Asgard's Conquerors (32 page)

These
globules seemed to me to be neither resting on the ground nor growing from it,
but rather to be aggregations of the quasi-protoplasmic goo over which we
walked, whose inner warmth I could feel even through my boots. It was as if we
were walking upon a vast marbled-white tegument which welled up at irregular
intervals into giant puff-balls.

It was
easy to imagine that we were tiny endoparasites migrating across the skin of
some vast scaly-skinned beast, and in my fanciful way I tried to enhance the
illusion by trying to imagine the surroundings as verrucose growths on the hide
of some albino giant. The globules varied in diameter from a metre to thirty
metres; the larger ones towered above us and seemed almost to touch the ill-lit
ceiling.

We dared
not stop to rest, but Serne moved into step with Susarma Lear, touching helmets
occasionally in order to be more easily heard. Their voices reached me as a low
and distant murmur, and I couldn't see most of the hand- signals they were
exchanging, but I knew they were discussing tactical options. I deduced that
Serne wanted to try to get us some guns—feeling, no doubt, that two experienced
Star Force commandos were easily the equal of half a dozen savages armed with
vulgar popguns. I guessed that the further we went without reaching any sign of
a destination, the more that idea might come to seem attractive to the colonel.
She knew, though, that there wasn't time to lay an intricate ambush. We had no
idea how much further we had to go, and our recyclers would supply us with
oxygen for only three more hours.

Had I
been fully fit, the pace at which we were moving would have been quite
comfortable, but I had only just begun to recover from a bad bout of fever, and
I was now beginning to feel weak at the knees. My stomach was sending me
mutinous signals, and I became fearful that I might vomit. Throwing up inside a
plastic suit is absolutely no fun at all, and can be very dangerous. You don't
need a reducing atmosphere to choke you to death when a rebellious body feels
like making its own arrangements.

The
colonel and the sergeant were showing no obvious signs of similar distress, but
as we went on I noticed a slight faltering of their strides. They might have
been giving the Tetrax a fair chance to stay with us, but it seemed more likely
that the sickness was beginning to take its toll on them, too. To my annoyance,
Finn seemed to be having no difficulty at all.

I soon
began to have distinct feelings of
deja vu,
remembering that last time I'd broken out of jail, I'd quickly begun to wish
heartily that I'd never left the comfortable safety of my cell. I reminded
myself that the invaders had been all set to treat me like a good friend, until
they had been disconcerted by the plague I'd unwittingly unleashed among them.
Now my ingratitude in opting out of their hospitality had persuaded them to try
to kill me. And for what? We still hadn't a clue where we were going, or why.

I was
seized by a distinct impression that ever since I had last been trapped deep
inside Asgard with Susarma Lear and her loyal follower, with pursuers on our
tail and the unknown up ahead, life had been one long bizarre dream. Maybe, I
thought, I'll wake up in a moment to find my head aching from that stupid
mindscrambler, and discover that I'm right back at square one.

Unfortunately,
it didn't happen. What happened instead was that a whole section of the sky got
ploughed up, and bits of it began to fall on the fungoid jungle like a black
rainstorm. Just for a fraction of a second, it did look like the fancy
mindscrambler Myrlin's friends had used during our final encounter, but it
wasn't. The sound and the shockwave, arriving just behind the shattering of
the sky, told us what it really was. The invaders had fired a shell at us from
some kind of tank. They had miscalculated the attitude of the gun—the arc of
the shell had been just a fraction too high and it had hit the ceiling.

It all
struck me as being rather unsporting—it was like spearing fish in a bathtub.
But I could hardly doubt that it would be effective, even if they only kept
hitting the sky and bringing tons of debris down on our hapless heads.

Terror
lent strength to my legs which I had been sure they did not have, and I ran. So
did we all. There are times when you just have to let panic take over, and
deliver your future into the unreliable hands of fate, even when you know full
well that fate is out to get you.

24

I think it was the
fourth blast that knocked me off my feet, although the bangs and the shockwaves
and the solid black deluge were beginning to blend into an endless ongoing
confusion, and my head was aching so badly I thought my brain might be about to
erupt out of my skull like a grey volcano. I went face-forward into a mass of
off-white goo that seized my plastic-clad limbs like flypaper. I struggled for
a few moments to get up, but then another blast went off nearby, and more of
the ceiling rained down.

I'd had
enough, I tried to stick my head down into the glutinous protoplasmic mud, and
hoped it would swallow me up entirely. I didn't care whether it cloaked me,
choked me, or digested me. I felt quite bad enough to be careless about dying.

There
was another blast, not quite so near, and my head rocked as something bumped
into my helmet. With the mud all over my faceplate I was as blind as a bat, so
I raised my head slightly and began to push the mud away with my fingers.
Something knocked my hand away and forced my head down again.

"Stay
low, damn it, you stupid bastard!" The words reverberated, as if I was
hearing them under water. Despite the basso profundo tone, I recognised the
charm and poetic diction of my commanding officer.

There
was a lull then in the firing. I felt her squirming round so that we were side
by side, and she put her arm around me so as to snuggle in close. It wasn't a
sign of

affection. She just
wanted to get our helmets so close together that we could converse without
undue difficulty.

"They
don't know exactly where we are," she said. "But they know which
direction we're going. I think the bastards are actually trying to bring down
the roof on our heads— puncture our suits with shrapnel."

I had
another go at clearing the mud from my faceplate. It seemed much darker now,
possibly because the area of ceiling directly above our heads wasn't glowing
any more— not even faintly. I had a momentary vision of the whole thing coming
down on us—of the macroarchitecture of the whole world making an infinitesimal
adjustment, and squeezing level fifty-two entirely out of existence, eliminating
it from the scheme of things Asgardian. I imagined the collapse leaving only an
extremely thin layer of organic sludge in a sandwich of awesome solidity. It
couldn't happen, of course. No feeble shell fired from a cannon could do more
than knock a few chips off the outer surface of the sky. Behind that thin
tegument was something utterly unscratchable.

After a
minute passed, she said: "They'll send in the foot soldiers to mop up,
now. Stay cool, Rousseau." Then the brief touching of helmets was over,
and she was gone.

I sat
up, and looked around. It was difficult to see much, with the local sky out of
action. There was a lot of debris in the air—the mists were supplemented now
with heavy smoke. Contrary to proverbial wisdom, though, there was no fire at
all. For fires you need free oxygen.

I
staggered to my feet, and continued to clear my faceplate as best I could.

Six or
seven metres away a figure emerged from the roiling murk. It could have been
anyone—except that it was carrying some kind of rifle. He must have seen me
about the same time I saw him, and his immediate reaction was to bring the
rifle to his shoulder. I never knew whether he just intended to cover me, or to
blow my head off—another body hurtled at him from the left, wielding a great
jagged- edged shard that must have fallen from the ceiling. The shard's
battle-axe trajectory nearly took the armed man's head from his shoulders. The
rifle spun away, unfired, and Susarma Lear fell upon it hungrily. She tossed
the club to me, and pointed in the direction in which we'd been travelling. Her
forefinger stabbed the air urgently, and I realized that she was telling me to
get the hell out of it.

Behind
me, as I lurched once again into a ragged run, I heard her firing.

With
every minute that passed I expected to hear the tank open up again, and the
images which my mind produced of the sky erupting again spurred me on. I was
no longer coherent in my thinking, but in a state of profound trauma. I had
forgotten my stomach and the danger of vomiting, forgotten the agony in my
unready limbs. The headache was still there, the blood booming in my temples, but
there was no thought in my mind that it might all calm down if only I could
stop running.

I got
away from the smoke and the darkness, back to territory where the sky still
glowed, and where the ground was firmer and flatter. In retrospect, that was a
lucky break, because if I'd had to run around and between the black- patterned
deathcaps for any length of time I'd have completely lost the direction that
was indicated by the colonel's stabbing finger. As it was, I was soon back
among dendritic forms again—but not, this time, the faintly-lit tangled things
that grew around the prison. These were much bigger and more angular, growing
floor-to-ceiling like heaps of scrap metal, intricately bedecked with spiky
thickets of branches. Fortunately they did not grow close together, and their
most extensive branches grew above head height.

It was
like running through a vast vault filled with gigantic, decorated pillars—the
fact that these trees were rooted at both top and bottom made the ceiling seem
so much nearer.

I looked
back once or twice, and to either side, but as far as I could tell I was
completely alone. I could still hear the occasional crackle of gunfire, but it
sounded surprisingly faint and far away. I wasn't in much of state to think
about that. I just kept running and running. I fell three or four times, but
each time I just jarred my bones on the hard ground, picked myself up, and kept
going.

I kept
going, in fact, until I reached the wall.

The
levels of Asgard are full of walls. They have to be— after all, something has
to hold the levels apart. In the topmost levels, with which I was most
familiar, the walls were usually the walls of cities, with many doorways,
because the supporting pillars were honeycombed with passages. Up there,
though, even the more open spaces tended to be small in scale, continually cut
up and blocked off by sections of structural material. This level seemed to
have bigger spaces, and it also seemed to have thicker supports, because the
wall I came to was smooth and black, and there was not the least sign of a door
or a window or anything else in the thirty metres or so that I could see to
either side.

I
staggered right up to the wall, and put my spread-eagled arms upon it, as if
appealing to it to be sucked in and dissolved. It was as hard as adamant, and
surprisingly cold. Unlike the ground, which I judged to be close to blood heat,
it felt as unfriendly as ice. I flinched away from it, and stood still, having
not the faintest idea what to do next.