Asgard's Heart

25

There was a long time to wait while Urania and Clio cooked up a surprise package for the monsters that were lurking down below. They quickly came to the conclusion that a bomb wasn’t the answer—it was likely to be very messy and wasn’t guaranteed to be one hundred percent effective. After examining the bits of alien flesh which had come up the shaft attached to the battered Scarid, the Isthomi decided that a biotechnological attack would be infinitely preferable.

While they were figuring out the details of its manufacture they programmed and dispatched a small swarm of flying cameras to reconnoitre for us. These electronic eyes were no bigger than the largest flying insects, but they didn’t have wings. Because they had to do the greater part of their flying in an evacuated shaft—we saw no point in sending them down in the car—they were powered by tiny rockets.

In the meantime, we opened up the other truck and carried our two invalids over there. We stripped it of weapons before depositing them, but I lingered for a while before leaving them alone. Urania had asked me to stay because she wanted to make sure that the Scarid was still on the mend, but I wanted to have a word with Jacinthe Siani anyhow.

She was more-or-less okay, physically, but she was still badly frightened. She didn’t want to be left alone, and was grateful that I didn’t just dump her. She hadn’t expected any favours, given the way she’d dealt with me in the past, but it would have been too cruel to abandon her without some kind of reassurance.

“You’re as safe here as anywhere in Asgard,” I pointed out to her. “If we get through, there’s still a slight chance that we may be able to get the power back on. If we don’t, there’s a slight chance it might come back on anyway. If it doesn’t, you should soon be fit enough to try to get back to the Nine’s worldlet. You have all the time you need to find the way. The Nine are the best friends you could ask for in this situation. You’ll be okay. I wish I could be as confident about my own future.”

“Why go, then?” she asked, in a whisper. She was a pragmatist, who didn’t believe in heroism for its own sake.

I shrugged my shoulders. “I always wanted to go to the Centre,” I told her. “And now something else wants me to go there too.”

That reminded me why I wanted to talk to her.

“Tell me about 994-Tulyar,” I said. “You do understand, don’t you, that he isn’t really Tulyar at all?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “He was hurt, when the machines attacked us. He wasn’t badly injured, but he had difficulty talking. He got better. He says that he knows how to switch the power on.”

There was no point in disputing the fact. She had no idea what had happened to me as a result of the interface with the alien. She had no idea that such a thing was possible. Even the two Tetrax, who must have been in as good a position as anyone to see differences between Tulyar present and Tulyar past, must simply have assumed that if Tulyar’s body was walking and talking, it was Tulyar inside it. If it had behaved peculiarly, they’d simply assumed, like Jacinthe, that it was the result of his injuries. They might think him mad if he behaved crazily enough, but the idea that his body was being operated by a biocopy of alien software sneaked into his brain while he was fast asleep lay beyond their conceptual horizons.

“He was guiding you, wasn’t he?” I asked, determined to stick to less controversial ground. “He knows the way to the Centre.”

“He said that he’d seen a map,” she replied. Her voice was steady now, and she had no difficulty talking.

“Did he give you a reason for hijacking the transporter?”

“He said that we couldn’t trust the Isthomi—that they were really responsible for the power being shut off. He said that they were fighting a war of their own, and that we would be killed if we stayed on that level. Down below, he said, we’d find people to help us—the ancestors of the Scarida. He said that they’d find a way to restore power to the Scarid levels, once they knew the Scarida were in trouble. He said that the Nine were no friends of the Scarida or of the Tetrax… that they were frightened by the discovery of the Scarid empire, and the galactic community, and would like to see them both destroyed.”

She paused for breath. Then she went on: “He said that the Scarida and the Tetrax must make contact with the builders of Asgard, whether the Nine liked it or not, if the humanoid population of the macroworld was to be saved. If we didn’t, he said, all the humanoid races would be wiped out, and things like the Isthomi would be the sole survivors. He said they’d fooled you completely, and made you their slave.”

I remembered what I’d told her about the Nine being the best friends she could possibly have if the power wasn’t restored. For a moment, I wondered whether it might be true. Might the Nine be worried about the power of humanoid cultures inside and outside Asgard? Might they be acting entirely in the interests of their own kind? Might they have me completely fooled?

I didn’t think so… but how could I be sure?

The horrible thought struck me that it might all be a put-up job. Maybe there never was any attack on the Nine. Maybe it was the Nine and the Nine alone who had injected mysterious software into my brain. Maybe Tulyar hadn’t been taken over… maybe he had only guessed the truth. Maybe he had seen a map. Maybe I was being played for a sucker all along the line.

When I thought about it carefully, though, it didn’t make any sense. If the Nine had wanted to bring down the Scarid empire and cut themselves off from the galactic community, they could have done it all by themselves. They didn’t need to pretend to be injured, and they certainly didn’t need me. It had to be the Nine who were telling the truth, and the thing using Tulyar’s body that was lying.

Hadn’t it?

“I don’t suppose Tulyar mentioned dreaming at all?” I asked, weakly.

She thought it was a crazy question, and didn’t dignify it with an answer. There was only one question left to ask.

“I know you didn’t see much when the trouble started down below,” I said, “but did you see anything at all to indicate whether any of your people got through?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, faintly. “It all happened so quickly. Our lights were smothered… then put out. I’m only certain that some of them were killed. If I were you, Rousseau, I wouldn’t go down there.”

“If I’d always followed your advice,” I said uncharitably, “Amara Guur would have made mincemeat out of me a long time ago.”

She didn’t say anything in reply, but her big dark eyes were radiating injured innocence. If she had really pulled the Scarid officer out of the frying pan down there, she couldn’t be quite as nasty as I’d always supposed, but I wasn’t about to forgive her for the bad turns she’d done me.

“Don’t worry,” I told her, again. “You’ll be okay, if anyone is. Maybe we’ll meet again, when the lights are back on.”

I left her to mull over her past life, and to wonder whether she had a future.

When the flying cameras brought back their pictures we found that her story, such as it was, seemed to be honest and accurate. The picture quality was awful—not unexpectedly, given that there was no light and our spy-eyes had to use infra-red vision—but our brain-in-a-box managed to integrate all the information and enhance it a little. There was a good deal of debris, but it didn’t show up very clearly. We could make out a couple of bodies, still sheathed in transparent plastic, and we guessed that the killers hadn’t been able to breach the suits. That was comforting, in a way— but it hadn’t saved the poor guys inside them, who’d been broken and crushed regardless.

The predators themselves looked like a cross between gargantuan slugs and sea anemones. They were sitting still while the spy-eyes flew around, so we had no way to judge how fast they could move when the need arose, but they didn’t look very quick. There were about twenty of them gathered about the doorway by now, but several had been damaged by bullets and a few were almost certainly dead. They were heaped up untidily, and though it was difficult to be sure, I got the impression that the ones on top might be patiently devouring the ones below. The fact that their prey had proved unexpectedly difficult to digest hadn’t cost them their meal. No wonder they were still lurking, hoping for dessert.

“They’re nothing,” opined Susarma Lear scornfully. “If the Scarids had been carrying Star Force flame-pistols instead of needlers and crash-guns, they’d have mopped that lot up in a matter of minutes.”

I diplomatically refrained from pointing out that we’d lost our Star Force flamers long ago, and that she too was reduced to carrying a relatively primitive handgun.

“It will not be necessary to expose ourselves to any risk,” said Urania. “We have programmed the truck’s organic production unit to supply ample quantities of a powerful poison which will paralyse the nerve-nets controlling the smooth muscle of the tentacles. It is sufficiently powerful that the tiny robots which carried the infra-red cameras can easily be adapted to carry a lethal dose. We should not need our guns immediately, although it will of course be necessary to carry such arms as we can when we resume our journey.”

I saw Nisreen nodding with approval. The Tetrax had always believed that heavy metal was no substitute for clever biotechnics.

When our fly-sized shock troops had completed their mission, we set out ourselves. We had a certain difficulty crowding five of us and all the relevant equipment into the car, but it was possible. The pseudo-Tulyar’s party had divided themselves into two fours only because it was a split down the middle, not because four was the car’s maximum capacity. I guess we were crammed in pretty tightly, but we’d been crowded in the truck, and it wasn’t particularly claustrophobic.

The ride down was very long. The flow of time felt different now that we were out of the truck—the vehicle had been a comforting cocoon, where the minutes that passed were naturally dead and empty. Now I was in a light suit, with a small cargo of weapons and equipment to carry, every second was pregnant with hazard.

I hadn’t asked Urania exactly what Tulyar’s party had taken from their own truck, and much of it was already packed up in satchels. It was all too obvious, though, what kind of transport we would now be expected to employ. No doubt they were sophisticated robots in their own right, but they looked to me like glorified bicycles. Susarma was used to going into battle with whatever came to hand, and didn’t seem too worried about the prospect of riding one, but Myrlin was anxious about their small size and apparent frailty, and 673-Nisreen—who still had his right forearm immobilised by a plastic sheath—seemed on the brink of asking to be left behind. I made the suggestion that perhaps he should stay with the truck, in case it was only pride that was preventing him, but he said no. The Tetrax had something of a reputation for exaggerated discretion, but if the entire race could be judged by Nisreen, they were certainly no cowards.

The long descent was a severe trial of my peace of mind. By the time we reached the bottom I was so eager to move, so eager to act, that it was almost a disappointment to find that our advance guard of mechanical wasps really had stung to very good effect, and that there was not a monster in the vicinity still capable of raising a tentacle.

I consoled myself with the thought that Susarma Lear must feel ten times worse about the absence of a meaningful target at which she could blast away.

The ground on which we found ourselves was dead white and very flat, which seemed to me unnatural until I realised that it was actually the chitinous epidermis of some vast thermosynthetic organism—a living carpet which probably extended throughout the entire worldlet, having sustained itself until the switch-off by drawing off energy from the real “floor.” No doubt the chitinous tegument was to protect it from herbivores, which—equally undoubtedly— would have evolved ways of drilling through it in order to sustain themselves, enabling them in their turn to supply the tentacled predators with their natural sustenance. It was the classic ecological pyramid that defines the structure of life-systems everywhere. It would have been pleasant to chat to 673-Nisreen about the aesthetics of it all, but we were too busy.

Now that we could search more carefully, we found four bodies. Two were Scarid soldiers; two were Tetrax. 994-Tulyar wasn’t among them, and neither was John Finn, but those two were all that was left of the eight who had set out, and we now outnumbered them five to two—six to two if we counted the brain-in-a-box called Clio, which was strapped to Urania’s shoulders like a knapsack. I wondered if Finn had yet figured out that Tulyar wasn’t Tulyar and that he was being played for a sucker. I thought not. Despite his cleverness with electronic gadgets, John Finn was essentially a cretin.

The ground was far too hard to show obvious tracks, but the heels of the suits Finn and Tulyar were wearing had been rigged to leave a trace for us, and it didn’t take long to confirm that there was indeed a trail to be followed.

It took us about a quarter of an hour to organise the bits that we’d crammed into the elevator with us, but eventually we had them assembled into five two-wheeled vehicles with power-cells in the space between our knees and luggage compartments behind the saddle. I’d ridden similar vehicles in the suburban streets of Skychain City, where there were no moving pavements, but the fact that the gravity was so much less down here—and for the first time it seemed noticeably less than it had been in the Nine’s home level— made me a little anxious about keeping my balance.

Just as we were about to set off, our lights picked out three more of the slug-things, gliding with surprising swiftness over the great white carpet, but while Susarma Lear was eagerly pulling her crash-gun out of its holster our little flying friends were zooming in for the sting, and they still had poison to spare. The slugs were thrown into desperate paroxysms, and were rendered helpless within a matter of seconds.

“You’ll get your chance yet,” I consoled her, hoping that she wouldn’t. Then I looked at Urania, who had charge— via Clio—of the olfactory sensor that could pick up the trail we had to follow. She led the way once again into the desolate darkness. Susarma Lear and I followed in single file, with 673-Nisreen behind me, and Myrlin bringing up the rear.

It didn’t take me long to get saddle-sore, and to begin hoping that the next drop we would face would be the last.