Asgard's Heart

10

“Look, John,” I said, patiently. “I’m aware of the fact that you have a little learning difficulty, but even you must remember that we’ve been through all this before. If you wanted to exercise your death-wish, you could have done it this morning.”

“Personally,” he said, “I’d just as soon kill you, but I’m assured that for some stupid reason you’re considered to be quite valuable. No other hostage will do as well. Just behave yourself, and your freaky friends in the walls will make sure that no harm will come to you. No mindscramblers, no clever tricks at all—they’ll just give us what we want, rather than risk any harm coming to you. See?”

“What do you want?” I asked, flatly.

“We want to get the hell out of here before those killing machines come back. We want that armoured truck the magic Muses have been building for you.”

While he talked he urged me into action. He came round behind me but he kept the needier jammed into my neck, so that if anything unexpected happened he could blow my brains out without any delay at all. I allowed him to shove me where he wanted me to go.

“Whose bright idea was this?” I asked.

“Just keep walking,” he told me. The light was still gloomy, and there appeared to be nobody else about, but once we were away from the domes a couple of other armed men fell into step with us. I wasn’t in the least surprised to see that they were Scarid soldiers. They were the only people around who were stupid enough not to realise that they were safer behind the Isthomi’s defences, and that once outside them there’d be no way of getting all the way back up to level fifty-two.

“You were bloody lucky to get away last time,” I told him in a low voice. “The colonel’s been regretting that she didn’t shoot you ever since. She’ll be ever so grateful for a second chance.”

“She isn’t going to get it,” he said optimistically.

There was a car waiting for us in one of the Nine’s labyrinthine tunnel-systems, and I gathered that one of Finn’s friends had already made it clear to the Nine exactly what they wanted done. The Nine had apparently decided to play ball. I could only assume that they really did consider me a uniquely valuable asset, and were prepared to hand over the robot transporter rather than risk my being damaged. It also occurred to me, though, that the Nine seemed to have lost interest in the transporter and in the possibility of getting my fleshly self to the Centre by conventional means. So much for my plans going forward as I had intended.

“I suppose I should have asked the Nine to take care of that bug you planted,” I remarked, as I took my place in the front seat of the car. “You’d never have figured out that I was so important to the Nine if you hadn’t listened in.”

He sat directly behind me, never relaxing the pressure of the gun on my skin. It reminded me very strongly of the first time I had visited this level, when Amara Guur had treated me in exactly the same fashion. The Nine had supplied Guur with a weapon that wouldn’t fire, looking after me even though I wasn’t nearly as valuable then as I seemed to be now. It would be too much to hope, though, that the weapon which Finn had now was useless. Someone had probably tried it out during the morning’s skirmish.

Another Scarid came out of the shadows to join us in the car, making three in all; they seemed desperately morose. They were all officers, but none of them seemed to be assuming command. I was puzzled, because I couldn’t see why they’d consent to taking orders from a jerk like Finn. I could understand how they might feel very much out of their depth, and how eager they must be to get home. I also knew how this kind of strong-arm tactic was very much their way of doing things—but it still didn’t add up that they would turn in their hour of need to a no-hoper like Finn.

My puzzlement increased when a fourth figure came towards us from the direction of the village. It was Jacinthe Siani. She, of all people, should have known better than to get involved in this, but she was under Scarid orders now, and they probably hadn’t given her a choice. She took her place behind me.

“If you try to take the transporter out,” I said, speaking in parole rather than English so that the Scarids could understand, “you’ll very likely run into more of those things that attacked us. The Nine have defences now—here you’re safe. You could be going to your deaths if you try to go up through the levels, even if you can figure out a route.”

“Shut up, Rousseau,” said Finn, also in parole. “We know what we’re doing.”

I shut up. After all, I told myself, why the hell should I care if John Finn and a bunch of Scarids wanted to get themselves killed? There was no reason at all—except that I didn’t want them to take my transporter. If I was ever going to get to the Centre, I’d need it.

It didn’t take long to get to the manufactory where the Nine had been putting the robot together. It was even less well-lit than the residential area, and it seemed unnaturally still and silent. All the mechanical arms projecting from the walls were idle, mostly drawn back and folded. The transporter stood in lonely isolation in the middle of an open space. It seemed to be finished, and it had the special gleam of something brand new and never used. It was much bigger than the truck I’d used for work on the surface, but it didn’t look so very different. Most of its elaborations were internal—although it did have a turret on top with three different guns mounted on it.

“We’re going to drive to a certain place,” Finn told me, “where we have a couple of friends waiting. Then we’re going to give you something to hold—it’ll be a bomb, but don’t worry about it going off, because I’ll have the detonator safe about my person. Once we’re out of the habitat, with Asgard’s nice thick walls separating us, we’ll be safe, and so will the bomb. We’ll never see one another again.”

I reflected that it wasn’t all bad news.

Finn and I climbed into the front seat of the transporter, while the Scarids got into the cab behind us. There was a set of manual controls, although the robot was really intended to drive itself, or to interface with another silicon-based intelligence. The manual controls had been designed with a human driver in mind, though, and followed a common stereotype. I had no difficulty in starting up and driving off into the tunnel ahead. It was only just wide enough to accommodate us, but there was no problem in following it. I didn’t have to make any turnings—the Nine had obviously been apprised already of the destination that Finn had in mind, and they were happy to open up a route that would take us directly there.

There didn’t seem to be any point in further exercising my limited powers of persuasion, so I did exactly what Finn wanted me to do, taking comfort from the fact that I was probably driving him to the doorstep of his appointment with death.

When we stopped, I couldn’t see anything much outside except for a circular space with an empty shaft above it. I assumed that it was a platform that could lift the truck up to the next level—maybe several levels.

We remained in the cab while Finn carefully taped a cylindrical object to the part of my back that was most difficult for my hands to reach. It was no bigger than Myrlin’s thumb, but if it really was an explosive device—and I was quite prepared to believe that it was—it could do a lot of damage.

Finally, Finn ordered me to step out on to the platform. It wasn’t until I got down that I saw the other waiting figures, away to the rear. They came slowly forward, and I got two shocks, the bigger one hard on the heels of the smaller.

The first shock was that they weren’t the Scarid soldiers I had been expecting—they were Tetrax. The second shock was that the one who led them out was 994-Tulyar. I knew him well enough to be sure that I could recognise his features, even though he had an expression on his face that I had never seen before. He looked at me with glittering eyes that somehow caught the light shining from the walls. With the empty, unlit shaft above me, I felt as though I were standing in a pool of darkness.

“They told me you were missing,” I said to him. When he made no reply, I realised that something was very wrong. I wondered briefly whether I could possibly have made a mistake in identification, but I knew in my heart that I hadn’t. This was Tulyar—or, perhaps, had been Tulyar. I wondered whether the folklore of the Tetrax featured such beings as zombies.

He still didn’t say anything. He just stared at me, with what seemed to be an animosity beyond my understanding. But then he glanced sideways, quickly and furtively, and I felt a sudden flood of relief. I was sure that he wanted to kill me, but he knew that if he did, the Nine would strike back at him.

I realised that there was more to this crazy affair than the feeble-minded desire of a handful of Scarid bully-boys to get back home. Finn wasn’t just trying to escape. He was playing the mercenary again, figuring that he might get a greater reward from a grateful Tetron high-number man than he could expect from Star Force justice or the hospitality of the Isthomi.

I looked sideways at one of the Scarid officers. “You think this guy is going to take you to meet your ancestors, don’t you?” I said, with faint disgust. “You don’t intend to go up—you’re going down.”

“Shut up, Rousseau,” said Finn, unceremoniously. He took the gun-barrel away from my neck for the first time. “Get over there, out of the way.”

“John,” I said, feeling at least a quantum of genuine concern for him. “It’s not Tulyar. I know it looks like Tulyar, but he wouldn’t pull a stunt like this. Something else has colonised his brain—it got into him when he tried to interface with the Nine and got caught up in their close encounter with something dangerous. He’s been taken over— possessed by some software demon.”

It was no good. Finn and the Scarids wouldn’t believe me, and I couldn’t really blame them. They didn’t know about Medusa’s head, and they couldn’t begin to understand what kind of war was being waged inside Asgard. 994-Tulyar didn’t move or speak. He just waited. I wondered if I could appeal to his better nature, thinking that perhaps the real Tulyar was still in there somewhere, still potentially able to speak or think or act if only he could figure out the way.

“Tulyar?” I said. “Do you know what’s happening to you?”

It was a stupid question. This wasn’t just a misguided Tetron following some suggestion that had come to him in a dream; it was another kind of person entirely. Whatever had intruded upon the Tetron’s mind had done a far more comprehensive wrecking job than the thing that had got into mine. Assuming that what was in me wasn’t just a delayed-action seed of destruction, I was a lucky man. Looking at Tulyar, or what had once been Tulyar, gave me a little more confidence in the supposition that I had been drafted to the side of the angels.

“Do as you’re told, Rousseau,” said Finn coldly, his voice grating with evident strain. “Just get out of the way, and everybody will be safe and sound.”

Uncomfortably aware of the thing taped to my back, I moved away from the circular platform and into the mouth of the tunnel through which I’d brought the truck. My gaze flicked over the three Scarids and the two other Tetrax— neither of whom, I was oddly glad to see, was 673-Nisreen. They were all showing signs of anxiety, but they all seemed committed. I knew how sensitive the Scarida were about the question of their hypothetical ancestors, who had supposedly laid on the power that had recently been switched off, for the benefits and greater glory of the Scarid empire. I knew, too, how strong the Tetrax were on matters of obligation, and how nearly impossible it would be for men placed under Tulyar’s orders to defy him, even though they could plainly see that there was something very weird about him.

“Let them go, John,” I said to my fellow human, figuring that the brotherhood of man ought to count for something. “Stay here.”

His reply was brief and obscene. He’d never liked me, and that dislike had got in the way of his common sense on more than one occasion.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” I said, looking now at Jacinthe Siani.

“Do you?” she countered. “Does any of us?”

There wasn’t time to have a debate about it. The Scarids were already loading themselves into the rear part of the cab, and whatever it was that was wearing Tulyar’s body followed them. The remaining Tetrax got into the front seat, while Finn went last of all. The door shut behind them.

As the platform began to sink into the depths, carrying the truck away into abyssal darkness, I put out a hand to steady myself against the wall, feeling suddenly very weak.

Eventually, the wall lit up, and there she was, looking as sprightly as ever.

“You can remove the explosive charge now, Mr. Rousseau,” she said. “It’s quite safe.”

“Considering that your power is supposed to be not far short of godlike,” I told her, “you’re pretty damn useless every time it comes to the crunch.” I figured I was entitled to feel a little resentful.

“I must apologise for not warning you that it was about to happen,” she said, “but as you know, they were able to listen in on our conversation.”

“You knew what they intended to do?” I said.

“Certainly.”

“And you deliberately let them get away?” I was annoyed, having jumped to the conclusion that the Nine were really quite glad to wave goodbye to my transporter, on the grounds that it would narrow my options to the point where I’d have no choice but to go along with their plans. But I’d misjudged them, as usual.

“When we realised that something had been implanted in the Tetron’s brain—and that it was not akin to the programme sent to colonise your own brain,” she said, equably, “we could only conclude that it had been intruded by the enemy. We had then to consider what the best thing was to do with a possible enemy in our midst. Had it shown any hostile intention, we would of course have destroyed it, but in fact it seemed to want only to escape. It seemed to us to be an opportunity not to be missed, though of course we were concerned to conceal that judgment.”

“Opportunity?” I echoed. “Opportunity to do what?”

“As you guessed yourself,” she said, “the biocopy which has apparently taken over Tulyar’s body knows how to get into the deeper levels, despite the apparent difficulties of so doing. We must assume that it knows how to reach its destination.”

“How the hell does that help us? He’s got the only transport!”

I have to admit that she was very patient with me. “The reason that it took time to construct the vehicle,” she pointed out, “was that it was very difficult to programme the machines which built it. Now that they know how to do it, they can construct a duplicate in a matter of hours. We had quite sufficient time to equip the vehicle which they have stolen with a device whose model I’m sure you remember.”

Enlightenment dawned.

When the Tetrax had sent us into the levels to carry plague into the Scarid empire, they had thoughtfully equipped our boots with a device which leaked an organic trace, easily followed by an artificial olfactory sensor. That device, detected by John Finn, had led the Scarida down to the world of the Isthomi just in time to throw me in at the deep end of the crucial moment of contact. I had always assumed that it was 994-Tulyar who had been responsible for the trace.

Now, it seemed, the tables had been turned. Finn, Tulyar, and their allies were laying a trail which might lead the corporeal me—and a few friends—all the way to the Centre.

The boot, for once, was on the other foot.