“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. . . .
Chapter Thirty-two
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.”