Chapter Thirty-five

"Who would have thought it?" Lena murmured in a glutinous, good-humored voice.

The image of Lisa's vehicle exploding rolled in looped slow motion on a corner of Lena's screen. The tank's outline brightened and blurred as current surged through it. Steam bubbled from the water flowing around the skirts.

"Karring!" Count Starnes snarled. "Did Lisa get out? She had plenty of time to get out, didn't she?"

The image of the hatch blew off, puffing a perfect smoke ring into the sky. A heavier explosion bulged the hull's armored flanks. The turret lifted a hundred meters in the air, spinning like a flipped coin. The solid casting came down in the distant forest, while steam roared to cool and shroud the glowing hull.

"Who'd have thought it?" Lena repeated, chuckling over the utter dissolution of her sister.

"Milord," said be chief engineer in a distant voice, "we'll be able to determine casualties when we've accomplished our purpose. For the moment, the target is still loose."

Karring sat at an outstation in the Citadel's rotunda instead of his normal lair deep within APEX. The device he had created to modulate the Matrix hung in the air above him. On the chief engineer's console, the Fleet Battle Director used color and three dimensions to simulate the greater ambiance in which the intruder could move whenever he chose—

But he didn't choose. Without further data, not even APEX could make Karring's trap perfect.

"Another skinny one," Lena said. "But a clever little bastard, isn't he, boys?"

Her console displayed a full groundplan of Keep Starnes at the intruder's present level. Overlaid on the schematic were visuals of Lisa's death and—across the main screen—an image of Hansen in the waste outlet. The fabric of Keep Starnes was woven with sensors to determine the health and status of every portion of the keep's systems. A Fleet Battle Director was capable of converting heat, pressure and vibration into a three-dimensional picture—

So Lena could watch a stocky, filth-smeared man advancing relentlessly into the heart of the keep.

"I'm sure she got out before the—the explosion," Count Starnes muttered.

"What's he doing now, Lena?" whispered Voightman, the lover in iridescent posing briefs, in the ear of the count's surviving daughter.

"What are you going to do to him?" asked Plaid from Lena's other side. As usual, his costume involved studded leather and decorated pistols.

"Watch and see, dearie," Lena said as she reached up without looking to massage Plaid's bulging groin. "First we close the outflow again . . ."

Plaid hooked his thumbs in his groin cup to evert it and display himself to his mistress, but Lena's attention had returned fully to her workstation. The shudder of the waste gate slamming at the woman's direction could be felt through bedrock to the Citadel if one knew what to expect.

"I don't see why it opened in the first place," said Count Starnes. Starnes shook his head at memories which replayed as surely in his mind as they did on Lena's console.

"Because . . . ," said Karring. The chief engineer was so concentrated on his own screen that he didn't recognize his master's question as rhetorical. "All the keep's systems are interconnected. A power cable, a door control—APEX itself, though APEX is protected. He's using the system's own pathways to introduce commands."

The intruder stopped. He leaned his helmeted forehead against the tunnel's dripping wall. The waterlevel in the main channel was rising, though it was still well below the walkway.

"What's he doing?" Lena muttered. "There's nothing there but blank concrete."

Voightman preened and nuzzled closer to his mistress. Lena appeared oblivious of Voightman and the fact she had echoed his words of a moment before. Sweat gleamed on his body, from anticipation and the heat which radiated when the console worked at full capacity. Droplets splashed onto the gleaming rhodium plate of the workstation.

APEX threw the answer across Lena's display as a line of lime-green block letters which contrasted with both underlayers:

subject's command helmet is emitting ultrasonics at the sympathetic frequency of

Hansen's image stepped back. He kicked the tunnel wall with a bootheel. A one-by-two-meter section of cast plastic collapsed into powder.

"What?" cried Starnes' daughter.

the polymer plug which was inserted into the outflow pipe at the close of keep construction.

"That's not on my plans!" Lena shouted. "How did he know that there was a sealed tunnel there? His plans can't be better than mine!"

"Perhaps he's echo-sounding," Karring murmured as the shape and colors on his display changed almost imperceptibly.

the subject is not echo-sounding, replied the Fleet Battle Director.

Lena angrily stabbed at her manual controls. She was too angry to limit herself to mental input. Though her wrists were bloated white sausages, her fingers were surprisingly delicate. They shifted the layers of schematic and simulacrum to follow the intruder through the ancient construction boring. Hansen's image lost some definition.

Karring's face suddenly froze. "For god's sake, woman!" he blurted.

He caught himself and resumed, "That is—milady? You've opened the outlet gate again, haven't you? If the level in the tunnel rises much further while this hole is open, it will drain down. We don't know precisely down where."

Lena swore. A fleck of light on her schematic switched from yellow to green, lost in the mass of detail to anyone but an expert like the huge woman herself. The vague ringing of the pumps changed.

gate is open, APEX responded across Karring's display in response to the chief engineer's surreptitious question.

The emotional temperature in the Citadel had changed. Plaid and Voightman were nervous. They didn't understand what was happening, only that something had gone wrong for their mistress; and they knew Lena well enough to understand how dangerous she could be when she was angry.

"I don't see how you can raise a door through a power socket," Count Starnes muttered as he wrung his hands together. "And Lisa . . . "

"If there weren't a connection between the electrical system and the gate motors, the motors wouldn't work, would they?" Karring snapped. Only the fact that his master listened with no more of his brain free than the chief engineer spoke saved Karring's life at that moment.

"Now, the computing power that can trace the pathway and counterfeit the proper instructions, that is very interesting," the chief engineer added more calmly.

"He's reached Level FF," Lena announced. "He's coming out through a ceiling vent in the main auditorium on that level. Now I'll get him."

"Now!" Voightman repeated in a husky whisper. Plaid didn't speak. He was slowly masturbating himself through his leather briefs.

The image above Lena's schematic sharpened: there were visual inputs in the large room as well as the wide variety of other sensors by which APEX had tracked the intruder thus far.

A grating fell away. Hansen followed it. He landed on his toes and kept his balance after the drop.

Moving swiftly but with no sign of panic, the intruder crossed to a door and left the auditorium. The cameras tracked him down a corridor of closed doors.

"Where are the personnel?" Count Starnes asked in surprise. "FF40 is troop leaders' quarters. There should be someone out, surely?"

For a moment, no one answered. Lena hissed a curse and made a manual correction with her controls.

"Ah . . . ," said Karring. He nodded cautiously toward Lena. "Your daughter has ordered all personnel to their quarters and locked them in. I'm not sure . . . ?"

"Now!" Lena snarled. Blast doors slammed down to seal off the hundred-meter section of corridor through which Hansen strode. The ceiling vents pivoted shut. Dense yellow gas poured from the floor louvers.

"Halons to suffocate flame," the fat woman chortled. "They'll suffocate him, too!"

"His helmet has provided him with filters," Karring noted in a distant voice.

The intruder rested his helmeted forehead against a switch-plate controlling the corridor lights.

"He won't be able to—" Lena said. The blast door slid sideways, delayed only by the inertia of its great mass.

The Fleet Battle Director followed Hansen as he slipped through before the barrier was fully open. Water gurgled from a 10-cm wall outlet, onto the floor of the next section of corridor.

"What are you doing, Lena?" Count Starnes asked in puzzlement.

"I'm not doing it!" his daughter replied. "This bastard has opened the standpipe valves! The vents will flood if I don't keep them closed. I'll kill him for what he's doing to my system!"

The intruder entered an elevator, then brought his helmet in contact with the controls. The cage began to drop. It wasn't coupled, as it should have been, to another cage. This bank of elevators stopped two levels up from the Citadel.

"Wait," the count said sharply. "He's coming this way. That's what we want him to do. We'll simply let him come."

"I want him to come here through his Matrix," Karring objected. "Remember, we haven't had half a dozen visits from this one to refine our calculations, as we did with Fortin."

The chief engineer licked his lips nervously. "I think we need to release the personnel and set the mechanical locks. No matter how powerful his command helmet's computing capability, it won't be able to work a manually-set bolt on the opposite side of a barrier."

"No," said Lena as her schematic shifted to a new level.

"Milady, we must—" Karring began.

Lena moved with the sudden smoothness of a whale broaching. She drew the pistol from the holster slung to her couch and sent a bolt of charged particles toward Karring's head.

The chief engineer ducked at the first motion. A bank of imaging controls behind him went white and slumped as the bolt's thunderclap rocked the Citadel.

"Daughter!" the count snapped.

Lena dropped her pistol onto the floor of her console. The weapon's glowing muzzle discolored a patch of the plating. The air was sulphurous with the reek of the discharge.

Lena resumed tracking her target. "I will kill him," she growled to herself. "When he leaves the elevator. I will!"

"Yes . . . ," Voightman purred as he rubbed his groin against the back of his mistress' couch.