Asgard's Heart

by Brian Stableford

  The last thought I had before consciousness left me was that I had discovered what it felt like to drown.

  23

  The moment our lights picked out the shape of the other vehicle Clio brought us smoothly to a halt. Susarma Lear was sitting in the driver's seat, but she wasn't pretending to drive. Urania, with Clio on her lap, was sitting between the two of us.

  "Better get up to the turret," I said to the colonel. "We may need the guns."

  Susarma moved back, and moments later her place was taken by Myrlin. There had been no sign of movement near the other truck, which was facing a blank wall. Its lights were reflected back from the wall to produce a halo effect around it. Its doors seemed to be sealed.

  "You think they've all gone down?" asked Myrlin. He was assuming, of course, that they'd come to a dropshaft which was too narrow to contain the truck, and had been forced to go on in light suits, with whatever alternative transport the Nine had laid on for them. But he knew it couldn't be quite as simple as that. Somebody had sent out a Mayday from the truck. Either they were still inside the truck, or we were looking at some kind of trap, like the deadfall in the first shaft.

  "They couldn't have known that we'd lost their trail," I said, pensively. "They had to assume that we'd catch them up anyhow, if we survived their first little surprise package. If they had to leave the truck behind, it might have seemed a cute notion to turn it into a big booby trap bomb."

  "But they'd need it again when they came back," said

  Myrlin. "Tulyar may be leading them on a suicide mission, but his friends don't know that."

  It was a fair point. I could imagine John Finn's reaction to any proposal to blow up the vehicle.

  "Is it possible that they left some of the Scarid soldiers behind, to shoot at us when we try to open the door?" asked Urania.

  "Maybe," I replied. "But the same doubts apply. A couple of snipers couldn't expect to wipe out all of us, and even if they did—who'd want to be stranded in this godforsaken spot? If Tulyar and the others have already gone on, the rearguard would be left to its own devices, with no place to go."

  "Did they have enough suits?" asked Myrlin, still uneasy. "Perhaps there were simply too many of them, and they had to leave some people behind."

  "There were eight aboard," said Urania. "Enough for all of them. But the truck has light and warmth, and is well- supplied. It is by no means inconceivable that some of the party would elect to stay with it rather than descend into possible danger. They might well take the view that the truck could take them up again, if those who have descended never return."

  It was plausible enough, but it still sounded wrong.

  "I don't suppose they'll respond to a radio call?" I asked.

  "We have been transmitting a signal for some time," Urania told me. "The robot's automatic systems are returning a signal which suggests that all is well, but I cannot tell whether there are humanoids aboard. A design flaw, I fear."

  Even the Isthomi couldn't think of everything.

  "It looks," I said, "as if someone is going to have to go out to take a look."

  "Wait!" said Urania quickly, looking down at the suitcase, which was flashing something at her. "An infra-red scan reveals that there are two bodies outside the truck, between the front wheels and the wall. It is probable that they are hiding from us."

  "But why would they hide behind the truck with side- arms," asked Myrlin, "when they have a cannon on top of it?"

  "The instruments," said Urania in deadpan fashion, "cannot tell us that."

  "It doesn't pose much of a problem," I said. "All we need to do is call out to them, telling them to come out with their hands high or we'll blast them with our cannon. They can hear us."

  "Let's try it," said Myrlin, becoming impatient with all the talk. "It might work."

  We tried it. From inside, it sounded weird; I hoped the garbling was the effect of the truck's armour rather than the inadequacy of our loudhailer.

  But Myrlin was right—it did work.

  Within fifteen seconds, a lone humanoid came staggering out of the bushes. It was female, and she was wearing a tight transparent suit. Before she collapsed and fell face forward into the dust we got a clear look at her face, and despite the fact that it was covered in blood we had not the least difficulty in recognising her.

  It was Jacinthe Siani.

  The first thought which crossed my mind was that it had to be a trap. After all, her companion hadn't come out. But the more obvious interpretation of her condition was that her companion was probably in much the same state as she was, and couldn't come out.

  We sat in silence for half a minute, mulling over these

  possibilities and wondering what to do next.

  "Well," said Susarma Lear, in a tone whose mockery was not concealed by the muffling effect of her being in the gun- turret, "I reckon she was asking for trouble. One woman in a cramped truck with three Tetrax, three Scarid officers, and that bastard Finn."

  It had not occurred to me until she spoke that the Kythnan might have been the victim of a rape. The hypothesis did not strike me as a likely one.

  "Somebody has to go out," I said, tiredly. "I'll do it."

  "Like hell you will," said the colonel, suddenly appearing again at the hatchway connecting the cab to the back of the truck. "I'll do it. I'm the one with the combat training, remember?"

  I shrugged. There are times when you just have to stand aside and give the limelight to someone else—besides which, she was still my commanding officer.

  While she was suiting up I watched Jacinthe Siani lying in the mud. She moved once, as though trying to get to her feet again, but she seemed to be quite unable to muster the requisite strength. If it was an act, it was a good act.

  I watched Susarma approach the recumbent form, with exaggerated carefulness. She had a flame pistol in her hand. Jacinthe stirred again when the colonel touched her, and it looked as if she spoke, but there was no way to tell what she might be saying. Then Susarma stood up again, and moved around the truck to look for the other person who was supposedly lurking there.

  The colonel's voice came back over the intercom, sounding tired and a little bit frustrated. I think she'd really rather have found something to shoot at. "You'd better send Myrlin out to pick this one up," she said. "He's in a pretty bad way."

  "Can you tell what happened to them?" asked Urania.

  "Not exactly," Susarma replied. "But they look as if they've been in a hell of a fight. They've lost any weapons they were carrying and it looks to me as if they've been very badly beaten. This guy's suit has a lot of blood swilling around in it. He may have a few broken bones. It looks to me like they both might have died if they hadn't had the life-support systems in the suits to sustain them. There are a couple of things here that look like worms cut in half— they may have been twisted round the guy's ankles."

  While she was giving this report, Myrlin had moved back to suit up. The colonel was able to pick up Jacinthe Siani and carry her round to the airlock at the rear of the truck, and when Myrlin went out she was able to come back in. It took time to get them through because we put everything through a sterile shower. We didn't want the inside of the truck contaminated. Susarma eventually managed to cram the Kythnan woman into one of the bunk-spaces, and we opened her suit. The wall immediately began to put out hair-like feelers that burrowed their way discreetly into her flesh. She moaned a little, but when she tried to open her eyes she couldn't do it.

  "When will she be able to talk?" I asked Urania, who was busy with Clio.

  "A few minutes," said Urania. "She is not badly hurt— merely weak from blood-loss and exhaustion."

  I looked at the Kythnan's head, and saw that it had taken some bruising blows. It looked like the work of a very crude torturer.

  Myrlin brought the other one in. It was one of the Scarid officers, the paleness of his chalk-white skin exaggerated by the ribbons of blood that had dried upon it. He had taken more punishment than t
he woman, and he looked as if something rather heavy had run over the upper part of his body. His suit wasn't breached, but he'd been shaken up very thoroughly inside it. Again, I couldn't think of anything it looked like except for the results of crude brute force, liberally administered.

  We managed to get him into the bunk, and the truck's systems extended their biomanipulators into his tissues.

  "We can save him," said Urania, after a brief pause, "but he is very weak. We should not try to bring him round for several hours—he needs coma-rest."

  We waited patiently for Jacinthe Siani to come round. We all wanted to hear what she had to say.

  Eventually, the Kythnan opened her eyes, and looked around at the faces watching her. We might have appeared a little absurd, crowded into the narrow passage, but she'd been riding in a similar truck with eight aboard, and it must have stopped seeming funny a long time ago.

  "Rousseau?" she said faintly. I was the one she knew best—the one she was used to recognising in unexpected situations.

  "What happened?" I asked in parole, coming straight to the point.

  "I couldn't get him into the truck," she whispered. "I got in to send out the Mayday, but I had to try to get him in too. I got him up the shaft, but I couldn't . . . too weak. ..."

  It wasn't what we wanted to know.

  "What smashed you up?" I asked. "And where?"

  "Down below," she said, answering the second question first. "Creatures . . . big . . . tentacles. . . . Couldn't get into the suits . . . tried to pull us apart. ..."

  "The others?" I asked, falling into the same clipped style.

  "Don't know. Some dead . . . some maybe got through . . . we fired, but the bullets ... no good . . . needed flamers. ..."

  I was quite ready to believe her story. Nobody would take that kind of a beating just to add a little plausibility to a set-up.

  "Went down in groups of four," she said. "Took equipment. I was with the last group. Dark . . . they didn't look like anything much . . . then the tentacles . . . like whips and cables . . . grabbed at us . . . couldn't go forward . . . got him back to the shaft. . . they did too much damage . . . unconscious by the time we got to the top . . . got into the truck . . . went back for him . . . couldn't ... no one else came. . . ."

  This was where we'd come in. I put my hand on her shoulder, to signal that she didn't need to go on.

  She stopped, and closed her eyes again.

  Susarma Lear had her helmet off by now, but she didn't make any move towards getting out of the suit.

  "Well," she said defiantly. "Nobody said it was going to be easy."

  "But what do we do now?" asked Myrlin.

  "We say a prayer for the wise guys who stole our truck," she told me. "And thank them for discovering the trouble- spot."

  "You're ready to go down there?" I said. "After what our favourite traitor just told us?"

  "Sure," she replied. "But I think we ought to send them down a little surprise package first. I don't care how many tentacles they have—if they're made of flesh, they'll burn. If scorched earth is what it takes to get us through the door, let's start scorching."

  "Can we do that?" I asked Urania. "Could we send down some kind of robot bomb that will blow whatever's down there to hell and gone, and still leave the elevator car in good enough shape to come and fetch us?"

  "Something of the sort might be done," she replied. "It should not pose insuperable difficulties."

  It looked as though the old adage about forewarned being forearmed might pull us through. I wasn't particularly cheerful about it, though. Next time, there might be no one to forewarn us, and it looked as if we had to go the rest of the way tourist class, without our suit of robot armour to protect us.

  "What do we do with these two?" asked Myrlin, indicating the two invalids.

  "Put them in the other truck," said Susarma Lear, making decisions with the swiftness of one used to operating in difficult circumstances. "Leave them to it. Lock them in, if we can, and knock them out. We may want to come back this way. Unless you want one of us to stay, and mind the trucks."

  "That should not be necessary," said Urania, calmly. "But we must prepare carefully. We must discover precisely what equipment 994-Tulyar removed from the other vehicle, and make our own preparations with that in mind. We will need a little time."

  I went back to the cab, more to get out of the way than because there was anything that I could usefully do there. Susarma, still suited up, came to join me. I could see that there was a feverish light of action in her eye, and knew that she was going into existential overdrive. I'd seen her that way before, and was convinced that it would one day be the death of her.

  "This is it, Rousseau," she said, tautly. "Better get your arse suited up and your adrenaline in gear."

  "Sure," I said, lightly. "This is it. Marked down in my diary: appointment with sudden death, survive if feasible. Do you think you could possibly call me Mike?"

  "It's not the Star Force way," she told me. "And I suspect that now is the time when we have to start doing things the Star Force way—don't you?"

  The Star Force way consisted, in essence, of trying to reach the target by torching everything in the way. Bearing in mind what might be waiting for us, though, I had an unwelcome suspicion that she could be right. From now on, things would probably have to be done the Star Force way, all the way to the Centre.

  24

  I passed from my unreal state of consciousness into a dream within the dream. I was still in the grey water, though it seemed calmer now and not so cold.

  The armour I wore was hardly heavy at all, but it was slowly dragging me down. I tried to lash out with my limbs, with some idea in mind of bringing myself back to the surface, but all my actions were unnaturally slow and heavy, as though the water had the thickness of honey.

  I tried to blow out the water that I had taken in, but I had no strength with which to do it, and in any case my lungs were no longer desperate for air. My feebly thrusting arms became entangled with the waterlogged cloak that had been swept around me in a great arc, so that I could not make any sensible attempt to perform the actions that were demanded by my entirely theoretical notions of how to swim. Gradually, I ceased struggling.

  Once I had surrendered entirely to my slow fall into the depths, I became disentangled again, and the cloak streamed out from my body almost as though it were a great black parachute retarding my descent. The water was quite still now, and as the surface receded into the distance above me it took on the aspect of a great white-lit plane of crystal. Below me, by contrast, there was a dark abyss with no hint of illumination.

  The coldness had by now gone out of the water—or perhaps my flesh had adapted to it—and the viscosity too was no longer so noticeable, so that the experience of moving

  through it was more like falling through empty space. I could have imagined myself adrift in the lightless void of interstellar space. There was a silence more profound than any I had ever experienced before.

  I found it possible to open my mouth, but could not feel anything moving in or out of it. My chest was quite numb, and I had no sensation of breathing. Nor was I aware of any internal pulse-beat; it was as though time had stopped.

  As the last vestiges of light faded away, leaving me in total darkness, I was swept by a feeling of unutterable loneliness, which drowned out all thought and memory for an unmeasurable pause. I felt that I was shrinking into a curious vanishing point—that every last vestige of my soul was evaporating, lost and irrecoverable.

  I was certain that this was my experience of the moment of death. I believed that I had drowned, and would be no more as soon as my last moment of sensation was exhausted. I felt a small surge of gratitude that the moment was unmarred by pain or terror, and was calmly ready for extinction.

  Whether extinction came, requiring me to be somehow resurrected, or whether my acceptance of death was premature, I do not know. I was next aware of a small presence of mind. I do not know
how else to describe it, because I am sure—however paradoxical it may sound—that it was not an awareness of anything save that I was aware. Perhaps it was that irreducible quantum of certainty which Descartes tried to reach, imaginatively, with his dictum: Cogito, ergo sum. There is a thought, therefore there is a thinker.

  Strangely, though, I remained in doubt as to whether the thinker was me, or whether I was merely the thought in the head of some enigmatic god or giant. I was not sure whether I was still dreaming, or whether I was now being

  dreamed. But work of some kind was going on: work of reconstruction, perhaps of re-creation. Something was taking shape, and although I was part and parcel of that shaping, I could not honestly say that I was doing it. If there was any part of me actively involved, it was a subconscious part.

  I am not sure how to describe what was being built, because it had that absurd property of entities in software space that what it looked like depended entirely on the eye of the beholder—it was itself pure essence. When I tried to see it, I had to decide what I would see, and I had no basis for making any such decision ... no basis, at any rate, within my conscious mind.

  It may mean nothing, therefore, to report what images did come into the burgeoning mind that might or might not have been mine. I will have to take the chance, and say what I can.

  Perhaps it was a web spun to span the darkness by an invisible spider—across and across, then around and around, in a curving spiral. The anchor-points of the web were not arranged in a circle, but were instead the points of a tetrahedron, so that the web curved in all three dimensions, and then was slightly hollowed like a net, as though the centre were being dragged away at right angles to everything else— into the fourth dimension, I must suppose.

  Perhaps I caught brief sensations that might have been echoes of the dancing feet of the spinner as it whirled around its web, but perhaps those tremors of vibration were part of the life of the web itself.

  The web caught nothing, and though it might have shuddered in some kind of breeze, it was never stretched taut at any point.