She took the Scarid pistol from her waist, and looked at her two weapons for a moment or two, as if inwardly debating their relative merits. Then she shrugged, and passed the needier to me. It was by far the more effective weapon, and I was initially inclined to refuse it, but I remembered that she’d showed her prowess with the crash gun once before, while I was by no means certain to be able to hit anything with it.
I took the needier, and we moved off. As methods of communication went, the dumb show was only marginally better than the yes/no buzzing farce to which we had been reduced in exchanging opinions with Clio, but it worked well enough. The worst of it was that once we had separated and begun to move forward, none of us dared say a word.
We moved off along a corridor between two ranks of squat platforms, each one bearing the broken remains of what looked like a plastic bubble. The platforms were about two metres long by one wide, with the corners rounded down; the bubbles were a little less than that, and added an extra thirty centimetres or so to the height of each column. The space between them was so cluttered with nasty debris that I didn’t pay much immediate attention to the platforms, but I realised belatedly that they must be something like the artificial wombs which the Nine had built. This had once been a hospital—or a hatchery. Maybe this was where the builders designed other humanoids: the lab where evolution really happened, before the gardeners begin seeding the worlds with pre-adapted DNA. Or maybe it was only the place where the masters of Asgard investigated the lifeforms which they plucked from the worlds which they visited. We still didn’t know whether Asgard was an Ark or a nursery, though we were pretty sure that it was a fortress.
Somehow, that particular enigma seemed much less important now. The problem was not to interpret Asgard, but to save it.
We moved more slowly now than we had before, taking shorter strides. I tried to keep one eye on Susarma’s headlight, and the other on the rubbish which threatened to trip me up, with occasional glances into the gloom ahead, to make certain that nothing nasty was looming up there.
We had been on the move for about half an hour—just long enough to enable me to get thoroughly relaxed, when things began to happen again, and to happen all too quickly.
There was a sudden blaze of light from somewhere up ahead of me, which burst upon my retina like a bomb and blinded me. I knew that I was an easy target, and I let my brief Star Force training take over, diving away to my right to get behind one of the platform-wombs. A powerful beam of light chased me as I dived, and I didn’t hang about when I landed—rolling and keeping low, I wriggled away through the wreckage of machinery, trying to lose myself among the shadows.
I heard the crash-gun fire, and one beam of light disappeared—but then I realised that there were at least three.
I heard another gun go off—a needier spitting its tiny slivers of metal. The crash-gun boomed again.
Then there was silence. I tried desperately hard to locate some movement around the lights, hungry for a target.
And then I heard something very strange.
“Oh shit,” said Susarma’s voice. “I almost… Why the hell didn’t you…”
She didn’t sound angry—but she did sound very surprised. And her voice was cut off with a sudden, sickening abruptness, swallowed up by the brief growl of a needier.
I knew that someone had shot her.
But why, if she’d seen the other coming, hadn’t she shot first? Had she thought it was me?
I ducked down beneath one of the pillars, trying to hide as best I could, and trying furiously to think. Clio couldn’t hear us; Susarma Lear was down; 673-Nisreen didn’t even have a gun. It was all down to me, and I didn’t have a clue what was happening. I tried to look over the top of the plastic bubble, hoping that my eyes were ready to see, but in the glare of whatever light it was that promptly picked me out, I could see nothing but a vast shadow heading towards me. The shadow had a headlamp just like mine, and mine must have got in his eyes just as his got in mine, though they were feeble enough by comparison with the spotlight.
I didn’t have any trouble recognising him. I couldn’t see his face, but I would have known his bulk anywhere.
It was Myrlin—who was not, after all, being digested in some hideous insect’s stomach, but looming above me like a great big bear. I had half raised the needier, but I stopped myself from shooting, and remembered far too late what Susarma Lear had been saying when she was taken out. Enlightenment didn’t save me.
It was Myrlin’s body, but it wasn’t Myrlin’s mind. As he shot me in the belly, and sent my body hurtling backwards to collide with one of the platforms, I reflected that the Isthomi had made a bad mistake in judging that Myrlin hadn’t taken aboard any mysterious software during that fateful moment of contact. And so had I.
Whatever had got into Tulyar had got into him, too. It had simply lain dormant, biding its time—and by that strategy, had won the game.
We were all down, all dying… and the starlet was probably all set to go nova.
36
There was a voice, although there was no image of a speaker. I still had no sense of sight, and I did not think that the voice was really heard. It was more like a spoken thought inside my mind, though it was not my thought.
We have re-established full contact with the starshell, whispered the disembodied voice. Its own systems are virtually inert; the greater part of its software space is devastated; and its defences still prevent our moving any machine with substantial intelligent software into its actual space. But we do have eyes there, thanks to the Isthomi. And there is one move which may yet work. We are preparing.
I had the opportunity, at last, to ask a question.
What am I? I was surprised by the frailty of my own thought-voice.
There is no time, Mr. Rousseau, the voice replied. Believe me, there simply is no time. You know who you are, and there is nothing to be gained from a discussion of the nature of things. It is not that we wish to use you as a mere tool, understanding nothing, but the Tetron is within minutes of destroying us all. The crisis is upon us now, and desperation urges us on. Watch!
Suddenly, there was light, and it was as if I could see, though I still had no sense of possessing a body, and the sight which I had was not the sight of human eyes. It was more like an image transmitted by a camera—transmitted into the depths of my consciousness, upon the screen of my imagination.
I could see a room, where several figures stood. One stood alone, while three others watched him, two before him and one to the side. The viewpoint from which I seemed to be looking was somewhat above them, looking down from the side of the lone man confronted by the two, over the shoulder of the third.
The lone figure was 673-Nisreen. Directly in front of him was a second Tetron—or, to be strictly accurate, a second person inhabiting a Tetron body. That was 994-Tulyar. Beside Tulyar stood Myrlin, and the one whose back was to me was John Finn.
But where am I? I thought. Where are Urania and Susarma Lear?
“I don’t understand,” Nisreen was saying, in parole. Obviously, we had come in on the middle of a conversation.
“You cannot be expected to understand,” Tulyar told him, in that soft, dead voice that had given me the creeps when I first heard it on the Nine’s home level. “All will be explained, in time, but for now, there is urgent work to be done, and it is simply a matter of duty. The starlet is nearly ready; the power build-up in its peripheral systems is becoming critical.”