Hansen stepped from the elevator with a smile and the nonchalance of a cat entering a familiar room, but his eyes were wells of green fury.
"Hel-lo, Count Starnes," he called to the Citadel. No human being moved within Hansen's line of sight, unless you counted the curl of smoke rising from Lena's couch. "You know, I could complain about the hospitality you show your guests, if I had a mind to."
Besides Lena's shattered console, one of the three outstations in the rotunda was live. The unit's seat had been spun to the rear when the user left in a hurry. The display was full of colors flowing in patterns. It could have been abstract art, for all it meant to Hansen.
"Chief Engineer Karring is trying to display the Matrix in three dimensions," Third explained with a hint of mechanical amusement. "When the power surged in Lena's workstation, Karring decided that he would be safe only in one of the bays of APEX proper."
"Could you get to him there?" Hansen asked as his eyes searched the portion of the rotunda he could see from where he stood. The haze of burned insulation and burned meat was familiar, God knew; but familiarity didn't make the reek less sickening, mentally as well as physically.
He'd known what he was doing when he gave Third the order. Not the technique, not exactly; but Hansen had ordered enough killings that he didn't kid himself when he had to—chose to—do it again.
"I haven't had occasion to determine that," the AI responded coolly.
Hansen sauntered around the column of elevators in the center of the rotunda. "Count Starnes!" he called. "Hey, Count. Come out, come out, wherever you are!"
He could see the single corridor which led off the rotunda at this level. The mass of the Fleet Battle Director almost filled it, and Hansen knew the installation led back hundreds of meters into the bedrock.
A short man, balding and powerfully built (as were virtually all the inhabitants of Plane Five), sat in the nearest bay. He was dwarfed by the mass of the computer on three sides and above him. The device hanging over the mouth of the alcove had a noticeable similarity to the Web North gave King Venkatna; but the Web was static, and this unsupported ovoid spun in a pattern more complex than Hansen had thought at first glance.
"Count Starnes?" Hansen asked as he walked toward the corridor.
"That is Karring," Third said.
"I am Count Starnes!" boomed an amplified voice.
"Welladay!" said Hansen brightly. He turned to face the repulsion-drive tank a hundred meters away across to rotunda.
Despite the vehicle's mass, it was as much an article of dress as the battlesuits of the Open Lands were. The operator reclined in a couch with all the tank's controls at his fingertips—and no room to move more than those fingers. There was no rotating turret: the tube of a railgun extended from the frontal armor like the blade of a push dagger in an assassin's fist.
"Good to see you at last, Count. I was worried that I'd come all this way and missed you," Hansen said.
"Are you mad?" clicked the icy thoughts of the command helmet.
"Very, Third," Hansen said in a clear voice. "Very angry indeed. But I don't think he'll shoot when his computer's behind us, will he? How far through APEX do you suppose a slug from that gun would travel, eh?"
"He's right, milord!" Karring shouted from the bay. "There needn't be violence."
"Don't tell me what I need to do," snarled the speaker on the tank's roof. "Either of you!"
"They expected you to slink in here the way Fortin did," Third commented. "They don't know how to react to Nils Hansen."
"They'll know soon enough," Hansen said/thought.
The tank shuddered into motion. It slid forward at a barely-perceptible pace, the railgun centered on Hansen's chest. The hum of the vehicle's drive was almost hidden by the subliminal hugeness of the Fleet Battle Director, poised like a couching lion.
"You invited me to use APEX," Hansen said. He grinned and put his hands on his hips with the elbows flared out. "That's what I was told, anyhow. I think you ought to know that when I was Commissioner of Special Units back home, no place you ever heard of . . . but back on Annunciation—when I ran into somebody like you, Count Starnes, I kinda made it my job t' take care of things."
"Milord!" the chief engineer called desperately. "He can vanish faster than the bolt even!"
"Why would I want to do that?" Hansen lilted. "Now, you've nothing to fear, milord, not from me, so long as you keep your part of the bargain. I came to you unarmed . . . and you'll let me ask a question of APEX, now, won't you?"
"What question?" the tank demanded.
"Nothing to affect you," Hansen said. "Nothing to affect Plane Five, not really. I'll take off my helmet here—"
He touched the black plastic case above his temple with the pad of his right forefinger.
"—and it'll connect itself to APEX. Then I'll go home, and you'll go on with your—"
The air of mocking insouciance slipped. "—nasty little games that somebody oughta stop. But it won't be me. Unless."
"The locked sectors can't possibly be breached!" said Karring. The chief engineer was too aware that he was in the line of potential fire to listen to the nuances in the intruder's voice, nor was he in position to see the threat in Hansen's eyes. "Let him bring his helmet over here."
"He wants to bring you close to the device he built to control the Matrix," the command helmet observed.
"I know what it's like to have a new toy," said Hansen, pivoting smoothly though not particularly fast. "With me, it was mostly a gun, though, or a battlesuit later on. Let's go give Karring something to play with."
He walked across the rotunda with his back to Count Starnes. He could hear the tank behind him. Its drive sputtered like bacon frying, though the vehicle had stopped and was merely hovering a hair's breadth above the concrete floor.
The chief engineer's expression was a mixture of fear and exaltation. Karring remained in his seat, but he looked ready to jump up and run. His hand dipped occasionally toward the pistol he wore as insignia of his rank within Keep Starnes' hierarchy, but that was just a sign of nervousness.
"Karring is summoning additional troops," Third warned. "Count Starnes is not aware of this."
Karring was no gunman. He perceived war as a chess game, while Nils Hansen saw it as muzzle blasts and men's eyes rolling up into the whites as their bodies toppled backward.
Hansen smiled. The chief engineer squeezed against the back of his chair. He spread his hands at the level of his mid-chest. The posture was an unconscious attempt to prove that he was harmless, no threat at all to the predator who walked toward him, grinning like a skull.
The twenty bays were inset 90° to the right or left from the axis of the corridor which APEX occupied. Hansen walked under the spinning ovoid at the head of the first one. He looked up and winked.
This close, the Fleet Battle Director was a lowering presence, not a machine.
"Have fun, Third," Hansen said. He took off the command helmet. "Karring, isn't it?" he went on. "And your APEX takes mental input?"
The chief engineer nodded tightly. A skein of colored fibers showed on the display which covered the inner face of the bay. The strands knotted down to opalescent white. Karring was afraid to look at the pattern lest Hansen understand and attack while he and Karring were within arm's length.
"Then it'll take mine, I'm sure," Hansen said. He stepped past Karring and placed the command helmet on the coaming in front of the holographic display.
"Purty thing, isn't it?" he said to the chief engineer as he walked back out of the bay. Probes extended from the moonstone-gray crystal on Third's forehead.
Hansen sauntered back across the rotunda without looking behind. The tank swiveled to track him with its railgun. Hansen was headed toward the wrecked console and the corpses still smoldering on and around it.
"It's worked, milord!" Karring shouted. "He can't flee into his Matrix now, I'm sure of it!"
"Tsk!" said Hansen. "I just got here, Karring m'boy. Why would I want to leave?"
"Try it!" Karring said. "You're so sure of yourself, you bastard—but try your Matrix!"
Hansen shrugged. He continued strolling toward the destroyed workstation. His fingertips, then his right hand, vanished into a shimmer not of Plane Five.
"Not much of a trick, is it?" he said with a supercilious frown. His hand reappeared. The fingers, long and tanned and callused, flexed as though they held a weapon.
"He's yours, Count Starnes!" the chief engineer cried. "He's your slave, completely at your mercy!"
Hansen bent down and drew one of Plaid's pistols. The leather bolster had insulated the weapon from the current which burned off the owner's legs.
"The man who killed my daughters," boomed the speaker on Count Starnes' tank, "can scarcely expect mercy!"
The railgun fired.