Fortin slipped through the Matrix like a silverfish crawling between the pages of a book. His soft, cling-soled footgear stepped without a tremor onto the floor of a corridor within Count Starnes' fortress.
Fortin was on one of the lower levels of Keep Starnes, beneath many layers of shielding. Except for one of the cleaning personnel in an orange uniform, sucking grit from the thin carpet with a static broom, the men and women in the corridor wore blue serge outfits. They belonged to units which directly supported the army.
Fortin in his light-bending cape was completely invisible to them.
A colonel in magenta and gold strode down the hall like a battleship under way, looking neither to his right nor his left. He had a train of six subordinates—all of them in blue. Even the lowliest of the elite who crewed Count Starnes' war vehicles was too grand a personage to perform in a servile capacity within the keep.
Civilians stood at attention against the sides of the corridor. The cleaner knelt and pressed his forehead to the dull green carpet. His broom whined unattended. The cleaner's hand patted the floor in tiny arcs, hoping to find the off switch. He was afraid to open his eyes to guide his movements.
Fortin fell into line at the end of the colonel's entourage.
They came to a rotunda. Armored doors hung ready to seal any or all the corridors which starred off from this center. The civilians present were in the retinues of the score or more soldiers striding along on their business. This deep within Keep Starnes, each corridor was a community from which civilian staff members moved only upon direct orders of the military.
There were six sets of paired elevators in the center of the rotunda. The colonel stepped into one cage; his servants got into the other half of the pair.
Fortin, grinning with the spice of near-danger, hopped into the cage behind the colonel.
This side of the elevator had a full set of controls, but the colonel did not deign to touch them. The cages dropped together, under the direction of one of the servants.
The elevator stopped four levels down, just above the Citadel. The atmosphere pulsed with the life of the keep itself: relays which clicked like beetles mating; the soft susurrus of the ventilation system; the hollow echo of water which had seeped through the rock walls of the enormous structure, being pumped up to the surface for disposal with the sewage.
The tremble of the Fleet Battle Director operating in the Citadel beneath was omnipresent.
The colonel got off and strode down an empty corridor. He didn't bother to look to see that his entourage had fallen into place behind him.
Fortin tapped the control for Citadel level as the elevator door began to close. The cameras which peered from all four corners of the cage ceiling could not see his smile of superiority.
The elevator resumed its descent. Fortin prepared to slip out quickly when the cage stopped.
Fortin knew he was the cleverest of all those who lived in Northworld. There was no situation from which his cunning would not extricate him; and anyway, he could always escape through the Matrix.
But there was no point in taking risks. . . .
"He's entered Elevator Four with Colonel Markesan," said Karring. "He's coming here, as we expected."
The Citadel was the lowest inhabited level of Keep Starnes. Its rotunda had a forty-meter ceiling, but a far greater mass of metal and crystalline armor separated the Citadel from the nearest portion of the keep above it.
The single corridor that led off from the rotunda held the nodular immensity of APEX, a computer capable of controlling the largest battle fleets of the Consensus of Worlds. It was now the domain of Karring, Count Starnes' chief engineer.
"Why doesn't Markesan see him?" Count Starnes asked. He was stocky and very broad; a physically-powerful man whose uniform was tailored to conceal the extra weight of middle age.
Starnes' build ran true to the dominant genotype on Plane Five—on Earth, Starnes would have said, though there were still folk who used the name Northworld. Northworld was a term from the distant past, associated with the myth that humans had come from a wholly different planet to settle here. . . .
Lena, Starnes' elder daughter, operated from one of the four remote consoles in the rotunda. She reclined like a huge spider at the heart of a web formed by all the systems of Keep Starnes which fed into her semi-circular workstation. "Markesan couldn't find his ass with both hands," she said. "Or," she added with a giggle, "his prick."
The pair of lovers standing behind Lena's contoured chair chuckled with practiced appreciation. Both wore leather briefs; one of them had added a studded leather cross-belt and balanced pistol holsters as ornamentation. The men were as thick-set as their mistress, but their bodies were densely muscular while Lena was fat. A sheen of oil glistened on their skins.
"The intruder is shielding himself from all normal observation," Karring explained. At his mental direction, APEX projected a holographic image of the elevator's interior in the air above Count Starnes. "We can't see him either."
Colonel Markesan stood in a formal at-ease posture, even though he must have believed himself to be unobserved. There was nothing near him but the walls of the descending elevator.
"It might not be him," said Lisa, Starnes' other daughter. "It might be her."
Lena guffawed. The count turned away to conceal a smile.
Lisa was a sport, a throwback to a body type which had become increasingly rare in Plane Five's limited gene pool. She was as tall as her father, but she weighed less than a third of his hundred-and-sixty kilograms. Where her elder sister wore a net bra and crotchless briefs, Lisa affected the uniform of a private soldier.
"We'll know soon enough," Karring said mildly. "I'm going to Bay 20 to prepare for our visitor."
"Well, it might be," Lisa muttered.
She lifted the bulky helmet fabricated to Karring's specifications. The face of the helmet was solid and featureless. A ten-centimeter tube stuck out to either side, like the periscopic lenses of a range-finder hood. She put the helmet on.
Air began to sigh in the single elevator shaft which penetrated the Citadel's cap.
"And I'll get ready too," said Count Starnes with a tone of satisfaction. At last he would face a new kind of enemy; an enemy who might provide the challenge which he no longer found in grinding to dust the neighboring keeps on Earth.
The squat master of Keep Starnes opened the hatch in the rear face of his personal war vehicle, a miniaturized tank three meters long and almost equally broad. The tank's frontal armor of collapsed uranium sloped at a 70° angle. It was thick enough to resist even a slug of the same material fired from a railgun like the tank's own weapon.
The interior of the vehicle fitted Count Starnes like a glove. All the available space was filled by the operator, the railgun, or the fusion powerplant on which the tank's weapon and repulsion drive depended. Additional internal volume would require additional armor to protect it. The present defensive load was at the limits of what a magnetic flux could raise a workable distance above the surface.
The hatch clanged shut. The vehicle quivered as Starnes brought its systems to life.
In the huge curving screen in front of Lena, a three-dimensional schematic of Keep Starnes spread with the complexity of a taproot's microstructure. Passages were color-coded as to purpose and level. There were almost a hundred shades in the pattern, and Lena recognized every one of them.
The display changed as APEX responded to the huge woman's mental directions. Her lovers preened and posed behind her couch, waiting patiently for the next demand on their particular skills. They knew from experience that their mistress' requirements would not be long in coming.
The Fleet Battle Director extended over twenty bays, offset from one another so that the corridor between them jogged like a series of square waves. Though Karring walked quickly, it took him over a minute to reach his destination.
A tracery of wires hung in the air above the entrance to Bay 20 without physical connection to any other solid object. Karring looked at it in grim satisfaction. The object's existence was only partly within the dimension in which it had been built. APEX converted into a map display the changes in potential which the device recognized.
If ordered, APEX could modulate the device that looked like no more than a wire cage; and through the device, the fabric of spacetime. . . .