Asgard's Heart (40 page)

673-Nisreen looked around with an
expression that said: "Who's next?"

I didn't rush to volunteer. I looked at
Myrlin. He was a little preoccupied, perhaps mulling over the fact that he was
more than two metres tall and weighed something over a hundred and fifty kilos—at
least twice as much as the scion.

"Okay Rousseau," said Susarma
Lear, in her most frigid She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed tone. "We go together on
the count of three, and if either of us chickens out he gets busted to
corporal. One. . . . Two. . . ."

She was already scrambling up on to the top
of the protective fence, balancing herself on the guard-rail. She wasn't even
looking at me to make sure that I was doing as I was told. In the Star Force,
officers take that kind of thing for granted.

"...
Three!" she said, and jumped.

Somewhat to my surprise, I found that I had
jumped with her. Maybe it was the influence of Star Force discipline coming out
at last. Maybe it was my latent superhumanity taking over in the moment of
crisis. Either way, I found myself tumbling in the air, watching the circle of
light that was the airlock slowly dwindling in size. There was one horrid
thrill of pure terror, like a fire alarm going off in my nervous system, and
then a flood of intoxicated relief as I realised that nothing was happening to
me. I was floating free, and remembered that while in free fall I was, of
course, quite weightless.

It was not completely dark, but all the
light I could see was emitted by distant pinpricks that were very remote, so I
had no real sensation of movement or speed. No doubt I was accelerating with
whatever alacrity the weak gravity could muster, but I could not feel it.
Instead, I felt utterly isolated, out of touch with the entire universe . . .
almost alone.

Almost.

For a couple of seconds I was on the brink
of lapsing into a kind of trance—a dream-state. I was very nearly there when I
realised what was happening, and snatched myself back. It was a sensation like
many I'd had before, when snatching myself back from a doze induced by warmth
and relaxation, but I knew that this time was different. Something was in my
head— something which had nearly taken advantage of a moment of shock and
confusion. Maybe its intention was innocent; maybe it only wanted to show me a
bit more of its psychic movie about the history of the universe. But I'd seen
it wearing the face of Medusa, and I was frightened of it. I wanted to hold on
to my presence of mind at all costs.

I made a deliberate effort to assume the
position that had been recommended to me, adjusting the attitude of my body so
that I was face-down, with my arms and legs spread out. It was easier than I
thought, but when I then tried to look back over my shoulder to see how much I
resembled an angel I found myself rolling over slowly, spinning about two
different axes. A moment's dizziness confused me further, and then I righted
myself again.

I still couldn't sense the velocity of my
fall. The darkness was near-total, and the suit I was wearing prevented my
feeling the friction of the air against my skin. I had a dreadful suspicion,
though, that my wings hadn't grown yet. In fact, I had a dreadful suspicion
that they weren't going to grow at all.

I tried to calculate how far I might have
to fall. I'd done sufficient mental arithmetic while we were coming through the
levels to have some vague idea of the distances that were probably involved.
The radius of the macroworld was something on the order of fourteen thousand
kilometres, from which one had to subtract the depth of the levels and the
radius of the starshell. I figured that if I called those seven and four
thousand I probably wouldn't be too far out. That meant that I had something in
the region of three thousand kilometres to fall. The gravity here was probably
about a ninth or a tenth of Earth-normal, and I figured that that would lead to
an acceleration not too far away from a metre per second. On the other hand,
that neglected air resistance, which would in the circumstances be
considerable. It also neglected the effects of friction on my suit. I couldn't
quite see how to go about the job of calculating whether and how quickly I
would turn into a meteor, and whether that could possibly happen before I
actually landed. It did seem very unlikely, but the whole situation was so
bizarre that I really didn't feel able to discount it.

"Is everyone all right?" asked
Susarma Lear, startling me somewhat. In trying to absorb myself so deeply in my
silly calculations I had somehow let it slip from my mind that we could still
talk to one another with the aid of radio.

"I don't know," I said,
truthfully. "I can't see or feel a thing. Maybe I have wings and maybe I
don't."

"You have wings," said Urania.
"I have Clio with me. She has you all under observation."

"I feel fine," Myrlin assured me.

"Nisreen?" I asked.

"I am quite well," the Tetron
assured me, and if the smoothness of his parole was anything to go by, he was
telling the truth.

"Unfortunately," the scion's
voice chipped in again, with a sudden hint of urgency, "it seems that we
are not alone. There are other winged creatures, in considerable numbers,
approaching from below. We will be among them in a few minutes."

"Can that brain-in-a-box tell us what
they are?" demanded Susarma Lear.

"Only that they are very large; they
have masses considerably greater than our own."

"I can't see a thing," she
complained. I could imagine her finger tightening about the trigger of her
needier, desperate to find a target.

"How can
they
see
us
?" inquired
Myrlin, with a similar note of desperation.

"Perhaps they can't," I ventured,
hopefully, peering into the night and bringing my own gun round to aim at the
gloomy void which still separated me by thousands of kilometres from the tiny
sparkling worldlet which was Asgard's heart.

"I fear," said Urania—who would,
of course, be the first to encounter danger if danger there was—"that they
may not rely on light."

My mind, unprompted by any conscious
effort, conjured up the image of a host of gigantic vampire bats homing in on
us unerringly with the aid of their sonar, avid for our blood.

Urania made a noise, then. It wasn't a
scream—I don't believe that she could ever have produced a scream—but it was a
sound that had shock in it, and maybe terror. I hadn't thought her capable of
terror, and that small sound suddenly seemed dreadfully ominous.

"What is it?" asked Susarma
sharply.

She received no answer.

Then, I caught sight of the swarm of shifting
shadows, silhouetted against the diffuse light which was still far below them.
As they eclipsed the pinpricks I formed a hurried impression of their number,
which was far more than I could count, and though in that first brief moment
the shadows seemed quite small they were growing with terrible rapidity.

"Oh
merde,"
I murmured, as I
tried to brace the hand

which held the needier, and prepared to fire.

But I never had a target to aim at. The
tiny light on my helmet showed me flickering wings, but they were too far away,
moving far too quickly relative to my own downward course. I longed to let
loose a stream of needles, though I could hardly begin to believe that such
trivial missiles could be effective against the mothlike leviathans which whirled
like a Stygian maelstrom from the starry mass of the mysterious Centre. Every
time I tried to line up a shot, the flicker of leathery wings snatched the
targets away.

I still had not fired a single shot when I
fell with distressing smoothness into the gaping maw of a monstrous shadow,
and was grabbed with sufficient force to knock me senseless yet again.

30

Being beheaded is not very pleasant, even when it
happens to a dream-self that can take it.

I didn't know that I could take it when the
blade sliced through me, so I was able to savour the unpleasantness to the
full. I was in the process of trying to utter a few last words—nothing, I fear,
of any particular note—but discovered that without a throat I could only
gurgle wetly. My mouth opened and my tongue tried to wrap itself around a
syllable of protest, but no sound came out.

Surprisingly, though, the stream of my
consciousness continued on its weary way without any hint of interruption.
Indeed, the effect which my beheading had on the people who were watching
seemed to be far greater than the effect it had on me.

I already knew that I was not a pretty
sight, and I did not suppose that my transformation into a bodiless head held
aloft by a malevolent godling would improve my image, but I was quite unprepared
for what actually happened.

The laughter which had been echoing around
the great plaza died away. The faces which had been full of amusement had just
time to change, as a wave of pure horror spread through the multitude,
signified by dilating eyes and hands brought swiftly upwards in hopeless
defence. Thousands of mouths opened to speak—or to howl with anguish—but were
no more capable of giving vent to sound than my own impotent lips. Silence
descended like a curtain, and all movement ceased.

The thing which had mockingly called itself
Loki had turned my gaze away from his own when he struck the crucial blow, but
I could still see him out of the corner of my eye. His pale complexion was even
paler now, and the paleness had quickly claimed his eyes and his hair. He was
as still and silent as the rest.

Like them, he had been turned to stone.

The only sound I could hear was the hissing
of serpents, and the only movement which remained was the stirring of those
same serpents as they writhed around the stone hand which grasped them, making
the head to which they were anchored rock and sway.

The Nine, interpreting my dreams with
casual confidence in their ability to do
so,
had told me that I had been given a weapon, which might be used
against the forces which had injured them. They had not been entirely accurate
in their judgment. The biocopy which had been thrust into my brain hadn't been
designed to
give
me a weapon when my persona was re-encoded—it
had been designed to
make me into
a weapon.

I had found Medusa, and she was me.

The invaders of Asgard's software space had
never realised precisely what tactics were being used against them. I knew now
why the one which had appeared as Loki had still been hesitant, playing for
time until he felt safe—until he had seen my body decay to a point where he
thought that it posed no further threat. He had been anxious, and rightly
so.
The enemy had been bluffed and deluded into contriving my capture and
my apparent destruction, not knowing that my destruction would trigger their
own. I was a booby-trap
bomb ...
a Trojan
Horse ...
a gorgon in sheep's clothing.