner Hansen might or might not be alive to examine the data then.
“Top to Orange Three,” he ordered, letting the AI punch him through the chatter of the unit he’d just watched launch the SpyFly. “Put one into the building’s ventilation system. Use a One-Star.”
The 1* class drones were old and slow, but they had double-capacity powerpacks and were rugged enough to airdrop with their lift fans shut down.
“Sir, they’ve turned off the air system ’n the louvers ’re down!” the Orange Three team leader replied in a voice half a tone higher than normal.
“Then it’ll take the SpyFly a bloody while to burn through the louvers, won’t it?” Hansen snarled. “So get on the bloody job!”
“Hang on, sir,” his driver warned. The aircar bounced to a dynamic halt behind the forcefield barricade at the intersection.
A streak of flame washed from the villains’ hideout. The portable forcefield pulsed like a rainbow, but it absorbed the burst without strain.
Regular police fired a sparkle of stun needles, but the temporary opening in the villains’ forcefield had already closed. The Special Units teams held their fire the way they’d been ordered to do.
Polarized light cast a blue wash over everything on the other side of the barricade. The legless man halfway to the intersection had stopped twitching. Another plasma bolt licked from the far side of the building, silhouetting the roof moldings with its brief radiance.
Hansen glanced at the video loop running across the bottom of his visor. It displayed the sensor log of the patrolman who’d arrived to investigate a reported domestic disturbance.
The cop had been a little fellow and young, to judge from the image of him recorded in reflection from the building’s front door as he entered. He was whistling something tuneless between his teeth. As he climbed the stairs, he checked the needle stunner in his holster.
He’d been a little nervous, but not nearly as nervous as he should’ve been.
It was all a mistake. The reported loud argument had been in District 9, not here in District 7. An administrative screw-up that normally would’ve meant, at worst, that a family argument blossomed into violence because the uniformed man who could’ve stopped it had been sent to the wrong place.
No sign of a domestic argument now. Knuckles rapping on a doorpanel; Who’s there? muffled by the thick panel, and “Civic Patrol! Open up!” sharply from the cop whose equipment was recording events and transmitting the log back to his district sub-station; standard operating procedure.
Maybe if the patrolman had been a little less forceful in his request-
But that was second-guessing the man on the spot, and Hansen wasn’t going to speak ill of the dead.
The video image of the door opened. Before the figure within was more than a blur, the universe dissolved in a plasma flare that the victim didn’t have time to understand.
Hansen got out of his vehicle. The air smelled burned, from the forcefield and the weapons the villains were using; from the hellfire dancing in the Commissioner’s mind.
His jaws hurt. He’d been clenching them as he watched the patrolman die. Hansen’s muttered order cleared his visor of both the remote and the recorded images, but the fatal plasma burst continued to blaze a dirty white in memory.
Bad luck for the cop, knocking on the wrong door. And very bad luck indeed for Solbarth.
Four Special Units personnel squatted behind the forcefield they’d stretched between their vehicles. Two sighted over plasma weapons; one had a wide-muzzled projectile launcher; and the fourth, the team leader, carried the forcefield controls, a pistol, and long knives in both of her boots. They were all dressed in light-scattering camouflage uniforms which blurred their outlines and hid anything that an opponent could use for an aiming point.
The team members kept their faces rigidly to the front, pretending they didn’t know the Commissioner was standing behind them. “Pink Two to Top,” Hansen heard the leader say. “Are we clear to fire?”
The question didn’t come to Hansen through the commo net, because the Commissioner’s AI blocked out all the idle chatter that would otherwise have distracted him from the real business of solving the problem.
Hansen stepped over to the team leader, put a hand on her shoulder, and said, “We’ll get where we’re going, Pink Two. Don’t worry.”
“Sorry, sir,” one of the plasma gunners said, though the reason he thought he needed to apologize was beyond Hansen’s understanding.
Nobody needed to apologize. No matter how good your training was, no matter how much on-line experience you had, there were going to be tics and glitches in a real crisis. People said things, people forgot SOP . . . sometimes people shot when they shouldn’t’ve, and even that was forgivable if you survived it.
Training went only so far. Situations like this went right down into the reptilian core of the brain.
With his fingers still resting on Pink Two’s shoulder, Hansen said, “Support. Give me a fast three-sixty of the target site. Left side only.”
Hansen’s artificial intelligence began walking him visually around the apartment building. Remote images from other police personnel were remoted to the left half of the Commissioner’s visor, changing every ten seconds to proceed around the site in a counterclockwise direction.
A patrolman in an apartment to Hansen’s right poured a stream of stun needles toward the gang’s hideout. There were brief sparkles on the forcefield and occasionally a puff of dust from the plastic facade. Raindrops would have been more effective than the one-gram needles were at this range.
On a roof halfway down the block, Special Units personnel stripped the tarpaulin from the 4-cm plasma weapon they’d just manhandled from an armored personnel carrier. Two other teams watched tensely from behind the forcefield they’d erected to shelter the gun installation. They knew the weapon could probably batter through the villains’ protective screen; but they knew also that the sidescatter of powerful bolts hitting powerful armor was likely to incinerate every unshielded object within a kilometer of impact.
Ten seconds later a white aircar picked out with gold braid skidded to a halt behind a forcefield manned by Civic Patrol personnel. Holloway, Chief of the Capital Police, got out. He was still trying to seal his bemedaled uniform blouse over his fat belly.
An aide lifted a pair of slug-throwing hunting rifles out of the car and handed one to Holloway. Both men aimed as a police technician spun narrow loopholes in the protective forcefield so that his superiors could fire at the hideout.
No one but Special Units personnel was permitted to use deadly force. No one.
The AI cycled to the next image around the circle. Hansen’s mouth was open to bark an order that Holloway, even Holloway, would obey-or else-when his right eye saw a whorl gape in the villains’ forcefield. Solbarth must be using tuned elements so that merely presenting a weapon opened his shield wide enough to fire. That sort of hardware was too expensive even for Special Units.
And the weapon being aimed in Hansen’s direction this time wasn’t a plasma gun.
“Watch it!” he screamed, and, “Down!” to the personnel near him who thought their forcefield protected them from the villains’ fire.
Hansen flattened, pushing the team leader out of her crouch and hoping the three men had sense enough to obey without asking questions. There was a flash from the momentary hole in Solbarth’s protective bubble.
A ten-kilo war rocket arched down on a trail of thin smoke.
The missile skimmed the top of the police forcefield-which would have halted it harmlessly-and detonated in thunder on the pavement behind Hansen and his people.
The blast hurled the Commissioner’s car-was the driver clear?-onto its side. The pavement shattered. Howling shards of missile casing pocked facades for twenty meters in every direction. Bits that struck the inner face of the forcefield hissed and melted as their kinetic energy was transformed into heat.
Hansen’s ears rang. The men around him were all right, and his driver was getting out of the aircar with a dazed look on his face.
A rifle bullet whacked the hideout’s facade and ricocheted over Hansen’s head.
Hansen took a deep breath. “Top to all units,” he said in a voice that rattled like tin in his own ears. “Cease firing. All units cease firing. I am Commissioner Hansen, and this site is under the jurisdiction of Special-”
Three bullets smacked the villains’ forcefield where it bulged from one of the third-floor windows. The projectiles melted in showers of white sparks. The muzzle blasts of the rifles echoed down the corridor of building fronts like a burst of automatic fire.
“I say again, cease fire,” Hansen ordered. “Special Units personnel, enforce my orders by whatever-”
The left half of Hansen’s visor had cycled back to a view of Chief Holloway just as the fat man’s body rocked back under the recoil of his powerful rifle. Hansen fully expected one of his people to stitch the Chief’s ass with stun needles, but he hadn’t said that.
Actually, he hadn’t gotten the order completely out of his mouth before the back of Chief Holloway’s limousine geysered metal and plastic, then collapsed in flames. Somebody from Special Units had put a plasma round into the vehicle.
Well, Hansen’s personal motto was that no means were excessive if they got the job done. Holloway hurled the rifle away and curled up in a ball. His aide tried to shield the Chief’s body, but the disparity in size of the men made the attempt ludicrous.
The delicate flicker of stun needles hitting the villains’ forcefield stopped also.
Hansen stood up. A black spot in the center of a window spat plasma at him. He flinched as the bolt coruscated fifty centimeters from his face.
He drew his own pistol. “Pink Two,” he said, wishing he could remember the woman’s name. “Get ready to open the screen for me.”
“You’ll shoot, sir?” the team leader asked.
“For me, damn you!” Hansen shouted. “Me! Not a gun!”
He’d have to apologize later.
“Yessir.”
He’d been this scared before, so scared that his palms sweated and muscle tremors made the fine hairs on the surface of his skin crawl. Sure, he’d been this scared.
But he’d never been more scared.
“Now,” Hansen said very softly. He leaped forward as the forcefield collapsed momentarily to pass his body.
It was thirty meters to the front of the building. Hansen had covered half the distance in ten quick strides when a hole like Hell’s anus spun in the bulging forcefield above him.
The Commissioner’s pistol snapped two high-velocity projectiles through the opening before the villain within could fire. The mirror of the protective forcefield dulled momentarily as its inner face absorbed the plasma bolt triggered in a dying convulsion.
Hansen was doing this job because he wouldn’t order any of his people to do it, and because it had to be him anyway.
But nobody in Special Units was better qualified to handle it, either.
Motes of plastic drifted in the sunlight beneath 212 Kokori, bits snapped from the facade by stun needles and shrapnel from the villains’ own weaponry. They had one hell of an arsenal in there. This wasn’t a police action, it was a war . . . or at any rate, it’d degenerate into a war if Hansen’s try here failed.
Hansen looked back the way he’d come. Squat figures, mere shadows behind the polarized sheets of forcefields, waited with mechanical passivity.
He was panting, as much from tension as from the sprint. The villains’ forcefield bulged from the windows above him. It was driven hard enough to reflect light, not merely shadow it. Solbarth must have his own fusion generator. . . .
But even Solbarth couldn’t fight the Consensus.
“Support,” Hansen said. “Give me a lower-quadrant remote from the four-centimeter’s guns-”
The sight picture, broad field in acquisition mode, from the crew-served weapon directly across from 212 inset a quarter of Hansen’s visor. He could see himself as a tiny figure in the corner of the image, staring at the bulging fortress above him.
“-ight,” Hansen’s mouth said, completing the order that the AI had already obeyed.
He heard the crack! of a plasma weapon firing somewhere from the back of the building, but there was no time to worry about that now.
“Solbarth!” he shouted. He tilted his visor up, losing the panoramic image that he’d need for warning if-
“Solbarth!” Hansen shouted again, his voice no longer muffled by the shield in front of it. “This is Commissioner Hansen. I’m giving you a chance.”
“Kommissar?” said the voice that Hansen’s artificial intelligence had passed to his ear. “Orange Three. We’ve got the SpyFly in position outside the last set of louvers. Do you want us to burn through?”
“We don’t need a chance from you, Hansen,” called a cold, clear voice from a window on the third floor. “You’ll be old and gray before we run out of supplies.”
“Orange Three, not yet,” Hansen muttered. He desperately wanted images from within the hideout, but he knew that this reconnaissance drone would be zapped like the others if it left its protective screen of metal too soon.
Hansen cocked his visor at a 45° angle, open enough for him to shout past it. He peered at the distorted quadrant of panorama-which his AI immediately reconfigured to meet its master’s needs.
And why the hell hadn’t he been smart enough to tell the machine to do that?
“Solbarth, I’m offering you your lives,” Hansen said. He could hear other muffled voices from the lower floors of 212 Kokori, civilians praying or weeping into their shielding hands. “It’s more than-”
The helmet beeped to warn Hansen and flashed a red carat over the remoted image on his visor, but his gunhand was already rising, pointing-taking up the slack on the trigger. An arm thrust a wide-mouthed mob gun through the window five meters above the Commissioner’s head.
Hansen fired twice. The villain’s weapon rang and bounced off the bloody transom before dropping to the street. There was a bullet hole through its bell muzzle, and a separate hole through the wrist which the screaming gunman jerked back within the forcefield.
“You won’t open this can with the toys you’ve brought out so far, Hansen,” Solbarth said, as calmly as if the wounded man’s whimpering was only the whisper of wind. “When you do requisition what you’d require . . . if you do . . . then this whole district will be radioactive for a decade.”
The bare skin of Hansen’s hand and chin stung from the whiplash muzzle blasts of his pistol. The shadows of Special Units stirred restively behind their forcefields.
“Solbarth,” he called, “if you don’t surrender to me now, I’ll have the building cut away beneath you. For all I know, your forcefield may hold; but that won’t matter to you, because you and everything else inside the field’re going to be shaking around like the beans in a maraca as you drop into the sub-basement.”
The silence was so deep that Hansen could feel the pulse of the villains’ forcefield through the fabric of the building.
“The lower floors are full of civilians,” Solbarth said. Hansen thought he heard a tremor of color in the gang leader’s voice, though ‘emotion’ would have been too strong a word for it.
“Solbarth,” Hansen said, “I know you . . . and you know me. This is a Special Units operation. I answer to no one until it’s complete. And I promise you, Solbarth, that I’ll do exactly what I told you I’d do.”
Very softly, almost subvocalizing, he added, “Orange Three, go ahead. Support, switch my remote.”
“A starship,” the cold voice demanded. “A starship and your word that we’ll be allowed to take it and leave, Hansen.”
“Your lives, Solbarth,” the Commissioner repeated flatly. “And the rest of your lives to spend on whatever hellhole or prison asteroid the Consensus chooses to send you. But I promise you your lives.”
The remote quadrant of Hansen’s visor suddenly melted into an image of the gang’s hideout. All the interior walls of the third story had been removed. The cases of food and water suggested that Solbarth hadn’t been entirely bluffing when he’d said they could withstand a siege.
Not years, though. Not the dozen males and three females still moving.
A corpse had been dragged into the center of the room. The moaning man, his right hand hanging by a scrap of skin, still huddled beneath the window at which Hansen had shot him.
The female who’d just gotten up from the protective-systems console to join the argument was a Mirzathian, skeletally thin and over two meters tall. The SpyFly whose sensors were recording the scene made a bright pip on the holographic screen the Mirzathian was supposed to be minding. The touch of a key could have pulsed the drone’s electronics fatally, but neither the Mirzathian nor any of the other gang members had time to spend on that now.
Solbarth was a male of average height, with a pale complexion and features of perfect beauty. He was wearing a loose-fitting suit of rather better quality than the clothing of most residents of District 7. He moved languidly, but Hansen’s practiced eye could still identify the bulge of a pistol high on Solbarth’s right hip.
When Hansen wore a business suit, that was where his own holster rode.
“He won’t really spare us!” the Mirzathian shouted.
“He won’t really blast all them civvies!” a heavy man with a shoulder-stocked plasma weapon boomed simultaneously.
“He didn’t come here,” Solbarth said mildly, “here-” he gestured down in the direction of Hansen, standing beneath the overhang “-to lie to us. He’s Hansen, and he’s quite mad . . . but I think he’s telling the truth.”
“Look, whadda we got to lose?” whined another gunman. “Look, they blast us or we wind up drinkin’ our own piss ’n starvin’, right? So whadda they do to us worse if we do chuck it in now?”
“Wait,” said Solbarth.
He leaned closer to the window above Hansen and called, “Commissioner, there’s something that you don’t know about me. How can I trust-”
“I don’t know that you’re an android, Solbarth?” Hansen said. His words echoed uneasily, in his ears and weakly through the radio link from the SpyFly that had penetrated the hideout. “Sure I do. The offer stands.”
“You promise,” Solbarth said forcefully. “But the Consensus wipes androids that vary from parameters, Hansen. You can’t promise for the Consensus.”
Hansen wiped the lower half of his face with his left hand. Sweat glistened on his skin, but his mouth was as dry as the pavement.
“Solbarth,” he said, “you’re a murdering bastard and I’d’ve strangled you with my own hands if I could. But I’m Hansen, I’m Special Units, and here I’m in charge. For this moment, I am all twelve hundred worlds of the Consensus.”
He took a deep breath. “They can fire me for making this deal if they like. But the Consensus will stand by my deal . . . or by god, Solbarth, the Consensus will deal with me. On my honor.”
The image of Solbarth turned to face his henchmen. “I think,” he said with delicate insouciance, “that we should take the offer.”
“I say you’re fucking crazy!” the Mirzathian snarled. She snatched up an antitank launcher and leaned toward the window.
Hansen wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a man draw and fire as swiftly as Solbarth did . . . though Solbarth wasn’t technically a man. The contents of the Mirzathian’s skull splashed the inner face of the forcefield and sputtered. With their velocity scrubbed away, bits of bone and fried blood tumbled out the window and fluttered past Hansen to the sidewalk.
There were two more shots from within the hideout; the heavy man collapsed around the plasma weapon cradled in his arms. Either he’d been planning to use it, or he’d looked like he had . . . or, not improbably, Solbarth was making a point to the remainder of his gang in the most vivid fashion possible.
Other weapons clattered to the floor of the hideout. A small man covered his face with his hands and cried, “I’m clean! I’m clean! Don’t shoot me!”
“Hansen!” Solbarth called without turning his eyes from his fellow villains. “We accept your offer. Warn your men that we’re coming out!”
The android’s left hand keyed a series of commands into the protective systems console. The window above Hansen gave an electronic whine. The forcefield went translucent an instant before it vanished altogether.
“All units, hold your fire,” Hansen said. “The subjects are surrendering. I repeat, the subjects are surrendering. Blue teams, prepare to secure the prisoners. Orange teams, be ready to move in with the medical staff. There’s a wounded prisoner, and we won’t know about the residents here until we check.”
The SpyFly showed Solbarth gesturing the last of his subordinates down the stairs with a negligent wave of his pistol. The slim android set the weapon carefully on the floor, bowed toward the closed heating duct whose paint had blistered when the SpyFly burned through a hole for its sensors, and left the room.
Hansen couldn’t tell whether or not the bow was ironic. Perhaps not.
“Blue teams,” Hansen said, “I want you to accompany the prisoners to the detention center after you turn them over to the Civic Patrol. There’ll be no accidents along the way.”
He swallowed. “Whatever it takes, there’ll be no accidents.”
Six Special Units personnel jogged from their positions in the building across Kokori Street. They held both nets and electronic restraints.
The first of Solbarth’s men poked his head through the entrance door. His mouth was bent into a smile like the rictus of the last stages of tetanus, and his eyes were glazed with fear. Blue One gestured to the villain as though he were a dog to be petted.
The man glanced aside at Hansen, then bolted into the arms of the personnel waiting to immobilize him. A second gang member scuttled out behind the first.
Hansen was still holding his pistol. He tried to holster it, but his hand was shaking too much for him to manage that operation. Swearing under his breath, he set the weapon down on the sidewalk in front of him and clasped his hands together.
There was commotion at the intersection where Hansen’s car lay on its side, but he couldn’t tell what was happening since the portable forcefields were still-properly-in place.
Chief Holloway waddled down Kokori Street from the other direction, at the head of a contingent of Civic Patrolmen. Holloway’s white uniform was streaked and blackened. His face was maroon. Blood pressure might prove fatal though the nearby plasma bolt had not.
Most of the villains had left the building. Blue One was giving crisp orders to the Civic Patrolmen arriving to accept prisoners cocooned in restraining nets. Some civilians poked their heads from the lower-floor windows, able now to savor the adventure they’d survived . . . and how close it’d been, might they never know!
Hansen was tired. He was as tired as he ever remembered being.
“Kommissar!” cried the team leader whose concern was obvious despite compression of the radio signal and the minute speakers in Hansen’s helmet. “This is Pink Two, and something’s-”
The warning crunched to silence, though Hansen could vaguely hear Pink Two continuing to shout behind the barrier.
“Commissioner Hansen,” said a voice more mechanical than any machine needed to be in a day that AIs could manufacture surds and sonants with greater life than those of any rhetoric teacher. “You are summoned by the Consensus.”
Something-a spindle of black fuzz, taller than a man-drifted through the forcefield blocking the intersection. There was another spindle beside the first.
Hansen had never seen anything like them.
The portable forcefield sputtered and vanished.
“Not now,” Hansen said. The sweat on his palms was suddenly cold. “I’ve got to-”
Hansen’s visor went opaque. His helmet was dead, screens and speakers alike. He took the helmet off.
His hands no longer shook. He didn’t glance down toward his pistol, but his toe, with a motion that might have been only a twitch, located the weapon precisely.
Solbarth stepped from the entranceway. The android froze, his blank eyes taking in Hansen and the creatures which slid toward the Commissioner at a walking pace.
The two spindles were hazily transparent. An aircar-Hansen’s own aircar, torn but upright again-drifted along behind the creatures, a hand’s breadth above the pavement.
No one was aboard the vehicle. Krupchak, the driver, gaped at Hansen from beside the personnel of Pink Two.
“Commissioner Hansen, please get in the car,” said the mechanical voice.
It sounded exactly as it had before, even though Hansen was no longer wearing his helmet.
“I had the authority at this site,” Hansen said hoarsely. “You have no grounds to remove me without a hearing.”
The spindles moved to either side of him. Hansen’s skin tingled. Close up they still looked transparent, but he thought he saw something in the black tendrils as well as between them.
The vehicle’s power door opened. “Commissioner Hansen,” the voice repeated, “please get in the car.”
Hansen obeyed, shifting his foot slightly so that he didn’t scuff the pistol. One of his people would take care of it. . . .
Fifty meters away, Chief Holloway licked his lips. He looked as though he were watching a pornographic display.
The door shut after Hansen. The two spindles drifted through the plastic panels, into the driver’s compartment. Hansen didn’t see them fold or shrink, but their peaks didn’t quite brush the vehicle’s blast-pocked headliner.
“Sir, should we-” shouted one of the Special Units personnel as he leaned from a roof with his plasma weapon half-pointed.
“No!” Hansen cried. He stuck his head out the shattered side window and shouted, “No, everybody get on with your duties.”
He didn’t know what was going on, but he knew that it wouldn’t be helped if his own people started shooting.
The aircar slid in a tight circle and accelerated as it started to rise.
“I have full authority from the Consensus for everything I’ve done here,” Hansen said, knowing that in truth, he’d always claimed whatever authority he needed to get a job done and trusted that he could make it stick after the fact.
That had always worked. Until now.
“The Consensus is not interested in your actions here, Commissioner Hansen,” said the voice. The words sounded in the Commissioner’s mind, seeming to have nothing to do with the creatures which were escorting him. “The Consensus has need of you on a planet called Northworld.”
The car had risen to 300 meters and was moving at a speed that made the wind howl through the many shrapnel holes. Other air traffic was avoiding their arrow-straight rush.
Hansen frowned. “What’s Northworld?” he muttered.
The creatures-or the voice-must have been able to hear him despite wind noise, because Hansen’s mind rasped with the words, “The Consensus will inform you of what you need to know, Commissioner Hansen. In good time.”
For the first time in his life, Commissioner Nils Hansen realized that there might be more to the Consensus of Worlds than simply the bureaucracy of control of which he himself was a part.

Chapter Two
North came out of the Matrix, gasping and wheezing as he always did.
Hanging in the Matrix, the world that connected the Eight Worlds, was like drowning in ice water. The infinite series of minute events forced itself into his being, through him; chilling his flesh, freezing him, threatening to grind him out of existence in an avalanche of nine-times-simultaneous discrete realities.
It would almost be better not to be a god.
“But that is a lie, North,” said Dowson with the dry precision which was all that remained to him since emotion had been cut out of him with his body.
“Who are you to speak of truth and lies, Dowson?” North said. “All you know are facts.”
“Facts are all there is to know, North,” replied the disembodied brain suspended in a vat of nutrient. The words washed across North to ring coldly within his skull, but they were not as cold as the Matrix. . . .
He shuddered again and looked up at the roof of his palace, shards of sunlight frozen into groins and vaulting that could cover an army.
“There’s another one coming,” North said. “From outside, from the Consensus.”
The liquid flowing through Dowson’s vat kept up the same soft susurrus it had whispered for ages. “What will you do with these?” asked the non-voice as colored waves which sprang from a cone of ice beside the vat. “Find them a plane of their own?”
“There are no unoccupied planes, Dowson!”
“None that you know of, North,” the brain replied. “None that I know of either.”
For a moment, North imagined that the pause was one of sadness, but Dowson’s words were as emotionless as ever when he continued, “Send them to the lizardmen, then. Let them destroy one another.”
North’s laughter bellowed out in response to the bitter joke. The sunlit building trembled and quivered with shadows. North stretched his long, sinewy arms high above his head, and the air cleared.
“The others will need to know,” Dowson warned.
“The others will want to know,” North corrected. “I’ll summon them.”
His right hand twisted in the air. Motes of light sprang away as though condensing from the atmosphere; a score of sparkling blips that drifted in widening circles until they touched the walls of the palace, spat, and vanished on their missions.
“They’re only sending one this time,” North said, trying to control the shudder which remembering the Matrix induced in him. “A man.”
“You’ll kill him?” Dowson asked, carelessly, uncaringly.
“His name is Hansen,” said North. “And he will serve my purposes.”

Chapter Three
Hansen’s car was speeding toward a large building on what had been the outskirts of the capital twenty years before. Now it was a bland residential district, not dissimilar to the one from which Solbarth had spun his webs of theft and murder.
The building was marked as Consensus property on the maps Hansen had viewed in the course of his duties, but there were many Consensus buildings in any planetary capital. A warehouse, Hansen had thought; and he would still think the great three-story block was a warehouse, except-
Except that two creatures had ordered the Commissioner of Special Units into an aircar that they were driving straight into the front wall of the building.
Hansen opened his mouth to protest-and closed it again, because there was nothing he could say that the spindles didn’t know already.
The warehouse was an old one, built of clay and a plasticizer which hardened after extrusion. That technique created a solid structure of surpassing ugliness even when new.
The aircar was about to hit the dark dun building at 200 kph. The smear Hansen made would scarcely be distinguishable from the stains and earth tones already an indelible part of the wall’s texture.
He forced his muscles to relax. So be it. A pedestrian in the street looked up in amazement.
The aircar shot through the ‘wall.’ Hansen felt a momentary chill. They were in a lighted tunnel whose circular sides made the drive fans rumble.
“Where are we?” Hansen demanded. The noise of the damaged car was even worse in this enclosure than it had been in the open air, but he knew the spindles could hear him if they wanted to.
No answer rang in his mind. They shot past a pair of cross-tunnels. Half a dozen workmen carrying unrecognizable tools glanced up at the aircar. One of the faces turned toward Hansen was inhuman: blue, scaled, and as expressionless as those of its companions.
“Where are we going?” Hansen cried. He didn’t even expect an answer.
He’d been a powerful man, a few minutes ago. In some ways-in some circumstances-the most powerful man on Annunciation.
He looked at the things beside him in the car and wondered whether any man in the Consensus really had power.
The spindles were shrinking. When Hansen first saw the creatures, they had been taller than he was; now they were only about the length of his thigh. They sputtered like electronics on the verge of failure, and the scenes within the fabric of their bodies were becoming increasingly clear.
Hansen looked away.
The tunnel ended in a white-tiled rotunda which appeared so abruptly that Hansen felt the car braking before his eyes focused on the change in scenery. Two figures waited for them, both human-
Not human. Both of the figures were male androids. One was as beautiful as the dawn, while the other was a squat, hideous travesty of humanity with thick, twisted limbs. They might very well have come out of the same production batch.
The rotunda had a high, domed ceiling. There were eight archways leading from it-all of them closed by bronze doors, including the arch by which the aircar had just entered.
“Please get out, Commissioner Hansen,” said the voice in Hansen’s skull. The aircar bobbled a few centimeters above the floor instead of settling with the shut-down fans.
“This way, please, sir,” said the handsome android. He had to shout to be heard over the racket the car made.
The android was speaking with his mouth. At least that was a change for the better. . . .
Hansen got out of the vehicle. It sped off into-through-another doorway.
The spindles who’d escorted the Commissioner had shrunk to hand’s breadth height. They were giving off sounds of sizzling, fiery anger as they disappeared.
The rotunda was almost silent when they and the aircar were gone.
“This will only take a moment, sir,” said the misshapen android, raising the flared nozzle of the apparatus he carried. “Please hold still.”
“What are you-”
“Please hold still,” said the handsome android as the nozzle hissed an opalescent bubble which wobbled and grew without detaching itself from the apparatus. The android reached around Hansen and guided the edges of the bubble like a couturier with a swatch of cloth.
“Now, sir,” said the ugly android, “if you’ll step carefully onto this . . . ?”
Hansen lifted his feet so that he was standing on the doubled thickness of the bubble’s lower edge.
He understood, now. They were blowing him a temporary atmosphere suit, a membrane of polarized permeability. Oxygen could pass in, while carbon dioxide and other waste gasses passed out no matter what the composition of the encircling atmosphere.
A useful tool for chemical emergencies or even fires, though the membrane didn’t block heat. Temporary suits could keep people alive in hard vacuum for as long as the oxygen level within the bubble remained at a breathable level.
The hideous android smiled as he continued to extrude the material. Hansen supposed the expression was meant to be friendly.
The handsome attendant took a palm-sized device from his belt. He gathered the flattened bubble over Hansen’s head in his slim hands and touched the edges with the tool, mating them with a faint sputter.
The seam was a quiver of light when Hansen moved and made the bubble tremble. His mind told him falsely that his lungs had to struggle to breathe. He controlled his expression, but he could feel his heart rate rise.
“That’s right, sir,” said the ugly attendant. “Now, if you’ll just walk this way . . . ?”
The attendant had shut off his apparatus. Now he gestured toward one of the archways. His skin had the utter pallor that some androids tried to conceal with cosmetics; but whatever his skin color, this creature couldn’t have been anything that sprang from a human womb.
Hansen obeyed, walking deliberately so that the flexible membrane could billow ahead of his motion. He could see and hear normally, except for a slight shimmer in the air and the hint of distortion at the seam.
The Commissioner’s senses were overloaded with hormones from the gunfight, from the capture that should have been the crown of his career no matter how much longer he served the Consensus-
From all that had happened since.
“Why is this happening to me?” Hansen shouted. “Why are you doing this?”
The handsome attendant shook his head blandly. He’d put the sealing device back into its belt pouch. “Don’t worry, sir,” he said. “Just step through the portal.”
Would the bronze doorleaves open, or would-
Hansen stepped through what had seemed to be solid metal. There was an instant of chill. He thought he saw the crystalline pattern of the atoms themselves, but then he was through the door and standing in a darkness more intense than that of the core of his brain.
Light bloomed, a flush of pink so faint that for an instant Hansen thought the illumination was an accident of his optic nerves-synapses tripping to relieve the oppressive black.
The color was real. He could see again.
Almost-color sublimed in all directions from a stalagmite of ice that grew out of a floor as smooth as a bearing race. Hansen couldn’t see any walls, but the ball of light-fading as it expanded-swelled across a dozen other cones of ice.
Hansen braced himself. When the pink glow touched him, a voice in his mind said, “There has been a crime, Commissioner Hansen.”
Other stalagmites were scaling away drifts of color as weak as the nimbus of sunlight about a butterfly’s wings. Each was a separate pastel, each so pale that only by comparison could they be differentiated.
“I don’t belong here!” Hansen cried. “If there’s been a crime, let me out of here and I’ll deal with it.”
Hansen could see that there was no door behind him now, nothing but vacancy and a plain like a mirror.
Green ambiance washed over him. “There was a world,” said a different voice in his mind, mellifluous and a trifle arch. “It had been charted. Humans could live there, we thought-”
Orange light. A voice like a whip. “The Consensus thought. Captain Rolls led a unit to do a final examination. They-”
Pink neutrality again: “They vanished. A crime has been committed.”
Motes of light drifted upward like fog without finding a ceiling. Hansen tested the floor with his toes. It was solid, unyielding. It felt cold, even through his boots and the double insulating layers of his airsuit.
Almost all of the cones were glowing now as they discharged their burdens of thought and near-light.
“Listen and learn, Commissioner Hansen,” said blue certainty in the Commissioner’s mind. “We sent another team under Captain North, trusted personnel who had dealt with crises on a dozen other worlds to be colonized. Faithful-”
“Faithful servants of the Consensus,” quivered a red voice. It reminded Hansen of the lip-smacking tones of politicians who demanded tough measures but who’d never stood in an alley after a firefight and realized how little there was to a human being after the life goes out of him. “North had cleansed worlds, seeded them-changed weather patterns, raised continents, crushed all opposition to the Con-”
“The Consensus,” whispered violet. “North reported that he had succeeded again, that we should send a colony at once, that all was prepared for settlement. He said that we should call the planet Northworld, that it was his right that the planet receive his name.”
Blue fog drifted over Hansen. “We sent the colony, because-”
“-because he was a faithful servant,” rejoined the red tones. “Ruthless and skillful, a servant to the needs of the Consensus. But North and his team had not returned from the planet, as they reported, and the new colony-”
“The planet vanished,” said pink light. “There has been a crime, Commissioner Hansen. The colony has been stolen, the planet has been stolen.”
“Northworld has been stolen,” thundered Hansen’s mind in the organ tones of all dozen shades of light at once. “You will determine why, and you will cure the problem.”
The plain on which Hansen stood was boundless, but he no longer thought it was empty. There were shapes in the far distance, hinted bulks as huge as storms on a gas giant.
“This is nothing to do with me,” Hansen cried with fatalistic recklessness. “The colony wasn’t sent from Annunciation, North wasn’t-was he?-from here. I have my duties. Let me return to my duties.”
Light like yellow sunshine washed over him. If glaciers could laugh, the sensation in Hansen’s mind would have been that cold laughter. “Your duties are to the Consensus, Commissioner Hansen,” said a voice. “The Consensus demands that you deal with this event. You have been chosen from among-”
“From among many,” said violet light. “From among all the planets of the Consensus, from all the peoples. . . .”
“Records have been searched,” said the cold blue voice. “The Lomeri settled the world in past ages-”
“The lizardfolk settled Northworld in past ages,” said pink, “but no Lomeri were there when the exploration unit arrived. There has been-”
“There has been a crime, Commissioner Hansen,” purred a pastel so faint that it might have been either brown or mauve. “When Rolls’ exploration unit landed, they found a waterworld with necklaces of islands-”
“Island necklaces and no other land,” the yellow light said. “But North reported a world with 46% of the surface area land.”
“And now the world is gone and North is gone, and they have taken with them the colony,” said pink. “There has been a crime, and you must solve it-”
“Cure the crime,” insisted the red voice. “Deal with the criminals with the full rigor of the Consensus, for the will of the Consensus is the law of the universe-”
“For all the universe except Northworld,” resumed blue. “That world does not recognize the Consensus, nor do the Lomeri-”
“The Lomeri who were lizards and who have been dust,” rasped the orange voice, “for a thousand millennia before there were men. And before the Lomeri there were other settlements, we are sure of it-”
“The Consensus is sure,” whispered violet, “though that past is a far past even for the Consensus.”
“Far even for us. . . .” the voices of color murmured in unison.
Hansen felt the chamber shiver like a sigh. His feet were becoming cold, and it was not merely his imagination that the membrane around him sagged. It was voiding the carbon dioxide Hansen exhaled without a corresponding influx of oxygen.
“This isn’t my job,” Hansen said. “I don’t-”
He paused. He was at the center of a glowing ambiance that continued to expand indefinitely, like the ball of plasma generated by a nuclear weapon between the stars.
“Send a fleet, s-sirs,” he continued, afraid to choose a term for the entities which spoke here with him. “I’m a man, a cop. I don’t find planets. You need a-”
“There was a fleet,” said a voice as scales of light shimmered away from the brown/mauve stalagmite. “A fleet and a fleet-”
“-and a fleet,” echoed the pink voice. “Humans in the first fleet, and they vanished-”
“Though drones,” said blue, “had penetrated the area where Northworld should have been, and the drones reported nothing. Therefore we sent-”
“The Consensus sent a second fleet,” said the red voice, “crewed by androids and ready to destroy anything it met in the dead zone, the region-”
“The region that had flouted our majesty, our Consensus,” resumed the violet voice. “And when the androids vanished without warning, without report, we sent a third fleet that was a great machine in itself but which lived and thought, though-”
“Though not as men think, and not part of the Consensus,” chuckled the yellow voice. “And it vanished, Commissioner Hansen, as though it had never been . . . and though machines that are no more than machines ignore the area and pass through it.”
Hansen felt the pressure of thoughts, of words, all around him. The airsuit was no protection. His whole body was becoming numb.
“Fleets have failed,” said the red light, “so we are sending you. We will arm you, Commissioner Hansen-”
“But the fleets were armed,” shivered tones of deep green light. “You will be alone, so you may penetrate the defenses unnoticed-”
“Penetrate the mystery . . . ,” brown/mauve murmured.
“You are the best for the task,” boomed all the colors together. “On all the planets of the Consensus, in all the Consensus.”
You are resourceful/Commissioner Hansen is resourceful/The Kommissar is resourceful, rasped/purred/said the voices pounding Hansen’s mind.
And then, in a single thought so smooth and steely that it could have been Hansen’s own-and perhaps it was Hansen’s own thought-
“Commissioner Nils Hansen will execute the will of the Consensus. . . .”

Chapter Four
The light through the varied crystalline roofplanes was brilliant without being dazzling. Some of the score of figures seated around the walls used the rays to ornament themselves; others formed the light into shrouds and hulked as shadows within opalescent beauty that hid their features better than darkness could have done.
North sat in the high seat and glowered at his peers. His left eye didn’t track with his right; there were limits to power, even North’s power, and the freezing paths of the Matrix had exacted a price as he learned them.
“This latest probe by the outsiders doesn’t matter,” said Rolls from his place near the doorway. He was almost as tall as North and enough heavier than the man in the high seat to look soft . . . until one looked more closely. “Any of us can take care of that-”
“My pleasure,” said Rao. A smile of anticipation licked over his broad, dark face.
The curtain of light beside Rao rinsed away for a moment as Ngoya reached over to stroke her husband’s thick wrist and silence him. Rao wasn’t interested in-wasn’t capable of understanding-what Rolls and many others of the team regarded as major issues. Ngoya was often embarrassed for her husband, since she in turn failed to see that Rao’s single-minded simplicity was also his greatest strength.
“What matters,” said Miyoko, pointing an index finger at North to emphasize her words, “is the threat to Diamond. You can’t think of sending this invader to Diamond until we at least understand-”
“We don’t know there’s a threat,” objected Saburo, not so much in disagreement as to calm his sister. He glanced uneasily at North, trying to read meaning into the craggy patience of the man who had led both his own team and the exploration unit of which Saburo was a member ever since-
But ‘since’ implied duration. . . . Saburo composed his mind, then his face, and nodded apology to Rolls.
“There is a threat to Diamond,” said Rolls, “whether or not we can see where it comes from.”
He looked up at North, then across the hall to Eisner, and continued, “I’ll admit that I can’t see the source of the threat.”
Eisner nodded her crisp agreement; North and North’s face said nothing.
“I don’t see what the problem is,” Penny said. “I don’t see why we’re here at all.”
Penny was playing with her appearance. As she spoke, she changed from a petite redhead in her early twenties to a tall, black-haired beauty whose face promised experience as well as passion . . . and back again to the redhead. A curtain of light provided a mirror, and the jewel on Penny’s breast glowed with the power it gave her desires.
“On Diamond,” Eisner said-in another of the attempts to inform which exasperated her fellows as much as Penny’s care of her physical form bothered Eisner- “the inhabitants-”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Penny snapped, briefly flirting with an older image, still redheaded. “They’re having nightmares, terrible nightmares, and that’s all very sad-but there can’t be anything really wrong going to happen with them, because we’re the only ones who can touch them or Ruby.”
She looked around the room challengingly. “And if we did, the balance would fail, and we’d all-”
Penny made a moue of distaste and a dismissive gesture with fingers which for the moment were long and aristocratic. “Not that anybody would do that.”
Fortin stretched and smiled. His white skin and perfect features were a legacy of his android mother, but the twisted subtlety of his mind was his own . . . if not from the genes of North his father.
“Who can fault the wisdom of our Penny?” Fortin said. His lilting sarcasm cut all the deeper because what Penny said was true, though none of them doubted the reality of the danger except Penny, who didn’t care; and Rao, who couldn’t imagine it; and Dowson, who saw no threat in the Matrix and who lacked the fleshly baggage of emotions from which to create a hobgoblin that the data didn’t support.
“I still don’t think we should chance setting an intruder down in Diamond until we have a better idea of what’s going on,” Rolls said calmly.
“Of course,” said Eisner as much to herself as to the assembly, “if the intruder were put in Diamond, we might learn more about the threat-”
“We might learn he was the threat!” Miyoko snapped. “Put him in Ruby. They’ll take care of him!”
“Or set him on the plane of the Lomeri,” her brother added. “So long as he’s coming from outside the Matrix, we have absolute control of his destination. It makes no sense to take a risk-” he nodded to Miyoko “-even though the risk is still speculative.”
“We’ll set the intruder in Diamond,” said North, speaking for the first time during the assembly he had called, “because only in Diamond can we be sure that all of his weapons will be stripped from him-” he smiled “-without harm.”
“What do we care about hurting him?” Rao asked. “I mean, it’s all right with me, but he’s just an outsider. Isn’t he?”
He looked around his fellows to make sure that there wasn’t some point he had missed. Ngoya patted his arm.
North nodded. “I understand your position, my friend,” he said, “but I’ve seen far enough into the Matrix to be sure that this Hansen is no threat to Diamond.”
“But still-” said Miyoko.
“And I,” North continued, “have my own reasons for wanting him unharmed for the time. Surely I needn’t be the one to apologize for not killing, eh?”
“Well, do what you want, then,” said Penny, who had finally fixed on slight, red-haired youthfulness. “You’re going to anyway. I don’t see why you even bothered to call us here.”
Fortin began to laugh, because Penny was again perfectly correct. . . .

Rolls waited to meet Eisner in the doorway of North’s palace as they left the assembly. She smiled at him, but the expression went no deeper than her thin lips.
“He sees something in the Matrix,” she said, flicking her head back to indicate their leader and late host. “Do you?”
Eisner’s hair was the color of a gray-draggled mouse; a few wisps which had escaped from her tight bun wobbled abstractedly.
Rolls shrugged. “North plays games,” he said. “If there were something to see, you or I would know it. But still. . . .”
Neither of them spoke for a moment. Their eyes glanced over their fellows leaving the assembly; some of them concerned, some not.
Rao had hitched to his cart a pair of frilled ceratopsians from the plane where the Lomeri ruled. Most of the beasts which whim led others to ride or drive gave the dinosaurs a wide berth, but Saburo’s huge hog-like dinohyid exchanged angry grunts and foot-stampings with Rao’s much larger animals.
Eisner nodded. “Good day,” she said and turned.
“Let me take you back,” Rolls said. “You don’t need to walk.”
“I don’t need to do anything,” the woman corrected crisply. “None of us do.” Eisner was thin and looked small at the moment, but only Rao and North failed to shrink when they stood next to Rolls.
“But yes,” she added. “All right, I don’t need to walk.”
Rolls whickered to his giant stag and let it nuzzle his hand for a moment before he mounted. The beast had cast its horns and looked oddly naked. Still, it was awkward to bridle a creature whose horns spread a meter and a half to either side.
Everything was whim-for Rolls, for all of them since North had discovered the turning of the Matrix which gave them each whatever they most wanted. . . .
Rolls leaned over and lifted Eisner up ahead of him. The stag’s spine was higher and sharper than a horse’s, so the saddleframe had to be built out stiffly to give a comfortable seat. Horses were better adapted as riding animals, aircars were a far more efficient way to get around; but the most practical means of transportation for Rolls, for any of them, was the choice that provided the most amusement-and a practical level of aggravation.
It had been hard at first to imagine that there were any negative aspects to godlike power.
Eisner tried to straddle the spine the way Rolls did, but he turned her side-saddle and put his arm around the small of her waist to support her. She met his eyes and said coolly, “Still your games, Rolls? You might have learned by now.”
Rolls shrugged. “The saddle was designed for me, so you’ll find this more comfortable, Eisner,” he said. “More practical, if you wish.”
He clucked to the stag. It turned obediently and slid by the fourth stride into the long-legged canter that Rolls found its most comfortable pace.
Eisner sniffed, but she didn’t object further to Rolls’ touch. Neither did her abdominal muscles soften beneath his hand.
Rolls kept the contact well within the bounds of what was necessary for the task. His easy-going charm was effective because a real concern for others underlay it.
Rolls smiled to himself. One might almost say that concern for others ruled him.
The grassland swept by beneath the stag’s measured paces. The rounded roofline of Eisner’s palace appeared in the near distance.
“Do you remember,” Rolls said, “when duration had meaning?”
Eisner shifted to meet his eyes; her left thigh slid over his. “Time still has meaning, Rolls,” she said. “Time means everything dies. Even us. . . .”
Eisner had looked older than her years when Rolls’ unit arrived on the planet it was to survey. Power had not given her youth, neither in her face nor in the mind which, more than age, had shaped the lines of that face.
Obedient to its training rather than specific command, the stag drew up before Eisner’s palace, a windowless dome. Rolls held out an arm like a steel bar to support the woman as she lowered herself to the ground.
She looked up at him and said, “We created Diamond and Ruby as bubble universes, bound into the Matrix by our united minds.”
Rolls nodded. “A whim,” he said. “A desire to create the perfection that we-”
He swung his leg over the saddle and lowered himself beside Eisner “-fail to achieve in ourselves.”
Rolls pretended to be unaware of the wariness in the woman’s eyes at the implication that he intended to enter her palace.
She grimaced. “All right,” she said and stepped toward the door. It opened in response to her presence. Eisner kept no human servants.
“If one of us destroys Diamond,” she continued, “our minds fall out of balance with the Matrix and . . . All of us. But only we can harm Diamond.”
“If that were the case,” Rolls said as he ducked to follow Eisner, “then Diamond wouldn’t be in any danger. As perhaps it is not.”
Though the ceilings within Eisner’s dwelling were full height, the woman had pointedly constructed the door transom to clear her head by a centimeter. Eisner had few visitors; and, she would have said, little need for them.
“There’s Fortin,” Eisner said as she turned. “Fortin is insane.” The door behind Rolls remained open, a reminder and invitation to him to leave.
“Fortin is very clever,” Rolls said. “And yes, he’s usually destructively clever. But he doesn’t want to die before his time, Eisner. All our time.”
He looked at the books, racked in a jumble of varied sizes and bindings. Computers were a better way to access information, and the Matrix itself was all knowledge if one had the patience to prowl its twisted, freezing pathways. Eisner used both, constantly, because there was no end to learning . . . but books were a symbol, and symbols had a particular reality here on Northworld.
“There’s something we don’t see . . . ,” Eisner murmured.
“We’re changing, Eisner,” the man said as he watched his hostess through the corners of his eyes.
“We don’t change,” Eisner snapped, crossing her arms over her chest as she turned her back on Rolls. Her breasts, as unremarkable as her face and hair, were hidden beneath the loose folds of the coveralls she habitually wore. “We’re old and we’re getting older, but we don’t change. We don’t have the power to change ourselves-”
Rolls touched the woman’s shoulder. “You know what I mean,” he said.
“-except for Penny with her necklace,” Eisner continued. Her voice, never particularly attractive, cut the phrase like a hacksaw. “She can change.”
“Penny got what she wanted,” Rolls said. Rather than try to turn Eisner to face him, he stepped around her.
“You have-” He gestured with his left hand. “You wanted knowledge. You wouldn’t trade that for Penny’s necklace, would you?”
“No, no,” Eisner agreed, forcing herself to lower her arms, though she met her guest’s eyes only for a moment. “I have exactly what I want, of course. . . .”
“But we don’t have to limit ourselves to one thing,” Rolls said. “Eisner, we have all powers, we’re like gods. But we’re focusing down to-” his hand described an empty circle “-to caricatures, like Penny and her appearance.”
“And her men, you mean!” Eisner said.
Rolls’ expression softened to see the pain in the woman’s eyes. “That’s all part of the same thing, Eisner,” he said gently. “You know that. There’s no reason that we can’t change things back. Become-”
He reached out slowly, his fingers curled to cup Eisner’s breast.
“-complete human beings again.”
Eisner slapped his hand away and turned her back again. “I don’t want that!” she said.
In a voice almost too faint to hear, she added, “And you don’t want me, not really.”
“I do want you,” Rolls said. “I want you to be-”
“Go on!” Eisner said, facing Rolls to gesture imperiously toward the door. “Get out. Your sympathy is quite unnecessary.”
“Whatever you wish,” the big man said as he obeyed; but he paused, hunched in the doorway, to add over his shoulder, “There’s still time to change, Eisner.”
As the door swung closed behind him, Rolls heard her cry, “There’s nothing to change!”
There was no doubt in her voice; but Rolls thought he heard sadness.

Chapter Five
“There are no abnormal emanations from the target zone,” said the artificial intelligence controlling Hansen’s intrusion capsule.
In its current mode, the capsule’s radiation on all spectra was as close to zero as Consensus technology could arrange. That meant Hansen had no radar, no lasers-no emission rangefinding of any sort. He was dependent on the target to reveal itself when the intrusion capsule got close enough.
If North had managed to blank out a planet as thoroughly as Consensus scientists had shielded this capsule, the two were going to intersect with what would seem to be a hell of a jolt from Hansen’s side.
“On a dark stormy night . . . ,” Hansen sang.
Hansen had a pleasant voice, but he couldn’t carry a tune even on a good day.
“. . . as the train rattled on. . . .”
A good day was one on which Hansen wasn’t scared and strapped into a seat with only the dim blue numerals of the console to illuminate his surroundings. In low-observable mode, the AI shut down all non-essentials so that there was as little energy as possible to be trapped within the hull as heat.
It was out of his hands. There was nothing to expect from the next few moments except death, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. He’d been shot at before, but it wasn’t like that. Then he’d had a gun in his hand or at least the chance of getting to a gun. . . .
“. . . one young man with a babe in his arms,” Hansen sang tunelessly, “who sat there with a bowed down head.”
His palms were sweaty, his skin prickled, and he figured he knew now what it was like to be under artillery fire where life or death were at the whim of entities in the invisible distance.
“The calculated time of arrival is five seconds-” said the artificial intelligence.
There was no lack of data for the calculations-
“Four-”
-because the Consensus handlers had watched three fleets vanish at the intersection point.
“Three-”
The voices in the mist might think an intrusion capsule-
“Two-”
-could slip through where a fleet couldn’t, but Hansen didn’t believe that.
“One-”
If it wasn’t impact and instantaneous death waiting, what-
“N-” said the artificial intelligence, the first grunt of “Now!” before it cut off and the console display went dead black.
Hansen listened to the sound of blood coursing through the veins of his ears.
The next line of the song went, ‘The innocent one began crying just then . . .’ Hansen would’ve kept singing to show the bastards somewhere that being trapped in limbo until his air supply failed didn’t terrify him; but his mouth was too dry to form the words.
The hull of the capsule quivered. One of the hull plates shifted like a shingle that had rotted away from the staple holding it to the wall.
Light bathed Hansen through a crack that widened as the plate fell off completely. The capsule’s three-layer coating of absorptive materials had already sloughed like the carcase of a beached jellyfish.
The console displays were still dead.
Hansen should’ve been dead also. The amount of heat or other radiation it would take to make the capsule disintegrate would carbonize a human being before he knew what was happening.
Not that Hansen did know what was happening.
Three more hull plates fell away, clanging against one another and, more mutedly, on the ground beneath.
Hansen still couldn’t see much, just blue sky with some impressive cumulus clouds in the distance. He hit the quick-release plate in the center of his restraints and rose with a neutral look on his face.
Hansen was more than 200 meters in the air, on top of a huge building. He was looking out over the neat patterns of farmland, and-
The floor of the intrusion capsule gave way and dropped Hansen thirty centimeters to the ground. That shouldn’t’ve been unexpected, the way the upper hull was crumbling, but everydamnthing was a surprise just now. The read-outs and touch-sensitive panels on the console all had a frosted look as though they were withering under extreme heat.
Particularly surprising was the fact that he was alive.
The capsule had-landed?-on a promenade around the building’s roof. Behind Hansen was the quarter-sphere sheltering the audience section of a 3,000-seat odeum.
Two men and a woman came from a door in the back of the much smaller quarter-sphere intended to cover the performers. Apart from miniature figures in the fields below, these were the first living beings Hansen had seen since a trio of androids strapped him into the intrusion capsule.
“Can we help you, sir?” called the older man in the center of the group.
Hansen stepped out of the collapsing ruin of his capsule. The fallen hull plates had a porous look, and the monomolecular carbon frame members were beginning to sag under their own weight. He’d envisioned a lot of possibilities for what would happen on this mission, but not this one.
Not anything as survivable as this one, if it came to that.
He bent his mouth into a pleasant smile to match that of his questioner and said, “Ah, my name’s Hansen. Ah, this is going to sound silly, but is this Northworld?”
Hansen wore what looked like standard exploration-unit coveralls until you checked at the level of the weave and found the battery of hidden weapons and sensors. Besides the coveralls, he had a satchel holding three separate changes of clothes, each one a direct copy-in appearance-of an outfit that one of the later colonists was known to have carried to Northworld.
His options didn’t include sandals and loose, flowing robes cinched at the waist with a belt of soft fabric-which was what the three locals greeting him wore.
“Well, that isn’t our name for it, Mr. Hansen,” said the other man-still older than Hansen by a decade, if appearance was anything to judge by. “We call it Diamond, but since we believe we’re in a spacetime bubble of our own, we may well be a minority in our opinion.”
“We’re so glad to see you,” said the young woman who touched Hansen’s arm in a gesture of welcome and perhaps reassurance-for one or both of them. “We’d been afraid that it was, you know . . . something to do with the Passages.”
Her fingertips felt warm even through the cloth. She had long brown hair and was very attractive, primarily because of her lively expression.
This place might well be a bubble of phased spacetime; certainly it wasn’t Northworld, a barren wilderness until its settlement three standard months before. The crops below had been in the ground longer than that, and Hansen couldn’t even guess how long it must have taken to construct the city-sized building on which he now stood.
“You were expecting me, then?” Hansen asked, keeping his tone mild. The promenade was paved with a rubbery layer that responded comfortably beneath his boots.
“Well, not you precisely,” said the old man.
“My name is Dana, by the way,” interjected the younger man. “And these are Gorley-” the other man “-and Lea.”
“And as Lea said,” Gorley went on, “we’re delighted you’re here-”
“Both for yourself,” added Lea, “and because you’re not. . . .” Her face quirked in embarrassment, and her hand squeezed Hansen’s biceps.
“But particularly for yourself, Mr. Hansen,” the older man went on. “We never received a visitor before.”
“As to whether we knew you were coming,” said Dana, “and please-you mustn’t take this as an insult-but. . . .”
“You are disruptive, you see,” explained the woman. “Here in Diamond, because of the, ah. . . .”
“Well,” said the older man, “your weapons, Mr. Hansen.”
He pointed with the paired index and middle fingers of his left hand toward the remains of the intrusion capsule-now a silhouette in ash as if a quantity of cardboard had been burned on the promenade. “I’m afraid that the vehicle in which you arrived was itself a weapon.”
All three of the local citizens looked apologetic. “And you see,” the younger man finished, “weapons don’t exist in Diamond.”
“Anything can be-” Hansen snapped before he got control of his tongue. Even if what he’d been about to say were true-and it certainly was true where he came from that anything could be used as a weapon if the will to do so existed-that wasn’t an attitude he wanted to stress to his present hosts.
“But with the weapons gone,” Lea said, “we hope that you’ll be able to stay. Would you like to see the village?”
“Or perhaps you’re hungry/he’s hungry?” the men said in near unison.
“I-” said Hansen. He looked at his hosts and decided to be perfectly honest-because he didn’t have enough information to lie; and anyway, because he preferred the truth.
“I’m not hungry,” he said. “But I’d like to get out there-” he gestured toward the surrounding fields “-just to prove this isn’t some kind of stage set.”
Lea giggled and hugged herself closer to Hansen. Both men smiled also. “Of course, of course,” Dana murmured.
“And I’m wondering a little where everyone else is . . . ?” Hansen added.
Contact with Lea wasn’t as pleasant as it should’ve been, because Hansen noticed his coveralls gave too easily at the pressure of her soft body. The equipment woven into Hansen’s garments seemed to have vanished. His intrusion capsule was now fluff which drifted over the edge of the building on the light breeze.
“We didn’t want you to worry,” said Dana.
“We thought you might be startled by a crowd,” said Gorley.
“But everyone wants to meet you,” said Lea, “not just here but everywhere in Diamond.”
As she spoke, an aircar curved neatly around the odeum from a landing site on the opposite edge of the roof. Simultaneously, loosely organized groups of people began approaching from either direction along the promenade.
All the newcomers, including the vehicle’s driver, dressed in a similar fashion, but there was wide variety in the color and textures of their garments. The crowds contained many children, some of them infants being carried or led carefully by the hand by their parents.
“Hello, Mr. Hansen,” called a little boy, waving a small bouquet.
The aircar touched on the walkway near Hansen and rotated slightly to face its nose outward toward the edge of the roof before it settled finally. The vehicle hummed instead of howling; Hansen couldn’t see fan ducts.
These might be gentle people, but they weren’t stupid-and they weren’t without technology. The whole city-building-very likely the whole of Diamond, planet or universe or whatever it was, was listening to what Hansen said and reacting to it immediately.
“We thought you might prefer to ride,” said Lea, nodding toward the car.
“Though we can take the elevators if you’d like,” said Dana.
“Or walk,” said Gorley. “We’d be more than happy to walk with you.”
The old man looked fit enough to manage the walk despite his age, but Hansen wasn’t sure he wanted to try the long staircases, even going down.
The crowds had halted a comfortable, non-threatening ten meters from Hansen and his companions. More people were still coming around the curves of the promenade.
“No, the car’ll be fine,” Hansen said, letting Lea guide him into the open vehicle.
“Goodby, Mr. Hansen!” called the little boy, waving enthusiastically.
“We’ll have a proper gathering in the common area later,” Gorley said.
“If that’s all right with you, Mr. Hansen, of course,” Dana interjected.
“Yeah, I . . . ,” said Hansen. He didn’t know enough to ask questions.
“But everyone’s so excited,” Lea said. “We all wanted to see you in person as soon as we could.”
The car lifted to clear the turbulence around the building’s edge, then dropped in a curve toward the fields. The irrigation ditches between rows of grain were dry at the moment, but a large reservoir reflected the cloud-piled sky in the near distance, ready to flood the ditches if needed.
“How long has Diamond been settled?” Hansen asked.
The driver throttled back, slowing the car as he steered for a dike between fields. The vehicle was admirably quiet, but it seemed to have surplus power even with five of its six seats filled by adults.
“Our records go back ten thousand years,” said Dana.
“What?” Hansen snarled. “That’s three times as long as there’ve been human spacecraft!”
“We didn’t mean to distress you, Mr. Hansen,” Lea said softly.
“You understand, of course,” said Gorley with an apologetic look, “that time within our bubble-if our scientists are correct-doesn’t necessarily travel at the same rate as that of the outside universe . . . of which our ancestors may have been a part.”
“Though,” Dana said, “we don’t have any record of existence anywhere but here, in Diamond.”
“I’m sorry,” Hansen said.
It bothered him that these people kept apologizing to him when hell, either he was at fault or nobody was. He got out of the car and walked toward the rows of grain.
Diamond wasn’t an elaborate stage set. Hansen’s boots sank into the turned earth. The air was fresh with the scents of growth, and a cloud of small insects rose from the shade beneath the leaves as he reached into the grain.
The crop was still green, the grainheads unformed. Hansen stroked the fine-haired leaves.
His outfitters had given him a ruby ring in a massive gold setting for the middle finger of his right hand. The stone was now as dull as a chip of cement, and Hansen was quite sure that the one-shot laser which the ruby focused no longer functioned.
He turned back to his hosts. They had waited beside the car in attitudes of hopeful attentiveness.
“Do you have criminals on Diamond?” he asked abruptly.
“Oh, no, Mr. Hansen,” Lea replied.
Hansen smiled lopsidedly. “Then I’m damned if I know what good I could ever be to you,” he said as he took his seat in the car again. “But I guess I’m here anyway.”
“Oh, Mr. Hansen,” Gorley said, “you can’t imagine how wonderful it is to us to have a visitor! We weren’t sure that it was possible to enter or leave Diamond.”
“May we return to the village, then?” Dana asked. “Or perhaps you’d like to see the animals?”
“The village is fine with me,” Hansen said. There was a mild low-frequency vibration through the frame of the aircar for a moment as the driver raised his power. “You know, I’d sort of figured you were vegetarians.”
“Ah, well, we are,” explained Gorley diffidently. “But we use milk and wool, you see.”
The car climbed as swiftly as it had dropped minutes before; he’d been right about the vehicle having plenty of power. “You’ve been trying to get out of your bubble, then?” he asked.
“Oh, goodness, no!” said Dana in amazement. He blushed in embarrassment. “I am sorry. We just-we’re happy here.”
“It’s the knowledge that we miss,” explained Gorley. “It’s all very well to speculate about our existence, but proof that there is an outside universe is quite marvelous.”
Lea bent close and kissed Hansen’s cheek. “We do hope you’ll be comfortable in Diamond.”
Instead of returning to the section of promenade where Hansen’s capsule had appeared, the aircar circled the building and dropped onto a purpose-built docking area where hundreds of similar vehicles were already parked. “The community is gathering in the common area,” Gorley said. “That seemed simplest.”
“But if it makes you uncomfortable to be on display, even briefly,” Dana said, “of course your peaceful enjoyment is far more important to us.”
“To all of us,” Lea agreed and nestled closer to her guest.
There was a bank of at least twenty elevators, each of them sized to hold half a dozen people. Cages and shafts alike were of a material whose crystalline transparency had been slightly dulled by dust and use. Again, Diamond hadn’t been somehow raised as an elaborate hoax to fool Hansen.
The aircar’s driver waved and got into a separate cage. Hansen didn’t see the controls-or, for that matter, the elevator’s drive and suspension apparatus-but he and his three guides dropped to a level forty meters beneath the roofline and got off when the door rotated open.
The whole area was open except for the eight massive pillars which housed the elevators as well as supporting the building’s upper stories. Plants grew around the outer edges and a lightshaft in the center.
The ten-meter ceiling kept the space from looking packed, but it was full of people who waved and cheered when Hansen got off the elevator. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a crowd that big with a happy ambiance to it.
“We have a little dais built for you, if you don’t mind,” Dana said, bending close to speak directly into Hansen’s ear.
Lea gripped his hand with friendly firmness as she led him to up a short flight of steps to a chair on a plastic platform. “If you could say a few words, that would be wonderful,” the young woman said as she motioned Hansen to the seat.
Even so they weren’t all going to be able to see, Hansen thought; and then he noticed that the crowd of gaily-clad citizens was moving in a clockwise rotation, bringing forward those from the other side of the huge room and taking away those who’d already gotten a close look at their visitor. There was no apparent pushing or concern.
“Ah-” he said.
The room stilled save for the whisper of sandals on the tile flooring.
He certainly wasn’t going to sit. He felt like an idiot. Lea started down the steps. Hansen grimaced, wishing he’d grabbed her earlier so that he at least wouldn’t be alone here in his-‘ignorance’ was an insufficient word for how he felt.
“Ah,” he repeated, “ah, I don’t know how I came to be here, but I hope that-”
The sunlight through the open sides of the common area dimmed as though shutters had been drawn all around the building. People screamed.
Hansen glanced around him. The threat was everything but palpable, and he was exposed on top of the dais.
He was in his element.
Short-boled palms and bromeliads fringed the exterior of the common area. While the sky beyond darkened in pulses like the throbbing surf, the broadleafed plants were sucked into shadowy, fanged silhouettes. The sun brightened again, and the normal foliage returned.
Shadow humans appeared in the common area when the plants grew serpent doubles also.
Amid the crowd’s weeping and wordless cries, Hansen heard from hundreds of throats a Passage/another Passage . . . and over and over again, May it be swift/May it end/end/end. . . .
For a moment, the great covered park was what it had been when Hansen first saw it: bright, clean, and filled with thousands of healthy people, though their faces were now streaked with tears and terror. Then it changed again, and Hansen saw an armored vehicle that must have weighed hundreds of tonnes.
The tank glided toward Hansen in a false silence while the shadow figures and vegetation shuddered with the noise that such a monster must have made in any medium denser than vacuum. It sprouted missile batteries, guns, and swatches of wire mesh which could have been either antennas or a form of defense.
The tank proceeded at a walking pace which nothing in the park or its own shadow world slowed or affected.
The folk of Diamond keened and clutched one another, keeping their faces down and their eyes closed.
There was no place to run. Hansen picked up the chair-extruded plastic, light if not quite flimsy . . . and probably just as effective as any other man-portable weapon against a monster like the tank which bore down on him now.
Lenses and vision blocks winked with gray highlights that didn’t come from the sun of Diamond. None of the tank’s guns were aimed at Hansen, but attachment lugs on the bowslope would gore him back until he and they sailed off the edge of the building. Even on the dais, he had to look up to see the top of the turret and the multiple weapons’ cupolas.
Hansen swung his piece of furniture at a vision block on the upper left of the bowslope.
The plastic chair whistled at and through the knobbly armor without touching anything material save the air. Hansen overbalanced and almost fell of the front of the dais. Daylight had returned, and with it the rich, soft colors of Diamond.
“Oh, Mr. Hansen . . . ,” someone murmured behind him. Hansen turned. Lea had started up the steps to the dais again and paused, staring at the chair in the visitor’s hands.
Anything’s a weapon if you want it to be one.
Hansen put the chair down carefully, feeling embarrassed . . . though there wasn’t any need to, god knew. What he’d done made as much sense as anything could in a crazy situation like that.
“Oh, Mr. Hansen,” Leas repeated. “I’m so sorry.”
She stepped closer to him and reached out her hand. Hansen glanced over his shoulder; the whole crowd was watching him, but there was an evident sadness in everyone’s eyes.
What he’d done made sense where Hansen came from; but this was Diamond.
He felt-cold wasn’t the word, but a sensation as deep as if freezing water were drawing all the warmth out of his body. There was a thin film between Hansen and everything around him. He felt the pressure of Lea’s hand but not its warmth.
“We’re so sorry,” she said through a corridor of mirrors. “It isn’t a fault in you, Mr. Hansen, but weapons don’t exist here in Diamond.”
She raised onto her toes to kiss him. He couldn’t feel her lips. Everything was becoming gray. He remembered the capsule in which he’d arrived, ash that divided into dust motes as a breeze swept it gently from the promenade.
“Goodby, Mr. Hansen. . . .” called a distant, childish voice.
“And you are a weapon . . . ,” whispered words that were only a shadow in Hansen’s mind as he felt the structure of Diamond interpenetrate him completely and leave only nothingness.

Chapter Six
Rolls found Fortin with his back to an outcrop, looking down the slope and through the shimmering discontinuity to a forest on the Open Lands, the surface which could be reached from any of Northworld’s other planes. Armed figures groped among the dimensionally-distant trees, an army searching for the foe with whom it would fight to decide . . . nothing or everything, a matter of perception.
Fortin was tossing pebbles. They quivered when they struck the discontinuity. Fortin’s arm wasn’t strong enough to hit the warriors from his vantage point, but his tiny missiles flicked snow from the tree branches.
“Planning to visit the colonists?” Rolls said, seating himself beside Fortin. North’s son had surely seen him climbing from the valley below; if he chose to ignore Rolls’ approach, that was merely a ploy-and as such to be ignored.
“Perhaps,” said Fortin without looking around.
He threw another stone. It sparkled and switched planes. By adjusting their vision, the two men could focus on either the stream a thousand meters below in their reality or the snow-wrapped forest and ignorant army. “Do you care, Rolls?”
Rolls chuckled. Seen from this angle, Fortin’s face had the cool perfection of a well-struck medal. “What you plan is no concern of mine, Fortin,” he said. “You know where my interests lie.”
Fortin turned at last to face him. “Whatever I do,” he said, “you’ll know.”
Rolls shifted slightly. “That’s right,” he agreed easily. “You-do things. I observe. Eisner learns.”
The granite ledge on which they sat was flaking; Rolls reached beneath his buttocks to sweep aside some sharp-edged bits. Fortin picked up one of them, looked at it, and dropped it again instead of flinging it through the dimensional barrier.
“Why are you here?” he demanded.
Rolls smiled. “I’d like,” he said, “to borrow Penny’s necklace.”
Fortin began to laugh. He had a tenor voice, as smoothly pleasant as his features-and as cool. “Then you’d better ask Penny, hadn’t you?” he said, looking down for the stone he’d just cast aside.
“I thought perhaps you might help me,” said Rolls.
“Did you?” the half-android remarked without interest. His index finger dug at the ledge, trying idly to worry another bit loose.
“I . . . want to borrow it for only a moment,” Rolls said, trying to keep his voice clear of the concern he was beginning to feel. He had no way to coerce Fortin, and a claim on the halfling’s friendship would be as empty as claiming to be a friend of the Matrix itself.
Though the Matrix was not perverse.
“It’s nothing to me how long you want it,” Fortin said. “Or what you want it for.” He met Rolls’ eyes again.
Rolls grinned. He was willing to bargain with Fortin; for a moment, though, he’d been afraid that there was nothing he could provide that the other wanted.
He should have known better. Schemes filled Fortin the way maggots did a three-days corpse. There was sure to be a scheme which impinged on Rolls or what Rolls could do. . . .
“Yes,” Rolls said, “I can see that.” He settled himself against the crag, closing his eyes to feel the sunlight warm their lids.
“I’ve been thinking of visiting Ruby, you know,” said Fortin in a voice as coolly distant as if it came through the dimensional barrier. “It seems to me that Ruby might have something to do with the problem of nightmares on Diamond.”
“Waking nightmares,” Rolls said, opening his eyes and looking without expression at his smaller companion. “Yes, you might very well be right.”
“But I would rather,” Fortin continued, picking his words with the care of a climber negotiating a cliff face, “that my visit to Ruby didn’t come to North’s attention. My father doesn’t-”
A look of fury momentarily transfigured Fortin’s face, though his features were no less perfect for the purity of the emotion they displayed. “My father doesn’t trust me.”
Rolls laughed, an easy, deep-throated sound. “Nobody trusts you, Fortin,” he said.
The anger left Fortin’s visage, leaving behind a coldness like the blue heart of a glacier. “Because my mother was an android,” he said.
“Because you’re Fortin,” Rolls said, still smiling. He’d never been a good liar, and acceding to godlike powers had leached away even the impulse to say less than the absolute truth as he saw it.
And Rolls saw very clearly indeed.
“Maybe it’s in the genes,” he added, his expression untroubled by Fortin’s wintry glare. “After all, Fortin, nobody really trusts North, either.”
Fortin turned away. He drew in a deep breath and pretended to look for another chip of stone to throw.
“I can’t prevent North from seeing whatever he chooses to see,” Rolls said. “But he observes for reasons . . . and I observe because it’s my life.”
For a moment, a look as bleak as a snowfield wavered across Rolls’ soft, handsome features.
“I won’t be the one to inform your father that you’re visiting Ruby,” he said.
Below and beyond them, scouts rejoined the army. A trumpet call quavered through the discontinuity and the wind skirling past the crag.
“All right,” Fortin said. His voice and visage were carelessly without expression again. “If you can occupy Penny outside her room-and without her necklace-for half an hour, say-”
Rolls chuckled again. “That should be possible,” he agreed.
“-then I’ll see about ‘borrowing’ it for you.”
There were two armies visible now. To the men on the crag, they seemed to be fighting as though mirrored in the flat surface of a pond.

Chapter Seven
Hansen felt the shock of landing before he knew he was alive. The ground was solid enough to knock his breath away.
He could see again. He still existed-or existed again.
Hansen hadn’t fallen far. In fact, he’d just gotten his feet tangled during the moment-or however long; maybe he didn’t want to think about that-during which Diamond forced itself through the space of Hansen’s being. The sun here was a little past midpoint.
He was on a forty-meter bluff, overlooking a considerable floodplain forested with scrub conifers as well as willows. The river which had carved the bluff was now an occasional glint through the trees a kilometer away. On the far horizon was a conical mountain from which trailed wisps of yellow vapor.
There was snow on the leaf mould and in the creviced bark of the trees around Hansen, but the air didn’t seem particularly cold. A fieldmouse gnawed audibly nearby, rotating a pinecone with tiny forepaws to bring hidden seeds in range of the glittering incisors.
Hansen wasn’t on Diamond. He could be quite sure of that, because riders carrying lances and crossbows were picking their way from left to right through the trees below.
A trumpet called from nearby to the right. A living creature out of sight on the left answered the horn with its own louder, angry echo. Two of the riders turned their shaggy, big-headed ponies and trotted back the way they’d come. Their fellows, perhaps a dozen of them, checked their weapons and resumed their careful progress through the trees.
Hansen looked at his laser ring. The stone remained as dull as it had been on Diamond, and even the metal had the false sheen of plastic.
The band crumbled as he tried to work the ring off his finger. He dropped the bits on the snowy ground in disgust.
One of the horsemen below took a curved trumpet from beneath his fur jacket, set it to his lips, and blew a three-note call.
Hansen sighed. He wasn’t trained to survive alone in the woods. The sooner he brought himself to the attention of the men below, the better . . . though of course, ‘better’ might amount to a swift death instead of a slow surrender to cold and hunger.
“Don’t be a fool, Hansen,” squeaked the fieldmouse. “Swear yourself to my service. You’ll never survive here without my help.”
Hansen rubbed the trunk of one of the pines. The outer surface of the bark rasped as it ground away beneath the ball of his thumb, exposing the russet layer within.
“Mice talk here, then?” Hansen said conversationally. So long as he squeezed the treetrunk, he could keep himself from slamming his fist into it in frustration at this further madness from which he was now sure he would never escape. . . .
“Faugh!” the mouse said. “Such a form is useful when I visit the Open Lands. You might not even think me alive in your terms, Hansen.”
The little creature tossed the cone aside. Half the scales had been nibbled into fibrous sprays. They looked like the blades of a turbine whose epoxy matrix had disintegrated under stress.
“I’m a machine,” said the mouse, cleaning its whiskers with its paws. “You can call me Walker. On my plane of Northworld the sun is red, and even the shoals of horseshoe crabs which used to couple on gravel beaches have died. There is no life besides me and my fellows-if we live.”
Another horn blew; a second group of horsemen rode into sight among the trees below. Several crossbows fired. The flat snap! of the bows’ discharge sounded like treelimbs cracking under the weight of ice.
Men shouted. Hansen didn’t see anyone fall, but the conifers hid most of the details.
He was shivering; perhaps it was the cold. “You’re a time traveler, then?” he said to the fieldmouse. The beast’s left eye was as dull as the ruby which had powdered like chalk as Hansen removed his ring.
“You still think in terms of duration, Hansen,” Walker said. “Don’t. This is Northworld.”
He paused for a moment to lick the creamy fur of his belly in firm, even strokes of his tongue. “I’m from a different plane of the Matrix. There are-” the mouse voice took on a didactic singsong “-eight worldplanes of the Matrix, and the Matrix which is a world. But those who live in the Matrix are mad.”
The riders on both sides were falling back. A riderless pony rushed to and fro among the trees, neighing and shaking cascades of snow from the branches.
Men on foot, stepping heavily with the weight of the full armor they wore, moved through the forest in a ragged array. They didn’t appear to be armed, but whenever one brushed a low treelimb, wood and snow spluttered away in a blue crackle.
Similar pops of electronic lightning suggested that more armored footmen were approaching from the other direction, but the line of contact would be at some distance to the right of Hansen’s present vantage point. He began walking in that direction, keeping a grip on saplings because he was paying less attention than he ought to the bluff’s edge.
Walker hopped along beside him. “Swear yourself to my service, Hansen,” piped the fieldmouse voice. “You’re nothing and nobody without my guidance. But be warned: oaths have power on Northworld.”
Scores of fur-clad horsemen like those who’d acted as skirmishers followed a few meters behind the ragged line of footmen. The latter’s armor was painted in brilliant colors, no two patterns alike. Hansen estimated that there were about 150 men in the force advancing from his left, with only a third of them in armor; but the trees made certain counting impossible.
Several horns called. Fifty or sixty equally garish armored men came into sight from the trees to the right.
A small gray bird, crested like a titmouse, landed on a branch beside Hansen. It rapped the seed in its beak three times to break it open. The bird’s head flicked as it swallowed the kernel, letting the husk flutter over the edge of the bluff.
“That’s the army of Golsingh the Peacegiver,” the bird said, twitching its beak in the direction of the newcomers. “Those others there-” it bobbed in the direction of the force to Hansen’s left “-they’re Count Lopez’ men, though he’s bedridden and can’t lead them.”
Hansen looked at the bird. One of its eyes was bright; the other had the yellow, frosted look of weathered marble.
“My word always counts, Walker,” Hansen said harshly. “I’m not giving it to you.”
Lopez’ mounted force suddenly sallied through the loose ranks of his armored footmen. Snow and dirt flew from beneath the hooves of the ponies.
When the riders were twenty meters short of leading clot of Golsingh’s footmen, crossbows snapped on both sides. Several of Lopez’ men tumbled from their saddles, but their own missiles were directed at the armored footmen.
It appeared to Hansen that the quarrels sizzled and dropped just short of the armor. Several, probably metal-shafted, vanished in showers of orange sparks.
A single footman stumbled, then fell backward in the snow. His heels drummed briefly. The fletching of a missile projected from his left armpit.
Walker made a tsk-tsk-tsk sound, as dismissive now as if he were in human guise. His beak sawed in the direction of the fallen man. “A hireling,” the bird explained. “Shoddy armor; no chance at all.”
He turned his one bright eye on Hansen. “But more chance than you have, Kommissar. Unless you put yourself under my control and direction.”
Hansen gathered a blob of saliva on his tongue. He grimaced and swallowed instead of spitting.
Golsingh’s lancers had also ridden through the loose array of their own footmen and were struggling with mounted opponents in a chaos of shouting and ringing metal. Hansen couldn’t imagine how the fur-clad riders told one another apart after the first shock had mixed their lines.
The foremost group of Golsingh’s footmen, twenty or so of them, broke into a stumbling run. Their leader was a huge man in red and gold armor. The nearest horsemen bellowed afresh and tried to disengage.
The man in red and gold pointed his right arm and splayed the middle and index fingers of his gauntleted hand. A blue-white arc snapped in a ten-meter parabola from the fingers with a noise like sawing stone. It touched three horsemen in a long whiplash curve, igniting their garments and cleaving away the head of one man as surely as an axe could have done.
Hansen was sure that at least one of the victims had come from Golsingh’s side.
“That’s Taddeusz, Golsingh’s foster father,” Walker said with another avian sniff. “The warchief as well. He thinks that war is for warriors, and freemen are more trouble than use.”
Taddeusz and his clot of footmen-warriors-continued to pound forward. Saplings burst into flame when arcs touched them in broad slashes, but the freemen had spurred their ponies out of the way so that no more of them fell.
A gap was opening between Taddeusz’ group and the nearest of the remaining friendly forces. A few other warriors began to trot from Golsingh’s line, but they seemed motivated by personal excitement rather than a desire to hit the enemy as a coordinated force.
Taddeusz and a green-armored warrior from Lopez’ army plodded together with a rippling crash of electrical discharges. They met in an alder thicket. Hansen couldn’t see the moment of contact, but lightning swept the slender stems away in time for him to watch the Lopez warrior pivot on his right foot and fall.
There was a black, serpentine scar across the green breastplate. Smoke or steam oozed from the neck joint of the armor.
Taddeusz strode on. His arc was condensed to a quaver that reached less than a meter from his gauntlet. Another of Lopez’ warriors cut at the war chief with an arc extended into a whiplash. It popped and sizzled, wrapping Taddeusz in its blue fire; clumps of snow puddled around the red and gold boots.
Taddeusz took a step and another step, each in slow motion as though he were walking in the surf. His opponent suddenly tried to back-pedal. He was too late. Taddeusz’ right arm slashed, and the dense electrical flux from his gauntlet sheared into his opponent’s helmet.
Circuits blew all through the damaged suit. Taddeusz blanked his arc for an instant, then snapped it back to life as he moved on.
His victim toppled. A wedge-shaped cut bubbled halfway through the sphere of the helmet, as though it had been struck by something more material than directed lightning.
A dozen fires struggled fitfully among the scrub trees. Sapless wood tried to sustain ignition temperature against the cold and snow.
Hansen moved sideways to keep Taddeusz in view. A crevice in the face of the bluff blocked him.
He cursed. It was three meters across. There was crumbling soil on the opposite side, but also saplings that’d provide handholds if he needed them.
A rocky, 70° slope jolted down to the embattled floodplain if he missed his hold.
Hansen jumped, knocking the saplings away with his chest as he landed a safe meter beyond them. A twig cut his cheek. He was beginning to feel the cold.
Lopez’ men were closing on Taddeusz from all sides. A dozen or so of Golsingh’s men still followed their warchief. They closed up and formed a circle as Lopez’ resistance stiffened. Smoldering armor lay along the course they’d cut into the enemy, the detritus of their success.
You could get more organization by rolling two handsful of marbles together.
“Damned fools!” Hansen snarled. “If that’s all they know about war, they oughta stick to knitting.”
He wasn’t aware that he’d spoken aloud until a red squirrel balanced on a branch above him took the half-gnawed hickory nut from its jaws and said, “They know that they are warriors and heroes, Hansen. Since you know nothing of Northworld, you must give your life into my keeping.”
“Go away,” Hansen said, restraining an urge to sweep Walker over the bluff edge.
He concentrated on the fight instead. He’d felt a fierce rush of anger-but he knew his emotion was directed at the butchery, the stupidity going on below.
Hansen was a craftsman, and controlled violence was his trade. The armies below were composed of murderous buffoons.
Two of Lopez’ men moved against Taddeusz simultaneously. Taddeusz cut at the one on his right; the warrior tried to block the warchief’s arc with his own. There was a moment of explosive dazzle and a shriek like that of bearings freezing up. The warrior attacking Taddeusz from the left slashed at the warchief’s helmet.
Taddeusz stumbled. The opponent to his right staggered away. The man’s red-striped armor had lost the sheen of electronic polish, but the fellow managed to run three steps before he fell. A pair of fur-clad freemen leaped from their ponies and started dragging the warrior to a safer distance.
One of Taddeusz’ party leaped between the warchief and his opponent’s descending stroke. Both warriors froze as their arcs crossed. Another of Lopez’ men punched Taddeusz’ defender in the side with an arc which blazed on entry and was still spluttering when a finger’s breadth of it poked through the opposite side of the armor.
Taddeusz got to his feet. Only two of his men were still standing; both of them promptly fell under multiple attacks. The warchief cut low, severing the thigh of the nearest opponent.
Two of Lopez’ men struck at Taddeusz from behind and the side. He spun, sparkling like a thermite fire but still moving with deadly precision. His short-curving arc carved through a helmet and the arm a desperate warrior had raised for protection.
Taddeusz extended his arc into a blue dazzle ripping a full three meters from his hand. He slashed it through the air as he turned and turned again, clearing the area around him. He was ringed by at least twenty of Lopez’ warriors, but each time some of them moved to attack, the warchief’s sudden movements sent them scampering away.
The remainder of Golsingh’s army had begun to catch up with their warchief. Several of Lopez’ warriors turned to meet the new threat. Hansen’s nostrils wrinkled with the sharp bite of ozone, even at his distance above the fight.
There was something else. Something quivered on the verge of visibility across the battlefield. Black shutters opening, or a great crow splaying its wingfeathers between the sun and death below. . . .
But not quite.
A warrior in silver armor raised his right gauntlet toward Taddeusz, palm outward.
The warchief’s arc lashed toward the man. Before the cut could land, an unconfined discharge leaped from the silver gauntlet to Taddeusz’ chest.
The thunderous report sounded like a transformer exploding. Both suits of armor lost their luster. Taddeusz’ arc-weapon shrank to an afterimage on Hansen’s retinas. Lopez’ men moved in for the kill.
The remainder of Golsingh’s army, lead by a figure in royal blue, swept across the circle of their opponents. One of Lopez’ warriors paused in the middle of a stroke aimed at Taddeusz and tried to run. Several others were struck down from behind.
Warriors began kneeling with their arms raised. Lopez’ freemen hopped back onto their ponies and trotted away, harassed by Golsingh’s horsemen.
Hansen noticed that the arc which touched the man in silver met no more resistance than it would from as sapling. It cut the warrior in two at mid-chest.
Walker tossed away the remains of his nut and sniffed. “The first rule of war,” he chittered superciliously, “is never to fire a bolt. It takes minutes for your suit to build up power again.”
Lopez’ men were taking off their armor. The suits opened down the left side like gigantic clamshells. Each suit’s arms and legs remained attached to the backplate, but the helmet and body armor split to allow the warrior access to his suit.
Dismounted freemen knelt beside Golsingh’s fallen warriors. In some cases the victim was able to stand after he’d been lifted out of his armor.
Golsingh’s baggage train arrived at the battlefield in a bedlam of trumpets and crackling brush.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Hansen muttered.
“You’ll surely be lost unless you put yourself under my protection,” the squirrel retorted primly. “You would have joined Lopez’ army just before the fight, wouldn’t you? And where would you be now?”
There was a remuda of saddled ponies in Golsingh’s train, but the baggage animals were elephants covered with long black hair. Their tusks had been sawn off close to the jaw and capped with copper bands.
The beasts would’ve been mammoths, if Hansen were standing on Earth a million years before . . . and very possibly they were mammoths here on Northworld-whatever nightmare Northworld turned out to be.
The animals were guided and accompanied by a hundred or more men on foot-but certainly not warriors. Whereas the freemen were dressed in furs, not infrequently picked out by streamers of bright cloth, this lot looked like so many bales of dingy rags plodding through the snow.
Hansen looked at the squirrel. “Servants?” he said.
Walker flicked the brush of his tail. “Slaves,” he replied.
Most of Golsingh’s men were getting out of their armor also. Pairs of slaves attended each warrior and carried the empty suits to bags of rope netting hanging from the flanks of the mammoths.
Hansen was shivering uncontrollably. He looked at the slope, wondering whether he could climb down directly in his present state or if he needed to find a gentler descent.
The warrior who’d worn the royal blue armor stretched as he stepped clear of his suit, then walked over to join Taddeusz. The warchief’s armor had for the most part regained the luster it lost when the bolt of raw energy struck it. There was a black star-burst in the center of the gold and scarlet plastron.
“King Golsingh,” Walker said. “He has dreams, but he’s too soft to make anything of them.”
Slaves were stripping the corpses of warriors; no one seemed to pay any attention to the handful of dead freemen. Birds were already circling the battlefield. The corpses of Golsingh’s men were laid over a pile of faggots sawn by the few warriors still wearing their suits. Lopez’ men lay where they’d fallen.
All the armor, damaged as well as whole, was loaded onto the mammoths who stamped angrily and hooted at the smell of blood. A score of Lopez’ warriors had been captured. They were herded together, under guard by freemen, and watched the proceedings with evident disquiet.
It wasn’t going to get warmer on the bluff, and the drop wasn’t likely to become less steep. Hansen lowered himself over the edge, keeping a grip on a treebole until his boots found purchase. So far, so-
“You’re a fool,” the squirrel chittered. “They’ll pay no attention to you. Or worse.”
Hansen glanced over his shoulder. Warriors were mounting the ponies brought on leads, and the line of mammoths was plodding off in the direction from which it had come.
Taddeusz and Golsingh were arguing. The warchief shouted an order. One of the warriors still wearing armor stepped toward the line of prisoners.
One of Hansen’s boots slipped. He dropped a step, then slid twenty meters in a half-controlled rush.
Hansen didn’t have to be watching to know what the vicious sizzle of an arc weapon meant. Because the captured warriors had no helmets to muffle their voices, their screams were clearly audible. Crows called in raucous answer.
Halfway down the slope, a fair-sized pine grew in a crevice. The bluff below that point was at a fairly safe angle. Hansen let himself slide, angling to catch the tree and hoping that Diamond hadn’t rotted the tough fabric of his coveralls the way it had his weapons.
It was a near thing in another way: he almost slid past the tree. The bark tore his palms as he grabbed and the shock strained his shoulder muscles, but those were small prices to pay for not fetching up against the granite outcrop twenty meters further down.
Bits of rock pattered as Hansen clung to the tree and panted. Golsingh had just mounted his pony. He said something to Taddeusz and pointed toward Hansen.
The pyre piled with the corpses of the winning side was ablaze and beginning to roar. The bodies of the captives smoldered on the snow. Birds were landing on them.
Taddeusz shouted a series of orders. A pair of lancers rode toward the warchief. The warrior who’d just acted as executioner halted in the process of getting out of his armor.
Hansen dropped to the plain in a series of calculated hops, knoll to rock to clump of trees stunted by periodic flooding.
He flexed feeling back into his hands, but he’d never been much good without weapons. Anyway, if it came to a real fight, he was more meat for the crows.
“Lord Taddeusz!” Hansen shouted. “Lord Golsingh, I’m a traveler from a far land, drawn to your excellence.”
He hoped the locals here spoke Standard. The colonists of course had . . . and the folk of Diamond, albeit accented . . . and the mouse/bird/squirrel that called itself Walker, for whatever that was worth.
The clear solidity of the sky and trees pressed in on Hansen. If all this was real, then what was he?
“Who are you, then?” Golsingh called in Standard, walking his pony a few strides closer to Hansen.
The beast sidled, presenting its left shoulder to Hansen as it advanced. The king frowned and tugged at the left rein, turning the pony’s head without straightening its approach.
Golsingh was of average height, though he looked small next to his warchief. Taddeusz might better have mounted a mammoth than the pony which struggled beneath his weight. The king’s neck and hands were well-muscled, but his swarthy face had a fine bone structure. Hansen got the impression of a slight man who had trained himself to athletic prowess.
Whereas Taddeusz was a bear . . . and Nils Hansen was a hound, with flat muscles and a hound’s utter disdain for the way cats play instead of killing.
Hansen smiled, and he probably shouldn’t have, because Taddeusz said brusquely to a freeman, “Kill him!”
The man lowered his lance and clucked to his pony. Hansen continued to walk forward. A short pine tree just ahead and to his right was the best shelter available. He’d run for it when the lancer charged, but until then-
“Stop!” Golsingh shouted to the freeman. Hansen halted also, unwilling to look as though he were disobeying a royal command.
“Taddeusz,” Golsingh continued, “remember that I am your king.”
“Excellency,” replied the big man, “I’m just-”
“The battle is over,” Golsingh snapped. “I am king, and I will give the orders now.”
Taddeusz nodded in contrition. “I apologize, my son,” he said. “I had only your safety in mind.”
Golsingh smiled. “As always, foster father,” he agreed, nodding back to the bigger man as a mark of honor.
Both men had enveloped themselves in fur cloaks and caps when they took off their armor, so it was hard for Hansen to judge their ages at twenty meters’ distance. Golsingh was probably in his mid twenties, Taddeusz two decades older. The warchief’s weathered complexion and grizzled russet hair would look much the same when the man was in his sixties, but the brutal force he’d displayed during the battle suggested a lower limit to his age.
Or else Taddeusz had been Hell itself on a battlefield when he was in his prime.
“Lord Golsingh,” Hansen said, “I’m a, ah, a warrior who’s come from the far reaches of-” why not? “-Annunciation to, ah, join Your Excellence.”
“Is this a joke?” said Golsingh, looking at his foster father with a puzzled expression. One of the slave attendants who huddled as they awaited their masters’ pleasure began to laugh.
A crow glided from a treetop and landed nearby on the one corpse the victors hadn’t bothered to strip: the warrior whose armor hadn’t stopped a crossbow bolt. The bird cawed in amusement, fixing Hansen with its one bright eye.
“Yes, he’s probably Lopez’ buffoon looking for a new place,” Taddeusz said. He added in dismissal-no longer angry, because the intruder was no longer worth his anger, “Go back to your master and tell him to have himself at Peace Rock within a tennight or we’ll burn him and everyone else in his miserable village alive.”
Taddeusz and Golsingh both wheeled their ponies.
Hansen’s face went flat. “If you’re looking for a buffoon,” he shouted to the riders’ backs, “then you could start with the fool who led your right flank into that half-assed charge. It was god’s own luck he didn’t lose you a battle you should’ve had on a platter!”
The horsemen drew up; Taddeusz’ pony stutter-stepped as the warchief twisted to look over his shoulder. The freemen lifted the lances they’d laid crosswise on their pommels for carriage.
“I’ll handle this, Excellency,” Taddeusz said.
The wall-eyed crow danced from one foot to the other on the dead man’s chest, clicking its beak in mockery.
“I tell you I’m a warrior!” Hansen said. “I can help you more than you imagine in planning your next battle.”
“You lot,” Taddeusz said, pointing to the four slaves. “Serve him out.”
He nodded to Golsingh again. “Come along, Excellence,” he said. “We don’t want to fall too far behind the column. You never know what’s lurking in these woods.”
The horsemen trotted off together, spurning clods of mud and snow behind them. The slaves, drawing single-edged knives from beneath their rags, moved toward Hansen.
“A warrior has armor and attendants,” cawed Walker. If the slaves heard the words, they gave no sign of it. “What do you have except your own foolishness, Kommissar?”
The riders were out of sight among the trees. “Look,” Hansen said to the slaves. “This isn’t your problem. Why don’t you guys just wait a few minutes-”
The nearest of the slaves rushed him.
Hansen scampered back. The knife looked dull, but its wielder slashed with enough enthusiasm to manage the job if he got close enough.
“Look,” Hansen called, “somebody’s going to get-”
“I git his boots!” the slave cried to his fellows. All four of them were plodding after Hansen at the best speed their rag-wrapped feet could manage on the slushy ground.
Hansen jogged in the direction Lopez’ surviving freemen had retreated. Only his mind was cold now. The defeated men had scattered equipment as they fled, and-
A shadow sailed past his head with a caw and a snap of its wings. It landed on a fallen branch ten meters ahead, then hopped so that its black beak was toward Hansen.
Walker’s claws rested not on a branch, but rather on the stock of a crossbow. . . .
“You don’t deserve help!” the crow called as it sprang airborne an instant before Hansen snatched up the weapon.
“I don’t need help, Walker!” Hansen snapped as he turned to face his pursuers.
And that was true enough. He would’ve found something. Though maybe not this crossbow, a little off the track he was following and half-buried in snow. . . .
The slaves paused doubtfully when their victim turned to face them.
“Naw, it’s all right,” said the one in the lead. “It ain’t cocked, and anyhow, he don’t have arrows.”
Hansen lunged, smashing the speaker in the face with the crossbow’s fore-end, then using the tips of the bow to right and left like a pickaxe to the chests of the next two slaves. The second stroke caught only rags as the target leaped backward, squawling in justified terror.
The crossbow weighed over ten kilos, combining a meter-long hardwood stock with a stiff steel bow. Anybody who doubted Hansen was armed with that in his hands was a fool and a-
Hansen buttstroked the man with the broken face, knocking him over the body of his fellow. The other two slaves were running. Hansen ran after them.
-dead man.
“Oh, you’re a fine warrior to fight slaves!” Walker cried. “Are you proud of yourself, now?”
Hansen stopped. His legs were trembling, and he could only breathe in great sobs.
Walker was right. There’d been four of them . . . but trash like that wasn’t what he’d trained for, lived for.
Hansen began walking back toward the battlefield, getting control of his adrenalin-charged muscles by moving them. When he was sure the surviving slaves were gone for good, he dropped the bloody crossbow.
The suit of abandoned armor was still where it had fallen. The crow lighted on it as Hansen approached.
“I can show you where a fine suit, a king’s armor, can be had,” Walker said. “Do my will and I’ll reward you.”
“Will this work?” Hansen demanded.
He knelt beside the body. The casing appeared to be mild steel, though there had to be complex electronics within. There was a single large catch, directly beneath the crossbow bolt projecting from the left armpit.
“Badly,” Walker cawed, hopping to a sapling so slender that it bobbed beneath the crow’s weight. “You won’t dare face a real warrior in flimsy junk like this.”
The helmet was a featureless ball. From a distance, Hansen had assumed there were concealed eye and breathing slits. He’d been wrong.
“Don’t tell me what I dare,” Hansen said. He released the sidecatch and flopped the suit open.
The man within had voided his bowels as he died. The stench hung in the cool air like a pond of sewage.
Hansen pulled the dead man from the armor with as much dignity as his need for haste and the corpse’s stiffening limbs permitted.
The warrior had been old, with a pepper-and-salt moustache and only a fringe of hair on his head. The bolt was through his lungs, and he’d hemorrhaged badly from his mouth and nostrils. At least they were much of a size, Hansen and the dead man. . . .
“How do I make it work?” he grunted as he lifted the body clear.
Walker stopped preening his lustrous, blue-black feathers for a moment. “The suit powers up when it closes over a man,” he said disinterestedly. “A living man, that is. But you’re a fool to trust yourself to it, Hansen.”
Hansen clucked in irritation. The suit could be stood empty on its spread legs-the warriors he’d watched had stripped in an upright position-but the piece was too heavy for Hansen to lift alone. It’d better have servos to multiply the effect of its wearer’s motions.
He braced his hands on the edges of the thorax armor and thrust his booted feet into the leg openings simultaneously. They put their pants on one leg at a time . . . , he thought with a grim smile.
The armor still stank. He lay back in it and fitted his arms into the arms of the suit. It’d stink worse in a few minutes if Hansen died in it also; and the smell would matter just as little either way.
“Walker!” he said. Would he be able to speak and hear with the suit closed up? “How do I make it throw an arc?”
The crow cocked its head. “Point your fingers and say ‘Cut,’ ” it said. “Spread them wider to lengthen it.”
Artificial intelligence controlled, then. How did you get AI and crude feudalism together? “And to fire a bolt?”
“The first rule of-”
“Bird!”
“Caawk!” Walker said. Then, “Point your palm and say ‘Shoot.’ ”
Hansen closed the armor. When the latch clicked, a display lighted in front of his eyes and tiny fans began circulating the foul air.
He got up. The visual display was streaked with raster lines and seemed to be compressing 180° into the width his eyes would normally allot to ninety.
“Reduce field fifty percent,” Hansen said automatically, before his conscious mind could remind him that this crude unit might not have verbal controls-or any controls at all.
The forest expanded to normal width and depth-a narrow window on the world, but the best display for walking.
Fast walking, if he could manage it. He had a lot of time to make up.
He took a step, then another, and raised his pace into a clumsy jog. There was enough delay in the suit’s response to Hansen’s movements that he thought at first he was going to topple. The dynamic rigidity of the joints was just great enough to save him from that embarrassment.
All exposed points of his body began to chafe. The armor was lined with suede at some points, with hide at others, and for some of its area with cloth scarcely better than the rags in which the slaves were clothed.
Hansen could feel a finger of cold air below his left arm, where the arrow-hole marked the suit. He didn’t think he’d have to worry about arrows, though-
But that reminded him. As he clumped along, following the muddy, surprisingly narrow, track the mammoths squeezed into the bottom land, he thrust out his right arm, pointed his fingers, and said, “Cut!”
An arc-blacked-out on Hansen’s display-sizzled from his gauntlet. It licked a small pinetree into resinous flame.
Hansen fell on his face. When his suit shot out the arc, the legs didn’t have enough power remaining to drive him at the speed he expected.
The arc continued to lash the leaf mould into sluggish fire. How did he- “Stop!” Hansen shouted. “Quit!”
The weapon cut off.
Hansen didn’t see Walker as he got up again, but from the closeness of the voice, the crow must have been sitting on his shoulder as it said, “A better suit would not have done that. A royal suit, like that which I offer you as my servant, could strike with both hands and still run faster than an unarmored man.”
“I’ll manage,” Hansen said.
He began to jog again, then broke into a measured trot. He was flaying the skin from his knees, shoulders, and jutting hip bones.
He’d worn hard suits before, but rarely-and even less often in a gravity well. Motors in the armor’s joints carried the weight and drove it in response to Hansen’s muscles; but the muscles had to initiate the movements, and there was always a minuscule delay. He felt as if he were trying to run in a bath of soap bubbles-except that soap bubbles wouldn’t’ve galled him.
Hansen concentrated on each next stride. His display fogged with his gasping exhalations. He didn’t notice that the trail was rising until he broke out of the trees and saw, on ground that rose still higher across a swale, a palisaded village from which rose the smoke of scores of hearths.
The riders and mammoths of Golsingh’s train straggled across the low ground, halfway down and halfway up the other side. A freeman at the rear of the line blew his curved horn furiously, pointing toward Hansen with his free hand.
Three of the warriors around Golsingh and Taddeusz at the bottom of the swale began getting into their armor.
Hansen slowed cautiously. He visualized himself skidding on his faceplate toward the men he wanted to impress; the image diverted some of his tension into a laugh.
A thought occurred to him. He centered the arming warriors in his display and muttered, “Visor, plus ten.”
Hansen’s helmet immediately gave him the requested magnification. The images were fuzzy, but he could see that the warrior donning the red-silver-blue armor was an octoroon, and that all three were powerful fellows of about Hansen’s own twenty-nine years.
“Resume normal vision,” he said, sucking his lips between his front teeth as he considered the situation.
This armor was crudely built, but it had a surprising range of capacities. Hansen was fairly certain that the warriors who’d struggled so clumsily in battle didn’t know or didn’t care about most of the things their suits could do. That gave him an advantage.
God knew that he was going to need one.
“Lord Golsingh!” Hansen shouted as he strolled toward the waiting army. His armor quivered with the amplified sound of his voice. “I came here to serve you. If there’s no place in your service at the moment, then I’ll empty one for myself!”
Hansen didn’t know anything about the culture of Northworld-but he knew organizations and pecking orders. He’d failed at the start with this lot because they didn’t respect him. He wasn’t going to fail again because of a lack of arrogance.
After all, it wasn’t as though arrogance didn’t come naturally to him.
The three warriors had their armor on, now. The suits were painted in patterns of black and silver; red, silver, and blue; and lime green with a phoenix emblazoned in gold on the plastron. All three men were big, and their armor was of obviously high quality.
As opposed to what Hansen was wearing: a piece of junk which had once been striped orange and blue, but which now was marked more by rust than by paint.
The shaggy line of mammoths continued slog onward, but horsemen as well as most of the slaves began to collect at the bottom of the swale. It was the only place for a kilometer in any direction where there was enough flat, clear space to serve for a dueling ground.
Hansen walked on, matching his pace to that of the baggage train. The mammoths moved deceptively fast, covering two meters with each slow stride. Their droppings steamed in the mud, offering Hansen’s lungs a tang of crushed hay.
Golsingh’s army waited for Hansen. Most of the riders had dismounted, though the king and Taddeusz still sat on their ponies, looking over the heads of the three warriors in brilliant armor.
“That’s Villiers’ suit,” somebody announced. “He’s stolen Villiers’ suit off his body.”
“Cut,” said Hansen. An arc spurted at an angle from his right hand. His fingers adjusted its length to quiver just above the muddy ground. He continued to walk forward against his suit’s greater resistance.
“Villiers never did anything right,” another voice guffawed. “Not even die.”
“Lord Golsingh,” Hansen shouted twenty meters from the armored warriors, “I challenge whatever champion you choose for a place in your service.”
Taddeusz turned to Golsingh. “This is a slave,” the warchief said.
“He’s dressed as a warrior,” Golsingh responded, quirking a smile at Hansen. “And of course he boasts like a warrior.” The king had short, curling hair and a down-turned moustache. “I think he deserves to die like one.”
Taddeusz shrugged. “Zieborn,” he said. “Kill him.”
The warrior wearing a phoenix stepped forward. A long arc sprang from his right gauntlet and swung toward Hansen in a curve.
Hansen stopped dead. He squeezed his right index and middle fingers together so that the arc at their tip shrank to a coating like St. Elmo’s Fire, the greatest flux density of which his suit was capable. He felt a tingle in his right arm as he blocked the attack, but it was Zieborn’s arc which failed momentarily with a pop.
The bigger, better-armed warrior boomed a curse. He stepped forward with his arc-weapon ablaze again, shortened to the length of his forearm.
“Off!” Hansen ordered his own AI and lunged toward his opponent with all his suit’s power concentrated on movement.
Zieborn must have expected Hansen to back-pedal-or flee, subliminally thinking of the armor as the poor excuse for a warrior who’d worn the suit most recently and died in it. Golsingh’s champion swiped horizontally.
Hansen was already within his opponent’s guard. He grabbed Zieborn’s right wrist with his left hand, shouted “Cut!” to his AI, and carved upward in a shower of sparks from belly to throat.
The painted phoenix sputtered away from the armor in a gout of ash and gold leaf. The underlying metal pitted but did not burn.
Zieborn’s electronic armor was proof to the worst punishment Hansen’s arc could deliver; and the other man’s arm was forcing his weapon toward Hansen’s face.
“Off!” cried Hansen and shifted his suit’s full strength into his grip on Zieborn’s right wrist.
Hansen had survived because he was very quick and-when he had to be-very strong. He was very possibly stronger than the king’s champion now, just as he’d out-thought the man and jumped into a clinch before the other could respond.
And it didn’t matter, because the crucial factor was the amount of power available to the armor-not to the human muscles within the suit.
Hansen’s display overloaded with the intensity of the sizzling arc and blacked out. The weapon made a sound like a crow laughing. Its negative image forced itself inexorably toward Hansen’s eyes like the tongue of a dragon.
He braced his right hand against Zieborn’s armored neck and pushed, with no effect on what the warrior was doing. If Hansen twisted away and tried to run, his opponent’s arc would extend and cut collops from the back of Hansen’s flimsy suit. So-
Receptors crackled and a quadrant of Hansen’s display went dead. The edge of Zieborn’s tight weapon had touched Hansen’s helmet.
“Shoot!” Hansen cried. The jolt left him blind, deafened, and tingling all over as if he’d been living in the heart of the lightning.
But Zieborn’s snarling arc hadn’t come through his helmet, destroying Hansen’s eyes with a metallic plasma even before the electricity itself converted flesh to traceries of carbon.
Hansen reached down to his left side, forcing his suit unaided against the friction of all its powerless joints. He tugged the catch open, then pulled the plastron away from the backplate. Sunlight flooded in.
So did the smell of burned flesh.
There was a babble of voices, angry or amazed in tone, but Hansen didn’t bother to process the words until he’d struggled free of the armor. Being trapped in the suit with its ventilation system and all receptors as dead as so many bricks was a more claustrophobic feeling than he had expected.
But Zieborn was dead too. His suit had lost its luster, and in the center of its neck joint was a hole no larger than a worm bores in an apple. Smoke drooled from the hole and from the louvered vents beneath the arms. That was why the air smelled like a bad barbeque.
The other two armored warriors waited impassively, but a freeman pointed his crossbow at the center of Hansen’s chest. The quarrel had a four-lobed steel head.
“Put that fucker down or I’ll feed it up your asshole!” Hansen snarled. The menace of his voice slapped the freeman back a pace, lifting his weapon as his mouth fell open.
Hansen’s suit and his opponent’s remained frozen and upright where they stood. A chickadee fluttered by so close that a wing brushed the hair which sweat plastered to Hansen’s head. It lighted on top of Zieborn’s helmet and said in a tiny voice that only Hansen seemed to hear, “The second rule of war is that in war, there are no rules.”
“Lord Gol-” Hansen said. His voice broke. His throat was dry, dry as bleached bones.
“Lord Golsingh,” he said, “I claim a place with you.”
“We know nothing of this-” Taddeusz said to his king with a face as red as a wolf’s tongue.
“And I claim,” Hansen continued in a rasping, savage voice, “the armor of this man I killed in fair combat.”
“We know,” said Golsingh to his foster father, “that he can fight.”
The king looked down from his pony toward Hansen and went on, “Your first request is granted . . . Hansen, wasn’t it?”
Hansen nodded. He wondered if he was expected to bow.
“Your second request is not granted,” Golsingh continued with a cool, vaguely detached expression. “Zieborn’s armor goes to his eldest son, as is proper.”
Hansen felt his face harden. He’d learned the importance of good equipment here, if he’d learned nothing else this day.
“But I think you’ve proved your right to a suit of comparable quality from the loot we took from Lopez,” Golsingh went on. He glanced toward the curve of his retainers.
“Get him a horse, someone,” the king snapped imperiously. “And get this gear loaded up. The women are probably worried about what’s going on.”
A pair of slaves pushed forward with a saddled pony, perhaps the one Zieborn had ridden until he was ordered to deal with the intruder.
“Oh,” Golsingh said, “and bring Villiers’ suit as well. It doesn’t seem to have been as valueless as we’d assumed.”

Chapter Eight
One of the human servants held up a mirror of polished ice. Fortin checked the set of his saucer hat, adjusted the brim slightly, and stepped into the discontinuity around which the central hall of his palace was built.
On the other side of this twig of the Matrix lay a swamp shadowed by giant ferns in the plane which his ancestors-
-his mother’s ancestors-
-inhabited. This time, however, Fortin’s destination was not so much a part of the Matrix as apart from it. For a moment, Fortin heard the boom of something in a warm pool swelling its throat in a mating call, while his eyes were still locked with those of his servant, impassive until the Master was well and truly gone.
Fortin let his mind step sideways . . .
And his feet were on solid ground, beneath the sullen sky of Ruby. A company of soldiers in battledress stood at attention before Fortin. The guns of a dozen huge armored vehicles were trained on him without even a vague attempt to be discreet about their caution.
A communications specialist stood beside the officer in command of the drawn-up company. The officer keyed the handset flexed to the com-spec’s radio and said, “This is Bonecrack Three. The Inspector General has arrived. Out.”
The officer stepped forward and saluted Fortin sharply. “Sir!” he said. “I’m Major Brenehan, in charge of your escort. We’re very glad to have you with us again.”
Fortin responded a deliberately languid salute which he knew would infuriate Brenehan-infuriate anyone in Ruby, with its total dedication to precision and lethal efficiency. He wanted their help, but he couldn’t keep from insulting them. It made him hate himself-
But then, Fortin hated himself anyway, most of the time. At least most of the time.
He smiled at Brenehan, flicked a non-existent bit of dust from the breast of his uniform, and said, “Very good, Major. I wish to confer with the High Council at their earliest convenience.”
“Yes sir,” said Brenehan. “At once, sir.”
The major took the handset again and began speaking a series of codewords into it. The infantrymen remained at attention.
The tanks continued to point their main guns at the spot where Fortin had appeared, and where he continued to stand.
There was a pause in the radio conversation.
“You’re very security conscious,” Fortin said with a smile.
Brenehan looked as if the visitor had commented on the fact that they didn’t smear their faces with pigshit. “Yes sir,” he said guardedly. “We are. Of course.”
The radio chattered to Brenehan. He replied in a series of precise monosyllables, his eyes on Fortin. Finally he nodded and returned the handset to the com-spec.
“Very good, sir,” the major said. “If you’ll come with me, we’ll take you to the meeting site.”
The infantry fell out of formation in response to an order Fortin didn’t notice. Brenehan nodded toward an armored personnel carrier grounded behind the troops, then began striding to the vehicle without looking around to see if the visitor were following.
“What if I wanted to meet the Council at General Head­quarters?” Fortin asked, speaking louder in order to be heard over the rising note of the APC’s lift engines.
“I don’t think that will be necessary, sir,” Major Brenehan said.
He offered Fortin the jumpseat near the door, where the commanding officer usually sat. A platoon of infantry piled aboard the vehicle behind them. The remainder of the company loaded onto the other three APCs. They took off with a roar of fans even as the last trooper slammed the door behind her.
There was a joystick attached to the seat. Fortin gripped it and toggled the switch that should give him a full holographic display-where they were, where they were going, and maps of any other region of Ruby he chose to view.
Nothing happened. Very security conscious, even with the Inspector General. . . .
“But if I did want to visit General Headquarters?” Fortin pressed, knowing that it was his self-destructive impulse working again.
“You’d have to take that up with the Council itself, sir,” said Brenehan. He stood beside the seat which would normally have been his, bracing himself against the armored ceiling as the vehicle pitched and bucked. The soldiers facing outward in a double line were robotically impassive as they checked and rechecked their weapons and other gear.
Fortin smiled at him. “I’m impressed by the way you always pick up my arrival,” he said.
“Well, sir,” Major Brenehan replied with a smile of satisfaction, “any disruption to Ruby is a potential threat. And even you, sir, if you’ll pardon my saying so . . . are a disruption.”
The flight to the rendezvous point took twenty minutes, but Fortin suspected that part of the time was spent in direction changes which only security required. The instant the car touched down, its sidewalls hinged flat with a bang/bang and the platoon of infantry lunged out with their rifles and multi-discharge energy weapons pointed. The accompanying APCs had also grounded and were disgorging their troops.
They’d landed on a volcanic plain, patterned in grays and greens by lichen. Other troops were already in position, nestled into crevices between the ropes of cold lava. Fortin noted that the waiting troops were equipped with crew-served weapons as well as the lighter hardware which his escort/guard carried.
There was no sign of the Council, just troops.
Fortin rose with dignity and walked toward the other position. Brenehan’s men-the Inspector General’s men-ported arms and fell in to either side of him. Some of the devices being pointed at Fortin were scanners rather than weapons, peering into the visitor and his equipment to make sure no threat was intended.
There was no question about where the priorities in Ruby lay: the Council was greater than the Inspector General-but Security was greatest of all.
A colonel stood, gestured Fortin within the perimeter, and spoke into a radio like that which followed Brenehan. Then he saluted Fortin and said, “Good to have you with us, sir. It’ll be just a moment more.”
There was a heavy drumming from the western sky. Another squadron of armored personnel carriers swept in low and fast. Most of the APCs landed in the near distance, but one crossed the perimeter and dropped only meters from where Fortin stood. Its fans blew hot grit across his face and uniform.
A door in the side of the vehicle opened. The uniformed woman within looked like a hatchetfaced leprechaun. “Sir?” she said. “We’ve brought a mobile command post. If you’d care to join us?”
Fortin stepped inside and met the stares of the five members of the Council who waited in a formal at-ease posture around a central table/display console. The ceiling of the command-post vehicle was twenty centimeters higher than that of a standard APC; even Marshal Czerny, as tall and thin as North himself, bent forward only slightly.
Marshals Czerny, Kerchuk, Tadley-the tiny, sharp-featured woman-Moro, and Stein. They wore the gorgets of their supreme rank, but their camouflaged battledress contrasted with the pearl gray of Fortin’s parade uniform.
The arrogance of those in Ruby amused Fortin-and frightened him. If you’d care to join us? after they’d danced him to their tune-and would continue, in one way or another, no matter what the Inspector General said, to do whatever they felt was necessary.
He could order the Council to commit suicide now, in front of him without explanation-and they would obey. But if his orders threatened Ruby, or might threaten Ruby-if the Inspector General absolutely required to be taken to General Headquarters . . . then obedience would be very slow indeed, and all possible administrative means would be taken beforehand to limit the potential damage.
Arrogance, but the arrogance of duty. Nothing came before that: not life, and certainly not the Inspector General. The folk of Ruby believed with a frightening intensity, while their visitor believed in no one, in nothing, except perhaps in his own godlike cleverness.
“Sit down, comrades,” Fortin said, gesturing his hosts to the seats around the display but continuing to stand himself. “I have a technical problem for you.”
He smiled with chill humor. “I think you might find it amusing.”
Czerny nodded sharply, part agreement, part prodding.
“Let us postulate for the moment,” Fortin continued, “that Ruby is a segment of phased spacetime in a larger universe-”
“Yes, yes,” Stein murmured. “We accept that.”
“-but that you are balanced within the matrix of that universe with a precisely opposite bubble universe.”
Moro’s chubby fingers were gliding across his keypad. The air before him quivered with a holographic display, intelligible only from the aspect of the intended user’s eyes. “Balanced in what sense, sir?” he asked/demanded briskly.
“In every sense, Marshal Moro,” Fortin replied.
“Our military equals, then?” Tadley said.
“Quite the contrary,” said Fortin, reveling in the glow of interest replacing caution in the eyes of those watching him. “Your opposites in the arts of war. Your perfect balance.”
A gust of wind traced across the lava flats, curling fiercely enough to make the vehicle tremble. Wisps of air with a sulphurous tang crept through the vehicle’s climate control.
“So . . . ,” said Moro, his fingers still, then dancing again. “So. . . .”
“If such a target existed,” said Fortin, “how would you go about attacking it?” He smiled again.
“A number of the possibilities which occur to me now . . . ,” said Kerchuk. His voice was rich and cultured in contrast to his scarred, brutal face; he had only one arm.
“. . . would involve support for the operation from outside Ruby,” he continued. “Are we to postulate that, sir? And if so, what are the param-”
“Under no circumstances are you to postulate outside assistance, Marshal Kerchuk,” Fortin said sharply. “This operation is to be planned for execution by resources available within Ruby alone.”
“On the face of it,” said Moro as he stared at his display rather than the visitor, “an impossible task. The operational unit’s first requirement, of course, would seem to be exiting from Ruby-from the universe.”
“And even if that problem could be solved-” said Stein.
“It can be solved,” interjected Tadley. “A way can be found.”
Stein looked at her. “Your confidence does credit to your optimism, Marshal,” he said caustically. He raised his eyes to Fortin again. “Even were that problem solved, if we and this postulated target are truly in balance-”
“Then it will flee through general spacetime at precisely the rate at which our operational unit pursues,” said Kerchuk with a broken-toothed grin. “An interesting problem indeed.”
“There’s also the difficulty of locating the target,” Stein mused aloud.
“No difficulty at all,” Tadley snapped decisively. “If they’re really our-other selves, shall we say-then locating us locates them as well.”
Even Stein and Moro nodded agreement with that.
“If I may ask, Inspector General . . . ,” said Marshal Czerny in a voice like stones rubbing. “What is the purpose of this proposed attack?”
Fortin hesitated a moment. “The total destruction of the objective,” he said crisply.
“Yes,” said Czerny, licking his lips. “I supposed it might be that.”
“This will take study,” Tadley said. “We’ll refer it to Contingency Planning and see what they come up with.”
“I think,” said Marshal Czerny, “that the matter will go directly to the Battle Center rather than Contingency. Although we will treat it as contingent unless and until we receive an execution order.”
He raised an eyebrow toward Fortin.
Fortin smiled again. “Yes, that will do quite well,” he said. “I’ll return to see what you have determined.”
He paused. “It’s necessary to identify all potential threats in order to defend against them, of course,” he added.
“Of course,” murmured the voices around the display.
All of them were grinning like sharks. All six of them.

Chapter Nine
“Welcome to Peace Rock,” said Malcolm, the powerfully built warrior who’d worn the red-blue-silver armor as he’d watched over Hansen’s duel with the late Zieborn. Malcolm had a café au lait complexion and a rich baritone voice that was musical even in its sarcasm.
A mammoth raised its trunk and hooted loudly as it walked through the gate in the outer ‘defenses,’ merely a wooden palisade. But then, stone and reinforced concrete would be no better protection against the warriors’ arc weapons.
“It was Blood Rock under Golsingh’s old man,” said Shill, who seemed to be one of Malcolm’s hangers-on; a crabbed, older warrior one short step up from Villiers, whose corpse and armor had been abandoned on the field. “Golsingh changed it, because he’s gonna bring peace to the whole kingdom. He says.”
“Don’t matter,” said Maharg, a hulking young warrior and also under Malcolm’s vague protection. “There’s plenty work for us while he’s bringin’ peace.”
“This is the capital?” Hansen said. “This is the king’s capital?”
Peace Rock was a village of mud streets and houses whose thatched roofs arched over meter-high drystone foundations. It stank of beasts-mammoths, ponies, and huge bison with polled horns, stabled within stone fences-and of excrement, obviously from the population as well as from their livestock. Women and children, their varied status indicated by the quality of their clothing, greeted the returning army.
Peace Rock’s only substantial building was in the center of the community: a hall forty meters long and almost half that in breadth. Hansen judged the roof to be ten meters high at the peak, but its thatched expanse swept down to waist height at either side. Smoke from an open hearth boiled out beneath both end gables.
Slaves had begun unloading the mammoths and collecting the ponies for feed and grooming. Many of the freemen were disappearing into squalid huts with women in tow. Nothing like an afternoon of slaughter to bring men to the need for reaffirming life in the most basic fashion possible. . . .
Hansen nodded to the hall. Dozens of male and female servants-and a pair of young women too beautiful and beautifully dressed to be less than nobles-waited at the entrance to greet Golsingh and Taddeusz.
“Is that Golsingh’s palace, then?” he asked the trio of warriors whom he’d permitted to take him under their wing.
“That’s the hall,” said Malcolm. “You’ll sleep there, until you find a woman with a hut of her own.”
He looked sharply at Hansen. “Why, do you do it differently in Annunciation?”
Hansen shrugged. “Not really,” he said noncommittally.
His coveralls had lasted the run and struggle in the battlesuit, but they weren’t sufficient garb for a winter evening. Where the skin was chafed, Hansen’s limbs burned in the cold. He was going to need additional clothing-furs, like those the freemen and warriors wore-heat, and food, all very quickly, or exposure was going to finish what Zieborn had attempted.
The richly-dressed blond woman put her arms around Golsingh and kissed him. As if that slipped the leashes of the others gathered before the hall, the servant women broke ranks into the returning warriors like a covey of quail lifting.
Malcolm patted Shill and Maharg on the shoulder and said, “Later, gents.” He strode forward and lifted a buxom redhead off her feet as she threw herself into his arms. A touch of embroidered hem showed beneath her fur cloak.
“Lucky bastard,” Shill muttered, but there was more pride than envy in his voice.
“We’ll do all right,” Maharg said, looking around the crowd. “ ’specially tonight, since there’ll be some bunks cold otherwise.”
A woman with an infant at her breast and a child of three clinging to her dress suddenly began to wail in heartbreak. Maharg watched her, flat-eyed.
The black-haired noblewoman took Taddeusz’ hands in hers and dipped her head. The warchief bowed back to her.
Hansen frowned. “His wife?” he said. “Taddeusz’ wife, I mean?”
“Krita,” explained Shill. “His daughter. Don’t touch her.”
“Won’t have much choice ’bout touching her at battle practice,” said Maharg with a note of gloomy memory. “Fancies herself a real warmaiden. Wouldn’t be surprised she goes for one of North’s Searchers.”
“North?” said Hansen, suddenly shocked by memory of the mission that had sent him here. “There’s a man named North here?”
“No, no,” said Shill in aged peevishness. “The god North. Where did you say you came from?”
“Look,” said Hansen, “if I don’t get near a fire, it won’t matter where I came from. Can we go inside? Somewhere?”
Maharg shrugged. “Why not?” he said and stamped toward the entrance to the hall.
Golsingh, Taddeusz, and the women who’d greeted them were already going in, talking with animation. The blond paused for a moment in the doorway and looked back over her shoulder at Hansen.
“Unn, the king’s wife,” said Shill grimly. “And if she don’t wear armor much the way Krita does, don’t let that fool you. She’s a tough one too. And she don’t want anybody tryin’ t’ put one over on Golsingh.”
Hansen snorted. “If Golsingh wanted to listen to me,” he said, “I just might make him a real king. But I don’t guess that’ll happen.”
The interior of the hall was dimmer than the twilight outside, but it was warm-which was rapidly becoming the only thing in the world that Hansen cared about.
The center of the long room was a hearth. Board cubicles, each with its own door, ran down either sidewall. Between the hearth and the cubicles, a U of trestle tables was arranged with benches on their wall side. Two carved chairs supplied the cross-table at the far end in place of a bench.
The whole thing was barbaric and pre-technological; whereas the warriors’ armor was extremely sophisticated-though idiosyncratic.
And there was a god named North somewhere, for a man-hunter named Hansen to find and to deal with.
Golsingh and Taddeusz seated themselves on the two chairs. To Hansen’s surprise, Krita and Unn took cups of jeweled metal from servants and offered them to the leaders instead of joining them at the table.
The face of Golsingh’s blond wife was as cool as the surface of a forest pond which hides all the life beneath its reflection. Taddeusz’ dark daughter Krita had high cheekbones and eyes like fire glinting from a hatchet blade. She wore a sleeveless tunic of blue brocade, cinched with a belt of gold. Her sinewy arms had calluses at the wrists and elbows, places where Hansen’s armor had rubbed him raw.
Hansen had been busy enough taking stock of his new surroundings that he hadn’t paid attention to the way his companions hesitated beside him while other warriors seated themselves at the benches. Servants stood on the inner side of the U-where the hearth must’ve been damned uncomfortable against their calves. They were slicing joints and ladling stewed vegetables onto plates.
Shill muttered something and scuttled toward a bench about halfway between the chairs and the door. Hansen followed, hungry enough not to realize that something beyond open seating was involved.
Maharg hung back. “Malcolm’s not here,” he said.
The benches were filling. Shill glanced over his shoulder, hesitated-but carried out his original intent. Maharg grimaced as he seated himself to the older man’s right-throne-side; and Hansen squeezed in beside Maharg.
“How do I get proper clothi-” Hansen began as a female servant set a plate covered with broiled meat-half-burned, half-raw-and stewed vegetables before him.
The man to Hansen’s right turned and gripped him by the ear. “What do you think you’re doing here, you slave’s whelp?” the man demanded.
The corner of Hansen’s eye placed the carving knife-too far-and the serving fork-just right, as the servant froze in surprise. The warrior who held him was big, young, and very angry. Hansen didn’t know the etiquette at Peace Rock, but he did know that in a fraction of a second, Nils Hansen would be discussing the matter with the survivors, over the body of the man beside him.
“I think,” said Malcolm, taking the other man by both ears from behind, “that he’s the guy who took your brother one-on-one, Letzing. Which you-” Letzing’s fingers relaxed as Malcolm twisted “-couldn’t’ve managed in a million years. So what’re you doing up-bench of him?”
Malcolm lifted Letzing deliberately from his seat. Everyone in the hall was watching, but no one attempted to interfere.
Letzing stumbled as Malcolm walked him backward off the bench. “You wouldn’t do this to me if my brother were here!” he cried out unexpectedly.
Malcolm let him go and said brutally, “Zieborn’s not here. He’s dead. Want to try me tomorrow and join him? Want to try me tonight?”
Letzing was broader than Malcolm and almost as tall, but you didn’t need Hansen’s experience to realize that it would be the contest of the axe and the firelog if Letzing accepted the challenge.
Letzing knew that too. He turned away and stamped across to a seat on the other side of the hall-and well down the bench. Malcolm took his place, looked at Hansen, and said, “Well, we’re the bold lad, aren’t we? But if Maharg doesn’t mind, I certainly don’t.”
Maharg forked a slice of meat into his mouth and said mushily, “Aw, it don’t matter. I figured I’d let him sit beside you this once, is all.”
The meat was unseasoned, tough, and cut into larger chunks than Hansen was used to putting in his mouth. He chewed and stared at Maharg until the powerfully built young man met his eyes.
Hansen swallowed. “And then again,” he said deliberately, “maybe this is how it’s going to stay.”
Maharg flushed and took a spoonful of turnips and potatoes. He didn’t reply.
Malcolm guffawed and accepted the cup handed him by the redheaded woman he’d embraced on returning. “Quite the lad,” he repeated.
The food was not so much bad as boring, and the beer that was the only available drink had a musty undertaste. Still, Hansen was hungry enough to have chopped a piece of one of the draft mammoths if nothing else were available. He concentrated happily on his meal.
While the warriors ate, slaves carried suits of armor into the hall and placed each in one of the cubicles along the sidewalls. Malcolm nudged Hansen and said, “That’s yours,” pointing to the quartet of slaves who had just entered with a russet and black suit.
“The arm’s cut off,” Hansen said, trying to keep the concern out of his voice.
“Don’t worry,” Malcolm explained. “It’s a good suit. We’ll carry it to Vasque the Smith tomorrow and get it repaired.”
“It’s a damned good suit,” muttered Shill.
Maharg turned on the old warrior and snarled, “So why didn’t you ever challenge Zieborn and get a suit just as good, ha?”
“Maharg,” said Malcolm quietly.
“Yeah, well,” said the younger man as he went back to his food.
Taddeusz’ daughter took a silver pitcher of beer from a servant and walked down the runway between the fire and table. Her soft shoes made no sound on the hall’s puncheon floor. Golsingh, Unn and-with dawning fury-Taddeusz watched her progress.
She stopped in front of Hansen. He looked up in surprise.
“Krita!” the warchief shouted.
Krita bent and filled Hansen’s cup.
“I want to meet the new hero,” she said in a clear voice that rang in the sudden silence. “The wolf in Villiers’ clothing.”
“Some would say,” Unn called with equal clarity down the length of the table, “that it’s a coward’s part to slay a man with a bolt.”
Hansen went cold. He looked in Unn’s direction, but he saw nothing except a blur of blond hair and his own cold fury. “Zieborn wouldn’t say that, milady,” he said loudly.
A warrior across the hall snorted. “That’s tellin’ her, buddy!” he shouted. The whole room rocked with laughter as heavy fists pounded the tables in amusement.
Krita raised an eyebrow and walked back to the other end of the room.
Taddeusz stood up. The hall quieted.
“I served my king this day as no other man has done,” the warchief boomed in what Hansen realized after a moment was a set speech. “Alone I strode among my king’s enemies-” nearly true, and nothing for a sensible man to boast about “-and smote them down by the scores. Cerausi, the warchief of Count Lopez, a mighty hero, dared stand against me. His armor was silver and blue. He struck at me-”
Hansen began to nod. He was exhausted; the fire warmed him, and much of his blood supply was in his belly, converting the heavy meal into strength for the morrow.
He looked around covertly to see how the other warriors were reacting to Taddeusz’ speech. They were just as tired as Hansen, and most of them had been much less sparing with the beer. Several had already collapsed in place. Servants worried the plates and remains of food out from under them.
Hansen heard dogs yelping outside, but at least they weren’t being allowed in the hall during the meal as he’d rather expected would be the case. Reassured that the worst he was likely to do would be within the bounds of propriety here, Hansen slid his dish out of the way and concentrated on keeping awake.
After Taddeusz finished his speech, the warrior at the head of the bench to the king’s left rose and rambled off on a boast of his own. No one seemed to listen to him-or, for that matter, to any of the warriors who followed him with equally boring harangues. As soon as one warrior sat down, the next-across the hall-got up, even if they’d been snoring on the table a moment before.
It was noticeable that the farther down the benches the speakers were, the shorter and less circumstantial their boasts tended to be.
The man across from Hansen stopped in the middle of a sentence that hadn’t seemed to be going anywhere. He didn’t so much sit down as flop when his legs gave way. A servant handed him a refilled cup.
Maharg elbowed Hansen. “Well, go on!” he said.
“But-” Hansen said. He stood, shaking his head to clear it. All right, he hadn’t been in the battle, and he wasn’t going to brag about killing Zieborn . . . or anybody else. Zieborn hadn’t been the first, or the twenty-first; but that had been the job of Special Units.
“I won’t tell you what I’ve done,” Hansen said, raising his voice over the sound of snores and servants clearing dishes. “That’s little enough so far, here in your country. And I won’t boast about what I’m going to do in the next battle or the next hundred battles. But-”
Hansen turned to the cross-table. Taddeusz was-no, the warchief wasn’t asleep, for his eyes snapped firmly shut when Hansen stared at him. Golsingh was watching; and Krita, and Unn. . . .
“But Lord Golsingh, if it’s your true desire to bring peace to all your kingdom-peace that stands, not a battle here and a feud there, always and forever, for you to stamp out and go on to the next-”
The king was nodding. The women’s faces didn’t change.
“Then I can show you how to do it.”
“That isn’t a warrior’s part!” Taddeusz shouted, raising his head from his crossed arms. Golsingh looked at him with a frown.
“I’ll do a warrior’s job when there’s fighting,” Hansen snapped. “But I’ll let you do a king’s job, Lord Golsingh-if you really want that!”
He sat down abruptly, before he said too much-if he hadn’t already. The beer’s unpleasant taste covered a surprising kick.
Another warrior rose and maundered unintelligibly.
Hansen fell asleep while the last warriors spoke.

Clashing metal-a dropped cup-awakened him. The hearth had burned to coals, but there was still enough light to see forms hunched at the tables. Half the room was empty, but many of the warriors were continuing to drink and mumble to one another.
“Malcolm, where do I bunk?” Hansen asked, hoping he’d correctly identified the man to his right.
A servant stepped between the coals and Hansen. “More beer, hero?” she asked.
Not a servant. Krita.
“No,” Hansen said curtly. “And you can call me a hero when you believe it yourself. Not now.”
The black-haired woman laughed. “How good are you, Hansen?” she asked.
“Good enough,” he said. “As good as I-”
He paused. “I’ll tell you this, lady,” he said in sudden decision. “I’m the best there is. That’s how good I am.”
He turned his back on her throaty chuckle. He was pretty sure he remembered which cubicle he’d seen them carry the russet and black armor into.
Malcolm put a hand on Hansen’s shoulder. “That one,” he said, pointing to a doorway.
“Thanks.”
“Quite the lad,” Malcolm said. “You know, boy-”
Hansen paused at the doorway and looked back.
“-I’m not sure I’m going to want to know you,” Malcolm finished.
And he chuckled as he sat down on his bench again, but Hansen was pretty sure the comment had been more than a joke.