Asgard's Heart (47 page)

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.

36