The point of black light in front of Hansen lost itself for a moment, then twitched inside out like an origami sculpture. The light became the figure of a black-haired woman on a dragonfly, landing in the courtyard of the Searcher Barracks.
A whiff of ozone dissipated quickly in the fresh breeze; the substrate of heated resins and polymers, the spoor of electronics seeing hard use, remained somewhat longer.
"A manual touch-down, Krita?" Hansen said in amusement. "As smooth as the automatic systems could have managed, I'll grant."
"Hello, Nils!" the Searcher said brightly as she swung off the saddle of her dragonfly. The dimensional vehicle's four legs were jointed into V-struts like the hind limbs of jumping insects. They bobbed when the rider's weight came off them.
Krita was a small woman, coming to a little above the shoulder of Hansen, who was of only average height for a man. Like Hansen, she was densely muscled and callused from battle practice; but she was a woman beyond doubt.
She wore soft boots and a white linen shift which had embroidered borders at the hem, armholes, and deeply-scooped neckline. Her breasts were wide-set on a broad chest, much more prominent when she was nude than through even a thin garment. The shift was cut to mid-thigh so that she could wear it comfortably in a battlesuit; her legs as she dismounted were smooth and tanned all the way to the black pubic wedge.
Krita put her arms around Hansen and kissed him. She smelled faintly of female sweat, modified by the fruit-oil soap with which she had recently washed her hair.
The barracks were apartments on three sides of a courtyard whose fourth face was closed by the towering majesty of North's palace. Dragonflies waited before many of the twenty-seven units. Another Searcher opened the door beside Krita's, noticed the couple embracing—
Recognized Hansen and jumped back so quickly that the panel of carved light shivered in its frame as it slammed.
Krita chuckled. "Come on in," she said, tugging at the edge of Hansen's marten-fur cape. "Seeing the gods here—"
She laughed again.
"—disturbs some of the girls."
"I've offered you a place of your own," Hansen said somberly as he stepped into Krita's suite.
If one looked carefully at the walls, one could see they were created of points of light disappearing into the infinite distance, like a clear winter sky compressed into a few centimeters. The design was North's business and that of those who chose to live in the War God's outbuildings. It reminded Hansen of Plane Four, where souls existed in ice and torture. . . .
Maybe that was what it reminded North of also.
Krita lifted on tiptoe to kiss Hansen again. She paused and said, "You know I won't do that."
"Sure," he agreed, looking around him. The walls were hung with tapestries, finely-wrought drinking horns, and the bows and spears of the chase. Very like a lord's hall in the Open Lands, but without the soot and bustle and life of that other plane. "No strings, though."
"I said no," Krita snapped. "You heard me the first time, and all the times since."
Hansen sucked his lips in. "Yeah, sorry," he said. "It's just I—"
He sat on a bench covered with a bearskin. As if changing the subject, he said, "There's something I'm thinking of doing."
Hansen gestured. In the air appeared a simulacrum of Keep Starnes, a dome a meter across glowing with the pale blue aura of a magnetic screen.
"On Plane Five?" the Searcher asked. Her anger was gone. The tone of her voice was cautious. Her mind had run ahead of what her lover was saying to what she knew he was: the most accomplished man of violence that she or Northworld had ever seen.
Krita sat down on the bench, an arm's length from the man.
"Right," Hansen said. "Count Starnes' keep. Fortin says there's a Fleet Battle Director there, a computer from the settlement."
As Hansen spoke, layers stripped one by one from the image. First the glow faded, exposing the underlying surface of collapsed metal and crystals grown in seamless, refractory sheets.
"A unit like that," Hansen continued in a tone half playful, half appraising, "might have the data I was sent to Northworld to find. Fortin says Count Starnes claims he'd let me access it."
The uppermost layers of the keep were given over to huge plasma weapons and missile batteries, artillery that could scar the face of the moon—but which could be used only if ports were opened in the defenses. For all their seeming power, an attempt to use the banks of weapons would be next to suicidal.
"That's nonsense!" Krita snapped. "You can't possibly trust him."
Hansen raised an eyebrow. "You know Count Starnes?" he asked.
"You know Fortin," she retorted. "Everybody knows Fortin! Whatever he says is a lie."
"Yeah," Hansen agreed/said. "There's that."
The living spaces and the workshops of Keep Starnes appeared as the plane of vision sliced deeper. The warrens of the lower classes near the top; deeper in, technicians' apartments, scarcely more spacious.
The overwhelming majority of the production lines that opened, layer by layer, were given over to armaments.
"Whoever sent you here has no authority now," Krita said. "You're a god, Lord Hansen. Nobody can force you to do anything!"
Hansen's face hardened from its neutral set. "Nobody ever had to order me to do my job," he said, more harshly than perhaps he had intended.
Krita's lips parted to let her breath hiss in.
The Searcher's eyes focused on the image of Keep Starnes. The lower levels, where Count Starnes' soldiers and their dependents lived, were laid out on a more spacious floorplan than those of civilians. Even so, the suites were harsh concretions of straight lines and right angles.
After a moment Krita said, "Yes, I see. I've . . . always wanted to see the Fifth Plane. Maybe I can arrange for Etienne—"
Hansen shook his head.
"—and Sula to take over my—"
"No, Krita," he said softly. He took her by the shoulders and deliberately met her eyes squarely.
"Why not?" she demanded. She shook herself violently, so that Hansen jerked his hands away. "Tell me why you can go but I can't?"
"Because," he said, his voice low, his words as precise as the clicking of a weapon coming to battery, "because if I go, there'll be problems enough—"
"Danger, damn you!" the woman shouted. "Say the word, danger."
"There'll be danger enough," Hansen said. "Without me having to nursemaid somebody raised in the Open Lands without a clue about how to conduct herself in a technological environment."
He got to his feet.
Krita closed her eyes. She said, "You could be killed, Nils. You c-could very possibly be killed."
"If I go. And I told you . . . ," Hansen added with intended tenderness as he stepped to the woman's side, "I'd like to make you a place of your own before I leave."
The woman jumped up and slapped his hand away as though it were a snake. "D'ye think I'm a whore?" she shouted. "Is that what you think?"
Hansen swallowed, massaging the red mark on the back of his right hand with the lean, strong lingers of his left. "I think," he said quietly, "that every time I try to do something with people, I fuck up."
He turned to the door muttering, almost under his breath, "Except when I've got a gun in my hand."
"Wait," Krita said.
Hansen looked back over his shoulder. Krita was rummaging among a pile of furs in an alcove, rich skins marked like red fox but the size of oxhides. Her short garment rode up over the curve of her buttocks.
"I have someth . . . here it is."
She straightened and turned, holding in her hands a low helmet of black plastic. There was a frosty jewel the size of Hansen's thumbnail in the center of the forehead.
"Here," Krita said. "Take it."
Hansen obeyed. The plastic was colder than the air around it. "Where did you get this, then?" he asked, his intonations faintly sing-song.
"North gave it to me when he brought me here," the Searcher said flatly. "Before you were a god. But he said—"
Hansen lowered the helmet carefully over his head. He continued to hold the rim as though he expected the material to burn his scalp.
"—that I should give it to you when the time came," Krita continued. "That I would know—"
"To me?" Hansen said in amazement.
"My name is Third," said/thought the artificial intelligence in the helmet.
"Bloody hell!" Hansen snarled as he snatched the helmet off.
"What's the matter?" Krita asked, concern breaking through the cold visage of a moment before. "Did it . . . ?"
She didn't know how to complete the sentence. The helmet had shaped itself to her skull when she once had tried it on; but it was otherwise cold and dead to her, a construct of dense black plastic.
"Nothing's wrong," said Hansen. "I've used . . . one of these before. It's a command helmet."
His thumb rubbed the bezel which clamped the jewel. "Yeah," he added, "it might come in handy."
Krita tossed her head. Her hair hung down to the middle of her back. When she shook it, it rolled like a black waterfall.
"I may not be here when you get back," she said in a distant voice. Her eyes were focused on a patch of wall slightly above Hansen's left shoulder. "I'm going to arrange with some of the others to handle my duties for a time. I need a break—"
She turned her back.
"And I have business. Of my own."
"Right," said Hansen. "Ah, sure. We'll get together again soon."
He started to don the helmet, then thought the better of it. With the object in his left hand, he took a step toward the door.
"Is that all?" Krita demanded on a rising note. When Hansen looked around, she was facing a sidewall of black light.
"Aren't we going to make love, Nils?" she went on stumblingly. "For old times' sake at least?"
"Oh, love," Hansen said.
He tossed the helmet onto the pile of furs and put his arms around the woman. She was crying silently, but her hands uncinched the hooks of her waistbelt when Hansen fumbled them.
They made rough, passionate love on the bearskin Hansen slid from the bench beside them. The jewel in the command helmet gleamed down on them like a cold gray star.