Asgard's Heart (12 page)

Despite the vastness of everything there was no detail
which I could not comprehend, and I
might
have seen a single sparrow fall if I had not been so disturbed by other things
that tormented my attention.

I saw a land all a-tremble with the paces of a giant
hungry wolf, which led a pack of dire shadows to a feast of blood.

I saw a world that was a mighty twisted tree, ravaged
by a blight which ate up its vitality from within, desiccating its foliage and
shriveling its multitudinous fruit.

I saw a great ship whose hull was made from the
growing nails of the coffined dead, whose sails were their silvered hair,
riding on massive waves stirred by the roiling of a serpent greater than
galaxies, its crew of skeletons armoured for war.

I saw a traitor with eyes like red coals, making magic
to draw the shadowy wolf-pack to the field of slaughter.

I saw a monstrous army whose troops were made of fire,
which marched like glowing lava from a wound in the fabric of time, its banners
of lightning streaming proudly in the radiant breath of countless dying suns.

I saw a bridge like an infinite rainbow, extending
from the world below to some other mysterious realm outside the range of my miraculous
vision, its colours livid as it cracked and splintered, presaging in its shattering
the death of all the gods, the desolation of that Valhalla where—after all—I
did not really belong.

And I saw a face, which stared at me from the starry
firmament, and knew it for the true possessor of that godlike sight I had
borrowed for an instant. It was a face full of sorrow and concern, a face where
mercy was mingled with wrath, whose sight could penetrate every atom of my
being, every secret of my soul, and I knew that this was a god which men had
made, and a god which had made man in his turn, and a god which now faced destruction,
and was desperate enough to seek his heroes wherever he could find them,
whether they belonged to him or not. . . .

And then the god who held me in his guardian hand was
forced to let me go, and I fell again, and fell, and fell, all the way back to
consciousness.

7

I
opened my eyes, and looked up into the ungodlike face of my old friend Myrlin.
I was flat on my back and he was kneeling over me, peering at me with a measure
of concern.

My back was hurting, but not so very badly. It was
cushioned by something soft and yielding. I was slightly surprised to find that
I was not in one of the Isthomi's healing eggs being quietly restored to full
fitness, but it seemed to be a time for counting my blessings and a quick
survey of the relevant referents assured me that my body was still in one piece
and that my mind, so far as I could tell, was still my own.

I looked around, and saw nothing but grey walls. The
ceiling was rather ill-lit and there was a distinct lack of furniture and
fittings. Susarma Lear was sitting on the floor with her back to the wall,
watching me, with less apparent concern than Myrlin. The upper half of her was
clad only in a light undershirt, and I guessed that her Star Force jacket was
what was providing my injured back with a modicum of comfortable support.

"Where are we?" I asked, hoarsely.

"Safe, for the time being," said Myrlin.
"How do you feel?"

"Not so bad," I said. "Just had a hell
of a dream, though."

"You'll be okay," he assured me. "The
way the Isthomi have fixed us up, we heal quickly. The cuts and bruises won't
trouble you for long."

I sat up, then reached behind me with tentative
fingers to see what sort of damage I'd sustained. There was no moist blood, and
the wounds didn't complain too terribly about being touched. I looked down at
the colonel's jacket, and saw that it wasn't badly stained. I picked it up and
threw it to her.

"Thanks," I said, as she caught it. She put
it on, but didn't fasten it. She looked rather tired.

"Anything to drink?" I asked Myrlin.
"Even water would do."

He shook his head.

I looked at the weapon which was propped up in a
corner of the tiny room. "What is that thing?" I asked—unable to
figure out how it had felled the dragon without so much as a bang, let alone a
bullet.

"It's some kind of projector," said Myrlin.
"I don't understand the physics, but it creates some kind of magnetic
seed inside a silicon brain, which grows—or explodes—into something disruptive,
wiping out most of the native software in a fifth of a second or so. It's a
kind of mindscrambler, I suppose, except that it's for artificial minds instead
of fleshy ones."

It was a gun that shot hostile software. The Nine were
clever with that sort of thing. It crossed my mind, though, that it was a
dangerous weapon to keep around the place. Presumably, it could be turned on
the Nine just as easily as their enemies. I knew that they could trust Myrlin,
but the thought of a Scarid regiment equipped with such weapons rampaging
around the Isthomi worldlet was one that might make a lovely goddess frown.

"I don't want you to think that I wasn't
impressed by the trick with the bazooka," I said, "but how the hell
did the Isthomi manage to let that thing into their garden?"

"The Isthomi have problems," he answered.
"Your dragon wasn't the only thing that went on the rampage around these
parts. The attack was sudden and surprising, and the Nine's ability to oppose
it was severely restricted by the fact that somebody had just switched the
power off."

I looked at him, blinking to clear my vision and
working my tongue over my salivary glands to try to spread some moisture around
my mouth.

"You mean," I said, slowly, "that
someone pulled the plug on the Nine's hardware?"

"Not exactly," he said. "I mean that as
far as the Nine can tell, someone pulled the plug on the levels. All of them."

I hadn't quite recovered complete control of my
faculties, so I stared helplessly at him for a minute or so. It was a fairly
mind-boggling item of news. We knew that there were at least two thousand
levels, each one containing anywhere between two and ten independent habitats—the
equivalent of ten thousand habitable worlds. Some of those habitats were dead,
others decaying, but most of the inhabited ones depended to a large extent on
power drawn from the walls—power that was presumably generated by a starlet: a
huge fusion reactor in the core of the macroworld.

Switching off that power wouldn't mean that all the
lights in Asgard had instantly gone out. Most of the habitats had
bioluminescent systems that could run for a while without input, and some of the
inhabitants had technical know-how adequate to the task of generating their own
electricity to feed electric lights. Nor did it mean that every
information-system in the macroworld had crashed; a great many of them would
have some kind of emergency system to prevent their going down. The Nine would
have had support systems to preserve themselves against accidents even of that
magnitude—but the vast majority of their subsidiary systems and peripheral
elements would have run on power drawn from the central supply. When the
central supply went off, the Nine would have had to shut down ninety percent of
their capacity—and if they had a physical invasion to fight off at the same
time, they must have been stretched to the limit. They'd already been weakened
twice by serious injury to their software; now, it seemed, someone or something
was bent on smashing up their hardware. The software saboteurs of inner Asgard
had turned Luddite.

"You're saying," I said, to make sure I had
it right, "that in order to attack the Isthomi, someone has cut off power
supplies to the entire macroworld."

"Not necessarily," he said. "I think we
can rule out coincidence, but it's possible that the enemy simply had advance
notice of the power being cut off, and decided to plan his assault on the Nine
accordingly. The power-cut might be part of a grander campaign. If there really
is a war going on in Asgard's software space—and the Nine are convinced that
there is—that war seems to be getting hotter by the hour."

I looked around again, at the blank walls. Susanna
Lear was still watching us, her eyes attentive despite her tiredness.

"We're sealed off in a hidey-hole," Myrlin
told me. "The Nine have put solid walls around us; hopefully no more robot
dragons will be able to find us, let alone break through to us. The real fight
is going on back at the living- quarters. We three were lucky to be away from
there for various reasons—we may yet turn out to be the sole survivors. The
Nine don't have many robots with fighting capability, nor any substantial store
of weapons. The Scarida will fight, and the scions with them, but they may be
up against overwhelming odds.

"It will take time to get power back to all the
peripheral systems, and to get vehicles like the ones which brought you here on
the move again. They'll send something to pick us up when they can, and will
activate the wall to talk to us once they're certain that it won't attract
hostile attention. They didn't know what they were up against when they last
got a message to me, and they didn't dare take too many chances."

"Well," I said, "so much for our fond
hopes that the software damage they sustained in their contacts was just an
unhappy accident. We really are caught up in a shooting war, and it doesn't
look as if the guys doing the shooting are prepared to consider us innocent
bystanders. If the power doesn't come back on. . . ."

I remembered that Sigor Dyan had casually mentioned
the total size of the Scarid population. There were tens of billions of them,
without counting the members of races they'd displaced or conquered. Their
tinpot empire had already been laid low by the plague that the Tetrax had
loosed on them; now the power supplies which they believed to have been left to
them by their kindly ancestors were suddenly gone. People were going to die.
Lots of people. If the power didn't come back on soon, every single habitat in
the macroworld would be under threat, not merely of major disruption, but of
total destruction.

"All in all," I murmured, "I'd rather
be in Skychain City." All the systems in Skychain City had been installed
by the Tetrax. The power-supply from the starlet had been switched off in
levels one to four for a
very
long time.

"Why are they so determined to get us?"
asked Susarma Lear harshly. "What makes
us
so interesting that someone would send something like that electric stick
insect after us?"

Myrlin looked over his shoulder at her. "I don't
know," he said soberly. "I'm not sure it's anything personal. It
looks to me like a chain reaction. Something down below was aroused from
inaction by the attempt the Nine made to explore the information-systems in the
Centre. At first it probably acted reflexively, but now it seems to be
organising a strategy of destruction. The entity that contacted Mike while he
was interfaced with the Isthomi is probably something different—if it really
was appealing for help, it may have brought us to the attention of its enemies."

"If your computerized buddies hadn't gone
prying," she said, "we wouldn't be in this mess." She was still
nursing aggressive feelings towards poor Myrlin.

"They wouldn't have embarked upon that kind of
exploration if it hadn't been for what they learned from us," he answered
mildly. "And I wouldn't have attracted their attention by buggering up
one of their systems if
you
hadn't been
chasing
me
with murderous intent."