The railgun's collapsed uranium slug was invisible, but behind it followed a track of fluorescing plasma: the driving skirt, stripped of electrons and heated sun-heart white by the jolt of electricity which powered the bolt.
The streak ended a centimeter from Hansen's smiling face. There was an almost-visible blotch at the point the hypervelocity shot vanished, the hint of a fracture in reality. The shimmer was no larger than a hole that would permit a man Nils Hansen's size to thrust his hand through to the wrist—
But that gap in normal spacetime was more than large enough to engulf the railgun slug. The projectile snapped across the Matrix with its velocity and momentum unimpaired.
A fluting, birdlike cry burbled up the ten-meter throat of a distant sauropod. The call rang through the forest. The carnivorous mounts of the Lomeri turned their heads toward the sound like six questing gun turrets. Lizardmen spurred the beasts' off-side flanks and tugged fiercely at their reins.
After brief struggles, the ceratosaurs settled down again. Under other circumstances the carnivores might have been more difficult to control. Now, poised on the edge of the Open Lands, they knew they would soon have ample opportunity to kill and feed.
The Lomeri captain chirped a sharp order to his subordinates. One at a time the lizardmen racked back the bolts of their weapons to load them; switched on, then off again, the force screens which would protect them against both arcs and projectile weapons in the event that the victims mounted a defense; and held up the bundle of self-looping nooses that each slaver was to bring.
The nooses were metal fiber and extended ten meters when thrown. They goaded their victims with low-amperage shocks and attached the fresh-caught slaves securely to the lizardmen's saddles.
The Lomeri carried twenty nooses apiece, but a ceratosaur dragging such an entourage was likely to turn and rend half the slaves before the rider could whip the beast off.
Smoke drifted from the eave openings of the houses in Peace Rock. It was midmorning across the shifting discontinuity. Folk sat on the benches in front of their dwellings and enjoyed the winter sunshine while they knitted or worked on harness.
A woman with brown-blond hair wove on a hand loom in front of the lord's thatched hall. She was working the figure of a warrior in gold armor onto a white field.
The humans were not consciously aware of the disaster being prepared for them across the Matrix, but occasionally a child or an old woman stared at the sky and frowned. Hobbled mammoths blatted nervously to one another as they foraged among the stubble in the fields.
The Lomeri captain gave another order. His team jockeyed their mounts into line facing the discontinuity. Even at this juncture, the lizardmen snapped and kicked at one another with clawed, narrow feet over questions of precedence and perceived insult.
When the captain was satisfied, he took his place at the head of the line. He gave the final command and spurred his mount forward.
The railgun slug, moving at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, entered and exited Plane Two a millisecond later. The bodies of the six Lomeri, decapitated in a fluorescent streak, pitched out of their saddles.
The ceratosaurs, maddened by the spray of blood, began to fight as they devoured their late riders.
On a plain that stretched without curvature or horizon, cones of wrinkled ice crept with sidereal sluggishness. Light bathed them from a point source that was not a sun. It penetrated the crawling figures and drove the utter cold still deeper.
A streak of excited plasma appeared and vanished across the waste in front of the hill that was the only terrain feature for as far as an eye could see.
The hill suggested a human face: a man with prominent cheekbones and a mouth as ruthless as a bullet from his gun.
If one spent long enough staring at the stalagmites which crawled across the plain on their damned rounds, one might imagine that many bore the distorted visages of those whom Nils Hansen had slain.
A lichen stared up at the red, swollen sun which could no longer bring it comfort. The corniche cracked away, sliver by sliver. There was no other movement in the airless void overlooking what had been a beach.
The lichen had endured, starving more slowly than the rock eroded around it. In the ordinary course of existence, the lichen would continue to endure for countless eons; helpless in the grip of entropy and a pain no less real for being visited on a lifeform little more complex than a bacterium.
A streak, especially vivid for occurring in a void where no gases diffused its light, flashed across the landscape. Rock smashed to vapor at the touch of the hypervelocity slug. A patch of corniche vanished in the cleansing flare.
The glow faded, leaving the scene much as it had been before. The sun's dull red eye remained—
But the lichen had found peace at last.
Saburo knelt on the roof courtyard of his palace, facing a table. On the table's surface were sand ridges and three irregular bits of tuff—ash blown from the vent of a volcano to harden in the air. The eyes of the slim god were open, but his expression was blank. His mind was fading to gray void.
Above the crag-top palace, clouds boiled in a storm lighted opalescent by internal lightning strokes. The rain lashed down to within meters of the courtyard, then sluiced sideways against an invisible barrier. Droplets from the heavens mingled with spray kicked up against the rocks; fresh water with salt, neither penetrating the limpid perfection of Saburo's mind.
If he could clear his mind completely, then he would be above existence—even the existence of a god. He would be worthy of the Princess Mala. When he had made himself worthy, then Mala would come. When—
A lambent streak ripped across a short distance of the courtyard. The sand table shattered.
Saburo shouted and hurled himself backward. Servants poked their heads up the staircase, then ran to help their master.
Saburo stroked his tingling face in wonder. His fingers felt gritty and glittered when he stared at them.
His cheeks were covered with microbeads, like the tektites formed by a meteor strike. The uranium slug on its track through Plane Seven had friction-heated the sand on the table to glass.
Fortin stood in the hall of his ice palace. His upper lip quivered with ecstasy. He stared through the milk-streaked discontinuity toward the lowering splendor of Keep Starnes.
Fortin could not see what was happening within the keep, but he could guess. Hansen had gone straight ahead in his pride, in arrogant certainty that he was better than all the forces Count Starnes could range against him.
That he was better than Fortin . . . though Fortin knew a truth that Nils Hansen would die rather than learn. Fortin was as low as the algal slime on stagnant pools—but for all that, Fortin was as good as any man, human or android or self-loathing halfling like himself. . . .
Because of Hansen's pride, Hansen would die. Was dying now.
Fortin quivered before the dark mirror of the discontinuity. If he dared, he could watch the event rather than the exterior of the city/building in which the event occurred. He could see the vain struggles, the blood; the screams, perhaps, as the victim learned there was truly no escape.
To become a spectator meant becoming a victim as well. Fortin understood perfectly how Count Starnes' mind worked, and how little mercy Starnes would show if Fortin returned to the keep. But it would almost be worth that to watch Nils Hansen humiliated in the final degree.
The handsome half android paced by habit around the facets of the discontinuity, but his mind was caught in the vision of what he could not see. The pain, the terror. . . .
Fortin's servants stood in plain sight at the arched entrances to the central court. They were afraid to be accused of hiding if their master needed them, but they desperately avoided looking at the court. When Fortin was in this mood, he was less predictable and far more dangerous than a wounded sabertooth.
"What are you doing now, Commissioner?" Fortin whispered as he stared toward the facet showing Keep Starnes. His voice was thick with gloating and self-disgust.
The discontinuity shattered. Eight simultaneously co-existing images of the same uranium slug ruptured its fabric from within. The mirror through which Fortin viewed life vanished with the slap of air rushing to fill hard vacuum.
Eight glowing tracks hung in the courtyard for a moment before they dissipated.
Fortin stared at empty air.
And began to scream.
The Citadel of Keep Starnes rocked with the whiplash crack! of the railgun.
The track that vanished a finger's breadth from Hansen's face reappeared a meter to the rear of Count Starnes' vehicle. The projectile retained the same heading and virtually the same velocity as when it left the muzzle of the count's gun. The only difference was that it now was behind him.
The slug hit the tank with the sound of a hammer on an anvil, magnified to cataclysm by the velocity and densities involved.
The vehicle lurched forward despite its mass. The frontal slope bulged. A white glow marked where it took the slug's impact on its inner face. The side and roof armor, relatively thin, ballooned outward.
Everything in the projectile's path inside the tank had been converted to gas at a propagation rate faster than that of high explosive.
The hatch through which Count Starnes had entered his vehicle flew back across the rotunda. The slug's entry hole was a neat punch-mark in the center of the panel. Orange flame, then a perfect ring of black smoke, spouted from the opening.
All the tank's systems were destroyed. The vehicle's carcase crashed to the concrete in a dim echo of the impact which had gutted it. Anything flammable within the tank began to burn.
Hansen grinned. He held Plaid's pistol in his right hand. "Your turn, Karring," he called in a clear, terrible voice as he sauntered toward the Fleet Battle Director.