Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

We managed to get him into the bunk, and the truck’s systems extended their biomanipulators into his tissues.

“We can save him,” said Urania, after a brief pause, “but he is very weak. We should not try to bring him round for several hours—he needs coma-rest.”

We waited patiently for Jacinthe Siani to come round. We all wanted to hear what she had to say.

Eventually, the Kythnan opened her eyes, and looked around at the faces watching her. We might have appeared a little absurd, crowded into the narrow passage, but she’d been riding in a similar truck with eight aboard, and it must have stopped seeming funny a long time ago.

“Rousseau?” she said faintly. I was the one she knew best—the one she was used to recognising in unexpected situations.

“What happened?” I asked in parole, coming straight to the point.

“I couldn’t get him into the truck,” she whispered. “I got in to send out the Mayday, but I had to try to get him in too. I got him up the shaft, but I couldn’t… too weak…”

It wasn’t what we wanted to know.

“What smashed you up?” I asked. “And where?”

“Down below,” she said, answering the second question first. “Creatures… big… tentacles… Couldn’t get into the suits… tried to pull us apart…”

“The others?” I asked, falling into the same clipped style.

“Don’t know. Some dead… some maybe got through… we fired, but the bullets… no good… needed flamers…”

I was quite ready to believe her story. Nobody would take that kind of a beating just to add a little plausibility to a set-up.

“Went down in groups of four,” she said. “Took equipment. I was with the last group. Dark… they didn’t look like anything much… then the tentacles… like whips and cables… grabbed at us… couldn’t go forward… got him back to the shaft… they did too much damage… unconscious by the time we got to the top… got into the truck… went back for him… couldn’t… no one else came…”

This was where we’d come in. I put my hand on her shoulder, to signal that she didn’t need to go on.

She stopped, and closed her eyes again.

Susarma Lear had her helmet off by now, but she didn’t make any move towards getting out of the suit.

“Well,” she said defiantly. “Nobody said it was going to be easy.”

“But what do we do now?” asked Myrlin.

“We say a prayer for the wise guys who stole our truck,” she told me. “And thank them for discovering the trouble-spot.”

“You’re ready to go down there?” I said. “After what our favourite traitor just told us?”

“Sure,” she replied. “But I think we ought to send them down a little surprise package first. I don’t care how many tentacles they have—if they’re made of flesh, they’ll burn. If scorched earth is what it takes to get us through the door, let’s start scorching.”

“Can we do that?” I asked Urania. “Could we send down some kind of robot bomb that will blow whatever’s down there to hell and gone, and still leave the elevator car in good enough shape to come and fetch us?”

“Something of the sort might be done,” she replied. “It should not pose insuperable difficulties.”

It looked as though the old adage about forewarned being forearmed might pull us through. I wasn’t particularly cheerful about it, though. Next time, there might be no one to forewarn us, and it looked as if we had to go the rest of the way tourist class, without our suit of robot armour to protect us.

“What do we do with these two?” asked Myrlin, indicating the two invalids.

“Put them in the other truck,” said Susarma Lear, making decisions with the swiftness of one used to operating in difficult circumstances. “Leave them to it. Lock them in, if we can, and knock them out. We may want to come back this way. Unless you want one of us to stay, and mind the trucks.”

“That should not be necessary,” said Urania, calmly. “But we must prepare carefully. We must discover precisely what equipment 994-Tulyar removed from the other vehicle, and make our own preparations with that in mind. We will need a little time.”

I went back to the cab, more to get out of the way than because there was anything that I could usefully do there. Susarma, still suited up, came to join me. I could see that there was a feverish light of action in her eye, and knew that she was going into existential overdrive. I’d seen her that way before, and was convinced that it would one day be the death of her.

“This is it, Rousseau,” she said, tautly. “Better get your arse suited up and your adrenaline in gear.”

“Sure,” I said, lightly. “This is it. Marked down in my diary: appointment with sudden death, survive if feasible. Do you think you could possibly call me Mike?”

“It’s not the Star Force way,” she told me. “And I suspect that now is the time when we have to start doing things the Star Force way—don’t you?”

The Star Force way consisted, in essence, of trying to reach the target by torching everything in the way. Bearing in mind what might be waiting for us, though, I had an unwelcome suspicion that she could be right. From now on, things would probably have to be done the Star Force way, all the way to the Centre.

I passed from my unreal state of consciousness into a dream within the dream. I was still in the grey water, though it seemed calmer now and not so cold.

The armour I wore was hardly heavy at all, but it was slowly dragging me down. I tried to lash out with my limbs, with some idea in mind of bringing myself back to the surface, but all my actions were unnaturally slow and heavy, as though the water had the thickness of honey.

I tried to blow out the water that I had taken in, but I had no strength with which to do it, and in any case my lungs were no longer desperate for air. My feebly thrusting arms became entangled with the waterlogged cloak that had been swept around me in a great arc, so that I could not make any sensible attempt to perform the actions that were demanded by my entirely theoretical notions of how to swim. Gradually, I ceased struggling.

Once I had surrendered entirely to my slow fall into the depths, I became disentangled again, and the cloak streamed out from my body almost as though it were a great black parachute retarding my descent. The water was quite still now, and as the surface receded into the distance above me it took on the aspect of a great white-lit plane of crystal. Below me, by contrast, there was a dark abyss with no hint of illumination.

The coldness had by now gone out of the water—or perhaps my flesh had adapted to it—and the viscosity too was no longer so noticeable, so that the experience of moving through it was more like falling through empty space. I could have imagined myself adrift in the lightless void of interstellar space. There was a silence more profound than any I had ever experienced before.

I found it possible to open my mouth, but could not feel anything moving in or out of it. My chest was quite numb, and I had no sensation of breathing. Nor was I aware of any internal pulse-beat; it was as though time had stopped.

As the last vestiges of light faded away, leaving me in total darkness, I was swept by a feeling of unutterable loneliness, which drowned out all thought and memory for an unmeasurable pause. I felt that I was shrinking into a curious vanishing point—that every last vestige of my soul was evaporating, lost and irrecoverable.

I was certain that this was my experience of the moment of death. I believed that I had drowned, and would be no more as soon as my last moment of sensation was exhausted. I felt a small surge of gratitude that the moment was unmarred by pain or terror, and was calmly ready for extinction.