"This time . . . ," Ritter said to himself in confidence and wonder. He stood up slowly from his chair as he stared at the two dragonflies rotating like mirror images in an all-angles view. "This time I think I've got you where you'll work, you cunning little devil."
"So she's ready for a test—" said a voice from behind him where nobody was. The engineer turned and groped for the pistol slung over his chair back.
The fingertips of Hansen's left hand rested on Ritter's holster flap. "—ride, is she, Master Ritter?" the slim, cold-eyed man concluded.
"I don't like that," Ritter said flatly. "I wish you wouldn't do that."
"I'm sorry," Hansen said. "I—"
He didn't look away from Ritter, but his eyes were no longer staring into the same universe. He was wearing a suit of velvet dyed a muddy blue, breeches and a jerkin cinched with a broad leather belt. The garments were obviously handmade, and they seemed to have been cut for a bigger man.
"There's been some things going on," Hansen went on with no more emotion than a voice synthesizer could supply. "Nothing to do with you, friend. Not even going that bad—"
Hansen shuddered. His face changed and he attempted a smile. "For the survivors, at least, and that's about all you can ever say, isn't it?"
"Your work is going all right, then?" Ritter said. Given his own focus, that was the most positive thing he could suggest to the other man without seeming to pry.
"That is my work, Ritter," Hansen said. His smile was wistful for a moment. "And yeah, like I said, it's going pretty well."
That wasn't what Ritter's visitor had said before.
"But the main thing," Hansen continued, "is how your project's going. Think you've got a handle on it?"
"Why don't you ride what I've built?" the engineer suggested proudly. "Then you can tell me."
He touched a control on his console. The pair of dimensional vehicles stopped turning on their invisible pedestals.
Ritter continued to manipulate his joystick. An invisible overhead beam slid one of the dragonflies out of the examination area. When the engineer thumbed the control downward, the crane deposited the dragonfly on the floor of the laboratory between the two men.
Hansen ran his hand slowly over the dimensional vehicle. The saddle was smooth, but it had a slight tackiness to the touch. He rubbed his fingertips together and found no residue on them.
Ritter smiled with quiet pride. "There's a suction system that works through tiny pores to help the rider keep his seat," he explained. "I'll bet you couldn't tell mine from the original."
"Her seat mostly, friend," Hansen said as he checked the control panel. "But I take your meaning."
He looked at Ritter. "I'm really impressed. You built it all here?"
He gestured around the huge workroom.
"Some of the smaller, one-off pieces," the engineer said with a shrug. "Most of it, though, I just piped the specs down to fabrication—"
He touched a switch. A wall became a full-scale window onto Keep Greville's manufacturing level.
Thousands of technicians and laborers worked in the interconnected bays. Occasional splotches of bright clothing marked Ritter's under-engineers, performing set-up or overseeing particularly complex operations.
"—as normal," Ritter concluded. "Does it matter?"
Hansen laughed. "I was worried somebody might find out what you were doing," he said. "For your sake, I mean. But I've always been told the best place to hide a needle is with a million other needles, not a haystack. Forgive me for trying to tell you your business."
Ritter shut off the wall image. "You didn't," he said. "And anyway, I'd have done what I pleased anyhow."
His smile was half humor, half challenge.
Hansen raised an eyebrow. "Like I say," he said. "It's your business, Master Ritter."
The slim man swung aboard the dragonfly.
At rest, he didn't look dangerous. It was only when Hansen moved that Ritter remembered the way the pistol was in the other man's hand and firing before the engineer knew an enemy had arrived.
"Are you going like that?" Ritter asked. His voice caught on the first syllable. He cleared his dry throat to finish the question.
Hansen plucked his jerkin between thumb and forefinger and peered at the material critically.
"Oh, this would fit in where I'm going," he said. He patted the saddlehorn. "The dragonfly would raise some eyebrows, but I'll hover just out of synchronous the way the Searchers themselves do over a battlefield. Anyway, it's just a quick test run."
"It . . . ," Ritter said.
He licked his lips. "Look," the engineer went on, "I'm good, but this is a complex sonuvabitch. I don't want you stuck in the middle of those lizardmen with no way to defend yourself."
He gave Hansen the holstered pistol which hung from his chair. "Take this at least. I'll find you a forcefield projector to go with it."
Hansen's mouth opened to protest.
Look, if I thought I needed hardware, I've got my own that'd make this look like a pop-gun.
Then he remembered Maharg standing within arm's length, and Hansen unable to save his life. Hansen failing to do what was necessary to save Maharg's life.
"Thanks," Hansen said. "Not the forcefield, though. An untuned unit might interfere with the dragonfly's own projector."
The belt was sized for Ritter's waist. Hansen hung it over his left shoulder like a bandolier. He adjusted the containers of spare magazines so that they did not chafe bone.
He gave Ritter a thumbs-up. "See you soon," he said.
"Good luck," said the engineer. He smiled tautly.
"I don't need luck, Master Ritter," Hansen said. "I've got you."
He stroked the dragonfly out of the present continuum, using the manual controls rather than voice operation.
To a Searcher, the Matrix was merely a blur of light. The dimensional vehicle shielded its user from the medium instead of merging her with it the way Hansen or even a smith on the Open Lands could do.
Dragonflies did not convey information about the Matrix, any more than a hovercar permitted its rider to levitate unaided—but that was beside the point. All a Searcher needed to know was that her vehicle would take her where North or her own whim decided she should be.
And that was all Hansen needed now as well.
The dragonfly shifted out of the veils of light. That was expected, a momentary pause on the next plane of the Matrix—
But this was Plane Four, which was Hell in truth as well as in appearance; and the dragonfly did not pause on the cold, milky ice sheath—
It stopped dead.
Hansen moved the thumb switch to its neutral setting, then rolled it forward again in case Ritter had simply failed to copy the original vehicle's repetitive-input setting. Nothing happened.
Nothing happened inside the dimensional vehicle's bubble of force. The ice was warted with milky stalagmites the height of men. They stretched to the blank horizon in all directions. The stalagmites were turning toward Hansen with glacial slowness.
"Control," said Hansen calmly, activating voice operation. "Shift to Plane Three."
The dragonfly was alive with the normal complement of electronic quivers; it had not depowered. The force bubble was at full strength. The nearest stalagmites began to press against the invisible barrier, deforming as exterior sections of a perfect sphere.
"Control," Hansen said, "Plane Two!"
The holstered pistol was in his way as he groped for the saddle-edge controls again. He swore and slung it behind him, then toggled the switch forward against its stop.
Nothing was bloody happening with the dragonfly. The sunless horizon humped up slowly and began to sag with cavities which hinted at the eyesockets of a skull.
Hansen swore by the god of his childhood. He gripped the vehicle's unified in-plane control, a wheel that moved in three dimensions as well as rotating on its axis.
He lifted the unified control on its column. He'd hover ten meters in the air—or a thousand meters up if the tumor growing on the horizon was what Hansen thought it was. Some safe altitude, so that he'd have time to figure out what the hell was going on with the bloody—
The dragonfly didn't lift.
Hansen spun the control column forward and gave it a vicious twist. The vehicle had plenty of power to smash through the wall of stalagmites—
But it didn't move, wouldn't move, and the milky peaks of the stalagmites were forming human features.
"Control!" Hansen shouted. "Plane One!"
He bumped the pistol butt again as he groped for the manual control because the dragonfly had done nothing this time either. The weapon was in his hand before he thought—
Nils Hansen never had to think about a weapon.
—but he didn't shoot because he knew the faces growing on ice colder than Death were the visages of dead men.
Men he had killed. Women—but only a few women, not many at all compared to the male faces, stretching to the horizon in every direction.
The skull at the edge of vision turned and cloaked itself in a milky semblance of flesh. Hansen stared at his own face.
He screamed then and—
His hand reholstered the pistol without conscious command.
—rocked the toggle switch back, to return the dragonfly to Plane Five.
If that control worked, while all the others had failed. It was Hansen's last resort.
The Matrix was magenta light as warm as love. Hansen caught the saddle with both hands as the dimensional vehicle purred and slipped from nowhere to rest on the floor of Ritter's workroom.
The dragonfly bobbed as its legs telescoped, accepting the pull of gravity that it had escaped in the Matrix.
"Oh my god," Hansen said. He was gasping.
He closed his eyes. "Oh my god."
"What is it?" the engineer demanded. "Come on, man! Are you all right? Tell me!"
"I'm all right," Hansen said in a voice that shuddered into normalcy. "Just keep the fuck away for a minute."
He opened his eyes and swung off the dragonfly. The vehicle's force bubble collapsed automatically as its rider's weight left the saddle. Condensate formed on all exposed surfaces.
The engineer's face was plastic; his need for information shimmered under a crust of rigid control. "Okay," Hansen said, "we've got a problem. Two problems. The unit switches to the next plane down, but it won't go farther."
He shuddered despite himself. "It does come back. That's a big one. It came back just fine."
"The other problem?" said Ritter.
"The in-plane controls, the physical movement ones," Hansen said. "They don't work either. Zip. Nada."
He could have abandoned the dimensional vehicle in Hell and entered the Matrix himself.
He thought he could have.
He had been safe all the time. He thought.
Hansen shuddered again. He unslung the gunbelt and handed it to Ritter.
"Right," said the engineer emotionlessly. "Well, there's full telemetry on the unit. I'll get to work on it right away."
"There's always glitches," Hansen said to his trembling hands.
"Sure," said Ritter. "We'll take care of it."
Then he turned and slammed his fist into the console, hard enough to crack the dense plastic top.