Hansen didn't have to speak aloud to the command helmet, but under the spur of tension he shouted, "Third! Hook to the antennas and take the bastard over!"
Then he jumped to the hovertank's back deck.
The vehicle was disabled; it wouldn't move anywhere under its own power until the burned-out drive fans were replaced. The tank's general systems were another matter.
The surge from shorting motors had tripped breakers and perhaps destroyed some of the circuitry itself, but a vehicle this sophisticated had redundant pathways. If the woman inside reset a switch or two, the automatic weapon which had sawed apart the mesonychid would be ready to repeat the process on Nils Hansen.
The tank was stranded in the gully. Hansen could avoid becoming a target simply by entering the dome through the personnel hatch—
But those who ran Keep Starnes would expect their visitor by that route. Avoiding the obvious was a survival ploy.
"Staying home in bed is another survival ploy, Commissioner Hansen," Third commented acidly.
Hansen's boots hit and skidded sideways, both of them. Slime and water from the flood still pooled on the back deck, making the armor slick as glass.
Hansen snatched at the grab-rail welded to the turret side for the convenience of the crewman boarding through the single turret-roof hatch. His left-handed grip kept him from sliding completely off the tank, but his hip slammed the deck. The impact would have been disabling if his bloodstream hadn't been so charged with adrenaline.
"Sonuvabitch!" Hansen wheezed as he pulled himself up. He seized the hatch's outer undogging handle with his right hand. It rotated the last eighth of a turn to unlatch beneath his palm.
"Put me down, then," Third ordered.
Hansen hung the command helmet from the stub antenna projecting from the top of the turret. He'd obeyed the artificial intelligence's directions without thinking about anything except how he was going to take out the tank crewman.
The club with which Hansen had faced the predator was up the bank, and he hadn't brought a gun or even knife through the Matrix with him. The hatch was a pretty good weapon itself for this purpose.
The armored disk started to rise. Hansen poised behind it. When the forward lip was twenty centimeters above the rim, he would slam it back down with the shock of all his weight. The armored bludgeon would crush the crewman's hands and maybe dish his skull—
"I surrender!" called a woman's clear voice through the part-open hatch.
Right. The crew woman, Third had said.
"You've beaten me! I'm completely at your mercy! I'm coming out!"
Hansen glared. The hatch was now vertical, his last chance to use it as a weapon, and he ought to . . . but instead he straightened and said, "Keep your hands high, and if you've got a gun, so help me—"
He swallowed the rest of the words. She didn't have a gun. She was stark naked.
"To prove that I'm no threat to you," the woman said demurely.
The command helmet clicked and sputtered. Antennas are designed to accept data and transmit it through a distribution apparatus. Third used the tank's common link to enter the vehicle's information processing network. The helmet now reset the operating system to suit Hansen's purposes. The tank was as thoroughly disarmed as if the component parts of its guns were slung out into the gully.
"I am Lisa, Lady Starnes," the woman said. "My father is the count."
Lisa looked like a parody of The Birth of Venus as she climbed from the hatch. She was a slight woman for Plane Five, though she would have passed for stocky in the Open Lands. Cropped brown hair, small breasts; pale lips and nipples.
A look of anticipation rather than fear, but maybe fear.
Hair-fine crystalline probes withdrew into the command helmet. Hansen donned Third again.
"I have dealt with it," stated the cold machine thoughts.
"I'm at your mercy," Lisa Starnes repeated forcefully. "I can't prevent you from raping me. The others are waiting for you inside, but they won't be able to interfere with you here."
Hansen shivered. He'd once met—very briefly—a man who liked the bodies of those he'd freshly killed. That acquaintance had lasted little longer than the time it took to take up three kilos of trigger pressure.
Lisa turned Hansen's stomach about as bad, though he didn't guess she was hurting anybody else. . . .
"Let's go," he said mentally to Third. He jumped down from the vehicle's deck.
Waste water gurgled thirty or forty centimeters up the skirts of the disabled tank. It was a hindrance for walking but not a problem. Hansen could see an inspection way built into the side of the outfall line, above the current flow level. He'd follow that for a distance, then have Third find him an access hatch well inside the keep.
"Wait!" the woman shouted. "Where are you going?"
"Find somebody else, lady," Hansen muttered. "I'm not interested even a little bit."
The echoing pipe slurred and deepened his words; he doubted that Starnes' daughter could hear him.
"You should take the opportunity, Commissioner," the AI said. "You may not get another one if you persist in this endeavor."
"I'll want you to find us a way out of here in a hundred meters or so," Hansen said instead of responding to the—joke? Was the machine making jokes? "I don't want them to figure a way to flood—"
The tank's hatch clanged shut again. A mechanical whine indicated that the vehicle's systems had been reset.
"You did disconnect the armament controls, didn't you?" Hansen said.
He jumped onto the slimy metal ladder leading to the walkway. A blind man couldn't miss a target in a tunnel, even a tunnel this big. The walls would channel shots until they found flesh.
"Not exactly," said Third.
A breechblock rang as Lisa charged the tank's co-ax.
"Shit!" Hansen shouted and vaulted to the walkway. If he lay flat, he might be covered until ring penetrators chewed away the—
There was a flood of orange light and a huge explosion. The shockwave flung Hansen down, but he was already diving and the walkway's slickly-wet surface saved him from the pavement rash he would otherwise have acquired.
He looked over his shoulder. The tank's hull spewed flame from the turret ring and all eight fan ducts. The turret was gone, blown somewhere beyond Hansen's present field of view.
"I set it so that the whole power supply would short through the hull if anyone tried to close a gunswitch, Commissioner," Third said. "Are you satisfied?"
Hansen's ears rang. He got to his feet. "Any one you walk away from," he muttered.
He thought he smelled burning pork; but that might have been his imagination.