OBEY glared huge letters as the rest of the holographic display blanked.
Well, he’d taken orders like that when he was a junior, and he by god expected his own people to take orders when he gave them.
Nils Hansen, junior volunteer, took two steps forward. His armored legs didn’t strike anything. It was disorienting to walk with no view but that of a command, worse than moving blind. He turned and took another step.
Hansen’s display suddenly blazed with cold blue lines, branching and linking among themselves into faceted patterns. He no longer felt the pull of gravity, though there was something beneath his feet.
“Walker!” he said sharply. He didn’t move either his arms or his legs. He felt as though he were standing in the schematic of a crystal lattice—
Or in a spider web.
A tiny red bead began to crawl along one of the blue lines. The pattern went on—forever, in all directions.
Hansen was alone in a universe of crisp, cold invariance, in which one spark moved.
He opened his mouth again to shout for Walker; closed it; and stepped as if the lines in his display were pathways and the red bead was his guide—
As of course they were, and it was.
Hansen stepped onto a wasteland. He faced a horizon silhouetted by the blur of a red sun. The skeleton of something gigantic lay a little distance from him, its ribs reaching toward the light like the fingers of a drowning man.
Hansen stood on a shingle beach, gravel separated out here by the waves in the unimaginably distant past when this planet had seas. Now there wasn’t even an atmosphere: what air remained formed a rime on the pebbles.
The louvers on the battlesuit’s air system clicked shut. Their sound reminded him that though the armor sealed for river crossings, it didn’t have an air pack to supplement whatever was trapped within its volume.
A crystal the size of a house was trundling slowly toward Hansen on jagged spines. The bases of the spines twisted within the mass until the whole—creature—overbalanced forward, onto other tines which twisted in their turn. The effect was a combination of a sea urchin and an avalanche.
The spines and flats of the crystal reflected and diffracted light from the dying sun, but at the heart of the mass burned the spark of Walker’s eye, with more life than the glow on the horizon.
“Was that the Matrix, Walker?” Hansen asked as though he were calm. “Is that what the smiths see when they build armor?”
Walker’s laughter clicked in Hansen’s earphones. “What you saw was a hologram, a pattern of light, nothing more,” the voice said. It sounded . . . not human, but no longer mechanical either. “And what the smiths see, that is in their minds. Patterns also, reflections of the absolute.”
Walker was staggering still closer. Light danced: on the fracture planes crossing the spines, and from lines of cleavage within the central mass.
Something that winked on the horizon might have been a form like that of Walker.
“There is a price for seeing the Matrix, Commissioner Hansen,” Walker said. The spark in the crystal’s core fluctuated as he spoke. “And for seeing through the Matrix, there is a very high price.”
“This suit doesn’t have much air, Walker,” Hansen said. The great mass had halted just in front of him. Several of the spines, their glitter streaked by milky flaws, waggled slowly above Hansen.
“You’re done with this suit,” replied Walker, and the crystal toppled forward.
Hansen braced for the impact, but there was none—no contact, just the utter cessation of movement that he’d felt once before, when his intrusion capsule reached the point in space that should have been Northworld.
Was Northworld.
His display blanked. The only sound was the thump of his heart.
Walker’s voice, no longer coming from the earphones, said, “You will keep the artificial intelligence and portions of the sensor suite. You will gain for me access to certain information which the androids have on the plane to which North sent them when they came to investigate. And you will gain the battlesuit which I promised you.”