Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

I took this as a good sign, until I saw the expression on my female companion’s face, and knew that this was not the way she had hoped that things would go.

“They know we are here,” she said, “and are prepared to test us. I had hoped to find less quickness of reaction, and I know now that we have more to fight than mere automata. There is a mind in this, and I cannot tell how clever it will prove. I fear that we may have underestimated their capacity to deal with such as we.”

“Well then,” I said, “we must hope that they in their turn will underestimate our capacity to deal with such as they.”

As I said it, the mist seemed to darken again, and renew its iciness, making me shiver even within my cloak. Hero though I was, armed and aided by gods, I felt a chill course through me, which promised me an abundance of pain and anguish in time to come.

There were five of us in the truck—or six, if we counted non-humanoids. That was one more than was specified in our original plans—but I thought we’d be able to cope, given that the truck we were chasing had eight aboard. As I had anticipated, the admission of 673-Nisreen to our company met with the unequivocal disapproval of Susarma Lear, who was still nursing an altogether reasonable suspicion of the probable perfidy of all members of the Tetron species, but by the time she realised he’d been added to our strength his position was a fait accompli. She had no opportunity to start an argument about it.

The scion who had been appointed to come with us was quite indistinguishable, in my eyes, from all her fellows. She suggested that we should address her as Urania-3, but there didn’t seem to be any point in retaining the number, so I promptly abandoned it.

The sixth member of our expedition might also have been reckoned to be a scion, though it (or “she,” as consistency demanded that I think of her) wasn’t any kind of organic entity. At rest she looked not unlike a suitcase, but she was studded with connect-points for all kinds of leads: metal, glassfibre, and organic, and she could extrude pseudopods of all these kinds in order to hook herself up to virtually any kind of system she was likely to meet. If necessary, she could slide artificial neurons into humanoid flesh, just like the hoods of the chairs the Isthomi used for interfacing with us, but she was equally at home interfacing with the systems of the robot transporter.

Her main purpose, to my mind, would be to help us open the many doorways that must undoubtedly lie between ourselves and the lowest levels of the macroworld, at least some of which would presumably need external supplies of power because they had no stored potential of their own and could no longer draw upon the great network. I had no doubt, though, that she thought of herself as the real guide and leader of the expedition—a far more powerful and more versatile incarnation of the Nine than Urania. She had no voice of her own, but Urania told us that we could refer to her, if we wished, by the name Clio-14. Again, I promptly forgot the number, and I had some difficulty at first in thinking of her by name, given that she was so very different in form from the furry humanoid Clios I had known.

By the time we had loaded extra power cells and the various kinds of equipment which either the Nine or I considered potentially useful, the free space aboard the truck was getting very cluttered. Anyone who was not in the cab had only two choices—they could sit in the gun-turret or lie down in the narrow bunk-space. To begin with, the colonel took the turret while Myrlin, Urania, and Clio shared the front seat with me and Nisreen lurked in the rear.

“Are you sure you can handle the guns?” I asked Susarma, before she went up.

“They’re guns, Rousseau,” she informed me with vitriolic contempt. “Given that the original plan was that you should be able to shoot them, I don’t think I’ll have much difficulty, do you? Are you sure that you can drive the bloody truck?”

It wasn’t quite like that. The original plan had been that the intelligent suitcase, hooked into the robot’s systems, could do the driving and man the guns, both at the same time. Needless to say, the robot had external sensors that could function far better as eyes than our real eyes peering through windows. Both sets of manual controls had been intended as back-ups. Susarma Lear still hadn’t cultivated the correct frame of mind for dealing with the Isthomi. I didn’t try to explain, because Clio had been quite willing to share control of the guns with the colonel, on the grounds that reflexes trained by the Star Force might easily outperform her own mechanical responses in a tough combat situation. Beyond the Nine’s protective barriers, there might be all kinds of electronic highwaymen lying in wait for us—and our recent experiences suggested that it might not be so easy getting past them. A dozen mechanical mantises would be no mean opponents.

We were so certain that there would be an ambush waiting for us at the bottom of the shaft that the Nine had given us reinforcements to assist us in getting past square one of the game. Following us along the corridors through which we took the truck on the way to our departure point was a ragged army of robots. Not one of them had been designed for fighting, and many of them hadn’t had any weapons grafted on, but their role wasn’t really an offensive one. Their job was to intercept anything thrown in our direction which might otherwise do us damage. They were a suicide squadron.

The robots were as ill-assorted a gang as I could ever hope to see—half of them on wheels, half ambulatory; some small and round, others like crazy assemblies of girders. In terms of animal analogies they ranged all the way from grubs and wireworms through crabs and giant turtles to surreal monstrosities which could only be described in terms of silly old jokes about what you’d get if you crossed a giraffe with a stick-insect or a peacock with a squid. What most of them had originally been designed for I could hardly begin to guess. Every spare mobile the Isthomi had was here, and though none of them qualified as an actual person in the way that Clio allegedly did, some of them were pretty smart machines. It was a terrible waste to use them as mere cannon fodder.

The Nine had initially sealed off the platform which Finn’s party had used for their descent, but before we took the new robot truck out there, they had brought it back up from the depths and made sure that it was empty of would-be invaders. That circular section of chitinous concrete was the last safe place in Asgard, and once we drove off it into the mysterious spaces of whichever level it could take us to, we were on our own.

It wasn’t until we crowded on to it that I saw the suicide army in its full strength. I knew that no more than one in five could even be credited with a sensible measure of artificial intelligence, let alone a suspicion of sentience, but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them as they shuffled dutifully around, cramping up their disfigured limbs in order to make room for one another.

We who are about to die salute you, I thought. All hail to the Caesars of Asgard.

The journey down was longer than I expected, given that the Nine had already told me that their explorations in a downward direction hadn’t been too successful. I’d been expecting to go down ten or a dozen levels, but by my rough calculation we dropped nearly two thousand metres into the darkness—which was probably somewhere between seventy-five and eighty-five levels. While we descended I tried out a few equations in my head, wondering—as I’d often done before—how many levels there might be between the Nine’s habitat and the bottom of the world. There were too many unknowns, most notably the size and mass of the starlet around which the macroworld was constructed, but if I fed in guesses which seemed to me to be halfway reasonable I kept getting answers of the order of magnitude which extended from five hundred to five thousand levels. That was a big margin of possible error, which became much larger if my assumptions about the starlet were cock-eyed, but for some reason it felt good to have figures in my mind, ready to be refined to reflect any new data which came in. I felt that my progress toward the Centre could be mapped by the increasing precision of my estimates regarding its proximity.