Asgard's Heart (32 page)

"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 the
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."