Chapter Forty-nine

The metal facing ran as Hansen's arc licked the doorleaves ahead of him. The audience hall's barred entrance tore apart in a blast of fire, charcoal, oak splinters, and the blue-white electrical tongue which flashed the portal into an orgy of self-destruction.

"There's troops comin' down the hallway towards us!" warned Shill behind him.

Hansen kicked at the center of the shattered doorleaves, where he thought the bar ought to be. He hoped Shill wouldn't decide to give the door an extra slash and get Hansen's boot instead, but at this point most actions had to be reflexive and you took your chances.

Something clanged away from the kick, an arc-severed bar or twists of decorative strap. Nothing that would have hindered the onrush of Hansen's close-coupled body wrapped in a hundred kilos of armor, but he was back on trained reflex. He hadn't worn a battlesuit until he arrived on Northworld—

A couple lifetimes ago.

Hansen crashed into the hall in a cloud of sparks and splinters. His AI instantly adjusted the visual displays to a preset 100% of normal daylight intensity, brightening the dim room.

"Blue Group," ordered Nils Hansen, "keep the rest of them off my back. I'll handle what's in here."

"Who are you?" boomed the Emperor Venkatna. His battlesuit was decorated in royal blue with ermine trim.

Venkatna stood at the right side of his wife's bier; behind him, Race and Julia stirred from their trances within the Web. Half a dozen slaves and palace functionaries cowered where the irruption had caught them in the large room, but there were no armored warriors except the emperor.

"I'm the guy who's come for you," said Nils Hansen as he eased forward. Arcs sputtered between his thumbs and forefingers. The flux was so dense that its color verged on the ultraviolet. "I'm what you earned for yourself."

"I earned glory!" Venkatna shouted. "I earned honor and worship!"

"Oh, no," Hansen said. His amplified voice rasped like a tiger's tongue. "That's not at all what I bring you, Venkatna."

The arc from Hansen's right gauntlet flicked four meters toward the emperor's helmet. Venkatna parried expertly. Madness hadn't destroyed his warrior's skills, and his suit was of royal quality.

Illumination by the snarling discharges lighted Esme's face deeper into the bluish glaze of death. Venkatna glanced aside at the corpse. As if the sight shocked him back to memory and reality, the emperor shouted, "Slaves! Make my enemies go away!"

Race's mouth gaped as she settled back. Julia had not risen from her bench. Her eyes closed, but her lips murmured, "Your orders are . . ."

Hansen lunged. He had to get past Venkatna to disrupt the Web before—

A railgun bolt, invisible save as a track of fluorescent plasma, lighted ten meters of the audience hall. The bier and the empress' corpse disintegrated under the impact and hypersonic shockwave.

Bits of the Web, shattered when the slug clipped through them, danced down on the Searchers like crystal rain.

"I wanted peace for the West Kingdom," Hansen said as he advanced slowly. "You turned it into a cancer."

His paired arcs extended twenty centimeters or so, killing range against anything short of another royal suit. When he struck home, it would be with one gauntlet or the other, not both.

The weapons pulsed slightly, forming a wave like the kerf of a metal-cutting saw.

"Who are you?" Venkatna screamed. He lunged, his arc extending in a sudden thrust.

Hansen parried with his left hand. He swiped at the emperor's helmet with his right. Venkatna's screens held in a roar and a momentary nimbus filling much of the hall. Paint scorched; bits of plaster dropped from the decorated vaults.

The emperor stumbled backward. Hansen continued his slow advance. The kill to come shimmered in Hansen's mind.

"I can't bring back the ones you starved to death," Hansen said. He spoke with the care of a man talking in a foreign language. All the animal parts of his brain were concerned with the animal processes of staying alive in combat; only the deeply-buried intellect formed words. "Worked to death. Killed."

Race and Julia stood against the wall, hugging one another for support. Neither woman looked capable of casting a shadow. They watched the battle with a hungry avidity, their eyes as bright as hawks'.

The probability generator had disintegrated when its integrity was broken. Its remnants lay on the floor like colored sand. Venkatna's boots streaked the granules as he backed between the benches on which the Searchers had lain.

Hansen feinted left, struck with his right. Venkatna threw himself backward from another crash and blue corona. Clerestory windows popped with the transient currents surging through them.

"But I'll send you the same place, Venkatna," Hansen promised softly. "Or a worse one."

"Watch—" Race warned in a shrill voice.

In Hansen's mind: the emperor dived toward his opponent. Venkatna's body was a spearshaft and the arc from his right glove the spear's cutting head.

In Hansen's mind.

Hansen leaped into the air as Venkatna dived forward. He didn't bother to block the emperor's thrust. Venkatna's weapon blasted a trench half a meter deep in the stone floor.

Hansen's boots crashed down on the emperor's back. His arc chopped. His gauntlet blazed in direct contact with its target. The flooring shuddered again as it drank the residual impact of Hansen's weapon.

The helmet of the Emperor Venkatna rolled away from the remainder of the battlesuit. It came to rest against the fungus-tinted cheek of his empress. The slug that smashed Esme's body had spared as much of her head as survived decay.

Hansen rose from the corpse of his opponent. The air shimmered like stress cracks deep within black ice. A pair of dragonflies appeared before Race and Julia.

"Bless you, Lord Hansen!" the emaciated women whispered. They threw themselves aboard their mounts.

Air popped in the place they had been. Freed by Venkatna's death, the Searchers rode home through the Matrix.

The doorway to the audience hall had been blasted ten meters wide and as high as the ceiling vaults. The armored carcases of at least a score of Venkatna's troops lay beyond in desperate profusion. It would be difficult to count the dead with certainty, because of the number of lopped limbs and torsos.

Body cavities still steamed from the arcs that had seared them open. Blazing draperies and lathes from the plaster work softened the carnage with gray smoke.

Only one member of Hansen's Blue Group remained: Shill, still upright though his bumblebee battle colors were blistered in a dozen places by cuts that missed lethality by a hair.

He turned and saluted Hansen with his arc. "Until the Final Day, milord," he cried.

Even as his armored soul vanished back to North's round of death and slaughter, Shill added, "We did 'em up proper this time! Didn't we, buddy?"

Hansen was almost too exhausted to stand. His arms throbbed from the oven heat of his gauntlets. His lungs felt as though they had been torn out and used to scour paving-stones.

But that was all right, that would pass.

Not even gods could bring the dead to life.

Swearing through his tears, Nils Hansen hurled himself into the icy Matrix, on his way to an empty home.