Asgard's Heart (22 page)

"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.

When the platform stopped, having reached the bottom
of its shaft, I switched the truck's lights full on, and Urania promptly bent
over her sister the suitcase. She wasn't controlling her—she was merely making
ready to relay to us any messages or commands which Clio wanted passed on. I
was sitting in front of the manual controls, ready to grab them if the
circumstances should make it necessary, but I knew that no such situation was
likely to arise and I felt uncomfortably impotent. I even envied Susarma Lear
her control of the guns.

There was no time to think too hard about it, though,
because the moment the platform ceased its descent our sacrificial army of tin
gladiators was scattering into every space they could find, and the explosions
were already beginning: one, two, three.

We could hear the blasts and see the splashes of fire,
but they were not so very close at hand—the jury-rigged soldiers whose job it
was to get in the way were playing hero and victim to the very best of their
ability. I only hoped that those which had some elementary capacity for
fighting back were sending forth their own missiles to wreak a measure of havoc
among the enemy. Some pretty heavy stuff must have been fired at us, because we
rocked slightly as we got underway, but we sustained no damage.

Susarma began returning fire as soon as she had space
to fire at the bad guys without hitting our own troops. She sent streams of
flame-bolts out in two directions. The flame-bolts, which became gaseous almost
instantly once they were in flight, were much more difficult to stop than the
solid missiles which were fired at us; although they couldn't penetrate armour
as heavy as the stuff which was wrapped around us, they could do a lot of
damage to anything that was slightly less robust—including the gun- barrels
and firing mechanisms of the robots arrayed against us. Clio was firing too—she
still had control of the magic bazookas: the software disrupters.

It would have been nice to know what kind of carnage
we were creating in the enemy ranks, but I couldn't see a damn thing through
the flickering glare except for a few shards from the bodies of our defenders
which impacted with the bar of clear plastic which served as a window.

The truck was accelerating as fast as it could, and
the momentum threw me backwards. The doorway through which we passed wasn't
very tall or wide, and there was something in the open space beyond it which
had fired at least one of the three biggest missiles which had come at us, but
the only thing we could do was go like hell and try to break through the
ambush.

I presumed that Clio was able to send signals of some
kind to the suicide squadron, trying to make sure that they all got blown to
bits usefully, but there was no way I could keep track of what was happening. I
just held on tight while we rocketed away from the shaft, hoping that Susarma
and

the
suitcase were equal to their task.

We had to swerve round something big and solid, and
then had to run a gauntlet of things which came from either side, determined to
blow us away if they could. A couple were essentially similar in design to the
mantis which had chased me in the garden, while others were just cannons on
legs, but as each one came up something zapped it—if none of our
fast-diminishing army of supporters got it, Susarma or Clio did. These things
were obviously operating a long way from home: they were geared to travel as
well as to fight, and their firepower was correspondingly modest.

There was a sudden series of explosions in front of
the truck, as the road seemed to rise up to attack us with tongues of flame. I
winced, realising that it had been mined with explosive charges which could
throw us up in the air and turn us over even if they couldn't crack our underbelly—but
the suitcase had detected them early enough, and every one of them was
exploding prematurely.

The battle lasted about two minutes and fifteen
seconds, and when it ended our robot transporter was hurtling into the darkness
at a hundred kilometres an hour, its steely carapace whole and essentially
undamaged. The sound and the fury faded behind us, our automata and theirs
still exchanging whatever shots they could. I think the battle continued,
sporadically, for a few more minutes when we were out of it, as the two
companies of machines made what efforts they could to mop up. There was no way
to know how many survivors there might be, and whether any of them might be
ours. We didn't intend that any pursuers should ever catch up with us.

The lights of the truck were now the only source of
illumination in the neighbourhood. They showed us the way ahead clearly enough—in
fact, I could see the tracks which the other truck had left in the soft earth.
It was more difficult to see what lay to either side of the road, but we were
out in the open, although we frequently passed hugely thick pillars connecting
the floor to the ceiling. This had once been some kind of forest, but it had
obviously been dead long before the lights were switched out. The trees were
leafless, most of the branches broken away to leave the jagged boles jutting
like rotten teeth. They showed up grey in the light, and gave the impression of
being petrified, yet somehow still brittle.

Nothing moved. Even the dust kicked up by the truck we
were chasing had settled back to the ground.

"Have the Nine explored this level?" asked
Myrlin. "Do they know what happened here?"

"Our machines have been here," Urania
replied, with a slight uncharacteristic hoarseness in her voice that suggested
that the experience of conflict had not left her unaffected. "They found
little here to interest us, and we already had a way down into lower levels
than this one, so we made no attempt to search vigorously for new routes. We
are not sure what manner of disaster destroyed the life- system."

"Could it be that the trees are simply the last
evidential remains of an ecocatastrophe?" asked Myrlin, whose own voice
was not completely steady. "It might have been something initially trivial—closed
ecospheres must always be vulnerable to mutant viruses which break crucial
food-chains by wiping out the members of a particular group of species."

"It is unlikely," said Urania, soberly.
"The extending consequences of such an event might easily be disastrous
for higher species, but it is difficult to believe that it could exterminate
all
life. It seems more probable that this
habitat was deliberately sterilised."

"An act of war?" I ventured, knowing that
she wouldn't be able to answer. If she had, she'd have told us already.

"Not necessarily," she replied with all due
caution.

"How many levels further down did your explorer
robots manage to penetrate?" I asked.

"The lowest level we have attained is one hundred
and three below this one, although we did not gain access to all the
intermediate ones."

"Any more dead ones?"

"Only one," she said. "But seven of the
habitats have reducing atmospheres, and were difficult to explore. A further
ten have ecosystems which are entirely thermosynthetic, and six of those are
entirely dark, consisting of organisms which make no use of bioluminescence at
all."

"How many of the remainder have indigenous
humanoid life?"

"Four of the seventy-one about which we have
information," she said. "We have not attempted to communicate with
any of them, but have been content to observe. None of the four seemed aware of
the fact that there are habitats other than their own; all were technologically
primitive in our terms—even by galactic standards. Their use of the power
available to them from the central network was very limited, although that will
not insulate them from the ecocatastrophes which will occur as a result of the
switching off of that power."

There wasn't much point in following up that line of
conversation. It wouldn't matter much whether a habitat was humanoid-inhabited
or not, whether its atmosphere was oxygen-rich or reducing, or whether its
organisms were photosynthetic or thermosynthetic: the big switch-off had left
them all to live on their energy-capital. Some of them would be able to support
sophisticated organisms for hundreds of years, simpler ones for hundreds of
thousands, and bacteria for hundreds of millions; but in the end, if the power
never came back on, entropy would turn them all into so much sterile sewage.

"Anyhow," I said, "we could always
cross our fingers and hope that some of the levels further down have intelligent
inhabitants who do know their way around, far better than we do. For all we
know, a hundred worldlets could have sent out teams of repair-men, every one of
them so clever that bringing the power back will be just like mending a
fuse."