Asgard's Heart (35 page)

"If I'd always followed your
advice," I said uncharitably, "Amara Guur would have made mincemeat
out of me a long time ago."

She didn't say anything in reply, but her
big dark eyes were radiating injured innocence. If she had really pulled the
Scarid officer out of the frying pan down there, she couldn't be quite as nasty
as I'd always supposed, but I wasn't about to forgive her for the bad turns
she'd done me.

"Don't worry," I told her, again.
"You'll be okay, if anyone is. Maybe we'll meet again, when the lights are
back on."

I left her to mull over her past life, and
to wonder whether she had a future.

When the flying cameras brought back their
pictures we found that her story, such as it was, seemed to be honest and
accurate. The picture quality was awful—not unexpectedly, given that there was
no light and our spy-eyes had to use infra-red vision—but our brain-in-a-box
managed to integrate all the information and enhance it a little. There was a
good deal of debris, but it didn't show up very clearly. We could make out a
couple of bodies, still sheathed in transparent plastic, and we guessed that
the killers hadn't been able to breach the suits. That was comforting, in a way—
but it hadn't saved the poor guys inside them, who'd been broken and crushed
regardless.

The predators themselves looked like a
cross between gargantuan slugs and sea anemones. They were sitting still while
the spy-eyes flew around, so we had no way to judge how fast they could move
when the need arose, but they didn't look very quick. There were about twenty
of them gathered about the doorway by now, but several had been damaged by
bullets and a few were almost certainly dead. They were heaped up untidily, and
though it was difficult to be sure, I got the impression that the ones on top
might be patiently devouring the ones below. The fact that their prey had
proved unexpectedly difficult to digest hadn't cost them their meal. No wonder
they were still lurking, hoping for dessert.

"They're nothing," opined Susarma
Lear scornfully. "If the Scarids had been carrying Star Force
flame-pistols instead of needlers and crash-guns, they'd have mopped that lot
up in a matter of minutes."

I diplomatically refrained from pointing
out that we'd lost our Star Force flamers long ago, and that she too was
reduced to carrying a relatively primitive handgun.

"It will not be necessary to expose
ourselves to any risk," said Urania. "We have programmed the truck's
organic production unit to supply ample quantities of a powerful poison which
will paralyse the nerve-nets controlling the smooth muscle of the tentacles. It
is sufficiently powerful that the tiny robots which carried the infra-red
cameras can easily be adapted to carry a lethal dose. We should not need our guns
immediately, although it will of course be necessary to carry such arms as we
can when we resume our journey."

I saw Nisreen nodding with approval. The
Tetrax had always believed that heavy metal was no substitute for clever
biotechnics.

When our fly-sized shock troops had
completed their mission, we set out ourselves. We had a certain difficulty
crowding five of us and all the relevant equipment into the car, but it was
possible. The pseudo-Tulyar's party had divided themselves into two fours only
because it was a split down the middle, not because four was the car's maximum
capacity. I guess we were crammed in pretty tightly, but we'd been crowded in
the truck, and it wasn't particularly claustrophobic.

The ride down was very long. The flow of
time felt different now that we were out of the truck—the vehicle had been a
comforting cocoon, where the minutes that passed were naturally dead and empty.
Now I was in a light suit, with a small cargo of weapons and equipment to
carry, every second was pregnant with hazard.

I hadn't asked Urania exactly what Tulyar's
party had taken from their own truck, and much of it was already packed up in
satchels. It was all too obvious, though, what kind of transport we would now
be expected to employ. No doubt they were sophisticated robots in their own
right, but they looked to me like glorified bicycles. Susarma was used to going
into battle with whatever came to hand, and didn't seem too worried about the
prospect of riding one, but Myrlin was anxious about their small size and
apparent frailty, and 673-Nisreen—who still had his right forearm immobilised
by a plastic sheath—seemed on the brink of asking to be left behind. I made the
suggestion that perhaps he should stay with the truck, in case it was only
pride that was preventing him, but he said no. The Tetrax had something of a
reputation for exaggerated discretion, but if the entire race could be judged
by Nisreen, they were certainly no cowards.

The long descent was a severe trial of my
peace of mind. By the time we reached the bottom I was so eager to move, so
eager to act, that it was almost a disappointment to find that our advance
guard of mechanical wasps really had stung to very good effect, and that there
was not a monster in the vicinity still capable of raising a tentacle.

I consoled myself with the thought that
Susarma Lear must feel ten times worse about the absence of a meaningful target
at which she could blast away.

The ground on which we found ourselves was
dead white and very flat, which seemed to me unnatural until I realised that it
was actually the chitinous epidermis of some vast thermosynthetic organism—a
living carpet which probably extended throughout the entire worldlet, having
sustained itself until the switch-off by drawing off energy from the real
"floor." No doubt the chitinous tegument was to protect it from
herbivores, which—equally undoubtedly— would have evolved ways of drilling
through it in order to sustain themselves, enabling them in their turn to
supply the tentacled predators with their natural sustenance. It was the
classic ecological pyramid that defines the structure of life-systems
everywhere. It would have been pleasant to chat to 673-Nisreen about the
aesthetics of it all, but we were too busy.

Now that we could search more carefully, we
found four bodies. Two were Scarid soldiers; two were Tetrax.
994-
Tulyar wasn't among them, and neither was John Finn,
but those two were all that was left of the eight who had set out, and we now
outnumbered them five to two—six to two if we counted the brain-in-a-box called
Clio, which was strapped to Urania's shoulders like a knapsack. I wondered if
Finn had yet figured out that Tulyar wasn't Tulyar and that he was being played
for a sucker. I thought not. Despite his cleverness with electronic gadgets,
John Finn was essentially a cretin.

The ground was far too hard to show obvious
tracks, but the heels of the suits Finn and Tulyar were wearing had been rigged
to leave a trace for us, and it didn't take long to confirm that there was indeed
a trail to be followed.

It took us about a quarter of an hour to
organise the bits that we'd crammed into the elevator with us, but eventually
we had them assembled into five two-wheeled vehicles with power-cells in the
space between our knees and luggage compartments behind the saddle. I'd ridden
similar vehicles in the suburban streets of Skychain City, where there were no
moving pavements, but the fact that the gravity was so much less down here—and
for the first time it seemed noticeably less than it had been in the Nine's
home level— made me a little anxious about keeping my balance.

Just as we were about to set off, our
lights picked out three more of the slug-things, gliding with surprising swiftness
over the great white carpet, but while Susarma Lear was eagerly pulling her
crash-gun out of its holster our little flying friends were zooming in for the
sting, and they still had poison to spare. The slugs were thrown into desperate
paroxysms, and were rendered helpless within a matter of seconds.

"You'll get your chance yet," I
consoled her, hoping that she wouldn't. Then I looked at Urania, who had charge—
via Clio—of the olfactory sensor that could pick up the trail we had to follow.
She led the way once again into the desolate darkness. Susarma Lear and I
followed in single file, with 673-Nisreen behind me, and Myrlin bringing up the
rear.

It didn't take me long to get saddle-sore,
and to begin hoping that the next drop we would face would be the last.

26

When I told him he was dead, and he said that I was
too, I half-expected a needier to materialise somewhere in the branches of the
monstrous tree. I winced in anticipation of little slivers of metal tearing me
apart. The branches that were his fingers rustled ominously, but nothing happened.
The relief was momentary—it dawned on me that if he didn't mean that he
intended to kill me, then he must mean something else.

"I don't feel very dead," I told
him defiantly. It wasn't true—I did remember the sensation of drowning, which
had seemed horribly like dying at the time, and I was uncomfortably aware of
the evil condition of my flesh.

"Nevertheless," he told me, in
his barbarous parole, "your attempt to reach the core of Asgard's software
space is over. You have been immobilised. Your body is already beginning to
disintegrate. Do not be misled by the fact that you retain consciousness—this
is Hell, Mr. Rousseau, and you are with the condemned."

I looked again at my hands, to examine my
peeling skin more closely. There was little feeling in the fingers, and the
strips of skin which were coming away were melting into liquid at the edges.
The discolouration suggested that gangrene was beginning to spread in the
deeper tissues. It was getting worse as I watched, and I became suddenly
anxious about the power of suggestion. Might this be no more than one more
attack, more subtle in kind? I didn't have to believe him, and I made up my
mind that I wouldn't.

I thought about what he'd said, and
wondered why it appeared to be Amara Guur who was speaking. The fact that he
was appearing in that form was something to do with his being my idea of the
archetypal enemy, but had the entity that confronted me chosen that form, or
had I imposed the identity upon it?

"You're just a figment of my
imagination," I told him.

"My outward form is a figment of your
imagination," he agreed. "It is the way you have translated my
presence into a visual image. Your consciousness is too limited to apprehend
me in any other way. All of this is a figment of your imagination, Mr.
Rousseau. It is a dream, which you now must dream alone. Everything you see is
transfigured by your mind into a set of visual symbols, but it is happening.
Dream or reality, you are doomed."

I heard a keening sound, and looked up to
see a company of predatory birds wheeling in the sky. I looked up at the
tangled foliage, at the poisonous fruits lurking amid the branches. I thought
about being on an island in the middle of an infinite sea: marooned. But if I was
already doomed— trapped and condemned to Hell—why would he be bothering to
tell me?

I knew then that this was just a new phase
of the contest. The gods had preserved me from the cruel sea, and the giants
had found a way to talk to me, but the battle of which I was a part was still
raging all around me, as yet unsettled.