Asgard's Secret

22

Fools rush in, they say, where angels fear to tread.

I can elaborate on that, by observing that fools trip up where angels would still be on their feet. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because if there’s a flame-pistol pointed at the place where your face should be, you might be a damn sight safer tripping up.

A flame-pistol doesn’t actually fire a jet of flame. What it fires is some kind of semi-liquid artificial plastic which is desperately unstable, and which bursts spontaneously into flame without requiring an external supply of oxygen. Once ignited, it burns very quickly and exceedingly hot, so the person at whom the pistol has been fired is faced with a rapidly expanding cloud of gas. It pays, sometimes, to be close to such a weapon, because if you duck, it can still miss you. If you’re a bit further away, you have to dive much further to avoid it.

When I tripped over the piece of rope that Myrlin had left inside the doorway, I was just close enough. That miniature sun couldn’t have missed me by more than ten centimetres, but it hadn’t expanded enough to burn me. The electromagnetic radiation it gave off wasn’t enough to blast a hole in the heavy-duty suit I was wearing. By the time the second bolt was fired, I was flat on the floor and I was determined to stay there until it was all over.

The flame-pistol had obviously been set on automatic, because the second bolt was by no means the last. I lost count after five, but I think the damn thing spat out eight or ten bolts before it finally gave up. Even at that, the trigger must have slipped—a fully-loaded flame-pistol carries a lot of ammunition. I waited for well over a minute, not daring to move, before I finally lifted my head, and then I came tremulously to my feet.

I turned around, and looked back at the carnage behind me, half-expecting to be confronted with the scene of a massacre.

There were great gouting clouds of gas, smoke and vapour, and great glowing patches where the ledge along which we had come had suddenly been raised in temperature from a few degrees Kelvin to a few thousand. One of the sleds had been completely devastated—it had been turned into a pile of slag every bit as useless as those million-year-old cars we had passed on the highway. The other one had been too close to me—the bolts had gone clean over the top of it, without the radiation doing too much damage.

If the star-captain and her men had been close enough to me to have entered the tunnel-mouth, they would have been cooked, but natural caution had held them back. When the firing started they’d done exactly the right thing, making full use of their hair-trigger reflexes. They’d moved into the shadow of the solid wall, hurling themselves forward and sideways so that the bolts had passed harmlessly by, crouching well away from the explosive impacts which the expanding bolts had made on the body of the second sled, and hiding their eyes. They were lucky that they were wearing heavy-duty suits, not the light sterile suits Serne had described to me as their normal combat gear. Even so, I ordered an immediate set of tests, to make sure that the radiation hadn’t done any fatal damage.

“Rousseau,” said the star-captain icily, “you’re a moron.”

“Maybe so,” I said. I actually felt like a moron, for not expecting the tripwire, and not being properly alert to its presence. “But you ought to thank whatever god you have that he put the wire so close to the doorway. If we’d been thirty metres into a narrow corridor, you wouldn’t have had a cat in hell’s chance of avoiding those fireballs. You think he’s a moron too, or was that just a warning shot?”

“Can it, Rousseau,” she said, with all her customary charm. “Just tell us how much we lost, and how much it’s going to hurt our chances.”

I sighed.

“Well,” I said, “it’s certainly not going to help. It’s cost us most of our cutting equipment, and all of our bubbling gear. That means we’re going to have difficulties when we sleep. We’ll have to pitch hammocks in the open, and make damn sure that we don’t take a fall. The suits are sound, as far as the tests can tell, but the material’s not really intended to cope with a deluge of infrared and microwaves. It saved us from being cooked, but its future tolerance might be affected. We can go on, but all risks are doubled now. Next time… well, next time, whoever goes first had better not trigger the trap. That’s all there is to it.”

There wasn’t much more to add to that, and she didn’t bother. There was no point in threatening to do all kinds of horrible things to me if I was so stupid as to get myself killed. She just had to trust me to be careful. No one else could take over—it was my territory, and her boys were way out of their depth.

The going got tougher after that. We eased our way into the corridor, past the point where Myrlin had fastened the flame-gun to the ceiling, and started picking our way through the maze following Saul’s torchmarks with the aid of my tape. We moved slowly, always scanning the ground ahead of us. Nobody commented on the obvious fact that our chances of catching up with Myrlin before he got to the dropshaft were looking distinctly thin—and nobody suggested that we do anything in response to that awareness but press on as rapidly as we could.

Before we stopped to sleep, we found two more tripwires, each one connected to a string that disappeared into the darkness. Neither of them was attached to anything at all—they were just mock-ups, set to delay us and to play upon our anxieties. For an android, Myrlin had one hell of a sense of humour—and he succeeded in slowing us up.

We slung our hammocks from plastic frames that touched the ground at the tips of their four feet. Without our bubbling gear we had no other protection from the cold. The cold floor couldn’t hurt us, of course, while we were insulated from it by a metre of near-vacuum, and I’d slept that way a dozen times before, but it wasn’t pleasant.

When we started off again, we followed Saul’s directions to a wider corridor, which had two thick rails raised above its floor—tracks that once had guided monorail trains in either direction. I was pleased to see them. Tunnels through which trains once ran tend to be virtually endless, with no closed doors to impede progress. They also tend to take you to interesting places, like stations. Stations are good places to hunt around for elevator shafts.

“How much further?” asked the star-captain, when we had trudged along in the space between the rails for half a day.

I consulted my recording of Saul’s notes.

“We should be going down to three within a couple of hours,” I told her. “Then we’re really in the cold. But we’ll only be one more day in the icehouse. Twelve or fourteen hours after we start again, we’ll get to the big dropshaft.

Saul spent a lot of time down there finding it for us, but we can go straight to it. We’ll be tired, but we can make it without stopping again.”

“Damn right,” she said.

It wasn’t quite as easy as I’d suggested it would be, partly because we found the wreckage of a train blocking the tunnel. It hadn’t posed any real obstruction to Saul, but that was before the ever-ingenious Myrlin had put an explosive charge in it, and spread it all over the place. Luckily, he’d blown it into small enough pieces to make a less-than-efficient barricade. The walls, the ceiling and the tracks were made of something far too solid to be broken up by the kind of petard which scavengers carry, so there was no way that Myrlin could engineer a major cave-in to block our path.

The troopers worked like Trojans to clear the way, and we were on the trail again with all due speed. Our tempers were only slightly frayed by this extra inconvenience, but my comrades-in-arms were already brimful of bile toward their hapless quarry, and I knew that if and when they caught up with him they were really going to make him suffer.

I resolved not to be there, if there was anywhere else I could possibly be.

Getting down to three was no picnic, but we still had the ropes and enough equipment to rig up a winch and harness, so the empty shaft posed no real problems. We stopped soon after that to rig up the hammocks again. The troopers seemed tired but otherwise undisturbed. We’d been moving through narrowly-confined spaces all day, and I’d known men who’d never before shown signs of claustrophobia begin to develop the heebie-jeebies under circumstances like these; despite their inbuilt paranoia, though, the troopers were tough and disciplined. Perhaps they were revelling in the luxury of having only one enemy trying to kill them, instead of being surrounded by malevolent aliens and dangerous biotech-bugs. Despite what he’d done to Amara Guur’s hatchet men, and despite the little incident of the flame-pistol booby-trap, they weren’t really frightened of the android. They were confident that once they caught up with him, they could fry him.

Serne said to me before we went to sleep that he didn’t see how a lone man could wander around the underworld for twenty days at a time without going a little bit crazy. I assured him that, with practice, the burden of solitude was easy enough to bear. The monochrome surroundings, I told him, were quite comforting in their way. I didn’t mention that I usually packed my microtapes with hundreds of hours of music to relieve the tedium, and that I was sometimes wont to talk to myself incessantly, making up with loquacious fervour anything which I lacked in narrative skill. That would have sounded too much like a confession of weakness, unbefitting even the most reluctant hero of the Star Force.

The next day, the conversation flowed more easily, partly because we were all becoming a bit more comfortable with one another’s presence, and partly because the visual environment remained so utterly sinister that we were in some need of auditory stimulation. The endless labyrinthine corridors along which we tramped were quite unchanging, and Myrlin had ceased to bother with such trivial practical jokes as laying tripwires that might or might not be connected to something.

I told the troopers about my adventures working the caves—about the kinds of things I had found, and about the kinds of things that everyone was very keen to find, in order to provide another quantum leap in our understanding of Asgard and its mysterious inhabitants. In exchange, they told me about their adventures fighting the Salamandrans— about all their narrow squeaks, and all their successful missions. Their stories seemed a lot more exciting than mine, and the laconic way they told them was enough to make the blood run cold.

“This may seem like a stupid question,” I said at one point, “but what exactly were we fighting the Salamandrans for?”

“We were trying to colonize the same region of space,” Crucero told me. “Beyond that region, we were virtually surrounded by other cultures longer established in space. There seemed to be only a handful of worlds up for grabs, with humans and Salamandrans equally well placed to grab them. We didn’t start out to go to war—in fact, we set out to co-operate, agreeing to share most of the worlds and defend them together, lest anyone else try to move in.

“Ninety percent of the worlds were dead rocks, which would take thousands of years to render truly habitable, whether we tried to establish a terraformed life-system outside or tried to hollow out an asteroid-type environment. There didn’t seem to be anything much worth fighting over, and it must have seemed easy enough to negotiate with the Salamandrans about who got which lump of stone. For a while, we were fetishistic about co-operation, especially when we found out that the Salamandrans had biotech skills somewhat in advance of ours, while their metals technology and plasma physics were less sophisticated—there seemed to be much to be gained by exchanging information.

“It all went sour, though. The closer the two races became, the worse the friction became. In the end, we found that we were too close. When hostility began to build, it couldn’t be contained or diverted. We were locked in a feedback loop which built up a series of individually trivial incidents into a chain of disasters. They started the actual war, but that was probably a matter of chance. Once the bombing started, there was no way to stop. It was genocide or nothing, and it was just a matter of which race ended up extinct or enslaved. We didn’t have the communications necessary to talk peace—we were spread out very thinly in a volume of space a hundred light-years across, and once we knew that the killing had started in a dozen different places there was no possible response except to commit the Star Force completely. If we’d hesitated, we might have been wiped out. As it was, we lost more than half our population outside the system, and a considerable fraction inside it— especially in the belt and all points outwards.”

“Are you sure that it couldn’t have been settled?” I asked. “Are you certain there was no way to stop?”

“Hell, no,” the lieutenant said. “But not being sure wasn’t enough. Don’t give me any Tetron crap about having to live together, Rousseau. We know all that. We know it’s a big galaxy, full of intelligent humanoid species, and we want to be part of a great big happy family just like everyone else. But once the killing starts, you can’t fall back on that kind of optimism. You have to worry every time you go to sleep that before you wake up the entire human race might be wiped out by some kind of Salamandran plague, or Earth itself turned to slag by some kind of planet-cracker. Once they’d begun to kill us, we had to kill them first. That’s all there was to it. You don’t have any right to say that we didn’t do it right, because you weren’t even there. You were here, doing your bit for the Tetron cause instead—helping those monkey-faced hypocrites lengthen their lead in the galactic technology race. Some people would reckon that a kind of treason, you know.”

As it happened, I did know. But I wasn’t about to concede the point.

“It isn’t just the Tetrax,” I told Crucero. “There are several hundred races represented in Skychain City. It’s the one place in the galaxy where everyone has to get along with everyone else. The C.R.E. has scientists from dozens of worlds, including Earth, and if there’s the seed of a real galactic community anywhere in the universe, this is where it is. Maybe the work we’re doing here, and the way we’re doing it, is all that will save the entire population of the galaxy from consuming itself in futile wars.”

“And maybe it won’t,” the star-captain butted in—which is the kind of argument which doesn’t readily yield to rational criticism. Then she added her own judgment. “I think this ironclad artificial world of yours is all that was left over from the last round of interstellar wars,” she said. “I think that’s why its atmosphere caught fire, and why its outermost layers were frozen down. Hell, maybe the war’s still going on down there—and maybe the reason the owners never came back out is because every last one of them was a casualty.”

I had to accept that it was a possibility. The thought that it might be true was one of the most depressing I had ever had to face. Whatever was waiting for us at the centre, it surely had to be something better than that. Of all the potential solutions to the riddle of Asgard that I could imagine, the one which implied that the galactic races might be doomed to have their nascent civilization blasted into smithereens by interstellar war was far from being the most appealing. Even the star-captain, for all her wolfish temperament, didn’t seem to relish it much.

“The galactic races are similar enough to be members of the same family,” I reminded her. “You and I may have more actual genes in common with chimpanzees and gorillas, but in terms of the way brains work, humans and Salamandrans—hell, even the Tetrax and the vormyr—are virtually mirror images of one another, with only very slight variations. We ought to be able to get along.”

“Sure,” she said. “And ninety percent of murders happen within the family. Been that way since Cain and Abel… likely to be that way forever more. Interstellar distances just make it a little bit easier to fall out with one another, that’s all.”

“I hope you’re wrong,” I told her. “I hope with all my heart that you’re wrong.”

“Oh shit, Rousseau,” she said. “How the hell do you think I feel? But hope just isn’t enough, is it?”

I had no answer to that.