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.