"They aren't going to wait for us to come to them," said the voice in Hansen's mind with what sounded like satisfaction. "One of them is headed for us from the other side of the keep."
Hansen jumped an open patch that be suspected was bottomless mud under a treacherous skin of cypress leaves. He was trying to pretend that the warning had not startled him, but he pushed off too hard and had to twist in the air to keep from falling.
"One?" he asked. He didn't have to vocalize questions to the AI, but it was natural to treat the command helmet as a person.
"One," agreed the helmet. It projected the ghostly monochrome of a hovertank into an apparent 20-cm circle a meter ahead of Hansen.
The image rotated, displaying the traditional three views. The hologram was bright enough for Hansen to pick out details if he so desired, but it didn't block his normal vision. He could continue moving forward if he wished.
"She is female," Third added. The tank was replaced by a view of a youngish woman in uniform. She had no particularly-distinguishing features, except that for Plane Five, she was very slender.
"Enough," Hansen muttered gruffly. Even as the image vanished from his field of view, he went on, "Vector and ETA?"
When he listened carefully, he could hear the roar of the tank's eight fans . . . or maybe that was his imagination.
The blue glow of Keep Starnes' protective field was occasionally visible through the trees three hundred meters away. The magnetic barrier didn't mean safety, but it was safety of a sort. The tank's co-axial machinegun wouldn't be affected, but the plasma weapon couldn't be discharged from or through that shield.
Third projected a schematic map of the immediate area. Hansen's position was a pulsing dot. A broken line worked around from the other side of the keep's huge bulk.
"Several minutes," the artificial intelligence said, "but I cannot be precise. She is more constrained by the forest than you are, though of course the vehicle is much faster when it has a clear run."
Hansen jumped, slipped, and dropped to mid-thigh in a pool so clear that he could see the bottom. He swore under his breath as he dragged himself out by a dangling tree root.
He did hear the fans.
"You could have entered the keep directly," the command helmet noted smugly.
"That's what they fucking expect me to do!" Hansen snapped.
Except that the woman in the tank either expected this, or somebody was playing a hunch. Fortin? That was possible.
"You are afraid that APEX will teach Karring how to use the Matrix and precipitate the Final Day?" the command helmet asked.
Hansen frowned. He hopped onto a fallen log. Rotten wood sagged beneath his boots. "Should I be?" he asked.
"Oh, yes, Commissioner," Third said. "You should certainly fear that—if you care."
The soil was firmer. Hansen could see the keep's shield regularly now. A pair of creatures with long, bushy tails chattered from a tree. Their slender bodies dipped forward and rose as part of their display behavior, while their forepaws continued to grip half-shredded pinecones.
"Are you ready?" Hansen shouted. He was three strides from the blue haze, light diffracted by the intense magnetic flux. If Third's electronics needed longer than an eyeblink to come into phase with the field, the command helmet was shit outa luck.
"I am always ready."
Hansen sprinted between a cypress and a pine standing on gnarled black roots like a gigantic spider. His skin tingled at the field's plane of demarcation. The tank must be very close now.
"To the right," the helmet ordered. "There's a gully. Get into it."
"I can't hide from a damned thing with sensors like that bitch'll have!" Hansen shouted. He angled right anyway, running flat out though it meant he stumbled twice. He burst through a tangle of saplings—
And hurtled into a gully, all right, a fucking riverbed—twenty meters across and five meters down. The bottom was soft mud, gleaming like black pearls because of water standing in low spots.
Hansen tucked and rolled. He was so pumped that he hadn't time to worry that a rock was going to smash his ribs.
You mighta warned me, he thought; but there wasn't much time, not for him or the command helmet. If they both survived, they could chew it over later.
Hansen used the momentum of his fall to fling him upright and running again toward the far bank. It was a perfect maneuver that he couldn't have duplicated in a thousand years on a gymnasium floor.
"No!" Third ordered. "Follow the gully toward the keep. She has lost us for the moment, if you stay out of sight."
Hansen grimaced, but he obeyed. He felt as though he were jogging down a main highway on Annunciation at rush hour. The broad gully made him a perfect target if the tank forced its way through the screen of pines as Hansen himself had done.
"Her sensors are not registering you," the command helmet explained in a tone of self-satisfaction. "I can do nothing with simple optics."
Before Hansen could frame the next question—or as he did, thought replacing speech with the AI—Third admitted, "If she realized what has happened, her vehicle's computer—" the pejorative overtones the artificial intelligence gave to 'computer' were obvious "—will be able to predict our course."
"Slick work," said Hansen aloud. If the tank driver had gotten this far, she would figure out where her quarry had gone; but at least he—he and Third—now had a chance to reach the keep before she caught up with them.
The gully had drained only recently. The bottom was soggy where it wasn't standing water. Rivulets flowed into the main channel from what had obviously been the overflow pools of previous periods.
"What the hell is this place?" Hansen asked.
"The waste outlet for all of Keep Starnes," Third explained. "They closed the gates when you appeared."
"Is that so . . . ?" Hansen murmured. Well, you expect a swamp to stink like a sewer. He had more important things on his mind just now than the muck clinging to his boots and the back of his jumpsuit.
For instance, the footprints crossing the gully ahead of him, left to right. They might have been bear prints, though they probably weren't.
For one thing, there weren't any bears on Plane Five. For another, bears didn't get this big.
Sewers meant nutrients . . . which meant life of all sorts in a concentrated food chain. The top of the chain here seemed to be a mesonychid carnivore. It was five or six meters long, with claws to match the size of its huge feet.
Hansen leaped for a root dangling down into the gully. He raised his grip with the other hand, then used the strength of his shoulders to twist his body back up onto the left bank. He vectored off at an angle to the left.
"She is coming again," Third warned, but the remark was informational rather than a comment on the human's judgment. "She is following the gully now."
They reached the outer skin of the dome. Hansen was breathing through his mouth. The humid air felt soothing to the roughness in his throat.
"There is a personnel hatch twenty meters to our right," Third said. "Or a vehicle hatch one hundred and seventy meters to the left."
Hansen jogged toward the right along the curving wall. Mosses and small plants grew in the detritus that had accumulated on the surface of the armor, but they did nothing to detract from the solidity of the dense metal beneath.
The air vibrated with the sound of the tank's lift fans, amplified by the gully walls. It was going to be close.
"Can she—" Hansen started to ask, then shut off the remainder of the question. Of course the tank could climb a five-meter bank. It had gotten down into there to begin with, hadn't it?
"The fans swivel," his command helmet explained without being asked to do so. "They have sufficient excess power to lift the vehicle at a 70° angle, so long as there is a surface against which the plenum chamber can seal."
He found the hatch, which was too fucking near the edge of the gully. Within what Hansen judged was a year or so, a maintenance crew had used defoliant spray to clear the immediate area. That looked like the last time the portal had been opened.
The hatch was sealed, as expected, a rectangle with radiused corners two meters by one.
There was no external latch or key plate.
"Put me against the power jack," Third directed crisply. "At ground level beside the door."
If the words had been human speech instead of thoughts generated by a machine, Hansen would have said Third was tense. Perhaps that was the listener's projection. . . .
The power jack was a three-prong outlet beneath a sprung cover, intended for the use of maintenance crews. Hansen tore off the command helmet. He felt naked without it.
The jewel on the helmet's forehead winked. Jointed arms extended the way iron filings grow into spikes in a magnetic field. The crystal appendages entered the jack. Hansen expected sparks, but there was no immediate response.
Hansen's body was trembling with adrenaline, but he had nothing to do except wait. A conifer uprooted in a storm lay tilted against several of its fellows nearby. Its sprays of needles were prickly brown; the bark had dried to a fungus-shot gray.
Hansen gripped a wrist-thick branch with both hands. The wood resisted, though fibers crackled as the branch bent. Hansen shouted and tore the limb away.
He turned, flushed with effort and triumph, to see how the helmet was coming with whatever it was doing.
The carnivore whose tracks they had noted lurched up from the gully. Its meter-long skull was almost all jaw. The beast straightened like a cat on a countertop, facing Hansen.
The beast had a brindled coat and legs that seemed rather short for its huge body. Its canines, upper and lower both, were the length of Hansen's index fingers.
Its snarl bathed the human with the effluvia of ancient death.
"Third," Hansen said in a lilting voice pitched to be heard over the predator's threat. "You'd best get that hatch open, or—"
He shouted and thrust out with the brush of dried needles. The beast, startled an instant before its own attack, snapped and caught the branch. Hansen tried to hold on. A quick jerk of the long jaws flung him sideways into the fallen tree.
The mesonychid worried the dead limb for an instant. Despite the size of its skull, the brain box was of reptilian proportions. Hansen staggered upright. The beast—
The beast turned in its own length and lunged toward the bow of the hovertank lifting up from the gully floor at a skew angle.
The carnivore weighed tonnes. The shock of its sudden mass overbalanced the vehicle and sent it skidding down the bank again. The tank's driver fought expertly to keep her vehicle from turning turtle. Her co-ax ripped the unexpected attacker.
Machinery shuddered somewhere in the dome. Third had penetrated the keep's control circuits by sending signals through the disused power jack, but the door was still set as firmly as if it had been cast in one piece with the armored dome around it.
"Third, damn you!" Hansen screamed as he tore off another treelimb, useless, even against the carnivore. He could flee through the Matrix and Starnes would win, evil would win, and that wasn't going to happen. Fuck 'em all!
The tank's co-ax used chemical propellant to fire ring penetrators, hollow tubes the size of a man's little finger that punched through armor more effectively than long-rod projectiles of similar mass and velocity. Continuous bursts raked whatever part of the mesonychid was in front of the gun muzzle at the moment. Some of them drilled the body the long way.
The beast continued to snap and struggle. Its snarls were as loud as the roar of the tank's eight lift fans.
The gate at the gully's head, twenty meters broad, rose majestically. Beneath it foamed the stored backlog of Keep Starnes' waste water. Hundreds of thousands of liters emptied into the gully as fast as the huge outlet could dump them.
The first onrush swept the predator's tattered corpse down the gully, biting at the foam. The tank lifted momentarily. When the flood poured over the vehicle's upper deck, the overloaded fans failed in a series of loud reports.
Hansen stared in amazement. Water boiled briefly over the tank's turret; then the flow sank back to a broad stream no more than a meter deep as the storage tanks emptied.
Hansen dropped the treelimb. He rubbed his palms against his thighs. They were sticky with pitch. He reached down for the command helmet and put it back on.
"I thought," said Third, "that it might be better to deal with what was behind us before we went inside."
"I don't second-guess my people," Hansen said. He rubbed his hands again, this time against one another. "So long as it works."
The tank's controls had fried when the drive motors shorted out. As Hansen watched, the turret hatch began to turn slowly open under the operator's muscle power.