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 erupt
ing 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.
I was breathing in great ragged gasps, and my heart was pounding. I could feel no immediate sense of recovery as I turned around and looked back the way I had come. Seized by exhaustion at last, I sank to my knees, and then slipped sideways into a half-sitting sprawl, my upper torso propped up by my left hand. In my right hand, I was surprised to find, was the makeshift club that Susarma Lear had thrown to me before commanding me to run. I had carried it, without being aware of the fact, all the way from the scene of carnage.
I had no idea how much time had passed, and I became fearful that I might run out of oxygen at any moment. The recycler was still working perfectly despite the battering I had taken, but I had no way of knowing how much longer it would do the job before coming to the end of its resources.
My capacity for intelligent thought was restricted to the consciousness that there were only three things I could do. I could go left along the wall; I could go right along the wall; or I could stay put.
I stayed put. I can now think of three or four good reasons why that might have been the correct thing to do, but I cannot honestly claim that any of them was the true reason why I did it. I did it because I felt completely and utterly finished. I was probably underestimating myself—after all, it wasn't the first time I'd felt that way—but I couldn't for the life of me get back to my feet.
Even when the other suited forms appeared between the spiky pillars, I couldn't get up. First there was one . . . then two . . . then half a dozen. I saw the nearest one pull up, turn, and go down on one knee, firing twice before hurling aside what was presumably an empty rifle and coming on toward me. I saw one of the others fall, and two or three others returning fire, but there was no sustained firing, and some of the pursuers were hanging back. Obviously, the shortage of ammunition was universal.
The first one to reach my side was Susarma Lear. She took one look at me, and then reached down to grab the club from my hand. I could barely lift it to meet her partway. When she turned back, I realized that she was the only good guy who had made it through. Serne was not with her, nor Finn. There was no sign of the two Tetrax. All the other suited figures I could see were the enemy.
Now they knew they had us cornered they were not chasing . . . instead they were fanning out, and approaching very slowly indeed. I realised that they were waiting for further support. There were five of them, but they were staying thirty or thirty-five metres away, awaiting reinforcements. I didn't take any pleasure in the implied compliment they were paying to my heroic commander.
Seconds drained by, and nothing happened. The approaching Neanderthalers had all stopped, apparently just as drained by it all as we were. I stayed sitting down. Susarma Lear stood beside me, battleaxe at the ready. I wondered whether she would carry the fight to them, if discretion kept them back for too long.
Then I saw the tank, manoeuvring round one of the pillars. It was a great ugly thing, with caterpillar tracks and an absurd plastic-shielded turret. Forty metres away, it stopped. The turret-hatch opened, and a suited man climbed down, followed by two others. They carried pistols, and they began to walk in a leisurely manner toward us. I watched them approach, their lazy, measured strides in sharp contrast to the staggering steps their companions had been able to manage at the end of the long chase.
She waited, without moving a muscle, until they were only three or four metres away. She stood in a slightly
slumped position, as though she had given up.
But she hadn't.
She hurled the battleaxe with all her might at one of the approaching men, and it took him full in the chest. He fell backwards, spilling his pistol. She hurled herself at the next in line, and though she moved faster than I could have imagined possible after everything she had been through, it had all taken just a little too much out of her. He was too quick on the trigger.
The shot, fired without aiming, must have gone through the flesh of her thigh, and I saw blood gush out into the cavity between her transparent plastic suit and the leg of her pants. I heard her scream of anguish, and I dived after her, trying to get my hands around her leg, in a desperate attempt to seal the rent in her suit. I knew that she'd be dead in a matter of minutes, even disregarding the bullet-wound, if the suit wasn't patched.
My own attempts were futile anyway—it didn't matter that the guy who'd been hit in the chest by her missile came to his feet in a temper and lashed his pistol across my helmet. In fact, if they'd been ready with some kind of patch or tourniquet, it might even have been the best thing for them to do, to clear me away while they took effective action.
But they weren't interested in applying any first aid. They were more than happy to see us both die. The blow landed just about where Trooper Blackledge's punch had landed, and this time I felt as if it had really broken my jaw. I sprawled over, while he got ready to hit me again, and I saw that they weren't going to do a damn thing for the colonel. In fact, one of them tried to roll her away with his foot. I was watching him and not the man who was hitting me, so the second blow came right out of the blue,
smashing into the other side of my helmet.
If the plastic had been rigid, it would have cracked, but the soft suit could take any number of blows like that. Unfortunately, the recycling apparatus inside the suit couldn't. I heard a kind of splintering sound, and I knew that the next few breaths I took would be the last ones from which I'd get any real benefit.
>
I lashed out with my foot, but didn't connect with anything, and then was flat on my back, gasping for air that wasn't coming through. Above me, silhouetted against the glowering sky, I could see three helmeted heads—our murderers.
And then, in what I thought at the time was a vengeful hallucination, I saw those three helmeted heads dissolve into murky black vapour.
For a few seconds there was nothing but the sky, and then something else floated into view. It was silvery and even in the faint light of that dreadful underworld it gleamed and glittered like something magical and marvellous.
Mori dieuf I thought. There is light beyond death after all!
And then, it seemed, I died.
25
You, of course, will not be in the least surprised to discover that I did not die. I would hardly be telling you the story if I had. I, on the other hand, was in no position to prejudge the issue. It came as something of a surprise to me when I woke up again, and the shock was most definitely not ameliorated by the circumstances in which I found myself.
I was floating.
At first I thought this was a purely subjective impression; I leapt from that idea to the conclusion that I was in zero- gee. Eventually, though, the tactile messages arriving in my brain sorted themselves out into reluctant coherency, and I knew that I was literally floating on some kind of thick liquid that did not wet me. The only kind of non-wetting liquid I knew was mercury, but I was too deeply immersed for it to be mercury.
There was sound in my ears, but it was only the thin hiss of white noise, completely featureless.
I tried to open my eyes, and found it difficult—not because there was any tiredness left to make me want them shut, but because there were two wire-ends stuck to my eyelids. I had to pull my right hand out of the glutinous fluid to snatch them away. There were other wires secured to my forehead, and more on my skull. They were not just glued down—in some peculiar fashion they seemed to be extending roots into my skin. I ripped them all away, not caring what kinds of sensors were on the ends. The "roots" snapped easily, causing no more than mild discomfort, and
Asgard's Conquerors Page 18
