Hansen settled his commo helmet and grinned like a death's head at the engineer. "Still time to change your mind," he offered with a lilt.
"Screw you," Ritter muttered.
Ritter's heavy form was as lumpy as the deck of a warship. Hansen had offered to equip him for the insertion, but Ritter preferred to carry hardware of his own design and construction. Hansen's forcefield and weapons might have been superior in some absolute sense—
"Ah, you're not my type, Master Ritter," Hansen said. He wore close-fitting coveralls with a flat forcefield generator that looked like a breastplate. His pistol rode in a cutaway holster high on his right hip, and a stocked, short-barreled energy weapon was slung muzzle-down over his left shoulder.
Hansen's voice trembled as if with laughter or madness, but that was only the adrenaline coursing through his blood.
—but in a firefight, the shooter was more important than his equipment. Hansen was too experienced to choose to send somebody into combat with hardware that the user didn't know by instinct.
Ritter's laboratory clicked and sizzled with the sound of ongoing processes, tests and experiments and computer-directed refining steps; mechanical life which continued whether its creator was present or not.
"Well," Hansen said softly. He lifted himself onto the dragonfly's saddle. "Let's do it."
The engineer stepped close to his mounted guide and touched his hands, skin to bare skin; but in the moment before Hansen took them into the infinite perfection of the Matrix, Ritter's mouth opened.
"Yeah?" said Hansen.
His voice was calm, his face calm. His hands shivered with hot fury.
"You're going to carry us to Plane Two," Ritter said. "This isn't going to—be a problem with North?"
Hansen's face glared ice through the mask of his smile. "I have powers," he said with brutal calm. "I've agreed not to use them for a time in the Open Lands. Period."
For a moment, Hansen's smile was touched with humor. "If North has a problem with what we're doing with the Lomeri," he said, "then he can come visit us on Plane Two. This is one time I wouldn't mind his company."
Ritter managed a grin which the taut muscles of his face turned to blocks and angles. His body's response to tension differed from Hansen's. "We don't need North," he said. "You and I can handle any trouble the lizards start."
Both of them knew that if the Lomeri managed to react in time to the brief intrusion, Ritter would have to face them alone.
"Hang on," said Hansen.
The walls became sharper, clearer. The network of reinforcing rods expanded in all directions until—
Ritter hung in a void at the base of an enormous tree. The roots spread to borderless infinity, forking again and again into hair-fine tendrils that split still further as Ritter surged along their pathways, dragged by a touch he could not feel toward—
They landed in a magnolia thicket. The ground was black with charcoal from the fire which had cleared the hill a few years before. Limbless stumps up to five meters high remained as grave markers for the forest that had once existed here.
Ritter stepped away from the dragonfly and took the separate control panel from one of his cargo pockets. The color-coded read-out was in the middle of the green zone, as expected.
"Ready!" he said to Hansen. He thought his voice sounded thin.
Horns sounded, clear and terrible in the humans' ears. The Lomeri were already on the trail.
Hansen nodded curtly. He and the dimensional vehicle started to fade.
"Good hunting!" the engineer shouted.
The read-out started to edge toward the upper yellow zone. Ritter thumbed the roller switch to center it again, then concentrated on his own defense.
There was low ground to the north and west of the hill. At the moment it was a band of lush meadow. There must have been standing water in it when fire swept past where Ritter now stood, since the forest on the other side was undamaged.
The trees were conifers. On the side facing the meadow and full sunlight, the trunks were lapped in lesser vegetation, brush and vines and white-blossomed dogwoods. Only a few meters deeper into the forest's heart, the gloom of great trees would open paths as broad as cathedral aisles among the pillared boles.
That was the direction from which the horns had called.
Ritter pushed his way downhill. Where possible he squeezed through or ducked under the tangled, odorous branches. When necessary, his powerful arms tore a passage. He was used to moving swiftly in the complex passages of his own workroom.
On standby status at present, none of the engineer's equipment had an electromagnetic signature on which the lizardmen could home, but their instruments had obviously registered the intrusion itself. He needed to put some distance between himself and the insertion site.
A cloud of insects, flies or dull-colored bees, rose from the magnolia stems and swarmed around Ritter's face. Some of them settled on his skin, drinking his sweat or sticking to it. He squinted, hoping the insects would stay out of his eyes.
The dragonfly read-out was sliding toward the low end of functional. Ritter corrected it.
If he'd done his job, there wouldn't have been any need for the override switch.
Ritter had coupled his passive sensors to a mechanical plotting table because he didn't want to risk the electronic signature of even a liquid crystal display. Three styluses jolted suddenly onto a positive bearing.
Ritter unslung his shoulder weapon and pumped the fore-end to chamber the first round. The click-clack, scarcely louder than the insects' buzzing, made him wince.
A horn sounded its brassy challenge from the forest margin. Three Lomeri scouts riding ceratosaurs strode into view. Vines and bits of undergrowth fluttered behind their powerful bipedal mounts.
Ritter held his breath. The leading scout clucked. The trio charged across the meadow in line abreast, aiming their short carbines one-handed as if they were lances.
The lizardmen were headed for the hilltop. They would not pass within twenty meters of where the engineer huddled near the lower edge of the magnolia thicket.
Ritter moved only his head, trying to keep the Lomeri in sight through gaps in the branches and dark green leaves. He hadn't had time to deploy the miniature optical periscope he'd brought along. Anyway, it might have gotten in his way if he needed to snap off a shot. . . .
For a moment the engineer wondered what would happen if the dragonfly reappeared just as the lizardmen reached the hilltop.
He'd seen Hansen move when it was time to kill. Ritter would bet on him again.
Muddy dirt splashed up beneath the ceratosaurs' great clawed feet. The ten-meter-long carnivores moved with birdlike jerkiness. Each beast had a short, blunt nose horn and a mouthful of daggerlike teeth.
They were passing him by. . . .
The nearest of the ceratosaurs paused. Its Lomeri rider snarled and kicked it with spike-roweled spurs. The carnivore ignored the punishment and twisted its head toward Ritter's hiding place. Its rider tugged on the reins.
The beast flared its nostrils. It had scented warm-blooded prey.
The Lomeri leader turned to chirrup up a complaint to the lagging scout. Nictitating membranes clouded and cleared as the slit-pupiled lizard eyes followed the line of the ceratosaur's interest.
Ritter fired at the nearest scout.
A magnolia branch caught the muzzle of his rifle as he swung it on target; the powerful duplex round struck low, in the carnosaur's haunch behind the protective hemisphere of the Lomeri force screen. The initial explosion blew a hole the size of a washtub in the beast's hide, and the follower projectile smashed the pelvis like a dropped glass before exiting on the other side.
The Lomeri leader swung his weapon past the crests of his mount and fired. A bolt of saffron energy crisped ten square meters of bushes, halfway between Ritter and the lizardman.
Ritter aimed and squeezed the trigger. There was a blue flash on the Lomeri forcefield, a second flash in the center of the lizardman's chest, and a spray of bright blood in the air as the creature went over the crupper of its saddle while its mount curvetted.
Though Ritter had missed the nearest scout, the lizardman's crippled, dying mount thrashed on the ground where it had thrown its rider under the bullet's goad. The beast's slashing legs flung leaves, magnolia branches, and bloody dirt in the air.
The third scout was aiming his—
The air in a spherical section around Ritter went bright yellow.
The engineer could see nothing but the enveloping afterimage. The back and breast pods of his forcefield generator glowed white with the overload, searing Ritter despite their thick asbestos padding. Deflected radiance blasted a ten-meter semicircle from the thicket, reducing the thick stems to carbon skeletons and completely vaporizing the foliage.
But the forcefield which Ritter designed and wore held against the direct hit.
He couldn't see the Lomeri scout because his retinas still pulsed from the lizardman's bolt. The engineer fired twice, aiming roughly along the radius of the blackened arc.
His bullets snapped blue sparks against the blur of light. As vision returned, he saw the third ceratosaur running riderless across the meadow.
The dragonfly's control read-out had risen into the red zone. Ritter screamed a curse and thrust it back into the green with the rotary switch.
He stumbled deeper into the magnolias. The thicket which had sheltered him was a charred waste that would draw the attention of every lizardman on this side of the planet. Of course, now that his forcefield generator was live, Lomeri instruments could home on it.
Three steps into the undisturbed magnolias, Ritter ran head on into another Lomeri on a ceratosaur.
The lizardman shrilled a curse and tried to aim his energy weapon over the head of his mount. The ceratosaur's gullet was mottled black and yellow; its breath stank like an abattoir.
Ritter pointed his short rifle as if it were a pistol and fired reflexively. The heavy recoil would have torn the weapon from the hand of a weaker man. The engineer noticed only the flash of heat as his initial projectile struck the Lomeri force screen and vaporized.
Metal plasma recondensed on the nearest solid objects, plating Ritter's gun muzzle and freezing in black microcrystals over his leading hand and wrist. The back of the ceratosaur's high-domed head blew away.
The dinosaur leaped high in an autonomic spasm. One of its legs flung Ritter backward, though the engineer's own forcefield prevented the black claws from rending him.
The lizardman spun out of his saddle, his weapon flying in an opposing parabola. Magnolias crackled when the Lomeri hit, then continued to rustle as the disarmed scout fled in panic.
Ritter got to his feet and ran toward the hilltop. The dragonfly's read-out was still in the green zone.
Bellowing and the calls of brass trumpets sounded from the forest. The Lomeri main force was coming up swiftly. From the sound the draft animals made, they were much larger than those the scouts had ridden.
Ritter wondered how far he could run before they caught him.
And he wondered when the dragonfly would return.