Ritter was pacing back and forth behind his console when Hansen appeared in the workroom. The engineer took the staccato, frustrated strides of a caged carnivore.
"Thought I'd drop in and say hi," Hansen said.
His ultramarine trousers and cream-colored shirt made him look like one of Ritter's underlings. The pistol he carried was part of the uniform also. The weapon was in a heavy flap holster very different from the breakaway unit Hansen had worn against the Lomeri.
"Drop in and check up on me, you mean," the engineer snarled.
If I wanted to check on you—
Hansen waved his left hand. An image of Ritter in his laboratory hung in front of the man whom it pictured. The color was full and rich, the resolution crystalline. The image's face went blank, then grimaced in embarrassment as though it were a non-reversing mirror.
Hansen waved the image away. "Hi, Master Ritter," he said with a slight smile.
"Hell, I'm sorry," the engineer said.
He slapped the chair built into the console. It spun on its gimbals, but the blow wasn't a serious one, just a flick of irritation. "I'm not usually that dumb. Hell, maybe I'm just too dumb to do your job, Colonel Hansen."
Hansen shrugged. "I doubt that," he said.
He sat down on the bed of a milling machine, shifting a tray of jigs carefully so that they didn't fall onto the floor. "Anyway," he continued, "I'm no colonel. Just Hansen. Or—"
He smiled. "—Nils, if you want to, but that formation's not much in favor on Northworld, I've found."
Ritter gave a deep sigh, not so much relaxing as expressing a willingness to relax. He seated himself with his back to the console's screens and controls. "Penny calls you 'Commissioner' sometimes," he said. "It seemed to mean 'colonel,' in the ranks here."
" 'Commissioner' was . . . ," Hansen said.
He quirked a corner of his mouth, trying to hook the correct words. "That was before I came to Northworld. I was a . . . type of policeman. For oh, well; violence, I suppose you could say."
"You were Civic Patrol?" the engineer translated, cautiously trying to avoid contempt.
Hansen grinned. "Close enough," he said. "It wasn't a high-status job where I came from either, Master Ritter. But maybe not quite as low as it is here, where military elites run the keeps and the police only have authority over the laboring class."
Ritter shrugged. "Well," he said, "none of that stuff matters anyway, does it?"
"Status doesn't matter?" Hansen said. "Balls."
He laughed, stood up, and stretched. The knuckles of his left hand bumped the suction hood that would close over the workpiece during operations. "You wouldn't say that after you told Lord Greville to go piss up a slope."
Hansen's smile was as hard as the diamond cutters of the milling machine. "Or," he added, "if one of your party girls said the equivalent to you."
Ritter grimaced at the backs of his hands. "You know what I mean," he said. "You know that getting the job done is the only important thing. And I've hit a stone wall on your job."
"What's the problem?" Hansen asked equably. "I don't know jack shit about the hardware, but you do; and talking helps a lot of times."
The engineer shrugged. "Okay," he said. "I can't find the bloody power supply. And I know there is one, because I've seen the unit work."
"You made a liar out of me," Hansen said. "I can help there."
He got up again, smiling at an unexpected win. "The dragonflies draw their power direct from imbalances in the Matrix. Same with the battlesuits. You remember them?"
Hansen waved his hand. Men in armored suits weighing a hundred kilos and more moved uphill at a swift, staggering pace toward another similarly-equipped force. Blue radiance sprang from the warriors' gauntlets. The lines crashed together in a blaze of arcs on protective forcefields like the lightning-lit core of a tornado.
"The problem those men have running," Hansen continued, "isn't the weight, it's the control circuits. There's lag time between moving your leg and the servos obeying, especially in the cheap suits."
Ritter swore and pounded the console behind him. He used the side of his hand, but there was nothing petty about the blow. He stood up again and walked around the console to put his back to his visitor.
"Problem with that?" Hansen asked mildly. His lips were the only portion of his face that moved.
"Look," said the engineer, "I know the Matrix exists, I've, I've been in it. But—"
He turned. "It doesn't exist for me, do you see? It's bloody magic!"
"Oh, yeah," said Hansen. He stepped forward, almost gliding, and put his arm around the engineer's shoulders. "Yeah, I do know what you mean. But look, friend—"
He waited until Ritter met his eyes, then continued, "It's what we've got. Pretending reality doesn't exist can get you killed in my line of work. Or yours."
Ritter began to laugh. "Civic Patrol!" he said.
Hansen laughed also. "Hey, man, try me one-on-one with your Lord Greville and we'll see who has a better idea which end of a gun goes bang. Is it my fault that your cops only carry nets and clubs?"
"Okay," Ritter said, "I'll build your magic horse, now that I'm sure I've got all the pieces." The laughter had broken his mood into good humor. "Reverse engineering isn't as easy as it looks. People don't realize that."
"If it was easy," Hansen replied, "I wouldn't have had to come to you, right?"
"So you figure I'm the best, do you?" the engineer said, half mocking but half in justifiable certainty of his own worth.
"You're the best I could find," Hansen agreed. "Of what you do, I mean."
He waved an image to life in the air before them. "In the Open Lands," he went on, "there are smiths who use the Matrix to create things. Some of them might be as good in their way as you are in yours."
In the image, a big man in a filthy garment lay on a bed of furs. His legs were scabbed, and his feet sprawled like a seal's flippers.
The viewpoint slid downward to cut a slice through the pile of gravel and metal arranged beside the man. Solid matter shifted, then re-formed from chaos into intricate patterns of circuitry and sheathing.
Hansen rotated the image viewpoint to a close focus on the man's face. His mouth lolled open, and the pupils of his slitted eyes were rolled up out of sight.
"His name is Sparrow," Hansen said. "And he's probably as good as you are."