Chief engineer Karring leaped from his seat in the nearest bay and turned to run down the corridor housing the rest of the enormous mass that was APEX.
"Help!" Karring screamed as he rounded a corner that hid him from Hansen. "All troops to the Citadel! We've been—"
His direct voice faded. Speakers in the rotunda—speakers in every room and hallway in Keep Starnes—relayed the chief engineer's commands.
"—invaded!"
Hansen's head rang from the impact which had demolished Count Starnes' vehicle, and afterimages from the flash still danced across his retinas. His throat burned with combustion products of both organic and synthetic origin, fused at near-solar temperatures—
But he felt alive in a way that happened only in battle. He viewed his surroundings in crystal perfection through a template of experience and adrenaline and instinct.
Especially instinct. Without that killer instinct, Nils Hansen would not have been the man who could exist here.
Did Karring think to run from him? At fifty meters, Hansen could have emptied the pistol into the back of Karring's skull, and the tenth shot would hit before the shattered body slumped to the floor.
Hansen whistled between his teeth as he entered the bay the chief engineer had just vacated. "This hard-liquor place, it's a lowdown disgrace. . . ."
APEX was above and around him on all sides. Three-meter displays looked huge when attached to the outstations in the rotunda. The one in the alcove was dwarfed by the Fleet Battle Director. Lines of shifting color knotted themselves on the holographic screen.
"The meanest damn place in the town. . . ."
Karring's device spun above the entrance to the bay. Hansen swatted the hollow ovoid casually with the barrel of his pistol. Fragile connections shattered. The construct's off-balance rotation spun it across the corridor to flatten against the wall.
There was a green flash. The remnants of the delicate object drifted away as fine dust. The holographic screen blanked to an expectant pearl gray.
In the ambiance of the bay, Hansen understood better why Count Starnes—and Karring, still more Karring—had tried to trample down everything around. Living within APEX would be much like being immersed in the Matrix. Here were powers beyond the conception of a normal human; powers that could mold a human mind into something inhumane that thought itself above humanity.
Hansen understood; but he'd never been good at pity, and mercy was for after the job had been completed to full, ruthless perfection.
The Citadel trembled with unfamiliar stresses. Karring's alert—the words were little enough, but the Fleet Battle Director had certainly amplified them—had stirred up this anthill, no mistake.
Hansen's smile was instinctive. He hadn't come here to kill Count Starnes' common soldiers—
But he didn't have any objection to doing that too.
Third remained on the console. The helmet was connected through the jewel on its forehead to APEX. Hansen reached for Third with his left hand. As he did so, the huge display lighted with violet letters: no data to your question.
Hansen lifted the command helmet. Crystal fetters reabsorbed themselves into the jewel with series of jerky movements, the way lightning moves across the sky when viewed in slow motion.
He settled the helmet onto his head. "You took your time about it," Third commented acidly.
"Are we in a hurry?" replied Hansen in a mild voice. His eyes were as restless as wood flames, flickering across the bay and the corridor beyond, searching for dangers.
"They'll attack us, you know," said Third.
Hansen snorted. "They'll do wonders!"
He dodged out into the corridor. His eyes swept left—toward the rotunda—to right, while his body moved right to follow Karring. The bays of the Fleet Battle Director alternated like the teeth in a crocodile's jaws, ready to scissor together and trap whatever entered them. . . .
"Karring dropped the Citadel's defenses when he summoned help," the helmet said with electronic smugness. "He was in too much of a hurry to be careful. He lifted the interlocks from APEX, as well. I now have full access to APEX."
Hansen spun into the second bay, offset from the first on the left side of the corridor. It was empty. The holographic display showed a schematic of the Citadel. Blue carats marked the elevator bank, the drain beneath the elevators in the center of the rotunda, and three of the Fleet Battle Director's twenty bays.
"You've blocked the elevators?" Hansen asked as he scanned the vast cable trunks in the shadowed darkness above him.
"Of course," Third replied. There was a click of thought that would have been a sniff were there nostrils to deliver it. "I sealed them to the shaft walls by firing the safety girdle intended to prevent the cages from free-falling."
Something crashed loudly in Bay 1. Hansen swung back into the corridor. As he moved, his gunhand stretched upward like the trunk of an elephant sniffing for danger.
Part of the base section had fallen from the meter-thick conduit which normally fed Bay 1 with sensory data. The edges of the metal glowed from the saws which had cut the opening. A soldier was crawling out of the hole with a short-stocked energy weapon in his hand.
Quick work, that, even though the conduits had already been gutted to trap Fortin.
Hansen fired at the soldier ten meters above him. The pistol's blam! and the snap! of its explosive bullet were almost simultaneous.
Hansen's finger twitched a second round to follow the first by reflex, but the target's chest had already vanished in a dazzling flash. The bullet had struck one of the spare energy cells in the soldier's bandolier. The cell shorted and set off at least a dozen additional charges.
The command helmet blinked to save Hansen's sight. When the visor cleared an instant later, he could see that the conduit was bulged and wrinkled all the way to the dense cap of the Citadel roof. The chain explosion had traveled up the tube like powder flashing across the ready charges in an artillery magazine. It had wiped out the whole attacking force.
You have to be good; but it helps to be lucky.
"They're cutting through by way of the elevators as well," said Third, "but I'll see to it that it takes them some time. Did they think we came here without knowing how to use a Fleet Battle Director?"
Hansen ran back past Bay 2 and around Bay 3 on his right again. They were not among those by which the keep's defenders were entering the Citadel.
A tremendous explosion from the rotunda shook Hansen despite the corridor's baffling. Third giggled obscenely in Hansen's mind. "I detonated the safety charges in only one of each pair of cages. I held the rest until the fools lowered an assault gun and its caisson through the hole they'd cut in the cage floor."
Bay 4 was another of—
Gunfire ripped and ravened in Bay 4. Hansen's command helmet projected a miniature image of what he would see when he swung into the alcove behind his gun. A dozen of the keep's soldiers had spilled out of a hole in the data feed conduit. They were shooting down into the empty bay.
Hansen moved. One shot per target, not great because they were in body armor, so he was aiming for heads and he wished he had a mob gun or a back-pack laser, something to sweep, but they were going down, four of them, six, and the last was the only one who saw Hansen and aimed but it was too late and the soldier's cheeks bulged as the bullet exploded in the spongy bone behind where his nose had been.
The console was slashed and punctured by the volume of fire the soldiers had directed down into it. The holographic display was still live. On it capered a life-sized image of Nils Hansen. The hologram winked and thumbed its nose at the real gunman, then vanished into electronic limbo.
Equipment and bodies dribbled from the top of the bay like water overflowing a sink. Hansen thrust the pistol's smoking barrel through his belt. He snatched up a grenade launcher.
no data to your question, said the display in blocky saffron type before it went blank.
Hansen fired two grenades into the hole from which the soldiers had entered the Citadel, angling the bombs upward. They burst within the conduit. There were no secondary explosions or sign of further attackers. The weapon's original owner had already expended the other three rounds in the magazine.
Hansen tossed the launcher away. He took an energy weapon from the hands of a soldier who'd been too nervous to slide up the safety before he squeezed the trigger in vain.
Keep Starnes rocked.
"I'm firing the main missile batteries," Third explained. The helmet's titter/giggle/electronic squeal scraped its nails across Hansen's mind again. "But I haven't raised the shutters of the launch tubes. Karring really should have thought before he dropped the interlocks."
Fallen soldiers lay on the floor of the bay like piles of old clothes. One of the men was on his back. His eyes were glazed, but the lids blinked and blinked again, despite the bullet hole in the middle of the forehead.
Stick grenades hung from the bandoliers crossing the victim's chest. Hansen pulled two grenades off and stuffed them into his left cargo pocket.
"What type are they, Third?" he asked. The folk of Plane Five fought in armored vehicles, so standard-issue grenades were likely to be smoke for marking rather than anti-personnel.
"Non-fragmenting assault," the helmet responded promptly. "You're dealing with internal security teams. Until Fortin arrived, they hadn't been deployed operationally in the past three generations."
"They sure kept their fucking training up," Hansen grunted. He looked at the weapon in his hands, still on Safe when its owner died. He smiled a shark's smile. Mostly they'd kept their training up.
The display had showed another team entering the Citadel through Bay 18. They were going to have plenty of time to prepare before the intruder reached them.
"Six men have entered the rotunda from the drain system," Third noted with thin exasperation. "More are making their way through the elevator shafts."
"No rest for the wicked," Nils Hansen said. He bent and took a third grenade from the bandolier. Aiming his energy weapon toward the crook in the corridor, Hansen held the grenade against the floor. He stepped on the safety ring, holding it while he drew the bomb away, armed.
"They're fanning out in the rotunda," Third reported.
Hansen threaded the corridor quickly, back to the edge of the first alcove. He tossed the grenade into the rotunda and darted back.
He wasn't left-handed, and the throw had to be side-arm anyway. For this purpose it didn't matter—and the bastards were good; a streak of focused plasma released its snarling fury against the corner of the bay only a fraction of a second after Hansen's hand curled back to cover.
A series of six rhythmic shocks made the whole fabric of Keep Starnes vibrate.
"Mine," the command helmet noted with cold pride. "I overloaded the magnetic shield generators one by one. Next I will short the keep's power supply into the dome itself. It will glow like the sun before it weakens enough to collapse, Commissioner."
The stick grenade went off in the rotunda with a triple crack! and a series of white reflections down the corridor instead of a unitary explosion. The bomb was designed to blind and stun defenders without fragments to endanger the assault force running toward the blast.
Hansen jogged back down the corridor. He ignored the ruin and corpses in the bays he had cleared. That was the past, that was over.
The massive Fifth Plane bodies looked utterly inhuman in death. . . .
Hansen didn't expect the ill-flung grenade to kill or injure any of the Keep Starnes troops. It was likely to hold them in the rotunda for a time, though. Heavy gunfire—some of it from an automatic cannon like the one Third had blown up earlier—ripped the mouth of the corridor in confirmation of Hansen's assumption.
Ghostly holograms, a 20% mask, glowed at the lower left of Hansen's field of view. They showed a schematic of Bay 18 from which advanced six rosy beads: Keep Starnes soldiers. They were rushing in pairs.
Hansen jogged past Bay 10. He'd meet them at about 14. They would meet Nils Hansen, because he knew exactly how his opponents were deployed. To the soldiers, the intruder they sought was only a lethal ghost.
"You're not bad backup to have in a firefight, Third," Hansen said/gasped. He didn't notice how his lungs were burning until he tried to speak.
"I was thinking the same thing of you, Kommissar," the helmet replied.
Hansen paused in Bay 12. He dragged in breaths as deep as his lungs could hold. His legs trembled. He sat in the console's chair for a moment and let his feet dangle as the muscles cleared themselves of fatigue poisons.
The trouble with living on nerves and hormones was that you could never be quite sure when you were about to exceed the mechanical limits of your body's framework.
Hansen didn't want that to happen five meters in the air.
Out of the line of Hansen's necessary vision, beads representing two soldiers flung themselves into the schematic of Bay 15. The Keep Starnes troops were alternating at point. They knew that the pair who first contacted the intruder had no purpose but to target Hansen for their fellows as they died.
Hansen slung his energy weapon. He jumped onto the console and groped within the pale glow of the holographic screen. Hansen's arms cast dark streaks when they interrupted one component of the three which gave the display solidity and color. He found the projection head and used the wrist-thick conduit which fed it as a pipe up which to shinny to the top of the alcove.
Soldiers rushed Bay 14.
"They're trying not to damage APEX," Third noted in amusement. "Karring warned them not to."
"Karring's a fool," Hansen gasped as he lifted himself to the platform where the thick sensor duct spread its optical cables throughout the alcove.
He unslung the energy weapon, then took the grenade sticks from his cargo pocket. There was no cover on the platform, but the shadows were thick.
The pistol barrel was so hot from rapid fire that he'd burned a blister where the muzzle lay against his thigh. He hadn't noticed it till now; and anyway, it didn't matter.
"Karring thinks he faces only a gunman, Kommissar," the helmet said.
"Though I admit . . . ," the mental voice added judiciously, "he faces that too."
no data to your question, glowed the display in orange as soldiers threw themselves around the corner into Bay 13. Their weapons swept, side to side and upward, trying to cover every nook before the intruder's snake-swift trigger finger cut them down.
Hansen pulled the safety ring from a grenade. The other four members of the Keep Starnes team joined the two scouts. A new pair poised on the edge of Bay 12.
Hansen threw the grenade stick back the way he had come. It bounced off the corridor wall and detonated within Bay 11.
The blast jolted the pair picked to clear Bay 12 into action an instant faster than they otherwise would have moved. That broke their rhythm and robbed them of concentration on the task in hand. The first two men flopped onto the floor of the alcove beneath Hansen. Two of their fellows rushed past them screaming and shooting—at Bay 10, from which they assumed the bomb had come.
The remaining pair of soldiers were also drawn off-balance by the break in routine. They jumped from cover and hesitated. Their gun muzzles were lifted so as not to aim at the backs of their enthusiastic teammates.
One carried a grenade launcher, the other an energy weapon like the gun Hansen had appropriated. Hansen shot them, then shot the pair rising from the floor of Bay 12.
His gun fired bolts of saturated white, like bits clipped from a stellar corona. The weapon had considerable recoil. Though the plasma released could be measured in micrograms, it was accelerated to light speed by a miniature thermonuclear explosion.
The two standing soldiers flopped backward when their chests vaporized. The other pair were on their knees and twisting to scan the top of the bay as they had failed—to their cost—to do initially. The bolts slapped them against the floor again.
Hansen drew the safety ring of his remaining grenade. He lobbed it into Bay 10. The two soldiers who had rushed ahead of their companions launched themselves into the corridor before the bomb went off. They were trying to look everywhere, but the ten-meter height advantage gave Hansen the fraction of a second he needed. He dropped the men with two dazzling bolts.
One of the victims flew back into Bay 10 just as the grenade stick went off. It couldn't have mattered much to him. The bolt didn't penetrate his body armor, but its cataclysmic energy dished in what remained of the breastplate so that it was virtually a coating on the inner side of the back piece.
There were still four charges in the energy weapon's magazine, but its barrel glowed white. If Hansen tried to climb down with the gun slung, it would burn him to the bone as it oscillated on the sling. He tossed the weapon to the alcove floor.
"Karring has a pistol," Third warned.
"Karring doesn't have any balls," Hansen grunted. "Not for this."
He lowered himself hand over hand through the blank screen. His soles gripped the conduit until they swung free. "How about the guys from the other end, from the drains?"
The command helmet flashed him an image. A gang of twenty or more red beads clumped together in Bay 4. From the look of the schematic, the Keep Starnes soldiers were gnawing their way through, straightening the corridor with heavy weapons.
"Tsk," chirped Third. "They needn't destroy APEX."
Hansen stepped over a headless body and trotted toward Bay 20. He didn't bother to rearm himself. There were ten rounds or so in the pistol's magazine; that would be quite enough.
"I'm not going to leave APEX for another Karring to conquer the world," he said.
"That is correct, Kommissar," the command helmet said. "We are not going to leave APEX."
Keep Starnes shook.
"The dome is sagging," Third explained. "Its weight is buckling the internal structures of the keep. I don't believe that even the Citadel will survive. Still, I've initiated the self-destruct sequence implanted in all Fleet Battle Directors to prevent them from being captured by an enemy."
Hansen reached the corner of Bay 20. He paused, breathing deeply. He was not so much catching his breath as controlling it.
Hansen laughed at his own vanity; the command helmet echoed the human sound with a trill of thought.
Pistol still thrust through his belt, coveralls torn and muddy, face blackened by metal vaporized from the energy weapon's bore and recondensed on the shooter's face—Nils Hansen strode into Bay 20.
"Hello, Karring," he said. Some of the syllables caught in his throat, making them a crazy half stammer, half lilt. "Not much point in running, you know. Not from me."
The chief engineer backed against the console. The display behind him writhed in an iridescent maelstrom. Hansen couldn't guess the question which APEX was trying to answer in its last moments of existence.
Karring's pistol was in his right hand, but the muzzle trembled toward the floor. This was a man to whom war was a game won by cunning strategy and superior weapons. Not a gunman; not a killer to face Nils Hansen.
"Go away . . . ," whispered the squat, bald man.
"You brought me here, Karring," Hansen said as he walked closer. "I would've told myself you were none of my business, but you and your boss insisted that I make you my business."
The air was hot. The cable ducts feeding Bay 20 were red where they passed through the ceiling. The glow brightened the alcove.
Karring looked upward despairingly. He let the pistol drop from his fingers. "Please," he begged. "Please. Take me away with you."
"You made your bed, friend," Hansen said. "Now lie in it."
The cable duct ruptured. It began to spurt smoke or steam across the ceiling of the alcove. "Time to go, I think, Third," Hansen said.
"Yes," agreed the command helmet. "But I'll make my own way back, Kommissar."
Hot, dry air puffed across Hansen's bare scalp. "Goodbye, Karring," he said and vanished into the Matrix himself.
no data on your question, read the vermilion letters which crawled across the bottom of the huge display.
Karring's eyes opened wide. "You think you're gods!" he screamed to the empty bay. "You're not, you know? The world is a god and you're only its pawns! Paw—"
The roar of the ceiling's collapse drowned the last of Karring's words an instant before it crushed him into the ruins of APEX.