Asgard's Heart

37

I awoke with a horrid, nauseous shock, as if some mysterious beam of malice had jolted my grey matter.

I felt very numb, as though I was floating. I was as high as a kite on some kind of pain-killer. That was due to the life-support system on my back, which was still hooked into my flesh. It had fed me enough anaesthetic to knock me out, and now it was letting me down again, as gently as it could.

I moved the hand that was clutching my abdomen, touching the fingertips very gently to the wound where the needles had gone in. There was a rough edge, but it was only the lacerated plastic of the suit. The entry wound had already scarred over. Whatever the Nine had done to me had given my powers of self-repair a considerable boost. I tried to sit up, and immediately regretted it. It wasn’t exactly pain, but it was a dreadful sensation of nausea. The needles were still inside me, and the damage they’d done was going to take a good deal more than half an hour to make good.

I lay back against the pillar, wondering whether it could possibly do me any good to be alive. I looked from side to side, hoping to see something reassuring. My headlight was still working, but its feeble beam showed me nothing but dust and wreckage—including a skeleton which must have been sprawling in much the same position as myself, against another pillar. When I tried to turn my head, though, I realised that there was another light-source not too far away. At first I thought that it must be Susarma Lear’s helmet-lamp, but it was actually an open doorway in a wall some thirty metres away. I couldn’t see inside from where I was lying, but I could hear 673-Nisreen’s voice over the radio link, and I had to bite my tongue to stop myself exclaiming in surprise.

I tried to sit up, and succeeded. It wasn’t comfortable, but I had a terrible sense of urgency. I couldn’t quite think why, but I had the idea that I was in a hurry. I came to my knees, and then I managed, with some difficulty, to stand up.

I looked around, but the needier I’d been carrying had gone.

Myrlin—the thing that was using Myrlin’s body—had taken it away.

From my new position I could see a pair of boots, attached to a body that was hidden by one of the pillars. They had to be Susarma Lear’s. There wasn’t the least sign of movement—if her powers of self-repair had managed to preserve her life they’d obviously had more work to do than mine.

I remembered that Susarma had had a crash-gun. Myrlin had shot her first, then come after me. He had disarmed me, but perhaps he hadn’t gone back afterwards to disarm Susarma.

I wasn’t sure that I could walk, but the low gravity gave me hope. Hyped up as I was, I didn’t seem to weigh anything at all. When I took a step I thought I could feel the needles ripping my intestines, but it might have been my imagination. I clenched my teeth hard, determined not to give myself away by groaning.

I don’t know how many steps I took to reach Susarma’s body, but I got there as quickly as I could, and knelt down beside her.

The crash-gun was still in her hand.

I could see her face through the helmet. It was very pale and drawn, but her brave blue eyes were shut and she appeared to be sleeping peacefully. I knew that she wouldn’t be feeling any pain, whether she was dead or not. I looked at the entry wound where the needles had hit her. She hadn’t taken any more needles than I had, but she’d taken them higher up, around the lowest ribs. No matter how well the Isthomi had rebuilt her, she couldn’t recover if her lungs had been reduced to tatters—but when I put my hand to her breast, I thought that I could feel a faint heartbeat.

I didn’t dare wait until I was sure—I was in a hurry. I prised the gun out of her hand. Her fingers weren’t rigid with rigor mortis, but it seemed as if she opposed me, very feebly. The reflex gave me further reason to think—at least to hope—that she was still alive, and that the ingenuity of the life-support system was equal to the task of preserving her strengthened flesh.

I checked the magazine, and found that the gun had only two bullets left. There were several spare magazines in her belt and I took two out—I didn’t really think that I’d get a chance to reload if seven shots weren’t enough, but I figured that I might as well have it as not.

I stood up, feeling my intestines lurch as I did so, wondering whether the superhumanity treatment the Isthomi had given me was really up to coping with aggravated peritonitis. I switched off my headlight.

I moved as carefully and as quietly as I could towards the open door. I made sure that I couldn’t be seen from within the room, though they weren’t likely to be able to see much looking out from a brightly-lit room into the darkness. From a distance I took a long discreet look to see where everyone was. Pseudo-Myrlin was away to the left, Finn to the right. 673-Nisreen was between them. Pseudo-Tulyar would be the most difficult one—he was sitting down again.

Again?

I shook my head to clear the strange sensation of deja vu which had come over me. I felt dizzy, as though there were something I ought to remember, but there was no time to worry about it.

I paused when I got into position beside the door, leaning against the wall to gain what support I could while I gathered my strength. I looked back the way I had come, but it was too dark to see Susarma’s body. I was as ready as I would ever be. Mentally, I rehearsed the shots that I would have to fire, and prayed fervently that I could aim the crash-gun effectively. It was a kind of weapon I’d never handled before.

My calculations weren’t made any easier by the fact that I couldn’t tell how many shots I’d have to fire. Whatever was in control of Myrlin’s body might not have recaptured all his skills, but had been effective enough to take Susarma Lear by surprise and shoot her down. Myrlin’s body was just as resistant to damage as mine, and wasn’t full of needles. It wasn’t going to be easy to put him away, even with a full clip. And how many shots would I need thereafter? One for Tulyar, to be sure—but what about Finn? Had he come sufficiently to his senses to realise that Tulyar was no friend of his? Might there be just enough humanity left in his befuddled brain to make him see that I was on his side?

I couldn’t spend too long wondering. Somehow, I knew that there was no time to spare.

I slid around the edge of the doorspace, keeping my back firmly against the wall—I knew that I’d need every bit of support I could get, given that the gun would have a much more powerful recoil than a needier. I was levelling the weapon as I moved, supporting my right arm with my left, as I’d seen Susarma do. Pseudo-Myrlin and Finn no longer had their guns in their hands, but they were far from relaxed, and when Finn saw me appear from nowhere and his eyes widened in horror the giant was quick to go for the needier which he had laid down near to hand.

I fired at the invader who was wearing the body of my friend, but couldn’t help wincing as I did so. It wasn’t a perfect shot but he was a very big target, and the bullet ripped into him just below the right collar-bone. He wasn’t braced the way I was and the bullet hurled him backwards, sending him crashing into the console behind him. I wanted to fire at him again, to make sure that he stayed down, but I could see from the corner of my eye that my optimistic hopes regarding John Finn’s essential humanity were not to be fulfilled. His hatred for me had corrupted his reflexes irredeemably, and he was already going for his gun with murderous intent.

I swiveled instantly and fired at him.

I saw the terrified expression on his face as he saw me turning towards him. He had already plucked his needier from his belt, but as I shot him, a convulsive jerk of his hand sent his shots straight upwards into the ceiling.

My bullet hit him in the head, and he went down as if he’d been switched off. Blood and brains filled up the space inside his helmet, and I knew that he wouldn’t be back, no matter how much work the Isthomi had done on his body.

I hadn’t intended to kill him, and if I’d had the option, I really would have knocked him down in such a way that he could get up again when it was all over, but I didn’t have the choice.

I also didn’t have a choice about what to do next, because pseudo-Myrlin was already coming back to his feet again. The bigger they are the harder they fall, but in low gee they can bounce back with astonishing alacrity. He was braced now as well as I was, and he was bringing the needier up to fire. I tried to zero in on the centre of his chest again, and blasted away. It would have done far more good to blow his head off the way I’d blown Finn’s, but that had been a freak shot and I knew better than to try for a repeat. I had to hit the giant again before he cut me in half with the needier, and if I had to hit him four more times to keep him down then that was what I had to do.

Pseudo-Tulyar should have been out of it for a few more seconds, but he wasn’t. His chair didn’t swivel but he had turned in it with unexpected agility, and was covered by its broad back. He must have had a gun very close to hand because it was in his fist now and he was already aiming it— but he didn’t have a chance to fire because 673-Nisreen, the aging man of science, brought down upon his wrist the hard cast which was protecting his own broken arm. Pseudo-Tulyar dropped the gun, and Nisreen grabbed him, wrenching his arm downwards, using the back of the chair as a fulcrum. Pseudo-Tulyar somersaulted lazily over the back of the chair.

I had already fired a second shot at pseudo-Myrlin, who took it square in the chest. Maybe it was too square, because it seemed to have no effect at all. He couldn’t be thrown back again and there wasn’t enough power to stop him even in a great big bullet like that.

He fired, but the needles went wild, splashing into the wall beside me. If he’d really been Myrlin he would never have missed, but he was a biocopy of some alien software, locked in an utterly unfamiliar body—he hadn’t had as much time as his brother to become accustomed to his flesh, and I realised how completely we had been taken by surprise when he first shot us down. I realised that he hadn’t fired into my belly in order to hurt me more, but because he didn’t know any better. It had been a mistake, and now he was paying for it.

I fired again, and again, and again.

I didn’t miss once. The third bullet opened up his great big chest, sending splinters of rib deep into his vital organs. The fourth and fifth must have turned his heart and lungs to pulp.

Three or four more needles ricocheted from the floor, and one of them grazed the boot of my suit, but I was still standing, still able to fire.

673-Nisreen was down in a heap with the pseudo-Tetron on top of him. There was no way I could get a clear shot, and I had no option but to pause.

I coughed, feeling a gout of blood rising from my belly into my mouth, but I knew that I had to remain standing. Whatever else I did before I died—and there was something I had to do—I had to destroy the alien that had made use of 994-Tulyar’s body to breach the defences of the starshell. Whatever mischief he was trying to work, he had been mere moments from completing it, and it wouldn’t be enough to hurt him. He had to be finished.

I watched, impatiently, while he got his arms inside the futile grip which 673-Nisreen was trying to secure, and thrust outwards both ways. The bioscientist’s grip was broken, and Tulyar threw him off. While Nisreen tumbled through the air in grotesque slow motion pseudo-Tulyar groped in desperation for the needier that he had dropped.

But in throwing Nisreen aside he’d signed his own death-warrant. I had a clear shot now, and I fired.

For the first time, I missed.

I was supposed to be the low-gee expert, the man from Achilles, but I fired the last bullet before I had quite brought my hand to a standstill, and I wasn’t properly braced against the kick of the gun.

I felt a surge of nausea, but I couldn’t even pause to swallow the blood that was in my mouth. I coughed again, spraying tiny flecks of red all over the hood, but hurled myself forward anyhow, knowing that I had to hit him before he could fire the needler.

I had my arms out ahead of me, and it was the gun I was holding which slammed into his helmet, but now he was the one who was braced and I was the featherweight. When he thrust out at me with his arms I began to do the same slow somersault as Nisreen. I went all the way over, and by the time I was facing him again I was staring straight down the barrel of his gun, looking failure and death in the face.

But when the needles came, they missed me again. The zombie had fired just a fraction too late, and the convulsion which sent the shots wide was caused by the impact of a stream of needles which passed through his right eye and cheek, ploughing into the brain and destroying whatever strange entity it was that had taken possession when 994-Tulyar’s own real self had given up the ghost.

673-Nisreen was holding John Finn’s gun. It was he who had fired. Finn was lying dead at his feet, and when Nisreen dropped his eyes to avoid looking at 994-Tulyar’s corpse he looked straight at the bloody mess inside Finn’s helmet. Tetrax can’t turn pale, but Nisreen did the best he could, and I saw him shudder convulsively.

I thought I knew how difficult it had been for him to do what he had just done. In a way, he’d done exactly what Finn had, and taken the side of an alien against his own species-cousin, but I knew he hadn’t done it for the same reason. Whatever Tulyar had been telling him when I woke up, he hadn’t believed. Reason had told him which side to be on, and even though what he’d done was making him sick to the core of his being, he’d done it. It only looked like the Star-Force way; the motive behind it had been something very different.

I hadn’t time to do or say anything. I took my place in the chair where pseudo-Tulyar had been sitting, and looked at the keyboards and the dials. There must have been two hundred different switches, and although every one had been shaped with humanoid fingers in mind, I couldn’t make any sense at all of the symbols.

I raised my hands, feeling a frightful sense of utter frustration rising inside me.

And then some kind of bomb went off in my head.

I began to punch the keyboard furiously. There were no flashing lights or ringing bells to give evident warning of the fact that the power build-up in the starlet was about to discharge itself, and I had in fact lost all consciousness of the fear that Asgard might very shortly be turned into nova debris. I had not the slightest notion what I was doing, or how, and my self-consciousness seemed to be locked into some absurd psychostasis, whereby I could watch my hands but could feel no connection with them whatsoever.

I had not even sufficient presence of mind to wonder whether this was how Myrlin had felt when the creature lurking in his brain had sprung its sudden ambush, and made him into what he had so tragically become—the traitor who had very nearly turned the war around.

When my hands finally finished their work, they just stopped. I must have been struck rigid in the chair, frozen into stillness. How much time there was to spare when I completed the sequence, I have no idea. The conventions of melodrama demand that it be a mere handful of seconds, and I can’t say for certain that it wasn’t, but the simple truth is that I did not know then and do not know now.

I wondered, as I sat there, perfectly still, whether it was now safe for me to die. I was feeling no authentic pain, but in myself I felt absolutely awful. If someone had told me then that I was dead, I could not have denied it with any conviction.

When I felt a touch on my shoulder, I looked up to see 673-Nisreen staring down at me. The poor guy still hadn’t much idea of what had happened, or how, or why, and he was desperate for some reassurance that he’d done the right thing.

“What have you done?” he asked, starting with one of the easier ones.

That was the moment when I discovered that I did, in fact, know what I had done. I didn’t know how, but I knew what.

“I shunted the power which had built up in the starshell into a stresser, to wormhole the macroworld,” I told him. “Which is exactly what they did a million and a half years ago, when the battle first reached its critical phase. The builders were still around then, in humanoid form. They didn’t survive the consequent skirmishes, but at least they got the starshell sealed off, and left the war to the software gods who were equipped to fight it.”

“Where are we?” he asked. I could see from his eyes that he was quick enough on the uptake to know that a thing the size of Asgard would make a hell of a wormhole. I knew he wouldn’t be overly shocked by the answer.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I moved us, but there’s no way to know where. At a guess, we’ve come a couple of million light-years. I hope you don’t feel homesick, because we aren’t ever going to see the Milky Way again, let alone Tetra. Asgard’s all we have now—we might even have to practice being nice to the Scarida. There are still billions of them up there. I doubt that there are more than a couple of thousand Tetrax, or a couple of dozen humans.”

The needles were churning in my guts, but somehow I had them sealed off. I was bleeding inside, but I had enough blood left in the arteries to keep my brain going. I felt light-headed again—anaesthetised.

He began to work his way up to the difficult questions.

“It wasn’t Tulyar, was it?”

“No,” I confirmed. “It wasn’t Tulyar, and it wasn’t Myrlin. Whatever their short-term plans may have been, they meant no good to your species or mine, or anything else that’s truly alive. I don’t know what it was that made them, but when it comes to the choice between our gods and theirs, it has to be ours that we go out to fight for. I’m certain of that, if nothing else.”

“How did you do it?” he asked. “How did you know what to do?”

“Physically,” I said, “I feel like half the man I used to be. Mentally, I fear that I may be a little bit more. The copy of my consciousness that the Nine launched into software space was somehow retranscribed into my own brain. It’s been through a lot, and it’s come every bit as close to extinction as my poor fleshly body, but it was strong enough, at the end, to carry another injection of programming into biocopy form—a set of instructions for moving the macroworld.

“The gods found themselves a hero, Nisreen. A demigod—whatever you care to call it. Believe me Nisreen, there’s a part of me that has seen things and been things nobody should be asked to see and be. The penalty of living in interesting times, I guess.”

I had a question of my own, though I didn’t really expect him to be able to answer it. “Is the colonel still alive?”

“Yes,” he said. More time must have passed than I thought. I must have been sitting still for several minutes— time for him to take a look.

“I don’t know how,” he went on, “but she’s still alive. I’m not sure she can survive for long, though, unless we can get help.”

“Help,” I said, “is not a problem. This is the real Centre of Asgard, and from this seat you can do anything, if you know how. The gods that the builders made to look after themselves and their creations can be summoned from the vasty deep and made to do our bidding. It’s all at our fingertips, now. If Susarma can be saved, she will be. You too. Even me—although it may take a long, long session in one of the Nine’s magic eggs. We’re going to live, Nisreen, thanks to you. If you hadn’t stopped Tulyar…”

“It wasn’t 994-Tulyar,” he said, with a sudden flare of wrathful indignation of which I would never have believed a Tetron capable. “It was something obscene. Something…”

He couldn’t even find words for it, and I realised belatedly how desperate had been the decision which he’d made. Reason had only been a part of it—and maybe, in the final analysis, not the most important part. The Tetrax identify with one another rather more closely than humans do. The brotherhood of man may be nine-tenths pretence, but the brotherhood of the Tetrax is something else. The thing that had stolen Tulyar’s body hadn’t killed Nisreen because it thought that it could recruit and use him the way it had recruited and used John Finn, but it had been wrong. As I looked at 673-Nisreen, I realised that even if I hadn’t managed to hit back—even if pseudo-Tulyar had managed to use the starlet’s power to destroy Asgard’s gods—the war wouldn’t have been over. Far from it. The Tetrax might still be primitive by comparison with the builders of Asgard, but they were on the side of life, and they would have entered the lists with every last atom of force at their disposal.

I knew that the war was still going on, throughout the universe, but I was hopeful.

It wasn’t just that we’d won our tiny little skirmish— there was more than that to help me to hope.

Whatever imagination it was had created the demons of Asgard had a hard fight on its hands if it intended to annihilate life itself, because life had men as well as gods, and hearts as well as minds, and its enemies had not.