Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

“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.”