Asgard's Heart. Brian Stableford
so that I was tumbling like an acrobat as I continued on my ungainly way.
Shards of the broken wall were flying everywhere, showering the bell-like flowers and lacerating their petals. I felt a prickling sensation in my back, accompanying the sensation of being hit by the shock-wave, and I knew that I’d been cut in a dozen places. The rolling probably didn’t help, but at least I didn’t drive anything between my ribs to administer a fatal stab in the back.
The noise was tremendous—the big flightless insects that roamed the overgrown wilderness always screamed with panic when they were disturbed, and they were certainly disturbed now. I felt them struggling to get out of the way as I landed on a softer spot, crushing the vegetation down upon them.
When I stopped rolling I was sprawled on hands and knees shaded by a huge palmate leaf. I came to my feet as quickly as I could and looked back at the spot from which I’d been hurled. What kind of petard had been used to blast the hole I couldn’t imagine, but I saw immediately that it hadn’t been quite big enough, because the thing that was struggling to get through wasn’t finding it at all easy.
It wasn’t immediately obvious whether it was a living creature or an artifact. In a bizarre fashion, it didn’t seem completely out of place in this world of enormous insects and elephantine flowers, because if it resembled anything I could put a name to, it looked like an immense praying mantis, with great long legs, a small head carried high, and groping arms, though the ‘hands’ on the end of the arms looked like a cross between a crab’s pincers and one of the articulated graspers they put on robots designed to explore places where no human being can go.
It seemed to be made of metal and plastic, but its joints were as flexible as the joints of a living creature, and the way that the head was moving from side to side as it tried to get its legs through the jagged split in the wall was surely suggestive of something searching for a sight of its prey. The head could swivel through three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, and it was mounted with four shiny black lenses which probably gave it vision in depth in all directions. It also had a rigid proboscis which looked ominously like the barrel of a gun.
It didn’t have vision in depth in all directions for long, though, because Susarma Lear had been far enough away on the curving path to be shielded from the blast, and she already had the Scarid crash gun in her hand. Whether it was a lucky shot or whether she’d been practicing I didn’t know, but the first bullet she fired hit one of those black lenses smack in the center, and blew it to smithereens.
One of those grasping hands immediately reached for her, striking with awesome speed. I had the uncomfortable feeling that if it had grabbed her, it could have broken her in two with its clutch, but the act of turning sideways jammed the thing firmly in the narrow fissure through which it was trying to haul its ungainly body, and when the pincers clicked shut at the limit of the arm’s expansion, she was all of ten centimeters out of reach. The monster spat fire, dragon-fashion, revealing that its proboscis was some kind of flamer, but the firebolt missed by a couple of meters.
Anyone with an ordinary capacity for fear would have run like hell, but the colonel was anything but ordinary. She watched the groping hand close and withdraw, not moving her feet at all, and as soon as she had the space she put her gun-hand forward again, supporting it at the elbow with her left, and took a quick but careful sight of that wheel-mounted head.
Her second bullet hit the skull-cap a mere half-centimeter away from the rim of a second eye, and ricocheted harmlessly away. I couldn’t hear her because of the cacophonous complaints of the insects, but I saw her lips move and I could easily imagine the manner of her cursing.
I saw—as she must have seen—that the colossal mantis had taken advantage of the miss to haul a bit more of its bulk through the scissored cleft in the wall, and that it only needed one last wriggle to get its entire carcass into the garden. I think I shouted at her to run, but there was no way she could hear me. As usual, it was an utterly futile gesture, because she was undoubtedly better at judging these circumstances than I was, and she wasn’t about to hang around for the next flame-bolt or the next attempted snatch at her midriff. She was already backing away, although she had the gun up, anxious to try a third shot if she could balance herself—the Scarid gun wasn’t an easy weapon to use because of the recoil kick.
While I was watching, fearful for her life, I’d carelessly forgotten my own troubles, and it was with a sense of desperate astonishment that I noticed the second arm flashing out in my direction, ambitious to grab my shoulder and pluck me out of my hidey-hole in the bushes. Even with its eyes at seventy-five percent strength, the monster was obviously capable of paying attention to two targets at once.
I ducked, wishing fervently that for once my reflexes wouldn’t let me down—I had long ago come to the conclusion that I’d been at the end of the queue when instincts were handed out, and that the stupid set I’d been born with was absolutely not to be trusted. But my luck was still holding; like Susarma, I was just out of reach, and the mechanical grab went back empty-handed.
Knowing only too well that it would get me next time, I turned and ran. A purple flower to my left suddenly turned into a firework, and I knew that the head was pointing my way now. Panic spurred me on, but running wasn’t easy. The plants were just too tightly-packed, and although their stems and branches weren’t woody at all, they were still capable of getting in the way.
There was only one thing I could do, and that was to dive down to the region where the insects lived, beneath the lowest leaves. There was a narrow space down there, where even a man might crawl, if he’d a mind to. Doing snake-imitations is not usually my kind of thing, but when death is only a few meters away you have to improvise as best you can.
Flattening myself out, I tried to pull myself along with my arms and scramble with my feet, almost as though I was pretending to swim. It was pretty crowded at ground level, because the entire space was seething with panic-stricken insects, who didn’t know which way to run, but who were totally committed to the project of getting somewhere fast. They were still shrieking their hymn of complaint from all sides. I hated the noise, but I could sympathize with the way they felt.
As I did my silly parody of the breast-stroke, I could feel the muscles in my back protesting. I could feel the stickiness of my shirt, but couldn’t make a guess as to how badly I was bleeding. I took a little comfort from knowing that the Isthomi were top-flight medical men when it came to repairing bodies and making people immortal, and that they’d already made me a promise that they’d wrought some considerable improvements in the quality of my flesh; but as the pain built to an excruciating level, that comfort seemed to fade away.
It faded away even further when the question rose belatedly in my mind as to why there was an enormous mechanical praying mantis trying to destroy me in the Isthomi’s own back garden. The fact that it had been able to make its grand entrance at all suggested that something was yet again amiss in the state of Isthomia. If not, the Nine would surely have managed to give us a little notice of impending danger, even if they hadn’t got the heavy metal to nip it in the bud.
As I continued crawling, I began to feel that I was in a uniquely awkward situation. I had no idea where I was going, and no way of knowing whether the monster mantis was right on my heels. I had no weapon of my own, and I was well and truly separated from Susarma Lear. The indigenous insects didn’t seem to want me in their underworld, and didn’t seem to want to get out of my way to ease my passage. Fortunately, I had every reason to think that they weren’t given to biting, stinging, or otherwise being nasty, although the repulsiveness of their touch made their company quite unpleasant enough. I imagined that they were tolerated in this garish scheme of things because they pollinated the flowers, but I couldn’t help feeling that a tastefully-designed and suitably-programmed robot could have done the job more economically.
I got to a place where even the space beneath the foliage became unbearably constricted, occupied by a tangle of what looked to me like surface-lying adventitious roots. They fanned out from a central stem, and I had moved into a closed V-shaped space, cornering myself. I had no alternative but to stand up, and was glad to find that the leaves above my head were fern-like, and that they parted easily. Unfortunately, their delicacy was compensated by profusion, and when I