Hansen's boots clashed on the floor of the light-struck hall. A wisp of smoke trailed from the muzzle of his pistol, but he'd emptied the magazine back in another universe.
The figures seated along the sides of the room were no longer veiled in light. They shouted a mixture of triumph and greeting as they rose and tramped across the adamant to Hansen, their forms shrinking with every step.
"Well done!" boomed the stocky, swarthy man as he clapped Hansen on the back. "Couldn't've done better myself."
"You couldn't have done as well, Rao," said a woman with an oriental face. "Brute force would have failed."
"Rao," Hansen repeated. "From North's team?"
"Once I was," Rao admitted. "Once I was."
Rao's powerful hand closed over the pistol Hansen still held.
"But let me take this, boy," Rao added. "Not the rules, here, you know. Makes some of 'em a little nervous, you see."
Hansen recognized other faces from his briefing on Annunciation. The big man was Rolls, who'd led the initial exploration unit, and—
A plump young woman squeezed through the crowd, using her elbows expertly, and slid her hand beneath Hansen's jacket.
"My necklace?" she demanded. "You have my necklace safe?"
"Uh?" said Hansen. "Sure."
He lifted the gossamer strap; the woman snatched it away as soon as it was clear.
"You're Penny, aren't you?" Hansen asked. "From—"
"Yes," she responded, a regal and statuesque redhead from the moment the jewel dropped over her head. "And you and I must see a lot of one another."
The figure seated at the end of the hall had not joined the general throng. He was fully in shadow until the sun moved above the crystal ceiling. A prismatically scattered beam fell across the craggy face in a rainbow.
His right eye blinked. His left did not.
"Walker!" Hansen shouted.
The tall figure stood.
"North," he said, laughing. "But sometimes Walker."
The others backed a few steps away when North spoke. Hansen looked at them, then toward their leader again. "Where is this place?" he asked. "Where are we?"
"North found the path through the Matrix," said a decisively plain woman. Eisner, Hansen thought; one of the exploration unit. "We travel all eight planes of the Matrix, now; and the Matrix itself is the ninth."
"We're gods," said Rolls. "You can think of us that way, Hansen."
There was more in his tone than satisfaction, but Hansen didn't have enough information to guess what the other emotions were.
But the real question—
"What's going to happen to me, then?" Hansen asked.
North began to laugh. Others of the self-proclaimed gods smiled or blinked in surprise.
"You don't understand, do you?" said Fortin with the air of detached amusement that was the attitude Hansen knew to expect of the android.
"Then tell me," Hansen said. He didn't need a gun in his hand to make the words a threat.
Fortin's face chilled. "It's very simple," he said. "Only one of us could enter Ruby from the—inside of the Matrix. So we had to make you one of us before we sent you in."
"Welcome to godhead, Kommissar," North said.
His terrible, thunderous laughter echoed through the hall.