Asgard's Heart

I swiveled instantly and fired at him.

I saw the terrified expression on his face as he saw me turning towards him. He had already plucked his needier from his belt, but as I shot him, a convulsive jerk of his hand sent his shots straight upwards into the ceiling.

My bullet hit him in the head, and he went down as if he’d been switched off. Blood and brains filled up the space inside his helmet, and I knew that he wouldn’t be back, no matter how much work the Isthomi had done on his body.

I hadn’t intended to kill him, and if I’d had the option, I really would have knocked him down in such a way that he could get up again when it was all over, but I didn’t have the choice.

I also didn’t have a choice about what to do next, because pseudo-Myrlin was already coming back to his feet again. The bigger they are the harder they fall, but in low gee they can bounce back with astonishing alacrity. He was braced now as well as I was, and he was bringing the needier up to fire. I tried to zero in on the centre of his chest again, and blasted away. It would have done far more good to blow his head off the way I’d blown Finn’s, but that had been a freak shot and I knew better than to try for a repeat. I had to hit the giant again before he cut me in half with the needier, and if I had to hit him four more times to keep him down then that was what I had to do.

Pseudo-Tulyar should have been out of it for a few more seconds, but he wasn’t. His chair didn’t swivel but he had turned in it with unexpected agility, and was covered by its broad back. He must have had a gun very close to hand because it was in his fist now and he was already aiming it— but he didn’t have a chance to fire because 673-Nisreen, the aging man of science, brought down upon his wrist the hard cast which was protecting his own broken arm. Pseudo-Tulyar dropped the gun, and Nisreen grabbed him, wrenching his arm downwards, using the back of the chair as a fulcrum. Pseudo-Tulyar somersaulted lazily over the back of the chair.

I had already fired a second shot at pseudo-Myrlin, who took it square in the chest. Maybe it was too square, because it seemed to have no effect at all. He couldn’t be thrown back again and there wasn’t enough power to stop him even in a great big bullet like that.

He fired, but the needles went wild, splashing into the wall beside me. If he’d really been Myrlin he would never have missed, but he was a biocopy of some alien software, locked in an utterly unfamiliar body—he hadn’t had as much time as his brother to become accustomed to his flesh, and I realised how completely we had been taken by surprise when he first shot us down. I realised that he hadn’t fired into my belly in order to hurt me more, but because he didn’t know any better. It had been a mistake, and now he was paying for it.

I fired again, and again, and again.

I didn’t miss once. The third bullet opened up his great big chest, sending splinters of rib deep into his vital organs. The fourth and fifth must have turned his heart and lungs to pulp.

Three or four more needles ricocheted from the floor, and one of them grazed the boot of my suit, but I was still standing, still able to fire.

673-Nisreen was down in a heap with the pseudo-Tetron on top of him. There was no way I could get a clear shot, and I had no option but to pause.

I coughed, feeling a gout of blood rising from my belly into my mouth, but I knew that I had to remain standing. Whatever else I did before I died—and there was something I had to do—I had to destroy the alien that had made use of 994-Tulyar’s body to breach the defences of the starshell. Whatever mischief he was trying to work, he had been mere moments from completing it, and it wouldn’t be enough to hurt him. He had to be finished.

I watched, impatiently, while he got his arms inside the futile grip which 673-Nisreen was trying to secure, and thrust outwards both ways. The bioscientist’s grip was broken, and Tulyar threw him off. While Nisreen tumbled through the air in grotesque slow motion pseudo-Tulyar groped in desperation for the needier that he had dropped.

But in throwing Nisreen aside he’d signed his own death-warrant. I had a clear shot now, and I fired.

For the first time, I missed.

I was supposed to be the low-gee expert, the man from Achilles, but I fired the last bullet before I had quite brought my hand to a standstill, and I wasn’t properly braced against the kick of the gun.

I felt a surge of nausea, but I couldn’t even pause to swallow the blood that was in my mouth. I coughed again, spraying tiny flecks of red all over the hood, but hurled myself forward anyhow, knowing that I had to hit him before he could fire the needler.

I had my arms out ahead of me, and it was the gun I was holding which slammed into his helmet, but now he was the one who was braced and I was the featherweight. When he thrust out at me with his arms I began to do the same slow somersault as Nisreen. I went all the way over, and by the time I was facing him again I was staring straight down the barrel of his gun, looking failure and death in the face.

But when the needles came, they missed me again. The zombie had fired just a fraction too late, and the convulsion which sent the shots wide was caused by the impact of a stream of needles which passed through his right eye and cheek, ploughing into the brain and destroying whatever strange entity it was that had taken possession when 994-Tulyar’s own real self had given up the ghost.

673-Nisreen was holding John Finn’s gun. It was he who had fired. Finn was lying dead at his feet, and when Nisreen dropped his eyes to avoid looking at 994-Tulyar’s corpse he looked straight at the bloody mess inside Finn’s helmet. Tetrax can’t turn pale, but Nisreen did the best he could, and I saw him shudder convulsively.

I thought I knew how difficult it had been for him to do what he had just done. In a way, he’d done exactly what Finn had, and taken the side of an alien against his own species-cousin, but I knew he hadn’t done it for the same reason. Whatever Tulyar had been telling him when I woke up, he hadn’t believed. Reason had told him which side to be on, and even though what he’d done was making him sick to the core of his being, he’d done it. It only looked like the Star-Force way; the motive behind it had been something very different.

I hadn’t time to do or say anything. I took my place in the chair where pseudo-Tulyar had been sitting, and looked at the keyboards and the dials. There must have been two hundred different switches, and although every one had been shaped with humanoid fingers in mind, I couldn’t make any sense at all of the symbols.

I raised my hands, feeling a frightful sense of utter frustration rising inside me.

And then some kind of bomb went off in my head.

I began to punch the keyboard furiously. There were no flashing lights or ringing bells to give evident warning of the fact that the power build-up in the starlet was about to discharge itself, and I had in fact lost all consciousness of the fear that Asgard might very shortly be turned into nova debris. I had not the slightest notion what I was doing, or how, and my self-consciousness seemed to be locked into some absurd psychostasis, whereby I could watch my hands but could feel no connection with them whatsoever.

I had not even sufficient presence of mind to wonder whether this was how Myrlin had felt when the creature lurking in his brain had sprung its sudden ambush, and made him into what he had so tragically become—the traitor who had very nearly turned the war around.

When my hands finally finished their work, they just stopped. I must have been struck rigid in the chair, frozen into stillness. How much time there was to spare when I completed the sequence, I have no idea. The conventions of melodrama demand that it be a mere handful of seconds, and I can’t say for certain that it wasn’t, but the simple truth is that I did not know then and do not know now.