He kissed Acca’s throat. She smiled and purred, but her eyes did not open.
“Darling?” he said. “Now I need to look at the data bank.”
She raised her hands to his neck.
“Why that?” she murmured. Her fingertips traced the flat muscles of Hansen’s shoulders and chest.
Moonlight turned her coppery pubic hair to silver. Hansen touched her groin, very carefully because the past hours had surely caused bruising.
Acca closed her eyes firmly again. She began to breathe in a series of gasps at decreasing intervals. He knelt and took one of her nipples between his teeth gently, tonguing it until her shuddering climax had come and passed.
“Now, darling,” he whispered. “The data bank. One question.”
Acca moaned softly. She made a gesture toward empty air. A terminal formed there, abruptly as solid as Hansen or the battlesuit standing in rigid majesty.
“Place me in front of it,” Walker ordered through the earphones, “and get into the battlesuit. It will fit you.”
Hansen kissed the woman’s lips and got up. He’d always done whatever the job required.
He set his helmet on the ground. The air through his perspiring scalp felt cool and pure.
Acca looked up at him with languid eyes. “Don’t play with the suit now,” she said. “Come to me. Just hold me.”
She smiled. Hansen closed the battlesuit over himself.
The display was diamond hard. Acca stared at him in dawning wonder.
The jewel burning in the center of the plastic helmet had extruded crystalline pseudopods into the casing of the terminal.
“What are you doing?” Acca called. She waved at the terminal, but it ignored her by remaining solid. “Please come out. Please, whoever—”
Walker was growing like a time-lapse image of ice forming in a supersaturated atmosphere. Highlights streaked his crystal limbs, but a single blue spark winked at his heart.
The mass grew above Hansen and about him, distorting his vision of the surroundings. The universe started to shift.
Very faintly, Hansen heard Acca calling, “Please, whoever you are. Please don’t leave me. . . .”
For a moment, Hansen in his golden suit stood on frozen shingle beneath the huge red sun. The crystal surrounding him began to cloud and crack, like ice in shadow on a warm day. Bits dropped from the outer surface of the mass.
“Walker?” Hansen said, outwardly calm but unable to control the jolt of adrenalin that made his limbs quiver.
Walker’s form was crumbling to white sand which dribbled across the gravel of the ancient beach. Hansen could still see the blue glint, but it hovered in airless space before him. He was hearing speech and almost words again. . . .
“. . . sen, I sum . . .”
The universe shifted again. Bright sunlight, a red and gold battlesuit; muddy ground—
He saw the practice field below Peace Rock. The whole community was standing around the circle of posts to hear Taddeusz issue his formal challenge.
“Appear or wander an outlaw and coward,” shouted the warchief’s amplified voice, “destined victim for the hand of any man, slave or free. Hansen, I summon you!”
“Display energy levels,” Hansen whispered.
The ground was solid beneath his armored boots. He heard the crowd’s gasp.
Taddeusz was twenty meters from him. To the sensors on Hansen’s new battlesuit, the power levels of even the warchief’s royal armor were varied—and vulnerable.
“Cut,” Hansen said. His weapon snarled as it traced a line across the mud at Taddeusz’ feet.
“You should have learned, Lord Taddeusz,” Hansen shouted across the field, “not to summon what you lack the strength to send away.”
“Dog spawn!” Taddeusz spat. His rippling arc crossed Hansen’s at midpoint between the combatants.
The prickling of incipient overcharge unexpectedly lifted the hair on the warchief’s arm.
It must have startled him, but Taddeusz was an old campaigner. He snatched his weapon back, let it vanish into his gauntlet, and thrust with his left hand.
Hansen saw the charge levels building, but he didn’t move to block the stroke. They were still twenty meters apart, and if the armor Hansen had brought from—bought from—Acca couldn’t take the impact, he might as well learn it now.
The world roared. Hansen’s display lost definition and color, and his every hair—from head to the tiny ones curling on the backs of his big toes—straightened as much as his garments would permit.