“Your task,” Fortin continued, “will be to penetrate Ruby’s Battle Center. The main computer there has already been programmed to carry out a particular phase shift. You must—”
“No,” said Hansen.
Fortin’s face froze. “Don’t think to cross me, human,” he said.
His malevolence would have surprised some listeners; but not Commissioner Hansen, who’d spent three years tracking down one Solbarth, a criminal of almost incredible savagery. . . .
“No,” said Hansen. “There’s no `must’ from you for me. You—”
He tapped out with a fingertip that stopped just short of the android’s chest “—can’t order me to piss on your boots. Though that I might do for fun.”
Laughter rocked and boomed from the end of the hall.
Hansen whirled on the sound.
“D’ye think I’m a gun you can point?” he shouted. “Do you? Well, you’re fucking wrong!”
“Do you remember Diamond, Hansen?” the voice asked. “Where you first entered our continuum . . . not at our request.”
It occurred to Nils Hansen that this pair was going to threaten harm to the gentle folk of Diamond unless Hansen did their bidding. An extortionist’s trick, a hostage-taker’s strategy.
And Hansen would have to react in the only way his soul would permit—kill Fortin, kill the voice behind the curtain of light; kill and keep killing until they killed him.
And perhaps the survivors would be less quick to use that gambit again with a man who was every bit as ruthless as they.
Fortin saw the look in Hansen’s eyes; something close to an expression of sexual climax suffused the perfect android features. It froze Hansen and sickened him, as if he’d entered a room with murder in mind and found his intended victim eating a plateful of feces.
“This is what happened to Diamond,” said the hidden man. “This is what you must avenge, Commissioner Hansen.”
The hall vanished. Hansen hung in nothingness surrounded by the common area of the city-building where his capsule had landed. The room was full of standing, singing people, but he saw them as photographic negatives while something else printed through in their place.
Then he was truly among them, seeing Lea and remembering how her body had touched his with a warmth that was no flirtation. There was the little boy who’d waved and called Hansen’s name, and—
He saw their flushed faces and the tears streaming down their cheeks as they sang of joy and sunlight.
The sun was a black pit out of which thundered a platoon of tanks rolling through the singing innocents rather than over them, grinding away the substance of their universe and not merely their bodies.
In place of the open park was a canyon walled by black houses as massive as coastal forts. Citizens in uniform danced in the street, firing slugs and streaks of ravening light into the air. Through all the celebration, the tanks roared triumphantly.
“You remember Diamond,” said the commanding voice. “This is Ruby, which destroyed Diamond. I brought you here, Commissioner Hansen, to destroy Ruby and preserve balance.”
The vision was gone, the hymn that was worse than the screams that should have accompanied the descent to some spicule of nothingness and death. . . .
Hansen shuddered uncontrollably. He worked his hands, watching the fingers bend and the skin mottle with strain over the knuckles. “Go on with the briefing,” he said.
Fortin laughed. “We thought this was a job you’d be willing to do for us,” he said smirkingly.
Hansen looked up. The android stepped away reflexively.
“I won’t do anything for you,” Hansen said. He spoke very distinctly. “I’ll do the job—this job. But not for you.”
“Which is all we ask . . . Kommissar,” said the voice from behind the veil.
Chapter Thirty-one
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.”