Asgard's Heart

by Brian Stableford

  We were so certain that there would be an ambush waiting for us at the bottom of the shaft that the Nine had given us reinforcements to assist us in getting past square one of the game. Following us along the corridors through which we took the truck on the way to our departure point was a ragged army of robots. Not one of them had been designed for fighting, and many of them hadn't had any weapons grafted on, but their role wasn't really an offensive one. Their job was to intercept anything thrown in our direction which might otherwise do us damage. They were a suicide squadron.

  The robots were as ill-assorted a gang as I could ever hope to see—half of them on wheels, half ambulatory; some small and round, others like crazy assemblies of girders. In terms of animal analogies they ranged all the way from grubs and wireworms through crabs and giant turtles to surreal monstrosities which could only be described in terms of silly old jokes about what you'd get if you crossed a giraffe with a stick-insect or a peacock with a squid. What most of them had originally been designed for I could hardly begin to guess. Every spare mobile the Isthomi had was here, and though none of them qualified as an actual person in the way that Clio allegedly did, some of them were pretty smart machines. It was a terrible waste to use them as mere cannon fodder.

  The Nine had initially sealed off the platform which Finn's party had used for their descent, but before we took the new robot truck out there, they had brought it back up from the depths and made sure that it was empty of would- be invaders. That circular section of chitinous concrete was the last safe place in Asgard, and once we drove off it into the mysterious spaces of whichever level it could take us to, we were on our own.

  It wasn't until we crowded on to it that I saw the suicide army in its full strength. I knew that no more than one in five could even be credited with a sensible measure of artificial intelligence, let alone a suspicion of sentience, but I couldn't help but feel sorry for them as they shuffled dutifully around, cramping up their disfigured limbs in order to make room for one another.

  We who are about to die salute you, I thought. All hail to the Caesars of Asgard.

  The journey down was longer than I expected, given that the Nine had already told me that their explorations in a downward direction hadn't been too successful. I'd been expecting to go down ten or a dozen levels, but by my rough calculation we dropped nearly two thousand metres into the darkness—which was probably somewhere between seventy-five and eighty-five levels. While we descended I tried out a few equations in my head, wondering—as I'd often done before—how many levels there might be between the Nine's habitat and the bottom of the world. There were too many unknowns, most notably the size and mass of the starlet around which the macroworld was constructed, but if I fed in guesses which seemed to me to be halfway reasonable I kept getting answers of the order of magnitude which extended from five hundred to five thousand levels. That was a big margin of possible error, which became much larger if my assumptions about the starlet were cock-eyed, but for some reason it felt good to have figures in my mind, ready to be refined to reflect any new data which came in. I felt that my progress toward the Centre could be mapped by the increasing precision of my estimates regarding its proximity.

  When the platform stopped, having reached the bottom of its shaft, I switched the truck's lights full on, and Urania promptly bent over her sister the suitcase. She wasn't controlling her—she was merely making ready to relay to us any messages or commands which Clio wanted passed on. I was sitting in front of the manual controls, ready to grab them if the circumstances should make it necessary, but I knew that no such situation was likely to arise and I felt uncomfortably impotent. I even envied Susarma Lear her control of the guns.

  There was no time to think too hard about it, though, because the moment the platform ceased its descent our sacrificial army of tin gladiators was scattering into every space they could find, and the explosions were already beginning: one, two, three.

  We could hear the blasts and see the splashes of fire, but they were not so very close at hand—the jury-rigged soldiers whose job it was to get in the way were playing hero and victim to the very best of their ability. I only hoped that those which had some elementary capacity for fighting back were sending forth their own missiles to wreak a measure of havoc among the enemy. Some pretty heavy stuff must have been fired at us, because we rocked slightly as we got underway, but we sustained no damage.

  Susarma began returning fire as soon as she had space to fire at the bad guys without hitting our own troops. She sent streams of flame-bolts out in two directions. The flame-bolts, which became gaseous almost instantly once they were in flight, were much more difficult to stop than the solid missiles which were fired at us; although they couldn't penetrate armour as heavy as the stuff which was wrapped around us, they could do a lot of damage to anything that was slightly less robust—including the gun- barrels and firing mechanisms of the robots arrayed against us. Clio was firing too—she still had control of the magic bazookas: the software disrupters.

  It would have been nice to know what kind of carnage we were creating in the enemy ranks, but I couldn't see a damn thing through the flickering glare except for a few shards from the bodies of our defenders which impacted with the bar of clear plastic which served as a window.

  The truck was accelerating as fast as it could, and the momentum threw me backwards. The doorway through which we passed wasn't very tall or wide, and there was something in the open space beyond it which had fired at least one of the three biggest missiles which had come at us, but the only thing we could do was go like hell and try to break through the ambush.

  I presumed that Clio was able to send signals of some kind to the suicide squadron, trying to make sure that they all got blown to bits usefully, but there was no way I could keep track of what was happening. I just held on tight while we rocketed away from the shaft, hoping that Susarma and

  the suitcase were equal to their task.

  We had to swerve round something big and solid, and then had to run a gauntlet of things which came from either side, determined to blow us away if they could. A couple were essentially similar in design to the mantis which had chased me in the garden, while others were just cannons on legs, but as each one came up something zapped it—if none of our fast-diminishing army of supporters got it, Susarma or Clio did. These things were obviously operating a long way from home: they were geared to travel as well as to fight, and their firepower was correspondingly modest.

  There was a sudden series of explosions in front of the truck, as the road seemed to rise up to attack us with tongues of flame. I winced, realising that it had been mined with explosive charges which could throw us up in the air and turn us over even if they couldn't crack our underbelly—but the suitcase had detected them early enough, and every one of them was exploding prematurely.

  The battle lasted about two minutes and fifteen seconds, and when it ended our robot transporter was hurtling into the darkness at a hundred kilometres an hour, its steely carapace whole and essentially undamaged. The sound and the fury faded behind us, our automata and theirs still exchanging whatever shots they could. I think the battle continued, sporadically, for a few more minutes when we were out of it, as the two companies of machines made what efforts they could to mop up. There was no way to know how many survivors there might be, and whether any of them might be ours. We didn't intend that any pursuers should ever catch up with us.

  The lights of the truck were now the only source of illumination in the neighbourhood. They showed us the way ahead clearly enough—in fact, I could see the tracks which the other truck had left in the soft earth. It was more difficult to see what lay to either side of the road, but we were out in the open, although we frequently passed hugely thick pillars connecting the floor to the ceiling. This had once been some kind of forest, but it had obviously been dead long before the lights were switched out. The trees were leafless, most of the branches broken away to leave the jagged boles jutting like rot
ten teeth. They showed up grey in the light, and gave the impression of being petrified, yet somehow still brittle.

  Nothing moved. Even the dust kicked up by the truck we were chasing had settled back to the ground.

  "Have the Nine explored this level?" asked Myrlin. "Do they know what happened here?"

  "Our machines have been here," Urania replied, with a slight uncharacteristic hoarseness in her voice that suggested that the experience of conflict had not left her unaffected. "They found little here to interest us, and we already had a way down into lower levels than this one, so we made no attempt to search vigorously for new routes. We are not sure what manner of disaster destroyed the life- system."

  "Could it be that the trees are simply the last evidential remains of an ecocatastrophe?" asked Myrlin, whose own voice was not completely steady. "It might have been something initially trivial—closed ecospheres must always be vulnerable to mutant viruses which break crucial food-chains by wiping out the members of a particular group of species."

  "It is unlikely," said Urania, soberly. "The extending consequences of such an event might easily be disastrous for higher species, but it is difficult to believe that it could exterminate all life. It seems more probable that this habitat was deliberately sterilised."

  "An act of war?" I ventured, knowing that she wouldn't be able to answer. If she had, she'd have told us already.

  "Not necessarily," she replied with all due caution.

  "How many levels further down did your explorer robots manage to penetrate?" I asked.

  "The lowest level we have attained is one hundred and three below this one, although we did not gain access to all the intermediate ones."

  "Any more dead ones?"

  "Only one," she said. "But seven of the habitats have reducing atmospheres, and were difficult to explore. A further ten have ecosystems which are entirely thermosynthetic, and six of those are entirely dark, consisting of organisms which make no use of bioluminescence at all."

  "How many of the remainder have indigenous humanoid life?"

  "Four of the seventy-one about which we have information," she said. "We have not attempted to communicate with any of them, but have been content to observe. None of the four seemed aware of the fact that there are habitats other than their own; all were technologically primitive in our terms—even by galactic standards. Their use of the power available to them from the central network was very limited, although that will not insulate them from the ecocatastrophes which will occur as a result of the switching off of that power."

  There wasn't much point in following up that line of conversation. It wouldn't matter much whether a habitat was humanoid-inhabited or not, whether its atmosphere was oxygen-rich or reducing, or whether its organisms were photosynthetic or thermosynthetic: the big switch-off had left them all to live on their energy-capital. Some of them would be able to support sophisticated organisms for hundreds of years, simpler ones for hundreds of thousands, and bacteria for hundreds of millions; but in the end, if the power never came back on, entropy would turn them all into so much sterile sewage.

  "Anyhow," I said, "we could always cross our fingers and hope that some of the levels further down have intelligent inhabitants who do know their way around, far better than we do. For all we know, a hundred worldlets could have sent out teams of repair-men, every one of them so clever that bringing the power back will be just like mending a fuse."

  "We can hope," said Susarma Lear, who had just climbed down from the turret, having concluded that there was nothing else out there to shoot. "But I've told you before, Rousseau—hope just isn't enough."

  As mottos went it had its good points, but in a morale- boosting contest it could only be a hot contender for the booby prize.

  "Well, if it's all down to us," I said, "we'd better look after that bloody suitcase, because everything I've seen of humanoid intercourse with machinery tells me that we're a hell of a lot better at smashing things than we are at fixing them."

  "We may find scope for the exercise of both talents before we're through," said Myrlin, with the air of one who does not fear contradiction.

  "We will do what we can," said Urania simply. "We can do no more."

  16

  The mist had faded into a light, silvery haze, and visibility on all sides of the ship had improved dramatically. A dead calm had fallen upon the sea. Where our oars disturbed the surface there was turbulence, and the ripples spread out slowly from each point of contact, but the viscous water damped them down and swallowed them. The wake which we left behind us was similarly impotent to disturb the waters for long; it too was calmed and soothed so that it stretched behind us for little more than a boat length, like gently- trailing tresses of weed.

  I watched dark-haired Athene as she stared over the rail at the still and silent sea, clearly perturbed by what was happening, because it was so unexpected. I think she would have preferred a more recognisable menace, which could be opposed in straightforward fashion.

  "What is happening?" asked Myrlin—not of her, though it was she who was surely best placed to answer—but of me.

  "They appear to have made a temporary withdrawal," I said. "I suspect they're taking time out to think things over. A council of war, maybe. When they have another go at us, they'll have a better idea of what to do. I have a suspicion that they may have done this sort of thing before, and know one or two tricks that our side hasn't even thought of."

  She turned to look at me while I spoke, and the bleak look in her eye suggested that she had reached similar conclusions.

  "It is too soon to despair," she said, sharply. "While they withdraw, we make progress. Our weapons are still potent, and whatever monsters they may produce can only become solid enough to do us harm by rendering themselves vulnerable to our power of retaliation. You are more difficult to destroy now than ever you were as creatures of flesh and bone—remember that!"

  While she instructed us to be brave, our surroundings began again to change. The mist began to thicken again, and draw about us, so that we could not see such great expanses of mirror-bright water to either side. The mist changed colour, too, so that it was no longer silvery-white but a roseate pink. At first I thought of this as if it were an infusion of something the colour of blood, which paled only because of its dilution in the mist, but there was too much yellow in the pink for that, and it was a colour I had only ever seen in the fragile petals of sweet-smelling flowers.

  I had the strangest impression that this must be the most perfect of the colours which mist might have: a colour for sugar-sweet clouds in a child's vision of paradise. I looked upwards, to the top of the mast, where the stirring of the wind had not completely ceased, and I saw wreaths of the mist thickening like radiant tongues of pink flame. The sea, beneath this glowing coloured vapour, could not help but lose its greyness, but the light that it reflected was by no means so pale. It was a red deeper by far, but still not like the colour of blood, tending more to the orange part of the spectrum. It put me in mind of films I had seen—the films by which I had learned the landscapes and appearances of the homeworld which I had never visited—where the camera's eye had looked boldly into the face of the setting sun. It had stuck in my memory that the sun in such circumstances seemed hugely bloated by virtue of its proximity to the horizon, its image rippled by the hazy movement of the heated air.

  I could easily imagine that the ocean upon which we floated was the surface of a dying sun, an infinite lake of quiet fire. Despite the redness, though, there was no heat at all. I no longer felt the need to draw my cloak tightly about me, but neither did I feel a need to discard it. There was still a hint of chill creeping in my bones.

  "Look!" said Myrlin, pointing dead ahead. We could see very little beyond the figurehead which was carved to represent Medusa, whose serpentine tresses were themselves half-obscured by numinous tongues of rosy vapour, but we could see that the fog in direct line with the vessel's course was beginning to thicken and to move in a mu
ch more agitated fashion. Its colour was darkening too, though not consistently, and as I struggled to make sense of what was happening I formed the notion that some kind of great arch was forming in the mist, through which the ship must sail, and that this arch was made of a blazing redness.

  The sea was disturbed now, but not in the chaotic fashion of a surface stirred by eddying winds. It was as though there were some kind of force flowing from the points where the fiery arch met the water, which was causing great ripples and surges. As the ship began to meet these ripples, the bow began to dip and rise.

  There was a sound, then, like the moan of some desolate creature slowly dying—a faint, hollow, hopeless sound which echoed eerily across the face of the water.

  I concentrated on the arms of the arch into which we were sailing, which were thickening all the time from the gathering cloud, and now seemed like huge rotating pillars, far thinner at the bottom than the top—great vortices which slipped sinuously from side to side as ripples of expansion passed up from the water, loosening their hold on verticality.

  "They're sucking up the water!" I shouted as I realised what was happening. "Like a brace of tornadoes!"

  The movement of the ship was increasing in its violence with every second that passed, and I moved in from the side, gripping the rail close to the position of the wheel, with which Myrlin was now trying to grapple.

  They had sent no monster to fly at us or rise from the depths, but were raising against us the very elements of this world which we had made—they were attacking us with a storm, trying to upset the very fabric which we had imposed upon software space.

  "Be calm!" commanded the gilt-clad goddess. "Hold hard, and we will ride it out. We are unsinkable!"