Asking what in hell was going on would be just as bad an idea as trying to learn what the season of the year was. Besides, Diamond had come pretty close to Hansen’s idea of what heaven would be—right down to the fact there’d been no room for him there.
That meant Hell wasn’t a word he wanted to take in vain on Northworld either.
Vasque was shuddering in his sleep. Hansen gestured toward him. “Is he any good?” he asked Malcolm in an undertone.
“You won’t wake him,” said Malcolm in a normal voice, as though that were the only reason someone would want to discuss the matter in a whisper. “And yeah, he’s very good.”
The veteran smiled impishly. “Almost as good as Dilmun, I’d say. You’ll have a suit to be proud of.”
Malcolm took the piece of armor from the apprentices and looked at it critically. “Who’s this for?” he demanded suddenly.
The youth who’d been on the couch said, “Well, it’s for stock, milord.”
“For practice,” added his fellow.
On closer examination, Hansen saw that the portion of armor wasn’t complete. It was shorter than most adult male forearms; and, while there was a raised border on the wrist end where the piece would join the gauntlet, there was no corresponding reinforcement toward the elbow. The core of circuitry in a ceramic matrix was white against the heavy metal of the exterior and the lighter cladding of the inner face.
Malcolm handed the piece back. “Keep practicing,” he said coldly.
The ore shifted around Hansen’s suit. The chunks on top of the pile slid as dust puffed away. As Hansen watched, a fist-sized lump he thought was magnetite crumbled as though in a hammermill. Bits of it drifted down through the interstices of the pebbles beneath it.
One of the apprentices bobbed his head in approval. “Look, he must be four centimeters away from the join,” he said. “Great extension!”
Malcolm sniffed. “The important part,” he said, ostensibly to Hansen, “isn’t how far a smith can reach through the Matrix for material but how well he stitches the result together. That’s the craftsmanship that keeps you and me alive, Lord Hansen.”
“That and skill,” Hansen remarked coolly.
He hadn’t seen Walker since the duel the day before. That was someone whom he could question without worrying about raised eyebrows.
Of course, while Walker could be a machine from the end of time, as he claimed; or simply a series of talking birds and animals, as he appeared—the likelihood was that the little voice was an aspect of Hansen’s psychosis, like everything else around him. Maybe Commissioner Nils Hansen had been shot in the head as he ran toward Solbarth’s hideout. . . .
Half the gravel piled on the shoulder of the battlesuit powdered and slipped to a flatter angle of repose.
Vasque shuddered like a swimmer coming out of cold water. His apprentices stepped toward him, one of them with a skin of wine or mead, but the older man waved them away. “There!” he gasped. “There, Lord Malcolm. Tell me about Dilmun now.”
“Although,” he added as he got to his feet and only then accepted the container of drink, “I checked the whole suit while I was in the Matrix, and it’s not so very bad after all. . . .”
“How do we test it?” Hansen asked.
Malcolm smiled. “I get my suit,” he said, “we go out to the practice ground . . . and I see just how good you are, laddie.”
It wasn’t an especially nice smile; but then, neither was the grin that bared Hansen’s teeth.
Chapter Eleven
The practice ground was outside the palisade, on a broad, flat stretch of meadow that had been trampled to gluey mud. A bad surface for comfort, but one which accurately reflected the sort of filthy conditions in which wars had been fought from time immemorial. There were fir posts set up at three-meter intervals around the perimeter; many of them had been burned in half.
Hansen was already pleased with his new armor. His displays were crisper by an order of magnitude than those of Villiers’ suit, and the limbs moved in response to Hansen’s movements without nearly as much lag time.