“I’ll try,” said Ruiz, a bit resentfully. He still couldn’t get used to the way Somnire responded to his thoughts instead of to his words.
“You try, yes,” said Somnire. He seemed to shake himself, and then he spoke in a less gleeful tone. “I suppose the armor is the first problem. Can’t make an omelet if you can’t break an egg.”
“What?” Ruiz didn’t understand the reference, but Somnire was bent over the screen, tracing the columns with a finger.
“Why do you use the screen? It seems a pointless rigmarole. Why not just pull the data from its matrix directly?” Ruiz still felt a degree of annoyance with the Librarian.
Somnire grinned his strange ambivalent grin. “I do it for your comfort. Would you rather fly the electron storm with me, blowing through the decaying synapses of the machine, formless and elemental? Ah… forgive my occasional lapses into purple speech — a hazard of my occupation.” He laughed darkly, and turned his attention back to the screen. “It’s all right with me, if you’re brave enough, but I should tell you that we sometimes drive our enemies mad in exactly that way. They become holy fools, of course… fortunately none of our enemies have any respect for holy fools, so they never learn to use their fools against us.”
“Never mind,” said Ruiz meekly.
“Ah,” said Somnire. “Here it is. She’s wearing Axolotl Light Intertribal armor, Mark IV version. Roderigo is frugal. Old, old equipment, but very good. She’s probably had the armor since she was a girl. Axolotl went out of business before we did.” He sighed. “Anyway. Designed for use in urban guerrilla conflicts. Twisted carbon monomol fiber. Most effective against light energy weapons and highspeed low-mass projectiles like splinter guns. Tough stuff.”
“She let me search her for concealed weapons,” Ruiz said. “The articulation under her ribs looked weak.”
The screen flickered, showed an image of the armor. It expanded into individual components, each tagged with stress engineering data. Somnire tapped the rib plating with a delicate finger. “No. You might break them open with a crowbar, but there’s nothing strong enough in the niche. Besides, I don’t think she’ll sit still while you pry.”
“Probably not,” Ruiz agreed sadly.
“Hmmm,” said Somnire. “Let’s take a different approach.” He pressed at the screen’s touchpoints, and the armor was replaced by the still image of an old man with a harsh dark face and the slashing cheek cicatrices of a Madeline Wreaker. “General Savin,” said Somnire. “He’s one of millions of personalities recorded in the Library’s Anthroreplicant files. A military genius. He fought a notable campaign on Juneau almost three thousand years ago. The rebels were equipped with Axolotls. Let’s see what advice he can give us.”
The screen flickered, and then the old man moved, raised his sunken eyes to Ruiz. “What? What do you want?”
“The Axolotl Mark IV. How do I disable a woman wearing it? Bare-handed?” asked Ruiz.
“Almost impossible.” The old man stared intently into Ruiz’s eyes, as if seeking something.
“Wait,” said Somnire to Ruiz. “Did I tell you that she found a wireblade on the corpse? She has it in her right calf sheath. Could you get it, if you surprised her?”
“Possibly,” said Ruiz. “But she’s alert, quick, and probably very strong.”
General Savin grunted. “With a wireblade, there might be a chance. The helmet latches on the Mark IV are less than optimal — their cams were slightly weakened by the fanciful carving on the helmet’s faceplate.”
The old man disappeared, was replaced by an image of a soldier wearing the armor — though the legs and arms were banded with bright primary colors and the torso had a blue and yellow flag painted across the chest. A pointer appeared, touched the helmet at its lateral attachment points.
The general’s voice continued: “A sharp blow here, at a fairly precise angle of one hundred and ten degrees to the column of the neck and with a slight anterior component, has been known to loosen the latch sufficiently to allow a knife between helmet and seat.” A red arrow appeared, pointed at the latch to show the proper vector; the image rotated to show the arrow from three angles. The vector fired and the helmet cocked up a centimeter on that side.
“So?” asked Somnire.
Ruiz nodded.
Somnire turned back to the screen and the old man reappeared. “Anything else, General?”
“The Mark IV was not designed for hand-to-hand. Get the helmet loose; then you might be able to break her neck, if you can hit her with a sufficiently massive club, or use her own weight against some immovable object.”
“We’ll keep it in mind, General,” said Somnire, and without ceremony he switched off the screen.
Ruiz fancied that the general had worn a faintly desperate expression, as though he didn’t want to return to the dreamless limbo of the files.
“They don’t know where they are,” said Somnire, still reading his mind. “We don’t let them wake long enough to think about it.”
Ruiz had an uncomfortable thought. “Is that where Leel has gone?”
“Yes,” said Somnire. “But I won’t call her back from her rest, just so you can say good-bye. That wasn’t her wish.”
“I see,” said Ruiz unhappily. “Well, now what?”
“Now we send you back to your body, so you can have a go at the hetman.” Somnire lifted his arm and a large brass chronometer appeared on his wrist. “Been about four minutes since you entered the virtual, real time. She won’t be expecting you back so soon. Most of their people we keep for days, just to inflict as much madness as possible on them.” The chronometer wiggled and disappeared in a puff of pink smoke.
“I’m curious; why do the Roderigans keep coming to the virtual, if all they ever take away is madness?”
Somnire laughed rather maliciously. “Oh, we don’t always destroy them completely — and sometimes we give them some relatively harmless scrap of information. Just enough to keep them from destroying the inducer and sealing us off forever. And we do what we can to keep Roderigo and Delt at each other’s throats.”
“Oh,” said Ruiz. “Well, do you know the answers to their questions? What’s going on under Yubere’s fortress? Are you going to give me anything to bargain with, if I can’t deal with the hetman? She promised me transport off Sook if I could get the information. Or can you give me a plausible lie — something to work with?”
“Are you still mad? Roderigo would never keep its bargain.” Somnire gave him a hard, somewhat unfriendly look. “I have great hopes for you, but you may fail. The information they seek is too important to give you, unless you can kill or incapacitate The Yellowleaf. As for fooling Roderigo… a callow hope indeed.”
Ruiz reluctantly saw the sense of it. Still, more than The Yellowleaf stood between him and escape. “But if I can best her… what then?”
Somnire grew agitated and, throwing off his ermine robe, paced back and forth among the holocubes and flat-screens, muttering to himself. Finally he threw up his arms and said, “All right. I’ve been living at a much higher rate than you since the moment I left you at Leel’s, so that I’ve had a week to wrestle with my conscience — which isn’t what it once was, not at all. It’s a terribly dangerous secret, more dangerous than you can possibly understand now. But it’s out, it’s surely out. The things your friend Publius told you, the conflict in SeaStack, the slavers conspiracy — all these things convince me that the secret is out.
“A disaster if the Roderigans find out for sure… but also a disaster if anyone else finds out.” Somnire fixed Ruiz with a baleful gaze. “I don’t admire you, Ruiz. You’re what I abhorred above all else, a man of violence. For all the changes that have touched you lately, you’re still a murderer. Your heart is open to me. You’d kill me in an instant if it would save you and your friends. Oh, you’d rationalize it until it didn’t seem like murder, if you could: ‘He’s just a pattern in the machine, not really alive,’ and so forth, but you’d do it, rationale or not.”