“There are no unoccupied planes, Dowson!”
“None that you know of, North,” the brain replied. “None that I know of either.”
For a moment, North imagined that the pause was one of sadness, but Dowson’s words were as emotionless as ever when he continued, “Send them to the lizardmen, then. Let them destroy one another.”
North’s laughter bellowed out in response to the bitter joke. The sunlit building trembled and quivered with shadows. North stretched his long, sinewy arms high above his head, and the air cleared.
“The others will need to know,” Dowson warned.
“The others will want to know,” North corrected. “I’ll summon them.”
His right hand twisted in the air. Motes of light sprang away as though condensing from the atmosphere; a score of sparkling blips that drifted in widening circles until they touched the walls of the palace, spat, and vanished on their missions.
“They’re only sending one this time,” North said, trying to control the shudder which remembering the Matrix induced in him. “A man.”
“You’ll kill him?” Dowson asked, carelessly, uncaringly.
“His name is Hansen,” said North. “And he will serve my purposes.”
Chapter Three
Hansen’s car was speeding toward a large building on what had been the outskirts of the capital twenty years before. Now it was a bland residential district, not dissimilar to the one from which Solbarth had spun his webs of theft and murder.
The building was marked as Consensus property on the maps Hansen had viewed in the course of his duties, but there were many Consensus buildings in any planetary capital. A warehouse, Hansen had thought; and he would still think the great three-story block was a warehouse, except—
Except that two creatures had ordered the Commissioner of Special Units into an aircar that they were driving straight into the front wall of the building.
Hansen opened his mouth to protest—and closed it again, because there was nothing he could say that the spindles didn’t know already.
The warehouse was an old one, built of clay and a plasticizer which hardened after extrusion. That technique created a solid structure of surpassing ugliness even when new.
The aircar was about to hit the dark dun building at 200 kph. The smear Hansen made would scarcely be distinguishable from the stains and earth tones already an indelible part of the wall’s texture.
He forced his muscles to relax. So be it. A pedestrian in the street looked up in amazement.
The aircar shot through the `wall.’ Hansen felt a momentary chill. They were in a lighted tunnel whose circular sides made the drive fans rumble.
“Where are we?” Hansen demanded. The noise of the damaged car was even worse in this enclosure than it had been in the open air, but he knew the spindles could hear him if they wanted to.
No answer rang in his mind. They shot past a pair of cross-tunnels. Half a dozen workmen carrying unrecognizable tools glanced up at the aircar. One of the faces turned toward Hansen was inhuman: blue, scaled, and as expressionless as those of its companions.
“Where are we going?” Hansen cried. He didn’t even expect an answer.
He’d been a powerful man, a few minutes ago. In some ways—in some circumstances—the most powerful man on Annunciation.
He looked at the things beside him in the car and wondered whether any man in the Consensus really had power.
The spindles were shrinking. When Hansen first saw the creatures, they had been taller than he was; now they were only about the length of his thigh. They sputtered like electronics on the verge of failure, and the scenes within the fabric of their bodies were becoming increasingly clear.
Hansen looked away.
The tunnel ended in a white-tiled rotunda which appeared so abruptly that Hansen felt the car braking before his eyes focused on the change in scenery. Two figures waited for them, both human—
Not human. Both of the figures were male androids. One was as beautiful as the dawn, while the other was a squat, hideous travesty of humanity with thick, twisted limbs. They might very well have come out of the same production batch.
The rotunda had a high, domed ceiling. There were eight archways leading from it—all of them closed by bronze doors, including the arch by which the aircar had just entered.