Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

He fired, but the needles went wild, splashing into the wall beside me. If he’d really been Myrlin he would never have missed, but he was a biocopy of some alien software, locked in an utterly unfamiliar body—he hadn’t had as much time as his brother to become accustomed to his flesh, and I realised how completely we had been taken by surprise when he first shot us down. I realised that he hadn’t fired into my belly in order to hurt me more, but because he didn’t know any better. It had been a mistake, and now he was paying for it.

I fired again, and again, and again.

I didn’t miss once. The third bullet opened up his great big chest, sending splinters of rib deep into his vital organs. The fourth and fifth must have turned his heart and lungs to pulp.

Three or four more needles ricocheted from the floor, and one of them grazed the boot of my suit, but I was still standing, still able to fire.

673-Nisreen was down in a heap with the pseudo-Tetron on top of him. There was no way I could get a clear shot, and I had no option but to pause.

I coughed, feeling a gout of blood rising from my belly into my mouth, but I knew that I had to remain standing. Whatever else I did before I died—and there was something I had to do—I had to destroy the alien that had made use of 994-Tulyar’s body to breach the defences of the starshell. Whatever mischief he was trying to work, he had been mere moments from completing it, and it wouldn’t be enough to hurt him. He had to be finished.

I watched, impatiently, while he got his arms inside the futile grip which 673-Nisreen was trying to secure, and thrust outwards both ways. The bioscientist’s grip was broken, and Tulyar threw him off. While Nisreen tumbled through the air in grotesque slow motion pseudo-Tulyar groped in desperation for the needier that he had dropped.

But in throwing Nisreen aside he’d signed his own death-warrant. I had a clear shot now, and I fired.

For the first time, I missed.

I was supposed to be the low-gee expert, the man from Achilles, but I fired the last bullet before I had quite brought my hand to a standstill, and I wasn’t properly braced against the kick of the gun.

I felt a surge of nausea, but I couldn’t even pause to swallow the blood that was in my mouth. I coughed again, spraying tiny flecks of red all over the hood, but hurled myself forward anyhow, knowing that I had to hit him before he could fire the needler.

I had my arms out ahead of me, and it was the gun I was holding which slammed into his helmet, but now he was the one who was braced and I was the featherweight. When he thrust out at me with his arms I began to do the same slow somersault as Nisreen. I went all the way over, and by the time I was facing him again I was staring straight down the barrel of his gun, looking failure and death in the face.

But when the needles came, they missed me again. The zombie had fired just a fraction too late, and the convulsion which sent the shots wide was caused by the impact of a stream of needles which passed through his right eye and cheek, ploughing into the brain and destroying whatever strange entity it was that had taken possession when 994-Tulyar’s own real self had given up the ghost.

673-Nisreen was holding John Finn’s gun. It was he who had fired. Finn was lying dead at his feet, and when Nisreen dropped his eyes to avoid looking at 994-Tulyar’s corpse he looked straight at the bloody mess inside Finn’s helmet. Tetrax can’t turn pale, but Nisreen did the best he could, and I saw him shudder convulsively.

I thought I knew how difficult it had been for him to do what he had just done. In a way, he’d done exactly what Finn had, and taken the side of an alien against his own species-cousin, but I knew he hadn’t done it for the same reason. Whatever Tulyar had been telling him when I woke up, he hadn’t believed. Reason had told him which side to be on, and even though what he’d done was making him sick to the core of his being, he’d done it. It only looked like the Star-Force way; the motive behind it had been something very different.

I hadn’t time to do or say anything. I took my place in the chair where pseudo-Tulyar had been sitting, and looked at the keyboards and the dials. There must have been two hundred different switches, and although every one had been shaped with humanoid fingers in mind, I couldn’t make any sense at all of the symbols.

I raised my hands, feeling a frightful sense of utter frustration rising inside me.

And then some kind of bomb went off in my head.

I began to punch the keyboard furiously. There were no flashing lights or ringing bells to give evident warning of the fact that the power build-up in the starlet was about to discharge itself, and I had in fact lost all consciousness of the fear that Asgard might very shortly be turned into nova debris. I had not the slightest notion what I was doing, or how, and my self-consciousness seemed to be locked into some absurd psychostasis, whereby I could watch my hands but could feel no connection with them whatsoever.

I had not even sufficient presence of mind to wonder whether this was how Myrlin had felt when the creature lurking in his brain had sprung its sudden ambush, and made him into what he had so tragically become—the traitor who had very nearly turned the war around.

When my hands finally finished their work, they just stopped. I must have been struck rigid in the chair, frozen into stillness. How much time there was to spare when I completed the sequence, I have no idea. The conventions of melodrama demand that it be a mere handful of seconds, and I can’t say for certain that it wasn’t, but the simple truth is that I did not know then and do not know now.

I wondered, as I sat there, perfectly still, whether it was now safe for me to die. I was feeling no authentic pain, but in myself I felt absolutely awful. If someone had told me then that I was dead, I could not have denied it with any conviction.

When I felt a touch on my shoulder, I looked up to see 673-Nisreen staring down at me. The poor guy still hadn’t much idea of what had happened, or how, or why, and he was desperate for some reassurance that he’d done the right thing.

“What have you done?” he asked, starting with one of the easier ones.

That was the moment when I discovered that I did, in fact, know what I had done. I didn’t know how, but I knew what.

“I shunted the power which had built up in the starshell into a stresser, to wormhole the macroworld,” I told him. “Which is exactly what they did a million and a half years ago, when the battle first reached its critical phase. The builders were still around then, in humanoid form. They didn’t survive the consequent skirmishes, but at least they got the starshell sealed off, and left the war to the software gods who were equipped to fight it.”

“Where are we?” he asked. I could see from his eyes that he was quick enough on the uptake to know that a thing the size of Asgard would make a hell of a wormhole. I knew he wouldn’t be overly shocked by the answer.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I moved us, but there’s no way to know where. At a guess, we’ve come a couple of million light-years. I hope you don’t feel homesick, because we aren’t ever going to see the Milky Way again, let alone Tetra. Asgard’s all we have now—we might even have to practice being nice to the Scarida. There are still billions of them up there. I doubt that there are more than a couple of thousand Tetrax, or a couple of dozen humans.”

The needles were churning in my guts, but somehow I had them sealed off. I was bleeding inside, but I had enough blood left in the arteries to keep my brain going. I felt light-headed again—anaesthetised.