Northworld By David Drake

Strombrand’s body ignited in a crackling green dazzle. His scream was terrible but very brief.

Hansen blinked and rubbed the bare skin of his cheek which prickled from the actinic glare.

“Walker,” he said. “What does she look like? Acca?”

“Does it matter?” the machine voice responded.

Hansen shrugged. “I suppose not.”

Walker’s laughter clicked. “Go on, Kommissar,” he said. “Go on. We’ve come this far.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Hansen stepped into a sun-dappled woodland. It was late spring, and the tips of the fir branches were bright green with new growth. A squirrel chittered wildly as it peered around a treetrunk at the intruder.

Hansen probed at the ground with his finger tips. He touched a yielding surface—but not the mat of needles his eyes told him to expect. He reached for a fir tree and found nothing, only an illusion of light through whose ghostly ambiance his hand gestured.

A tall nude woman ran barefoot past the false trees. Her braided red hair was long enough to fall to the back of her knees when she was at rest. A male cardinal flew from a pollen-bright bunch of cones as she flickered by.

Then the bird and woman were gone. Even the squirrel was silent—and none of them had existed to begin with.

The door had closed behind Hansen. No sign of its presence remained. He licked his lips and walked in the direction the woman’s image had taken.

Hansen stepped into a meadow. The grasses waved high over his head. The stems were studded with tiny pastel flowers; birds fluttered among them.

He couldn’t tell which way the woman had gone. His body touched nothing as he brushed through the sunlit display.

The woman was walking toward him. The grasses parted for her. A chickadee hopped from a green milkweed pod to her shoulder and back again, calling its brilliant, cheerful song.

The sun burnished golden highlights from her hair, but her skin was the pure white of an android.

Hansen stepped into her path. “Lady?” he called. “Acca?”

The image stepped through him without contact. He turned and ran after it/her onto a drift-swept volcanic plain. Here and there a patch of gray-green lichen grew where winds had scoured snow from the ropy basalt.

A golden battlesuit strode across the rock toward Hansen.

He halted. His body wanted to run, but there was nowhere to run. . . .

“Acca,” Hansen called. “I’ve come to you.”

Hansen could not only hear the sound of the battlesuit’s steps, he could feel the impacts through the springy reality of what appeared to be lava.

The figure was within ten meters of Hansen. It raised its right gauntlet and ripped the air with the lethal blue fountain of its arc—higher than the distance still separating guard and intruder.

“I must kill you,” the suit said in a woman’s melodious voice.

“There’s no must, Acca,” Hansen said. He spread his open hands. “You make your own fate. I was sent to you.”

The arc cut off. The battlesuit continued to advance, step by measured, armored step.

“I have everything here!” Acca said.

The volcanic waste shimmered into the meadow, the forest; a rocky skerry on which elephant seals roared their challenges back to the tossing surf.

“Now you have everything, Acca,” Hansen said. “I was sent to you.”

The golden armor halted almost close enough for him to touch it. “You can’t leave, now,” Acca said.

Hansen nodded. “I don’t want to leave, Acca. I was sent to you.”

The battlesuit’s right arm reached down to the latch and tripped it. Hansen gripped the edge of the heavy plastron and helped pull it open.

The woman inside was the original of the images which Hansen had followed through the images of places.

The spring forest grew about them again.

Acca accepted his hand as she stepped out of the golden armor. She looked him in the eyes and asked, “What do you want?”

“You, Acca,” Hansen said. “And to ask one question of the knowledge which you guard.”

He smiled. “But first you,” he said as he put his arms around her naked, perfect form.

They lay on a beach whose sand had the smooth resilience of rubber beneath them. The light of a full moon turned the sheen of the open battlesuit to silver. Hansen didn’t recognize the constellations.