The figures surrounding him in Fortin's hall of ice weren't hidden by their curtains of light, but Hansen's mind was focused on the insertion ahead.
Gods, humans, or diffracted shimmers, it was all one with him. He barely heard the swarthy, densely muscular man say, "Just how often do you visit Ruby, Fortin?"; and that penetrated Hansen's concentration only because of the threat beneath the words.
Fortin's finger tapped the bemedaled breast of the jacket Hansen wore, checking for the slight bulge of Penny's necklace. "All right," he said. "Here's the ring."
Hansen slid the large diamond in a gold band onto the middle finger of his left hand. His finger joints were no larger than the shafts of the phalanges. The ring fit easily, then clamped with a tiny prickling.
"Seconds to insertion," Hansen thought.
"Forty-seven," the ring's AI responded, using the nerve pathways of Hansen's body.
"It's connected?" Fortin said nervously.
"It's all fine," Hansen replied. "Look, I'm briefed and ready. Just step back."
"I don't like to see my necklace—on somebody else," murmured one of the spectators.
"And Fortin!" another chuckled. "That's a look you haven't tried—or have you, dearest?"
"That's not your gunhand, is it?" Fortin fussed. "It won't interfere?"
Hansen glowered at the android face of which his own was for the moment a perfect copy.
"My gunhand," he said distinctly, "is the hand I've got a gun in at the moment."
He flexed his left fist. The artificial intelligence flashed harder echoes of light across the ice and the fawn-gray uniform Hansen was wearing.
"It won't interfere. Trust me." Hansen's face formed a sort of smile. "Nothing interferes with that."
"Five seconds to insertion," said the machine voice in Hansen's mind.
"Here we go," Hansen said aloud, stepping toward the discontinuity as though his briefing officer were not in his way—and Fortin wasn't; he'd jumped aside as his double strode through the space.
Hansen began to giggle. He was wondering if the necklace would hide the stains if he pissed the pants of this beautiful dress uniform. The thought wasn't the worst way to release tension at the start of an operation.
He stepped into the faceted blur in the center of the hall and—
His polished shoe ground down on the gritty red soil of a drill field. An officer stood in front of a platoon of infantry. They were drawn up at attention but armed to the teeth. Dust, blowing across the field from the fans of eight APCs, aided the excellent camouflage pattern of the troops' fatigues.
The field was scooped from the side of a mesa. On the rim above, a tank company aimed its weapons toward Hansen. Each of the two-squad armored personnel carriers mounted a light cannon in its forward cupola; the guns were centered on Hansen's chest also, though some of the weapons would have to blast through the bodies of the infantrymen at attention.
Hansen didn't assume those gunners would be any slower to shoot than the others.
The waiting officer threw Hansen a sharp salute. "Sir!" she said. "I'm Major Atwater, in charge of your escort. We're very glad to have you with us again, but I have to warn you that we're on heightened alert. It's been raised to Threat Level 3."
Hansen returned the salute crisply but brought his arm down to point at the pair of APCs waiting with their hatches open. "Then let's get the hell out of an obvious target zone like this, Major," he snapped.
Major Atwater spun on her heel. She bawled, "First Platoon, saddle up!" though the formation had disintegrated with troopers running for their vehicles almost before the first syllable was out of her mouth.
"The other vehicle is commanded by Lieutenant Filerly," Hansen's AI informed him.
The infantry poured aboard the armored personnel carriers with the grace of belted ammo cycling through a machinegun. The APCs lifted to hover half a meter off the ground.
Atwater leaped aboard behind her troops. The hatch of the other vehicle clanged shut. Hansen reached for the equipment belt beneath his coat and followed the major. Within the APC, the crew chief's finger was on the hatch switch.
Hansen threw toward the rear of the troop compartment the contact grenade he'd snatched from his belt. Wearing the uniform and appearance of Major Atwater, he dropped backward out of the closing hatch.
The grenade belched orange from the hatch and the firing ports. Ammo went off in a crashing secondary explosion.
The armored personnel carrier staggered in the air. Hansen rolled to his feet and ran. The blast-ruptured fuel cells burst in a cataclysmic fireball, hurling bodies and other debris in a wide circle.
"Filerly!" Hansen shouted as he ran toward the APC which had taken aboard the other two squads. "Pick me up! The Inspector General's been assassinated!"
The armored personnel carrier, already several meters in the air, did a touch-and-go grounding whose violence proved the driver was nervous. The platoon leader, Lieutenant Filerly, hung out of the re-opened hatch and jerked Hansen aboard.
Hansen grabbed the microphone flexed to the vehicle's radio.
"This is Rainbow 6," he lied, aware of the nervous intensity with which Filerly stared at his CO's scorched fatigues. "Blue, Green and Yellow elements, land and secure the area. I'm taking Red Two to Headquarters immediately to report."
The APC's driver was listening on the general push, because the big vehicle surged forward before Hansen gave him a direct order.
The holographic periscope in the cupola showed the other six vehicles of the escort landing and dropping their side panels to spew troops. Wind scattered black smoke from the puddle of fuel and wreckage.
Hansen rested his fist against the vehicle's computer/communications console. He felt a faint crunching as his ring chopped a micropathway through the console's casing. The unit began to hum and buzz without Hansen's direct input.
"The officer commanding the Headquarters guard detachment is Colonel al-Kabir," said the artificial intelligence in Hansen's ring. "He's off duty and asleep at the moment, but he will shortly be roused because of the raised threat level."
"Have the security police confine al-Kabir to quarters on orders of—of the High Council," Hansen thought. "You can do that?"
"It is done," the AI responded with what Hansen suspected was an electronic sneer.
"You've got his appearance?" Hansen added.
"Full physical details are in the central files," the AI said. "Of course."
"All units!" squawked the console unexpectedly. "Threat Level 2 is in effect. Repeat, Threat Level 2 is in effect."
"Ah, Major Atwater?" Filerly said. "We don't have clearance for even the outer HQ Zone when the threat level's above 5."
"I've received the handshake from the headquarters identification unit," the artificial intelligence said. "It will recognize us as Colonel al-Kabir."
"Proceed to the main entrance, driver," Hansen ordered coldly. "The High Council has cleared us through because of the information I'm bringing."
Lieutenant Filerly looked at him doubtfully, but it wasn't the business of a Ruby officer to question a direct order.
They were overflying wind-carved badlands at less than ten meters' altitude. The tops of the richly-layered plateaus loomed above the vehicle. Occasionally Hansen caught sight of antennas or a dug-in missile array flashing by beneath them.
"I hope you're—" the platoon leader started to say, and the APC howled out of the ring of miniature buttes into a vast area of ocher dirt, pocked and studded with armaments.
Guns and missile batteries tracked the vehicle, but none of them fired. Hansen glanced sardonically at the lieutenant, wondering what the expression looked like on his present female features.
"Be ready as soon as I'm out of the vehicle," Hansen thought.
"I am ready to act as soon as we are out of the vehicle," the artificial intelligence corrected coldly.
A concrete elevator head that looked like a pillbox stood in the midst of four tanks with their bows facing outward.
"In the middle of the tanks?" the car's driver asked.
"Land in front of the two nearest tanks," Hansen ordered.
Each tank's main armament was a 20-cm laser, augmented by a coaxial automatic cannon and blisters holding a variety of other guns. All the weapons that could bear did so as the APC grounded in a spray of dirt and grit. Hansen reached past the crew chief and pressed the door switch.
The hatch cycled open. Hansen stepped out into the shimmer of dust and heat haze in the guise of a fifty-year-old man with a shaven scalp and a colonel's star-in-square lapel insignia.
"Hey!" cried Lieutenant Filerly, reaching for his holstered pistol as he watched the transformed figure stride toward the elevator door opening in obedience to the command of Hansen's ring.
The AI snapped out a second prepared command to the defense array. Both tank lasers ripped the armored personnel carrier at point-blank range, hurling bits away in the blast and sparkle of the automatic weapons joining the chorus of destruction.
Hansen dived into the elevator cage. The back of his neck and ears stung with the awful radiance bathing Lieutenant Filerly and his vehicle. As the elevator door slammed shut, Hansen saw one of the tanks sliding forward to crush anything remaining in the blaze of slag and fire.
"The entrance guards are under Captain Alsen," the artificial intelligence said.
The cage dropped two levels and stopped at the first support area. A company of shock troops were drawn up behind portable barriers across the corridor in both directions. Their guns tracked Hansen as he got out of the entrance elevator and stepped toward the red-painted door of the shaft beside it.
"Captain Alsen," he ordered crisply, "interdict all further entry to HQ region."
"But sir . . . ," the black-helmeted guard officer said. "We've been alerted to expect Field Marshal Yazov soonest."
Hansen set his ring against the keyslot controlling the elevator.
"That message was false, Captain," he said. "The enemy has penetrated our communications system. Any vehicle entering the outer HQ Zone must be destroyed at once."
He felt a minuscule click through his ring finger. "I'm reporting to the Citadel at once, as ordered."
"Aye aye—" Alsen was saying before the door slammed shut on the remainder of his words.
The interior of the elevator cage was polished steel. As it plunged downward, Hansen saw that he now looked like a moustached wrestler going to fat. Though he still wore fatigues, they had epaulets and his insignia were the wreathed stars of a field marshal.
"Thank you, ring," he thought.
"There is no need to thank me."
"Does this shaft go all the way to the Citadel?"
"We will drop beneath the Citadel level," the artificial intelligence informed its wearer. "I've keyed us down to Computation Control."
Hansen didn't realize how fast the cage was dropping till it slowed and the inertia bent his knees as though he'd jumped off the roof of a building. The door opened.
The walls and ceiling of the corridor were covered by mirrors, seamless except for emergency doors every hundred meters. There was a low-frequency vibration in the air.
"Left," directed Hansen's AI.
There were a number of people already striding up or down the corridor. They wore white smocks, the first citizens of Ruby Hansen had seen without uniforms . . . though the smocks were, now that he thought about it, uniforms also.
The technicians glanced at him as he passed and, though no one challenged him, he could feel them continuing to stare at his mirrored figure as he walked onward.
"How far?" he thought.
"Turn right at the cross-corridor," the ring said instead of answering.
Hansen wasn't as frightened as he should have been. It was like a house-clearing operation. He was moving so fast that he had no time to think about anything except the step he was taking now. Move and shoot—and keep it up until there's nothing else moving in the target area. . . .
The mirrors suddenly lost their opacity and opened vistas of Ruby's surface: missile batteries rising, searching for targets; children too small to bear arms marching in lock-step toward shelters; adults all over the planet grabbing weapons and reporting to battle stations.
Hansen turned the corner. Another figure marched in the mirrored walls to his left and right: Colonel al-Kabir. Smock-garbed technicians stopped and stared.
"How far?" Hansen's mind demanded of the artificial intelligence.
"To the left at the next corridor," the machine responded grudgingly. "And a hundred meters."
The reflections of al-Kabir quivered suddenly into Major Atwater, keeping pace with Hansen. If Hansen turned his head, the reflections turned also. . . .
"Sir?" called a technician. "Sir."
Hansen took the corner with a crisp military pivot. He was sweating. Alongside him strode the Inspector General with Fortin's cold, pale features.
Hansen could see the outline of the door he wanted in the wall ahead, but the mirrored reflections beside him shook. The real Nils Hansen flanked the false Field Marshal Yazov.
"Threat Level 1!" screamed a public address system. "Intruder! Intruder!"
Technicians were reaching under their smocks for weapons, but now Hansen was in his element. His left hand hurled a grenade behind him as he screamed, "Shut the crash door!" hoping his AI could react before the grenade did.
The pistol he drew was standard issue for Ruby. Its recoil was heavier than Hansen was used to, but it pointed like an eleventh finger and its bullets were explosive.
The skull of the first technician exploded in a red flash that blew her blond hair in all directions like chair stuffing. Hansen aimed for the center of mass of the second and third techs, dropping them both before they'd cleared their own pistols.
The emergency door clanged shut behind Hansen, then started to reopen as the PA system screamed, "The intruder is operating the electronic controls! Close and lock all doors manu—"
The grenade blast knocked Hansen down, but the part-open door protected him from the fragments that shattered the walls and the humans on the other side of it. He scrambled to his feet, pulling a spool charge from his equipment belt.
The door of the Computation Control room slid halfway open and stopped. Hansen leaped through, unreeling the spool charge behind him. His pistol centered on the forehead of the technician straining against the door's manual control wheel. Only as the door slammed shut again did Hansen fire.
The ballooning horror of the man's face was echoed by the strip of spool charge which detonated under the door's pressure. The multi-dogged valve torqued in the explosion, locking itself inextricably closed.
Technicians holding unfamiliar weapons started from their seats. A line of explosive bullets rang on the back of the wedged door and the floor where Hansen had been an instant earlier.
Hansen's form became that of the headless female technician he'd killed in the hallway. His left hand hurled the last piece of equipment from his belt—a spoofing bomb. It popped, deploying half a dozen miniature projectors.
Black-suited holographic gunmen capered about CompCon, some of them upside down. Technicians gaped and fired. Their bursts destroyed equipment in arcs and implosions, but the blazing gunfire didn't—couldn't—affect the holograms.
There were five technicians within the sealed room. As sickly layers of powder and explosive residues quivered at further muzzle blasts, Hansen moved his body only as much as he needed to get an angle on the next target.
He killed each technician with a single shot. The last of them, screaming in disbelief, pointed her machinepistol at the center of Hansen's chest and continued to squeeze the trigger even as the headless corpse aimed its gun at her left eye. The technician had emptied her weapon before the dancing holograms sputtered and vanished.
"Quickly," said the voice in Hansen's brain as the last technician fell, all but the splash on the wall behind her. "They're starting to drill through the door."
Hansen was holding his breath in a subconscious attempt to keep from vomiting the acid that was the only thing in his stomach. The renewed threat focused him. He looked for an undamaged terminal.
"In the left corner!" snapped the artificial intelligence.
Rather than reload, Hansen snatched an unfired pistol from the holster of the man he'd killed at the door controls and ran to the indicated console. He could hear tools cutting. They were very fast, very organized, the folk of Ruby; very skilled in the arts of war.
He put his ring against the terminal's control board.
Ruby wasn't facing a world of pacifists this time.
Almost simultaneously with the click from Hansen's finger, the lights in CompCon dimmed and the sound of electronic whispering hushed. He had his gun out, looking for a target.
"I'm shutting down other functions in order to bring up the matching program again," the AI explained. "It's no longer in the active memory."
The sound of computers working resumed at a higher, more insistent, note.
Something appeared in the center of the room—not a tank but the memory of a tank like the one which had ground through the crowd on Diamond while Hansen waited with a chair.
This time he had a better weapon—not the pistol, but the artificial intelligence on his finger which was turning Ruby against itself.
Hansen began to laugh. The electronic ghost disappeared, replaced by a scene from the field where Hansen arrived. Nervous troops were forming a perimeter while officers and non-coms checked the bodies scattered when the APC exploded. A lieutenant had turned over the corpse of Major Atwater. The escort commander had been stripped by the blast, but her features were still recognizable.
"Yes . . . ," the AI whispered to Hansen's mind in satisfaction.
The leaf of the heavy door was beginning to glow a soft rose that brightened into golden radiance.
Hansen began to shudder. He thought at first it was reaction, but then he noticed that the wounds of the dead technicians were beginning to steam in the frigid air.
"What's—" he said and stopped, unable to frame the question lucidly.
"We are repeating the cycle," explained the AI. "We are putting Ruby in phase with Diamond."
With where Diamond was now.
In the center of the room, the ghost image of a Ruby family huddled in its bunker. The youngest of them was a boy of ten. Their fingers were poised on the controls of the weapon systems poised around and on top of their bunker. They had no target, and their faces were growing pale. . . .
A hollow drill pierced the door to CompCon. Its snout quivered and twisted, seeking Hansen.
Hansen fired first. The charge of his explosive bullet was an orange flash against the yellow-white blaze of the door. He fired twice more, smashing the drill point before it could loose its own lethal greeting.
There was a bang! from within the panel itself and the glow dulled to red.
"The door has a self-sealing core," said the AI. "All the defenses here are redundant. It will hold long enough, I estimate."
The room was colder than the surface of a dead planet. A second drill began to gnaw at the door.
Another ghost, holding out her hand to him. Lea, surrounded by icy darkness; her hair unbound, her voice—surely her voice, not a memory.
Her voice calling, "No, Hansen, not this. Not for us."
But yes, for them. For all the folk whose souls wouldn't let them fight for themselves, who'd rather die than to kill—
That was Diamond's decision, and it did Diamond honor. But the folk of Diamond already knew that Hansen didn't belong with them. . . .
"There . . . ," said the artificial intelligence.
The door to CompCon collapsed in blazing fragments. Hansen fired into the opening, but Ruby was fading and merging with Diamond, spiraling down an icy black helix with nothing at all at the bottom. . . .