Asgard's Heart (24 page)

"Did I not tell you?" she called,
when at last we stopped our yelling and drew breath. Her voice was cracked, and
it was an effort for her now to speak, but the elation in her words was clear
to be heard, and it was obvious that this was a conflict she was delighted to
have won. We knew now that she had underestimated the enemy, but we had the
compensating hope that we might have underestimated ourselves. She turned to
face us, while I staggered to Myrlin's side, and we both leant on the wheel
while we watched the storm expire in the bubbling waters far behind our stern.

I gasped for breath, thinking to join in
the round of mutual congratulation, when I saw the expression of joy which was
in her eyes begin to die. She opened her mouth to say something more, and when
no words came I knew that it was not simply shortness of breath that would not
let them come.

I turned, quickly, steadying myself upon
the wheel, to look beyond the bows of the ship, at whatever terror now was to
be thrust into our path.

Had I never seen it before it would have
been a dreadful sight, but it was something I knew from the dream I had had
when concussion had freed that parasite which clung to the underside of my
soul.

Sailing directly toward us out of the mist
was a ship four times the size of our own, which stood twice as high in the
water, and looked as if it would break us in two if it could ram us squarely.

Its hull was made from strangely-knotted
strands whose nature and origin I could never have guessed, had I not had my
dream—but in that dream I had not had to guess, and had known what it was.

This was the ship of the dead, whose
timbers were made from the fingernails of corpses, which had continued to grow
long after the bodies were safe in their tombs, and whose fine white sails were
woven from hair of the same strange kind. On the deck were its crew, who were
made from the bare bones of the resurrected dead, all skeleton and sinew,
eyeless, lipless, and heartless, yet bearing arms and fervent with the lust for
life.

To the horror of the sight itself was added
a sudden thrill of panic, as I realised that here was a figment of my imagination,
a nightmare based in the ancient stories I had recalled. Such images had been
seized and appropriated, it seemed, by the tapeworm in my mind, and now they
were accessible to the others, whose object was my destruction. A moment ago, I
had felt such a power within me that I had almost reckoned myself a god. Now, I
remembered all too well that in the riot of
Gotterdammerung
the gods had perished,
wiped out by the giants and their macabre armies.

Myrlin's huge hand cast me roughly aside as
he sought to spin the wheel, but there was not a doubt in the world that he was
already too late. Although he steered the ship into a turn as sharp as she
could possibly take, all he could do was to make the collision a glancing one.
Our gleaming spur barely had strength to scratch the hull of the other vessel,
and although the gorgon's head which was mounted on our prow stared with
baleful eyes at the host assembled in its bows, the enemy warriors had no eyes
of their own by which her power could be known.

And as the honest timbers of the one ship
grated harshly against the eerie fabric of the other, those skeletal warriors
were already swinging onsropes of silvery hair, pouring like a troop of horrid
insects on to the deck of our small, frail craft.

17

It took some thirteen hours of driving through the
dead world to reach the next drop-point. I hoped that it would take us a long
way down, because the horizontal sort of journey was no fun, and didn't take us
a single centimetre closer to where we wanted to be. If we had to drive a thousand
kilometres sideways just to reach a point which would only let us go a couple
of kilometres downwards, the journey to the centre was going to be a very long
one, and we'd all be old before we got there.

I had been nursing the hope that whatever
was inside Tulyar's head knew the location of a dropshaft which could take us
all the way down in one long, slow fall, but I'd been around Asgard too long to
take it for granted that there was any through road from top to bottom, or even
from middle to bottom. I knew that we had to be prepared to drive sideways
across three or four more habitats, maybe for quite some distance. If the deck
was really stacked against us, it might be ten or twenty, or a couple of
hundred.

I wondered whether the thing which had
taken over Tulyar's body had undisputed sovereignty by now, or whether the
Tetron was still in there, conscious of what was happening, struggling to
recover the empire of his own soul. It was a morbid preoccupation, because I
had no way to be certain that I wasn't destined for the same kind of fate. At
any moment, I might cease to be me, and become a warrior in some aeons-old
conflict whose nature we had hardly begun to understand. To make myself feel
better I imagined

John Finn having to sit next to the pseudo-Tulyar,
maybe realising by now that he'd been played for a sucker, and that even the
Star Force would have looked after him better than the regiment in which he was
now enlisted. I couldn't find it in my heart to feel sorry for him—it was
easier to ill- wish him with the thought that he had amply deserved the very
worst fate which could possibly befall him.

Eventually, we came to the wall where both
the tyre- tracks and the olfactory trace disappeared as if by magic. From where
I sat the wall looked smooth enough, but there had to be a doorway there—an airlock
guarding a shaft which was probably evacuated.

It was time for the clever suitcase to do
her bit. She was hooked into the transporter's systems by means of half a dozen
leads; under her guidance the truck now began to extrude similar feelers from
some secret place beneath its central headlight. I watched with some
fascination as the feelers began to explore the wall, invading invisible seams
and searching out hidden mechanisms. I have no idea what they did, or how, but
it only took a few minutes. There was a sudden drain on the power-unit, and a
section of wall retreated from the rest, and then slid sideways, after the
usual fashion of Asgardian doors. As I had anticipated, there was a big airlock
backed by a second door. The lock was only just big enough to take the
transporter, and I couldn't help wondering what would happen if and when we
found a doorway that was too small for it to go through. Urania had assured me
that we had more economical transporters stored somewhere in the back, but I
hadn't seen them.

Once we were inside the lock Clio closed
the doors behind us, and set off the command sequence which would open the
inner door. Urania confirmed that there was, as expected, no air in the shaft.
At least some of the levels which it served must have reducing atmospheres. The
shaft was easily wide enough to take the truck, but there was no platform on to
which we could drive it.

"Well," I said, drily, "We
could hardly expect them to send it back up for us, could we?"

"Can we call it back?" asked Susarma.
"How long will it take?"

Urania's nimble fingers tapped away at the
keys on the outside of her small, square sister. Clio had no screen to display
words, but she was communicating with Urania somehow.

"We cannot bring the platform
back," she said, calmly. "It has been immobilised."

I felt a bad mood creeping up on me.

"Can she tell how deep the shaft
is?" I asked.

"Yes. It extends downwards for
twenty-five kilometres."

It wasn't as big a drop as I had hoped; it
was still one very tiny step toward the Centre, even if it did take us down
further than the Nine's robots had ever gone before. On the other hand, even
that tiny step would be a giant leap for a man—and when he reached the bottom,
the impact would reduce him to a very thin smear.

I had learned by now not to underestimate
the Nine. They were used to this kind of problem.

"How do we make a new platform?"
asked Myrlin.

"No need," said Urania, simply.
"We will descend by the usual method."

"What's the usual method?" asked
Susarma, with a certain wariness in her voice.

The usual method of descent into a lower
level for humanoid scavengers operating in the upmost four levels had involved
the rigging of a block-and-tackle and climbing down a rope. She'd seen that for
herself when we followed

Myrlin down Saul Lyndrach's dropshaft. But we were
talking about a hole that was twenty-five kilometres deep, and it didn't take a
mathematical genius to figure out that we'd need a hell of a lot of very strong
cable to lower an armoured truck that far.

"I guess we walk," I said.
"The way climbers go up and down chimneys. Brace ourselves inside the
shaft, and let ourselves down, slowly." I saw the expression of horror
flit across Susarma's face, and quickly added: "Not
us
as in you and me—the
entire package. The truck can put out limbs as well as feelers. How many?"

"Eight," replied Urania.
"Four will hold us at any one time, while the remaining four seek a lower
hold. But they will not have to brace us; the limbs are flexible, and can use organic
adhesives to bond us momentarily to this kind of surface, and dissolve the bond
with equal ease. Even so, it will be a long climb, and not so very
comfortable."

"Think of it as a new
experience," I said to Susarma. "We can be the first humans ever to
get seasick while descending a drainpipe in the belly of a robot spider."

"You must try to rest, Mr.
Rousseau," said the scion, solicitously. "There is nothing you need
to do. Clio and I will manage the descent. You should rest too, Colonel
Lear."

It sounded like a good idea. I was all in
favour of new experiences, but somehow I didn't passionately want to be in the
cab when the truck moved into the shaft. I was happy to believe that its
extruded "legs" could secure us safely, but it was the kind of belief
that might not be able to quell the anxieties triggered by one's sense of
sight. I could easily imagine my stomach turning over as we were picked up and
drawn inexorably into position above that twenty-five kilometre drop. Anyway, I
was hungry and thirsty.

There was just about room to stand up in
the back of the truck, but if three or four people tried to move around all at
once, the crowding quickly became absurd. There were four narrow bunks, two on
either side, and as soon as I had a tube of food-concentrate and a bladder-pack
of something to drink, I eased myself into the upper left. Susarma took the
upper right, and Nisreen, who had been dozing in the lower right, went forward
into the cab to join Myrlin and the Nine's two ill-matched daughters.

I looked across at Susarma as I chewed my
way through the flavoured concentrate. It didn't taste any better than
Tetron-manufactured manna, but it didn't taste any worse either, and it was
what I was used to. The colonel, to judge by her long-suffering expression, was
still accustomed to food that did more favours for her palate. I sympathised,
thinking how awful it would be if every single meal I ate conjured up memories
of some long-ago feast the like of which I was unlikely ever to taste again.