North rose in the center of his hall, shuddering like a man dragged from drowning in the frozen waters of the Matrix.
In his own form, he was a tall, craggy man with a gray beard and one eye as gray as sea ice. There were old scars on his body, lines and puckers and a dent the size of a maul's head in the side of his left thigh.
"Welcome home, Third," said Dowson's brain in a wash of tawny light. "Were you amused by your expedition with Commissioner Hansen?"
North snorted. He made a gesture with his right hand. Loose velvet garments clothed him, very different from the Consensus Exploration Authority coveralls which he ordinarily wore in private.
"As interesting as that?" Dowson gibed. The shower of light that brought his words was as pale as dry sand. A listener who knew Dowson as well as North did could hear the regret of a disembodied brain for the days in which it could act as well as be.
North barked out a harsh, false laugh. "I'll tell you this about our kommissar," he said. "In the old days, I'd have given him a job as scout for just as long as he lasted."
He laughed again. "Which wouldn't be long at all."
Thoughts with the sheen of hydrated turquoise scaled from the pillar before Dowson's tank. "When you look to your end on the Final Day," the brain noted, "as Commissioner Hansen does not . . . do you not see him still fighting as the hordes sweep you under? I see that, Captain."
"Oh, I never said he couldn't fight," North said. His tone was so coolly unemotional that a listener could almost ignore the fact that he was changing the subject.
North stretched high in the air. The garment's loose sleeves piled on his shoulders while his scarred, knobby arms wavered above them. "That's all he knows how to do, though, the commissioner. He brought down Keep Starnes, all right, but he got nothing at all out of APEX."
North dropped his heels to the floor and lowered his arms again. "Nothing!" he repeated forcefully toward the floating brain. "It was just an excuse for him to kill. He hasn't learned that we gods don't need excuses to do as we wish."
Dowson's laughter was as cold as the horizon-blue light that carried it in an expanding sphere across the hall. The lower edge sparkled and vanished as it rubbed against the floor, blocks of dense white laid in intricate marquetry with blocks of void in which distant galaxies gleamed.
"I don't think Hansen will ever learn that lesson," Dowson said, drawing an the final word into a mental sneer. "But as for what he learned from APEX—"
"Nothing!" snapped North. "APEX had no data on how I took Northworld out of the universe of the Consensus."
"That isn't what Commissioner Hansen asked while you were coupled to the Fleet Battle Director," Dowson explained. "He asked APEX to determine what you knew about how Northworld was removed from the universe of the Consensus."
North made a minuscule gesture. At the end of it, he was dressed again in gray coveralls with an equipment belt and a command helmet—the utility uniform he wore when he first arrived on the planet to determine why the original exploration unit had disappeared.
"He knows that you didn't steal Northworld at all, Captain," the brain continued in a shower of faded rose. "That you accepted the powers you had been given, but that you don't have the least idea yourself of who gave them to you."
"Do you know, Dowson?" North demanded. His voice was edged steel. North had never needed rank insignia to convey his authority.
"Karring did at the end, I think," Dowson replied/half-replied. "The Fleet Battle Director was the correct tool to correlate external data with what Third knew and to synthesize an answer. And I suspect Commissioner Hansen—"
From the pillar shimmered icy laughter the color of rotted bronze.
"—has guessed the answer as well. Did you think the Consensus of Worlds had chosen a mere gunman as their investigator, Captain North?"
For a time without measure, the tall man stared at the brain in the tank before him. At last North began to laugh—booming, godlike mirth that echoed from the mighty vaults of his palace.