"I hurt," said Hansen, "all over."
He kneaded his thighs viciously as he walked. At least fighting in a battlesuit didn't leave hands cramped the way Hansen's fierce grip on a gun butt invariably did.
Malcolm raised an eyebrow. "You look like you're in shape," he said. "It was a good workout, but . . ."
Hansen checked the double quartet of slaves sullenly carrying the warriors' armor. Malcolm had dragooned the nearest spectators without hesitation when he and Hansen agreed that they didn't feel like walking their own suits back up the half kilometer to the palisade. Furthermore, the train of slaves stumbling along behind them was an excuse for Hansen to walk slowly—and spare his aching legs.
"Yeah, well," Hansen said. "I'm in shape, all right—but I don't have the muscles for this particular job. Every piece of equipment you use—and that's as true of a rake as it is of a battlesuit—it takes a little different set of muscles."
A calculated risk.
"But—" said the veteran.
Hansen gripped Malcolm's right hand with his own left. Because of the tan Annunciation's sun had given Hansen, their skin was almost the same shade.
That wouldn't be true long—if he lived.
"Listen, Malcolm," he said. "Where I come from, we don't fight with battlesuits. We've got other weapons, that's all. It doesn't mean I'm not a warrior."
The two men continued to walk, hand in hand. Malcolm's expression was unreadable. Then he broke into a smile and said, "No, I don't doubt that you're a warrior."
He clapped Hansen on the back. "If Zieborn wasn't enough proof," he added, "what you did to me this morning surely is. You'll have to teach me some of those tricks."
They'd reached the palisade. The odor of Peace Rock assailed them, though the fact the citadel was on high ground meant there was some drainage.
Hansen nodded seriously. "I'll teach you all of them," he said. "There's still a lot to learn about this armor, and everything I learn, you and, you know, the others. They'll have to learn too, Maharg and Shill."
Malcolm sniffed. "Maybe Maharg," he said, concentrating on his feet. There were boardwalks between the huts, but many sections had sunk down into the mud.
"Both of them," Hansen said. "And later, all the rest after we've shown them that it works. We'll start this afternoon."
Malcolm laughed and strode ahead of his companion. "You can play with your armor this afternoon, laddie," he called back over his shoulder. "Nancy and I have some other exercises in mind—particularly seeings as I may get my balls whacked off in three days time!"
There was food being served in the hall. Hansen made do with beer, a slab of cheese and a wedge—torn rather than cut—from a round loaf of bread. Shill and Maharg had cornered Malcolm, though Malcolm continued to slake his thirst without apparent interest in what his hangers-on were saying.
Hansen decided to leave them all alone for the moment. He made sure that his battlesuit was stowed properly, then walked outdoors, munching on his bread.
There were a number of new warriors in the citadel. Some of the men had traveled with their own retinue of freemen, slaves, and baggage mammoths. The king was going to war, the king was hiring warriors.
Most of the would-be recruits lacked even their own battlesuit. Old men like Shill, youngsters like Maharg, with too little skill, training and luck to have won their own equipment.
Golsingh would pack them into whatever equipment he had available. One of those hungry-looking fellows would certainly be wearing Villiers' old suit when Taddeusz led the army out in two days' time.
And maybe the hireling would get lucky; but more likely, the new occupant would wind up the same way Villiers had, dead and forgotten almost before his corpse had frozen in the winter night.
Grit from the flour mill scrunched between Hansen's teeth. He liked the flavor of the bread, though. There were a lot of things he liked about Northworld; and a few he was quite sure that he was going to change, whatever else he did here—if he survived.
Hansen stepped into the smithy, now crowded with new arrivals whose battlesuits required repairs. He'd been fortunate in his timing. A few hours later, after these recruits had arrived and been issued units which needed repair, Hansen wouldn't've had the time he needed to practice with the unfamiliar hardware.
One of apprentices lay on the couch in the center of the shed. Ore was piled on the chest of the armor beside him.
Vasque was arguing with three warriors, each of whom stood beside what Hansen was coming to recognize as a (damaged) battlesuit of reasonable quality. Meanwhile, several lower-status warriors were trying to badger the other apprentice, though the boy was obviously too exhausted even to give coherent answers to the demands being fired at him.
Hansen moved in. "You lot," he snapped. "Get out of the way. You'll be taken care of in good time—better time than you deserve, at any rate."
He sat down beside the apprentice. The hired warriors backed unwillingly, but Hansen's assumption of rank made that rank real among these newcomers—and perhaps generally real in the Peace Rock pecking order.
There were slaves standing against the walls of the single room. Hansen pointed at one and said, "Beer! Something to drink. Now!"
The slave scurried off. People—lower-status people—didn't argue about orders here on Northworld. Of course, Special Units personnel hadn't argued with Commissioner Hansen, either.
As an afterthought, Hansen offered the apprentice a chunk of his bread. The boy took it and began to worry at a corner, not so much out of hunger as in an apparent need to do whatever was put directly in front of him.
"Just how is it that you work on armor?" Hansen asked, pitching his voice reassuringly but glaring at the other warriors to keep them at a distance. "How do you know how to design the circuit architecture, for instance?"
"Uh?" said the apprentice. His eyes were dull with exhaustion. Whatever was involved in fixing battlesuits, it certainly wasn't work that did itself. "Archi . . . ?"
He blinked and focused on Hansen. The warrior's patient interest brought the youth back to the present and the ability to think.
"I go into the Matrix," he said, "and I find the piece I'm supposed to work on. Where it's different from the Matrix, I move things so that it fits. I don't—"
The slave reappeared with a skin of liquid. Hansen took the container and passed it directly to the apprentice. While the youth drank greedily, Hansen asked, "What do you mean by 'the Matrix'?"
It couldn't be whatever Walker had talked about, dimensions and planes of spacetime. . . .
"Well, you know . . . ," the apprentice said. "Though you're not a smith. . . ." His brow furrowed. "It's the way everything's put together, you know, inside.
"You're hypnotized, and the first time you need a master to guide you, but it's like—" He gestured with his hands. Beer splashed from the neck of the skin. "—feeling your way through shadows even then."
Hansen nodded gently, to show that he was interested without interrupting the flow of words.
"And it's clearer each time," the young smith said with increasing animation, "but it's still like, you know, kneading mud and ash together into the shape of the armor. Even the master—" he gestured toward Vasque.
His voice lowered conspiratorially. "Even the greatest masters," the apprentice whispered to Hansen, "I don't think they see really clear. But the closer you can mold the workpiece into the Matrix—"
"Mold it in your dreams, you mean?"
The youth shook his head.
"It's not a dream," he said firmly. "It's entering the Matrix. And it's real—" He grinned and lifted a section of thigh armor from the table behind his bench. "—as this is."
He handed the piece to Hansen. It was dense and unquestionably real.
Hansen grinned back. And then again, it might be exactly what Walker had meant; but if it was, it didn't help Hansen a lot.
"Thanks," he said as he got up. "I figured I ought to know something about the hardware, since my life depends on it now."
And that was no more than the truth.
Hansen thought he might find Shill and Maharg in the hall, so he wasn't surprised to see them at the building's entrance.
He hadn't expected to see Malcolm stamping toward the pair from one of the huts, tying the sash of his vivid tunic and glowering like a stormcloud. A female slave skipped along the boardwalk behind Malcolm, eyes bright with anticipation.
"I thought I'd take you two out for a little practice," Hansen said to Shill and Maharg while Malcolm was still three strides away. The words were an instinctive game to prove that he was both innocent and ignorant of whatever was going on.
"What in the hell is going on?" Malcolm snarled.
"Nothin'," Maharg mumbled. He was rubbing his face. His nose had bled a rusty wedge into his moustache and beard.
"There's a new lot in from the East," Shill said. " 'Bout a dozen of 'em all together."
"Seven, yeah," said Malcolm. Hansen noted the way the veteran's anger vanished as though he'd closed a door over it.
Malcolm glanced toward the hall. Sounds of laughter and a snatch of song came though the half-open doors. "Go on."
"Bastards think they're tough," Maharg said. His voice caught.
Because Maharg was so big, it was hard to remember that he was only about sixteen standard years. That didn't make him less dangerous—more dangerous, maybe—but it meant that his emotions were still on the roller-coaster of youth.
Right now, Hansen thought he might be about to cry.
"They are tough," Malcolm said coldly. "Go on."
"They threw bones at him!" Shill said. "He was braggin' about what he'd do in the next fight, and they started throwin' bones at him. And me!"
"You bloody damned fools," Hansen said, before Malcolm could speak. The words were so close to those the veteran would have spoken that Malcolm blinked to hear them from another mouth.
Hansen pointed at Shill. "You sent for him, didn't you? Grabbed a slave—" the woman who'd followed Malcolm from his ladyfriend's lodging hovered nearby "—and sent her to roust your boss?"
"Well, I thought—"
"If you'd bloody thought," Hansen snarled, his arms at his sides and his face leaning close to that of the old warrior, "then you'd've known the best way to get out of this without a loss of status was to pretend it didn't happen. What d'ye expect? That Malcolm's going in there—"
He pointed at the door with his index and middle fingers together. "—and mop up your dozen tough bastards himself?"
"Wuzzn't that many," Maharg muttered, lifting his nose high, then lowering it again despite the fact that it continued to bleed. "Fuck this. I oughta go to Frekka. They're hiring there."
Malcolm's face hardened. "No true warrior would take service under merchants," he said.
"They got good armor fer their people," Shill said. "They know how a warrior oughta be treated."
"Merchants' armor!" Malcolm snapped. "All turned out the same."
"Sure, that's easy for you ta say," sniffled Shill. "You got a first-class outfit, you do. But how about somebody like me what never had no luck?"
"You've just had your luck," Hansen said. "You met me. Now, go on in there, one at a time so nobody thinks we're starting anything—which we're not—and get your armor. I'm going to teach you how to use it."
The two hirelings, the old man and the near boy, gave Hansen identical looks of sheeplike defiance. Then Shill spit into the mud, rubbed his lips, and said, "I s'pose practice wouldn't hurt none, with a battle coming up."
He peered through the doorway, then ducked inside.
"You coming with us?" Hansen asked Malcolm.
The veteran shook his head curtly. "No," he said. "No."
But ten steps down the walkway toward his girlfriend's dwelling, Malcolm turned and called, "Maybe later. Maybe."
Hansen took a critical look at his two companions on the practice field. He understood Shill's bitter reference to armor now: the hirelings wore junk, little better than the suit in which Villiers had died.
Maharg's suit might originally have been of respectable quality, but that was in the ancient past. Now the plastron was crudely patched, and the legs had sections of varied diameter where stock pieces had been spliced in to repair damage.
Shill's armor didn't even have a distinguished pedigree. It was a collection of bits of flimsy apprentice work, welded together by another apprentice. The join lines were obvious, despite Shill's attempt to hide them with a pattern of horizontal black and yellow stripes.
"How did you guys survive the battle?" Hansen asked in genuine wonder. "Did you stick close to Malcolm?"
"Well, we were . . . ," Shill said, the electronics robbing his voice of the embarrassment Hansen was sure was present. "You know, we watched his back."
"I fought a guy," said Maharg. "He didn't, you know . . . he didn't want to get real close."
And his armor wouldn't've been an improvement over Maharg's present suit if the boy had managed to bring him down. There were a majority of hirelings like these in every army, fodder for the leavening of principal warriors.
That would change.
"Then you were smart," Hansen said harshly, "because if you'd tried to be heroes before, you'd be dead. But now—" he pointed his finger at one man, then the other "—you're going to do things exactly the way I tell you."
"Why?" said Maharg bluntly.
"Because I'm going to make you a baron, boy," Hansen said, glad for the harshness the helmet speaker put into his voice.
He turned his head to the older man. "And you, Shill," he added, "because I'll make you rich. Without me you'll be slopping hogs in a few years, unless you get chopped despite the way you try to dodge around keeping outa trouble."
The blank face of Hansen's battlesuit couldn't smile. He clapped the men on the shoulders instead and said, "Come on, let's find a quiet corner where I can teach you what these suits can do. Even your suits."
The practice ground was several hectares in size, plenty of room even now when most of the warriors in Peace Rock were involved in either practicing for the coming battle or proving their prowess to Taddeusz and the cluster of high-ranking warriors around him.
Hansen faced a post on the end as far from the warchief as possible.
"All right," he lectured. "Your suits have both identification and designator capacity. Say, 'Mark friendlies blue.' "
"Huh?"
In Hansen's display, azure crests spiked from the top of the hirelings' helmets. "Just do it!" he snapped. "Do you remember what I said about obeying orders?"
The warriors looked at one another. "Oh . . . ," murmured one of them. "I din't know it could do that."
"Right," said Hansen dryly. "Now, the AI can also designate. The way we're going to win—the way we're going to survive, I want you to be very clear on that—is by all three of us striking together. I'm going to mark the target with a flashing white light. When the light changes to red, we all three hit it. Together, that's very important to overload the hostile system."
"I don' unnerstand," said both the hirelings.
"Bring your arcs up," Hansen said. "Practice, cut . . . ," and his right gauntlet quivered with the vibrating power that shimmered in it. It was an insidiously pleasant feeling, the power of life and death in a glittering package. . . .
"Now, watch."
Hansen centered the post in his helmet display and said, "Mark."
A pulsing white corona gleamed on the electronic image of the post in his display and that of his two trainees, though the scene wouldn't've changed to naked eyes.
"Strike!" and he slashed his arc weapon forward into the red glare marking the post, cutting the wood in a blaze of sparks and flying fibers—
While Shill and Maharg stood, with faces that were probably as blankly incomprehending as the painted fronts of their battlesuits.
Hansen straightened. "Now," he said calmly, "let's try something different. Maharg, I want you to hit the post when I yell 'Strike,' do you understand?"
"Ah . . . All right."
"Mark," said Hansen, lighting the post on their screens. "Strike."
Maharg feinted clumsily. Hansen's arc hit him from behind. The young warrior toppled to the mud.
"Not next year, not next second," Hansen said. "When I give you an order, you do it now. Do you understand?"
Maharg started to get up. "You bas—" he growled.
Hansen waited a beat for Maharg to get far enough off the ground that hitting it again would be a useful lesson. Then he slapped Maharg down.
"I am going to make you a real warrior," Hansen said to the youth's prone form. "I'm going to make you a baron, just as I said. But you're not going to argue, you're going to take orders. Do you—"
"You bas—"
Hansen's arc lashed out again.
"Nobody's ever given a shit for you, boy!" he said. He was shouting. "Nobody! But I care, and I'm going to make you what you want to be if I have to kill you first! Do you understand? Do you?"
The recumbent suit twitched into life again. "Yessir," Maharg said.
"All right," Hansen said. He was trying to keep the adrenalin shudder out of his voice. He wasn't successful. "Get up and watch how Shill does it."
He turned toward the post. Smoke trembled from a few splinters Hansen had knocked away with his earlier cut. "Mark," he said.