Asgard's Heart

29

At first glance, they didn’t look like wings.

In fact, the things which Urania pulled out of the bags she’d thoughtfully packed for us looked so much like screwed-up balloons that I thought I’d got hold of the wrong end of the stick and we were going down Montgolfier-fashion. No such luck—they were wings all right, but they were made out of artificial organics, and they spent their inactive time huddled into tight little balls.

“What exactly are we supposed to do with these things?” I asked Urania, as I took up one of these unpromising objects and weighed it in my hand. It felt distressingly light and fragile.

“Think of them as another kind of robot,” she suggested. “They are not so very different from the tiny things which we used to carry cameras and poison darts down to this level. But these are adapted for the purpose of carrying humanoid beings. It will not be necessary for you to do anything—they will hold you securely, and have an expertise of their own which will enable you to glide down safely. They can cope with any movements which you make, but it would be as well if you tried to remain still, spreading out your limbs horizontally until you touch down on the shell which surrounds the starlet.”

Susarma Lear was no more enthused than I by the sight of these creations, which certainly seemed less elegant in design than anyone could have anticipated. As inventors went, the Isthomi were easily a match for the legendary Daedalus—their home level had a labyrinth to put his to shame, and minotaurs would have been a mere finger-exercise for their biotech skills—but I remembered only too well what had happened to poor Icarus.

“Do not be afraid,” said Urania to Susarma Lear. “There is nothing to fear. At least, there is nothing to fear from the fall itself.”

Until she appended the last remark I had almost managed to reassure myself.

“What is there to fear?” I asked.

“There is breathable air in this space,” she reminded me. “Perhaps it is there only to facilitate the kind of descent which we are about to make. On the other hand, it may well support a complex life-system, which would presumably have its predators.”

I looked down at the void, and contemplated the faint, uncertain lights that marked out the disc of the starshell. With the central power-supply cut off, those lights were most probably the product of natural bioluminescence. The outside of the starshell was a planetoid in its own right— though it was like no other planetoid in the known galaxy. An asteroid that size couldn’t hold on to any atmosphere to speak of because it would be too light, but this one had air by virtue of being in an enclosed space. The combination of very low gravity and relatively high atmospheric pressure must be unique, and the life-system native to such an environment would probably be highly idiosyncratic. But everywhere there was life, there were predators and prey—and the hunters, presumably, would be well used to the darkness.

Myrlin handed me something else which Urania had taken from our luggage. It was a handgun—a needier. He gave one to Susarma, too, although she still had the Scarid crash-gun holstered at her waist.

“Carry it,” Myrlin suggested. “But if you have to shoot, try not to point it in my direction.”

She favoured him with a nasty scowl. She had chased him half way across the galactic arm with every intention of murdering him, and had thought for a long time that she had succeeded. She had probably never felt so good in all her life as when she thought she was gunning him down, and though she was a trifle saner now than she had been then, she hadn’t exactly learned to love him.

673-Nisreen refused the offer of a weapon, excusing himself on the grounds that the injury to his arm would prevent his using it effectively. The long ride on the motorcycle hadn’t done the broken limb any favours, and he was obviously feeling more than a little discomfort. But he wasn’t about to turn back; he was determined to be in this to the bitter end.

I watched Urania place a mass of folded flesh on Myrlin’s back, and I saw the thing beginning to unwind, sending tentacles around his neck and torso in a complicated web. It looked strong, but it also looked rather sinister, and I couldn’t help remembering those tentacled monsters that had come so close to stopping Tulyar’s party. No wings spread out as yet from the pulpy lump that was left. It just rearranged itself on either side of the life-support pack that was hugging the android’s spine between his shoulder-blades.

Myrlin inspected the bits of it he could see apprehensively. He knew the Isthomi better than any of us, and was usually inclined to trust their word without the slightest hesitation, but it takes a lot of faith to accept unquestioningly the assurance that when you jump into an enormous hole, a rubbery pink mess will promptly convert itself into a set of wings which is already trained to keep you safe.

673-Nisreen looked even more unhappy, despite the reputation the Tetrax have for inscrutability. Myrlin told him that he would try to stay close to him, and I ventured the opinion that we had all better try to stay together, although we would perforce have to be very careful if we had to start shooting.

The thought of having something to shoot at usually lifted Susarma Lear’s spirits, but she looked very grim now. She had a special frame of mind that she reserved for combat situations, but she hadn’t yet been able to define this as a combat situation.

“Go carefully,” I told her. “The guys with the headlamps are on your side. Chances are that if there’s anything big down there it’ll be no more lethal than those moths that mobbed us up above. It may be wiser to save our ammunition for 994-Tulyar and his friend.”

When we were all kitted out, Urania simply vaulted the barrier and launched herself into empty space, hugging Clio to her chest. She didn’t have a gun, but she had shown not the slightest sign of apprehension or anxiety. When she had put on frail flesh she clearly hadn’t acquired all the hangups that fleshy creatures usually have. She was of the Nine, and she had their perfect faith that what was properly planned would always work.

It would have made me feel a lot better if I could have watched her wings sprout and seen her dive flatten out into a graceful soaring glide, but she was leaping into darkness, and she was out of the reach of our feeble beams of light before the thing on her back had a chance to get its act together. I was prepared to wait, figuring that once her equipment had got itself into gear she might fly back up and favour us with a brief glimpse of her new accomplishments, but she didn’t.

673-Nisreen looked around with an expression that said: “Who’s next?”

I didn’t rush to volunteer. I looked at Myrlin. He was a little preoccupied, perhaps mulling over the fact that he was more than two metres tall and weighed something over a hundred and fifty kilos—at least twice as much as the scion.

“Okay Rousseau,” said Susarma Lear, in her most frigid She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed tone. “We go together on the count of three, and if either of us chickens out he gets busted to corporal. One… Two…”

She was already scrambling up on to the top of the protective fence, balancing herself on the guard-rail. She wasn’t even looking at me to make sure that I was doing as I was told. In the Star Force, officers take that kind of thing for granted.

“… Three!” she said, and jumped.

Somewhat to my surprise, I found that I had jumped with her. Maybe it was the influence of Star Force discipline coming out at last. Maybe it was my latent superhumanity taking over in the moment of crisis. Either way, I found myself tumbling in the air, watching the circle of light that was the airlock slowly dwindling in size. There was one horrid thrill of pure terror, like a fire alarm going off in my nervous system, and then a flood of intoxicated relief as I realised that nothing was happening to me. I was floating free, and remembered that while in free fall I was, of course, quite weightless.

It was not completely dark, but all the light I could see was emitted by distant pinpricks that were very remote, so I had no real sensation of movement or speed. No doubt I was accelerating with whatever alacrity the weak gravity could muster, but I could not feel it. Instead, I felt utterly isolated, out of touch with the entire universe… almost alone.

Almost.

For a couple of seconds I was on the brink of lapsing into a kind of trance—a dream-state. I was very nearly there when I realised what was happening, and snatched myself back. It was a sensation like many I’d had before, when snatching myself back from a doze induced by warmth and relaxation, but I knew that this time was different. Something was in my head— something which had nearly taken advantage of a moment of shock and confusion. Maybe its intention was innocent; maybe it only wanted to show me a bit more of its psychic movie about the history of the universe. But I’d seen it wearing the face of Medusa, and I was frightened of it. I wanted to hold on to my presence of mind at all costs.

I made a deliberate effort to assume the position that had been recommended to me, adjusting the attitude of my body so that I was face-down, with my arms and legs spread out. It was easier than I thought, but when I then tried to look back over my shoulder to see how much I resembled an angel I found myself rolling over slowly, spinning about two different axes. A moment’s dizziness confused me further, and then I righted myself again.

I still couldn’t sense the velocity of my fall. The darkness was near-total, and the suit I was wearing prevented my feeling the friction of the air against my skin. I had a dreadful suspicion, though, that my wings hadn’t grown yet. In fact, I had a dreadful suspicion that they weren’t going to grow at all.

I tried to calculate how far I might have to fall. I’d done sufficient mental arithmetic while we were coming through the levels to have some vague idea of the distances that were probably involved. The radius of the macroworld was something on the order of fourteen thousand kilometres, from which one had to subtract the depth of the levels and the radius of the starshell. I figured that if I called those seven and four thousand I probably wouldn’t be too far out. That meant that I had something in the region of three thousand kilometres to fall. The gravity here was probably about a ninth or a tenth of Earth-normal, and I figured that that would lead to an acceleration not too far away from a metre per second. On the other hand, that neglected air resistance, which would in the circumstances be considerable. It also neglected the effects of friction on my suit. I couldn’t quite see how to go about the job of calculating whether and how quickly I would turn into a meteor, and whether that could possibly happen before I actually landed. It did seem very unlikely, but the whole situation was so bizarre that I really didn’t feel able to discount it.

“Is everyone all right?” asked Susarma Lear, startling me somewhat. In trying to absorb myself so deeply in my silly calculations I had somehow let it slip from my mind that we could still talk to one another with the aid of radio.

“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully. “I can’t see or feel a thing. Maybe I have wings and maybe I don’t.”

“You have wings,” said Urania. “I have Clio with me. She has you all under observation.”

“I feel fine,” Myrlin assured me.

“Nisreen?” I asked.

“I am quite well,” the Tetron assured me, and if the smoothness of his parole was anything to go by, he was telling the truth.

“Unfortunately,” the scion’s voice chipped in again, with a sudden hint of urgency, “it seems that we are not alone. There are other winged creatures, in considerable numbers, approaching from below. We will be among them in a few minutes.”

“Can that brain-in-a-box tell us what they are?” demanded Susarma Lear.

“Only that they are very large; they have masses considerably greater than our own.”

“I can’t see a thing,” she complained. I could imagine her finger tightening about the trigger of her needier, desperate to find a target.

“How can they see us?” inquired Myrlin, with a similar note of desperation.

“Perhaps they can’t,” I ventured, hopefully, peering into the night and bringing my own gun round to aim at the gloomy void which still separated me by thousands of kilometres from the tiny sparkling worldlet which was Asgard’s heart.

“I fear,” said Urania—who would, of course, be the first to encounter danger if danger there was—"that they may not rely on light.”

My mind, unprompted by any conscious effort, conjured up the image of a host of gigantic vampire bats homing in on us unerringly with the aid of their sonar, avid for our blood.

Urania made a noise, then. It wasn’t a scream—I don’t believe that she could ever have produced a scream—but it was a sound that had shock in it, and maybe terror. I hadn’t thought her capable of terror, and that small sound suddenly seemed dreadfully ominous.

“What is it?” asked Susarma sharply.

She received no answer.

Then, I caught sight of the swarm of shifting shadows, silhouetted against the diffuse light which was still far below them. As they eclipsed the pinpricks I formed a hurried impression of their number, which was far more than I could count, and though in that first brief moment the shadows seemed quite small they were growing with terrible rapidity.

“Oh merde,” I murmured, as I tried to brace the hand which held the needier, and prepared to fire.

But I never had a target to aim at. The tiny light on my helmet showed me flickering wings, but they were too far away, moving far too quickly relative to my own downward course. I longed to let loose a stream of needles, though I could hardly begin to believe that such trivial missiles could be effective against the mothlike leviathans which whirled like a Stygian maelstrom from the starry mass of the mysterious Centre. Every time I tried to line up a shot, the flicker of leathery wings snatched the targets away.

I still had not fired a single shot when I fell with distressing smoothness into the gaping maw of a monstrous shadow, and was grabbed with sufficient force to knock me senseless yet again.