For a moment, nothing reflected back from the pool except cypresses and the stars above them. Planes shifted with the suddenness of prisms flashing. Nils Hansen stood on the bank. He wore boots, a jumpsuit, and a close-fitting helmet.
The smooth khaki surface of Hansen's garment was not broken, as it normally would have been, by a weapons belt.
A large, short-snouted tapir honked in surprise at the human's arrival, then galloped off through the forest. The beast vanished quickly among the undergrowth and the trees' outflung buttress roots. Its primitive hooves could be heard for another twenty seconds, splashing in the low spots and thudding heavily through the leaf mold on drier ground.
Bats chittered.
Hansen turned. The northern sky burned a cold blue, the corona discharge from the horizon-filling dome of Keep Starnes.
"You could have inserted closer to our objective," said the artificial intelligence in what Hansen's mind heard as a waspish voice. "You could have inserted within our objective."
"I could do anything I please, Third," Hansen said. "I'm a god, remember?"
As Hansen studied the huge fortress, he wiped his hands on his thighs to dry the sweat, then rubbed the palms together. The degree of care was worthy of volitional action.
"Besides, it's my legs that'll be getting the exercise." His fingers kept brushing back to where the pistol holster should have ridden, high on his right hip. "Maybe I wanted the exercise."
Sky glow penetrated the conifer needles and pin-leafed cypress foliage. The light illuminated the forest floor once Hansen's eyes adapted. Keep Starnes was its own beacon.
Maybe he should have entered Plane Five nearer to his objective. He'd always operated on instinct in a tense situation, though. This was tense, the good lord knew. Instinct warned Hansen to leave room for maneuver.
"Find us a good place to get in, Third," Hansen directed as he started walking north. "I kinda doubt they're going to roll out the red carpet for us."
The warning signal undulated through the Citadel like the tentacles of an octopus swimming.
Count Starnes lifted his head. "He's come?" he asked.
"He's come!" said Karring from an outstation in the rotunda. He shut off the alarm. "At any rate . . ."
The chief engineer paused to give APEX mental instructions. The numerical display above his console shifted to a panorama as it might be glimpsed from the exterior of Keep Starnes, hundreds of meters above their heads.
The trees were supported by bulbous bases or roots flung out from halfway up their boles. They grew on a surface that was as much shallow water as treacherous land. Over the next fifty million years, the present landscape would decay to peat and brown coal. For the moment, the site was notable for a stagnant purulence of vegetable life in which browsing animals seemed interlopers despite their considerable size.
Keep Starnes' sensor array extended kilometers into the sodden forest, but the thick growth shielded a man-sized target on many spectra. APEX formed the hints of mass, shape, and infra-red distribution into a figure on the display. The computer could have given it a face and mimicked expressions besides, but such details would have been wholly fanciful.
Karring limited the construct to what was supportable on the evidence: a male of moderate height and a compactly-powerful build.
"He isn't armed," he called to the others. "Lena, seal all the keep's orifices as though we were under massive attack."
"Use proper respect when you address the lady!" bellowed one of the big woman's lovers. His hourglass shape was accentuated by a broad belt decorated with studs of electrum. The frames of his two holstered pistols were plated with the same rich, silvery metal; the black onyx of the weapons' grips matched the leather harness.
"Shut up, Plaid," Lena said as she watched her own display. "You're useless when you're using your tongue to talk."
Plaid straightened with an incredulous expression. His companion, Voightman, sneered and began to pose to set off his muscles. No one bothered to look at him, but the polished metal surfaces of the console provided a mirror.
"But Karring, dear," Lena continued, her tone smoother but far from agreeable. "I don't want to keep him out, this Hansen or whoever Fortin sent us. I want him inside where I can play with him."
Lena's display showed the network of all systems within Keep Starnes, overlaid in forty hues distinguishable only by an expert. As she spoke, the image rotated. The visual result suggested the peristaltic motion of an intestine digesting the animal's last meal.
"I want him inside also," Karring explained. "But for me to close his escape route properly—as I did that of his fellow—it's necessary that he enter through what Fortin called the Matrix."
"Oh, all right," Lena said. The pattern on her display changed. Sounds rang through the fabric of Keep Starnes, penetrating even to the Citadel. Shutters dropped; valves closed. The hum of the ventilation fans changed note as the system switched over to recycle the atmosphere, scrubbing poisons instead of sucking in large quantities of outside air to replace what was dumped in normal, total-loss, operation.
"I hear water," said Count Starnes. He lifted his helmet and rubbed his cropped hair.
"Back-pressure in the sewage lines," his daughter said with satisfaction. "Waste is being pumped into the holding tank at ground level instead of being voided through the main siphon. We can go for three days this way."
Lena turned on her couch to look at Count Starnes. She moved like a whale basking. "Unless you want me to shut off water to everybody higher than Level K17? Or hold them to two liters a day? Then we could—"
"This will be fine, I'm sure, milady," Karring interrupted as he worked his manual keyboard.
He spoke more crisply than he should have done. Lena rotated her head, this time to look at the engineer. She did nothing further, but Plaid lost his pout and smiled again.
The external sensor trunks were conduits a meter in diameter. Lena's shutdown had severed them, so Karring shifted to induction input to regain data on the world outside the keep. The initial results were badly degraded compared to the images which passed through optical cables, but APEX used the baseline information gathered previously to enhance the new material to a similar standard.
"He's coming toward us," Karring said. He frowned. "But he's still walking."
"Some soldier," Lena said. "There's no more of this one than there was of the other. I've got room for his whole head."
She giggled and added, "Which might just be fun."
"Where's Lisa?" Count Starnes asked suddenly. He glanced toward the elevators as if expecting to see his younger daughter appearing from one of the cages.
"She is . . ." said Karring.
His screen split. On the left half of the display, the blur-faced figure of the stranger walked among cypresses and bog conifers. On the right was a one-man armored vehicle gliding through the same forest on an air cushion pressurized by eight fans. From the center of the tank's turret projected the short, tapering barrel of a charged-particle weapon with a co-axial machinegun beside it.
"Lisa is outside the keep in her personal scout tank," the chief engineer resumed. A topographic overlay glowed in the air beneath the images of the two contestants, the man in khaki and the tank surrounding a woman. "She's moving to intercept our visitor."
"I didn't tell her to do that," Starnes muttered. There was both pride and concern in his tone. His hand idly caressed the bow slope of his own repulsion-drive tank. The frontal armor was of almost stellar density.
"She puts pressure on him," Karring said with satisfaction. "He'll have to do something, enter or flee back where he came from. Since he's come this far, I think we can expect him to come the rest of the way to where we want him."
Voightman and Plaid lounged and posed, bored by what was going on beyond their immediate presence. The other three humans in the Citadel watched the ill-matched contestants avidly.
In the corridor beyond, the Fleet Battle Director hummed as it gathered and analyzed and . . . waited.