Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

Yes. Pause. No.

I shook my head, wearily. Then I felt the feelers which were holding on to me relax slightly, as if the box was trying to let go.

Inspiration struck. “What you mean,” I said, “is that it’s booby-trapped in such a way as to make it dangerous for some of us.”

Yes.

I thought hard for a minute, and then it clicked. It had to be magic bazookas, like the one the Isthomi had given Myrlin to blast the robot mantis. The inside of the starshell was lethal to silicon brains.

“What’s going on?” asked Susarma.

“What I think she means,” I explained, “is that there’s something over the threshold which is intended to put mechanical intelligences out of action. Maybe that’s what damaged the Nine the first time they tried to contact the Centre through software space. I guess that’s why the enemy needed 994-Tulyar—or his body. They must have slipped through some relatively crude device to hit the power-supply, but maybe it couldn’t carry the kind of programming required to complete the job. For that, they need an organic brain—and clever hands.”

Yes, signaled Clio. Short and sweet—but none too encouraging.

“So how can we get you in there?” I asked.

No.

“I think it’s trying to tell us,” said Susarma, drily, “that we’re on our own.”

Yes. No.

“She can still communicate with us from out here, as long as we don’t get too much solid wall between us,” I said. “Maybe she can send some eyes in with us, too—those flying cameras that spied on the slugs. They can’t carry much in the way of software.”

Yes. Yes. Clio wasn’t getting excited—it wasn’t in her nature. She was just giving us a measure of encouragement. She might have to be discreet, lest she walk into an ambush in there, but she was still on the team. We might have to work out a more elaborate code than a series of buzzes if she was going to work out for us exactly what we had to do in there, but she might be able to cope. At least she might be able to tell us how to switch off the defences that were holding her back.

I waited while she disengaged herself, and I placed her discreetly beside the doorway. She emitted a couple of tiny mobiles, the size one normally expects flies to be, in a world where they weigh what things that size are supposed to weigh.

Susarma took the lead, still carrying the needier in her hand. I went next, while Nisreen brought up the rear.

There were marked doors on either side of the corridor but we ignored them. At the far end there was a deep circular well about four metres across, with a spiral catwalk winding around its perimeter, leading down into the body of the starshell. We went down, in no great haste. There were more doorways, clearly marked, but I figured that our objective was down below, and that was the way we went. There was a good deal of dust on the steps, and it had recently been disturbed. I couldn’t tell how many other feet had passed this way, but it seemed to be more disturbance than one pair was likely to have made, so I had to stop being optimistic about the possibility that Tulyar and John Finn were waiting for feeding time in something’s nest.

The catwalk wound around and around the well so many times that I lost count. My headlamp wasn’t sufficiently powerful enough to show us more than a dozen metres or so, and there was no way to guess what was waiting for us at the bottom, so we had to be patient. We were able to take big steps because of the low gravity, and we covered the ground reasonably quickly, but we were taking a roundabout route and we took a long time getting where we were going.

Eventually, though, we came to the bottom of the well.

The catwalk delivered us into a much larger open space. The wall we had been following round and round straightened out, and extended away into the distance as far as we could see.

The space at the bottom of the stair was strewn with the most amazing litter I had ever seen. Some kind of battle had once been fought here, and there were bits of shattered machines everywhere, covered in thick, greasy dust. Among the debris there were numerous humanoid skeletons, stripped of their flesh by scavengers that had long ago moved on in search of more profitable fields. I could tell that they weren’t human, in the strict sense of the word, but they were certainly humanoid. If they were all that remained of the superhuman builders, then those builders had indeed been closely akin to all of us, human and Tetron alike.

There was a clear trail leading away from the foot of the catwalk, into the gloom of the cavernous chamber.

“I don’t know how it looks to you,” I said to Susarma, “but I don’t think there are two sets of footprints there. I think there are at least three—maybe more.”

She knelt to look at the scuffed dust. “There are more than two,” she said, pensively. “But they needn’t all have been together. Maybe Tulyar and Finn are following a trail, too—the trail of the whoever or whatever switched off the power.”

It was a possibility. We moved off, following the tracks in the dust. We moved carefully, all too well aware of the possibility of an ambush. Tulyar and Finn had suits like ours, and could listen in on our conversation if there were no thick walls separating us—though that would force them to keep silent themselves. They couldn’t know exactly where we were until they saw our lights, but they knew which way we’d be coming.

I wondered, briefly, how John Finn was feeling now that he was all alone with a Tetron who wasn’t really a Tetron at all. Maybe he was ready to defect yet again, back to our side. On the other hand, maybe not. He was way out of his intellectual depth, and there was no telling which way he would figure out his best interests.

“Clio,” I said, softly. “Are you still with us?”

There was a very faint buzz, at the threshold of perception. There was too much junk between the surface and our present position—as soon as we’d moved away from the well we’d come to the limit of our communicative apparatus. If we went on, we’d be on our own.

I hesitated, and looked at Susarma.

As far as she was concerned, she’d always been in command, and now it looked as if we would soon be catching up with the bad guys she was only too willing to take control. She wasn’t unduly worried about losing contact with Clio—her objective was the strictly short-term one of keeping us alive until 994-Tulyar and John Finn were neutralized. She brought us close together, and raised a finger to the part of her helmet that was in front of her lips, telling us to be quiet. She signaled in dumb show that she would follow the tracks, while I was to move away to the left and Nisreen to the right. We had to stay close enough to see her headlight, but at least we wouldn’t present a single target.

She took the Scarid pistol from her waist, and looked at her two weapons for a moment or two, as if inwardly debating their relative merits. Then she shrugged, and passed the needier to me. It was by far the more effective weapon, and I was initially inclined to refuse it, but I remembered that she’d showed her prowess with the crash gun once before, while I was by no means certain to be able to hit anything with it.

I took the needier, and we moved off. As methods of communication went, the dumb show was only marginally better than the yes/no buzzing farce to which we had been reduced in exchanging opinions with Clio, but it worked well enough. The worst of it was that once we had separated and begun to move forward, none of us dared say a word.

We moved off along a corridor between two ranks of squat platforms, each one bearing the broken remains of what looked like a plastic bubble. The platforms were about two metres long by one wide, with the corners rounded down; the bubbles were a little less than that, and added an extra thirty centimetres or so to the height of each column. The space between them was so cluttered with nasty debris that I didn’t pay much immediate attention to the platforms, but I realised belatedly that they must be something like the artificial wombs which the Nine had built. This had once been a hospital—or a hatchery. Maybe this was where the builders designed other humanoids: the lab where evolution really happened, before the gardeners begin seeding the worlds with pre-adapted DNA. Or maybe it was only the place where the masters of Asgard investigated the lifeforms which they plucked from the worlds which they visited. We still didn’t know whether Asgard was an Ark or a nursery, though we were pretty sure that it was a fortress.