Asgard's Heart

35

The flying spider, with Clio hooked into its nervous system like a possessive demon, returned with 673-Nisreen within half an hour. He was badly shaken, and still suffering from his broken arm, but once he was free of his swaddling-clothes I helped rub his ankles to restore the circulation. He had no weapon, so we remained defenceless until Clio and her assistant brought Susarma Lear down, but nothing emerged to threaten us. The forest floor seemed to offer adequate sanctuary from the horrors that haunted the treetops.

Clio put the flying spider to sleep before disengaging herself, leaving the monstrous thing laid out across the root-ridges, legs and wings sprawled in all directions. I had never seen such an ungainly creature, nor an uglier one, and I was glad when we hurried off, leaving it to the mercy of any scavengers or predators which cared to risk approaching it while it was too dazed to resume the normal course of its life. I rather hoped that it would survive—it had played a vital role in saving us from a particularly nasty predicament, even if it hadn’t been quite itself while doing so. Who was I to minimise the efforts of a helpless instrument, drafted into a conflict far beyond the scope of its own understanding?

From her temporary vantage point high up in the trees Susarma Lear had seen many small lights produced by living creatures, but down on the surface of the starshell it was much gloomier, and we had only our helmet-lights to show us the way. I had not the slightest idea which way we ought to go, but the magic box still had matters well in hand. She climbed up on my shoulders, but refrained from running her neuronal feelers through my suit and into the back of my skull. Instead she began to send electronic signals over the radio link that we used for voice contact. She couldn’t manage a voice of her own but she could understand our speech, and she could answer questions on a buzz-once-for-yes-twice-for-no basis. It didn’t take long to work out a rudimentary system of communication, and to figure out which way she wanted us to go.

“How far is it?” I asked. “An hour?”

No.

“Two hours?”

Yes.

It wasn’t much of a conversation, but the essentials were there.

In anything like Earth-normal gravity the journey would have been very difficult, because the ground was far from flat—the cracks in the carpet made by the root-ridges were anything up to five metres deep and ten across. As things were, we couldn’t have weighed much more than a tenth of our Earth weight, and we found that we could hurdle the cracks with consummate ease, and could have turned somersaults if we’d wanted to. But we had to keep a wary eye on the trees. Their lowest branches were high above our heads, but there were things moving on the trunks, and on three occasions great winged shadows fluttered down towards us, presumably intent on investigating our nutritious potential. Susarma was always ready with her needier in case the situation became desperate, but we obviously didn’t seem appetising enough and the shadows passed us by. There were creepy-crawlies in the cracks between the root-ridges, too, but they kept their heads well down and didn’t bother us at all.

“These roots don’t just overlap,” I said to Nisreen. “They’re all one system. There’s only one organism here, and all the trees are just branches. The starshell is bedrock to a single mammoth plant.”

I didn’t mention Yggdrasil, the mythical world-ash of which I’d dreamed. The name wouldn’t have meant anything to a Tetron—or to Susarma, who’d had a more practical education.

673-Nisreen agreed that the plant was remarkable. From a Tetron, that was a genuine concession. I think he might have entered into the spirit of the thing if his arm hadn’t been troubling him so much. I felt fine again, but he hadn’t gone through the Isthomi’s bodily tuning-up process, and he was conspicuously less than superhuman. Bioscientist or not, a discussion of the wonders of the local ecology simply didn’t warrant a place on his immediate personal agenda. I was left to marvel privately at the multitudinous scions of the single starshell-hugging tree. No doubt there would have been far more to marvel at had the light been better, but the gloom put me in mind of my expeditions into the cold levels in the quiet days before Saul Lyndrach, Myrlin, and Susarma Lear had so rudely interrupted the pattern of my life.

The journey took less than two hours—Clio had underestimated the ground that we could cover in the low-gee conditions. Our destination, it transpired, was a kind of tower built beside one of the spokes which connected the starshell to the outer part of the macroworld. The tower was built in the form of a tall four-sided pyramid with a few square-sectioned extrusions and a hemispherical dome on top. The spoke that vanished into the canopy above it was oval in section, about four metres thick on the long diameter. The dome on top of the building looked as though it ought to be transparent, but there was no light inside it now; the entire edifice was silent and dark.

There was a moatlike ditch around the building, created because the carpet of root-ridges was held back by a fence not unlike the one that protected the airlock on the level above. The ditch was about twelve metres across and five deep. We could see that there was a doorway directly across from the point where we stood looking down, and we could see that it had been opened in a rather crude manner. A way had been blasted through it by a sophisticated petard of some kind. The gap was adequate to let through a man—or a man-sized robot.

We jumped down into the ditch and approached the doorway cautiously. Susarma had the needier in her hand, ready to fire, but there was no sign of anyone lurking within.

We paused on the threshold, and the box on my back started buzzing at me to attract my attention.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Is there a booby trap?”

Yes. No.

“What’s that supposed to mean? Is there or isn’t there?”

Yes. Pause. No.

I shook my head, wearily. Then I felt the feelers which were holding on to me relax slightly, as if the box was trying to let go.

Inspiration struck. “What you mean,” I said, “is that it’s booby-trapped in such a way as to make it dangerous for some of us.”

Yes.

I thought hard for a minute, and then it clicked. It had to be magic bazookas, like the one the Isthomi had given Myrlin to blast the robot mantis. The inside of the starshell was lethal to silicon brains.

“What’s going on?” asked Susarma.

“What I think she means,” I explained, “is that there’s something over the threshold which is intended to put mechanical intelligences out of action. Maybe that’s what damaged the Nine the first time they tried to contact the Centre through software space. I guess that’s why the enemy needed 994-Tulyar—or his body. They must have slipped through some relatively crude device to hit the power-supply, but maybe it couldn’t carry the kind of programming required to complete the job. For that, they need an organic brain—and clever hands.”

Yes, signaled Clio. Short and sweet—but none too encouraging.

“So how can we get you in there?” I asked.

No.

“I think it’s trying to tell us,” said Susarma, drily, “that we’re on our own.”

Yes. No.

“She can still communicate with us from out here, as long as we don’t get too much solid wall between us,” I said. “Maybe she can send some eyes in with us, too—those flying cameras that spied on the slugs. They can’t carry much in the way of software.”

Yes. Yes. Clio wasn’t getting excited—it wasn’t in her nature. She was just giving us a measure of encouragement. She might have to be discreet, lest she walk into an ambush in there, but she was still on the team. We might have to work out a more elaborate code than a series of buzzes if she was going to work out for us exactly what we had to do in there, but she might be able to cope. At least she might be able to tell us how to switch off the defences that were holding her back.

I waited while she disengaged herself, and I placed her discreetly beside the doorway. She emitted a couple of tiny mobiles, the size one normally expects flies to be, in a world where they weigh what things that size are supposed to weigh.

Susarma took the lead, still carrying the needier in her hand. I went next, while Nisreen brought up the rear.

There were marked doors on either side of the corridor but we ignored them. At the far end there was a deep circular well about four metres across, with a spiral catwalk winding around its perimeter, leading down into the body of the starshell. We went down, in no great haste. There were more doorways, clearly marked, but I figured that our objective was down below, and that was the way we went. There was a good deal of dust on the steps, and it had recently been disturbed. I couldn’t tell how many other feet had passed this way, but it seemed to be more disturbance than one pair was likely to have made, so I had to stop being optimistic about the possibility that Tulyar and John Finn were waiting for feeding time in something’s nest.

The catwalk wound around and around the well so many times that I lost count. My headlamp wasn’t sufficiently powerful enough to show us more than a dozen metres or so, and there was no way to guess what was waiting for us at the bottom, so we had to be patient. We were able to take big steps because of the low gravity, and we covered the ground reasonably quickly, but we were taking a roundabout route and we took a long time getting where we were going.

Eventually, though, we came to the bottom of the well.

The catwalk delivered us into a much larger open space. The wall we had been following round and round straightened out, and extended away into the distance as far as we could see.

The space at the bottom of the stair was strewn with the most amazing litter I had ever seen. Some kind of battle had once been fought here, and there were bits of shattered machines everywhere, covered in thick, greasy dust. Among the debris there were numerous humanoid skeletons, stripped of their flesh by scavengers that had long ago moved on in search of more profitable fields. I could tell that they weren’t human, in the strict sense of the word, but they were certainly humanoid. If they were all that remained of the superhuman builders, then those builders had indeed been closely akin to all of us, human and Tetron alike.

There was a clear trail leading away from the foot of the catwalk, into the gloom of the cavernous chamber.

“I don’t know how it looks to you,” I said to Susarma, “but I don’t think there are two sets of footprints there. I think there are at least three—maybe more.”

She knelt to look at the scuffed dust. “There are more than two,” she said, pensively. “But they needn’t all have been together. Maybe Tulyar and Finn are following a trail, too—the trail of the whoever or whatever switched off the power.”

It was a possibility. We moved off, following the tracks in the dust. We moved carefully, all too well aware of the possibility of an ambush. Tulyar and Finn had suits like ours, and could listen in on our conversation if there were no thick walls separating us—though that would force them to keep silent themselves. They couldn’t know exactly where we were until they saw our lights, but they knew which way we’d be coming.

I wondered, briefly, how John Finn was feeling now that he was all alone with a Tetron who wasn’t really a Tetron at all. Maybe he was ready to defect yet again, back to our side. On the other hand, maybe not. He was way out of his intellectual depth, and there was no telling which way he would figure out his best interests.

“Clio,” I said, softly. “Are you still with us?”

There was a very faint buzz, at the threshold of perception. There was too much junk between the surface and our present position—as soon as we’d moved away from the well we’d come to the limit of our communicative apparatus. If we went on, we’d be on our own.

I hesitated, and looked at Susarma.

As far as she was concerned, she’d always been in command, and now it looked as if we would soon be catching up with the bad guys she was only too willing to take control. She wasn’t unduly worried about losing contact with Clio—her objective was the strictly short-term one of keeping us alive until 994-Tulyar and John Finn were neutralized. She brought us close together, and raised a finger to the part of her helmet that was in front of her lips, telling us to be quiet. She signaled in dumb show that she would follow the tracks, while I was to move away to the left and Nisreen to the right. We had to stay close enough to see her headlight, but at least we wouldn’t present a single target.

She took the Scarid pistol from her waist, and looked at her two weapons for a moment or two, as if inwardly debating their relative merits. Then she shrugged, and passed the needier to me. It was by far the more effective weapon, and I was initially inclined to refuse it, but I remembered that she’d showed her prowess with the crash gun once before, while I was by no means certain to be able to hit anything with it.

I took the needier, and we moved off. As methods of communication went, the dumb show was only marginally better than the yes/no buzzing farce to which we had been reduced in exchanging opinions with Clio, but it worked well enough. The worst of it was that once we had separated and begun to move forward, none of us dared say a word.

We moved off along a corridor between two ranks of squat platforms, each one bearing the broken remains of what looked like a plastic bubble. The platforms were about two metres long by one wide, with the corners rounded down; the bubbles were a little less than that, and added an extra thirty centimetres or so to the height of each column. The space between them was so cluttered with nasty debris that I didn’t pay much immediate attention to the platforms, but I realised belatedly that they must be something like the artificial wombs which the Nine had built. This had once been a hospital—or a hatchery. Maybe this was where the builders designed other humanoids: the lab where evolution really happened, before the gardeners begin seeding the worlds with pre-adapted DNA. Or maybe it was only the place where the masters of Asgard investigated the lifeforms which they plucked from the worlds which they visited. We still didn’t know whether Asgard was an Ark or a nursery, though we were pretty sure that it was a fortress.

Somehow, that particular enigma seemed much less important now. The problem was not to interpret Asgard, but to save it.

We moved more slowly now than we had before, taking shorter strides. I tried to keep one eye on Susarma’s headlight, and the other on the rubbish which threatened to trip me up, with occasional glances into the gloom ahead, to make certain that nothing nasty was looming up there.

We had been on the move for about half an hour—just long enough to enable me to get thoroughly relaxed, when things began to happen again, and to happen all too quickly.

There was a sudden blaze of light from somewhere up ahead of me, which burst upon my retina like a bomb and blinded me. I knew that I was an easy target, and I let my brief Star Force training take over, diving away to my right to get behind one of the platform-wombs. A powerful beam of light chased me as I dived, and I didn’t hang about when I landed—rolling and keeping low, I wriggled away through the wreckage of machinery, trying to lose myself among the shadows.

I heard the crash-gun fire, and one beam of light disappeared—but then I realised that there were at least three.

I heard another gun go off—a needier spitting its tiny slivers of metal. The crash-gun boomed again.

Then there was silence. I tried desperately hard to locate some movement around the lights, hungry for a target.

And then I heard something very strange.

“Oh shit,” said Susarma’s voice. “I almost… Why the hell didn’t you…”

She didn’t sound angry—but she did sound very surprised. And her voice was cut off with a sudden, sickening abruptness, swallowed up by the brief growl of a needier.

I knew that someone had shot her.

But why, if she’d seen the other coming, hadn’t she shot first? Had she thought it was me?

I ducked down beneath one of the pillars, trying to hide as best I could, and trying furiously to think. Clio couldn’t hear us; Susarma Lear was down; 673-Nisreen didn’t even have a gun. It was all down to me, and I didn’t have a clue what was happening. I tried to look over the top of the plastic bubble, hoping that my eyes were ready to see, but in the glare of whatever light it was that promptly picked me out, I could see nothing but a vast shadow heading towards me. The shadow had a headlamp just like mine, and mine must have got in his eyes just as his got in mine, though they were feeble enough by comparison with the spotlight.

I didn’t have any trouble recognising him. I couldn’t see his face, but I would have known his bulk anywhere.

It was Myrlin—who was not, after all, being digested in some hideous insect’s stomach, but looming above me like a great big bear. I had half raised the needier, but I stopped myself from shooting, and remembered far too late what Susarma Lear had been saying when she was taken out. Enlightenment didn’t save me.

It was Myrlin’s body, but it wasn’t Myrlin’s mind. As he shot me in the belly, and sent my body hurtling backwards to collide with one of the platforms, I reflected that the Isthomi had made a bad mistake in judging that Myrlin hadn’t taken aboard any mysterious software during that fateful moment of contact. And so had I.

Whatever had got into Tulyar had got into him, too. It had simply lain dormant, biding its time—and by that strategy, had won the game.

We were all down, all dying… and the starlet was probably all set to go nova.