Chapter Nine

The cage of Fortin's elevator opened into the armored heart of APEX.

With the right will and mind controlling it, a Fleet Battle Director could design weapons and draft tactics superior by an order of magnitude to those of any other keep on the planet. Count Starnes' was the will, Karring's the subtle mind. Together they could succeed within their generation in reducing all hostile keeps—all civilization on Plane Five outside Keep Starnes itself—to smoking ruin.

Fortin had observed the beginning of their destruction with a pleasure greater than any he achieved during brief moments of sexual climax. He grinned as he stepped once more into the Citadel, concealed in his wrapper of bent light. The keep's technicians would spend days tracing the fault in the elevator system which had caused a pair of cages to descend to Citadel level, but they would find nothing. . . .

A high-pitched alarm signal began to warble. The sound was not loud, but it cut through the vibration which funnelled from the corridor containing APEX.

Fortin frowned. The alarm was new, and so were other aspects of the Citadel. . . .

Four remote consoles were spaced around the periphery of the rotunda. In the center of the circular room was the bank of elevators. The figure walking toward the elevators—toward Fortin—must be Lisa, because there was virtually no one else in Keep Starnes so thin.

A bulbous helmet with horns and shoulder braces covered her head. It was apparently opaque, because she moved with the care of a blind man in an unfamiliar room. Lisa swivelled her torso, back and forth like a scythe stroke, every time she placed her foot.

Her sister, Lena, lay as usual in the center of a huge console. She concentrated on a display which, to Fortin's cursory glance and lack of interest, appeared to be a palette of blurred pastels. Her body gleamed with a thin film of sweat.

The huge woman's current pair of lovers stood—or posed—behind her couch. They flexed muscles and plucked nervously at their harness as they watched Lisa's deliberate progress across the rotunda. The lovers had no part in present events, but they obviously felt they were at risk.

Karring wasn't in the rotunda, but that was no surprise. The Chief Engineer's normal lair was Bay 20, at the far end of the APEX corridor. Others were not barred from entering that sanctum—Starnes and his daughters would have flayed alive anyone, even Karring, who presumed to dictate where they could or could not go in their own keep. Nonetheless, Karring was important enough to be allowed his privacy, so long as it didn't become a point of honor. Keep Starnes was a huge place, and its rulers had no desire to visit every cranny of their domain.

Count Starnes was not visible either, but the tank across the rotunda from Lena's console was alive and ready for action. The elevator shafts had been cleared so that the massive vehicle could be lowered into the Citadel. It was always parked here, where it provided Starnes last refuge against an enemy who had penetrated the myriad lines of defense above.

Fortin had never before seen the tank with its systems up.

The railgun's fat barrel was pointed only generally in the intruder's direction. A slug from that weapon could penetrate a hundred meters into living rock. A human as close to the muzzle as Fortin was would splash if the meteor-swift projectile struck him. Even a human with the powers of a god. . . .

Fortin smiled and shivered. He pretended to himself that he was unaware of the danger, but the danger itself was what brought him to this place of war.

"Try to your right," Lena called. She could pivot her couch to watch her sister, but she didn't choose to do so.

Lisa obediently turned and took another step—toward Fortin. She was still about ten meters away.

Real concern blanked the frown from the half-android's face. He walked across the rotunda with the quick, stiff steps of a dog in a modest hurry.

Fortin understood the operation of Lisa's helmet now. The short booms to either side projected coherent light. The interference pattern the beams should form where they crossed five meters from the source was calibrated to within angstroms. The slightest variation in the path of one of the beams would disrupt the pattern—

And locate the intruder, despite the near perfection of his light-bending suit, with precision.

"He's heading for APEX!" Lena shouted. She leaned forward in the heat of excitement; her couch rolled up to follow her, continuing to cradle the woman's head and shoulders.

Fortin did not understand where Lena's console got its input. It seemed to be only an approximation, but not even that should have been possible to Starnes' daughter. They were using the Fleet Battle Director to track him. Fortin needed to learn how.

His heart was beating fast, though there was no real risk. The elevators were too dangerous for Fortin to attempt again, but he could escape directly into the Matrix.

Not, however, before he learned how Karring had detected his presence. It had to be Karring.

Lisa followed Fortin down the corridor at a quicker shuffle. The two of them were playing a game of blind-man's buff, but the quarry could move. There was no risk, even though Lisa wore the pistol holster that was a badge of rank on Plane Five.

The corridor was five meters broad, but it jogged repeatedly where the banks of equipment projected farthest into it. APEX lowered over its surroundings like a giant carnivore bearing down on prey.

The Fleet Battle Director was constructed in twenty linked nodes. The designers' intention was both to minimize battle damage from a single hit and to provide shielding between segments so that sets of operations would not interfere fratricidally with one another. The armored bays contained individual input and output hardware. Input was via the operator's mental command, if so desired, or through a number of physical options. Primary output came in the form of holographic images which glowed in the air above each terminal.

Meter-thick conduits cross-connected the nodes and snaked through the walls of the Citadel, putting APEX in uninterruptible touch with every aspect of Keep Starnes. High overhead, the corridor ceiling crowded with a maze of lesser lines and the girders which supported them.

So close to APEX, the air was alive with a chittering like that of myriad goats, gnawing at the fabric of the universe.

Fortin walked on. His smile was becoming fixed. There was only a dim glow in the unoccupied bays he passed. Lisa's grotesquely distorted silhouette followed, backlit by the faint ambiance reflecting in from the rotunda.

The terminal at the far end of APEX was lighted. Rapidly-changing holographic displays modulated the pool of radiance which spilled from the bay into the corridor.

Karring was responsible. . . .

"He's still ahead of you," Lena directed her sister. Her throaty contralto rang from the speakers in the ceiling of each alcove. Their varying distance from Fortin blurred the words into reptilian menace.

Fortin reached Bay 20. Behind him, Lisa began to jog forward.

Karring sat upright at a terminal not dissimilar from the outstation at which Lena performed in the rotunda. Between the bald, aging engineer and the display hung a one-meter globe. Only careful study showed that it was constructed of matter rather than light. It glittered as it spun unsupported.

On the display—

Fortin squinted as his eyes tried to focus on holographic lines that seemed to be not quite in the same plane of existence. It was a pattern of translucent octohedrons with mass and depth that went beyond the three spacial dimensions; they were distorted, and as APEX twisted the globe in response to a silent order from Karring—

"I see—" Lisa cried from the mouth of the bay.

Fortin's jamming pods fired a blast of radiance matched to the helmet's input frequency. He ran back down the corridor, past Lisa.

Six of Count Starnes' soldiers poised in the shadows above Bay 18. In preparation for this moment, the cables had been removed from the conduit feeding that node and two others. The armored tubes now provided secret paths into the Citadel. Special troops crawled into position while Lisa drew the intruder's attention.

A mesh as fine as spidersilk drifted down onto Fortin from the maze of pipes and wires in the corridor ceiling. The strands were monomolecular. Any one of them was strong enough to serve as the tow-rope of a truck.

The pattern on Karring's display slipped over itself, torquing and rotating until one of the octohedrons was crushed almost to non-existence. The Chief engineer turned. He smiled.

The net tightened.

Fortin's brain was ice cold. He shifted himself into the Matrix, conscious only of his need to escape.

He couldn't move in the Matrix, either. Fortin's right hand clutched and wriggled in the free ambiance that was all eight planes and the paths between them—but only his hand. The vent that should have sucked the god in as the surface of a pool does a diver did not form.

Karring's globe spun faster as it distorted. The grip of the Matrix on Fortin's wrist was fiercer yet. He began to scream.

Glowing with the nimbus created by induced magnetic fields, moving at a walking pace, Count Starnes' tank slid down the corridor.

The bore of its railgun was centered on Fortin's chest.