Asgard's Secret

27

In the urgency of my flight from the lake monster I had come well away from the trail the four of us had blazed as we followed the fugitive indications of Myrlin’s passage. I wasn’t even sure of the direction I had taken, or which direction we had been facing after all our zigs and zags in the swamp.

I was lost—but after cursing myself briefly, I calmed down. I figured that I had to be heading back in the direction of the edge of the swamp, and that wherever I came out, I’d be able to follow the star-captain’s last plan and make my way around it—partially, at least—before retracing my steps and trying the other direction, until I found the place where we’d gone in. I had plenty of time; there was no problem, provided that I didn’t encounter any more nasty denizens of the swamp.

To keep myself company I tongued in the music tape that I always had set up in my helmet. It helped to steady me, because it restored the familiarity of the situation, to the extent that it could be restored. I was alone, in semi-darkness, beneath the surface of Asgard—and that had become, in the course of the years, the existential situation of the real me.

I began to feel confident, and even slightly cheerful. I had made the great discovery at last. I had found the way to Asgard’s heart.

I put the star-captain and her troopers out of my mind. I blotted them out of my consciousness and memory. They had interrupted the course of my destiny, and now they were gone. I was back on track. I couldn’t afford to dwell on the tragedy that had overtaken them; I had other things to think about, and new plans to make.

Eventually, plan one paid its first dividend. I reached the edge of the swamp. It was only then that I realised how utterly exhausted I was. I put a good ten metres between myself and the water’s edge, and I sank down on to the ground, lying there quite still, listening to the music.

I didn’t really intend to sleep, but I couldn’t help drifting off into a doze.

I didn’t sleep for long—not long enough, in fact. I was still very tired when I forced my eyes open and sat up again. The music was still playing. The pipes in my suit had kept right on pumping nourishment into my bloodstream and carrying my various wastes away. The oxygen/nitrogen mix had continued to flow into my headspace, always carefully refreshed, purged of carbon dioxide. The music had soothed my auditory canals like a drug.

I forced myself to my feet and took stock of my situation. I could see further here than I’d been able to while trekking through the forest earlier. There was a slope, and a ridge that seemed to be skirting the marshland. I went up it, confident that I’d be able to get a much better view from the top.

I found more than I had bargained for. The ridge proved to be an embankment, and there were rails running along it. They hadn’t been used for a very long time—it was difficult to guess exactly how long, given that they weren’t metallic and that the encrustation on them wasn’t rust, but the important thing was that they really were rails. Rails have termini, one at each end. Sometimes, they have stations along the way.

I forgot about skirting the marsh in search of my old trail, and set out to follow the rails.

I was half-entranced, and the rails made it easy to slip into a quasi-mechanical mode. I continued to put one foot in front of the other without giving the matter any conscious thought, and didn’t even bother to look around myself to any considerable extent. The landscape had become tedious in its seeming familiarity: trees and more trees, all thickly clad in cobwebs. Had another predator appeared, I hope I would have been able to react with appropriate alacrity, but none did.

I was between the buildings almost before I realised that they were there. I refocused my eyes abruptly, wondering whether I’d accidentally wandered into a city, but there were only two of them, one to either side of the track. There was no platform, and the buildings were in a very bad state of repair, their roofs collapsed and their walls crumbling. There didn’t seem to be any furniture inside what remained of the rooms that had been exposed by fallen walls—but even so, they were buildings, of an appropriate size and design to have been erected by humanoid hands. They warranted farther investigation.

I picked out the one that seemed to be in a slightly better state of repair, and stepped through the door into a shadowed hallway.

Then one of the shadows moved, extended an impossibly long arm, and pressed the muzzle of a gun to my faceplate.

Unlike the rails, the gun was made of metal, and it wasn’t old. I hadn’t the slightest doubt that if it went off, the faceplate would shatter—and so would my skull.

“Merde,” I said, with feeling. No one could hear me, of course. My suit radio was still switched off.

Having just stepped into the darkness, I couldn’t see the person holding the gun, but I formed the impression of a mass of shadow larger than any man—or larger than any man should have been.

He switched on his headlamp, dazzling me. I felt the pressure of his hand as he removed my flame-pistol from my belt. When my eyes had recovered sufficiently to begin to discern the muzzle of his gun again, it was moving over my faceplate in a very strange manner. I watched it go through the routine twice before I realised that it was writing out a series of numbers. It took me a while longer to work out that he was indicating a channel code. I deduced that he was instructing me to turn on my radio and retune it so that I could talk to him.

I did as I was told.

“I’m on,” I said, to let him know I’d done it.

“Mr. Rousseau, I presume,” he said, with the easy confidence of a man who’d just mounted a successful ambush. He must have seen me coming from a long way off. I hadn’t even seen the buildings.

“You can call me Mike,” I said. “Welcome to Asgard. I did come to see you the day after you landed, to apologise for my churlishness—but events had moved on. I seem to have caused us both a certain amount of trouble.”

I could see him now, after a fashion—or his suit, at least. He was enormous, but not beyond the bounds of everyday possibility. The suit-manufacturer had been able to supply him out of stock, albeit with a unit that might have sat in the storeroom for a long time if he hadn’t come along when he did.

“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m used to trouble. I’m sorry about your truck—and the body in your bed. I should have called for medical help as soon as I got Saul out, but I had no idea who my enemies were—and nor had Saul. He thought the Tetrax had tipped off Amara Guur.”

“Somebody did,” I agreed. “I can’t believe that it was a Tetron—but the inner workings of the C.R.E. are a mystery to me.”

“Do you know what happened back in Skychain City?” he asked.

“Not for certain. The story, as I see it, is that Guur’s men came to snatch Saul and found you there too—asleep, I presume. They took you both along, and put you on ice while they chatted to Saul. They had the notebook but couldn’t read it. Balidar told them that I might be able to. They checked, just in case—and when they couldn’t break Saul, they launched plan B. It had almost paid off when the Star Force arrived. By that time, you’d broken loose and indulged in a little payback—but Saul was past saving so you went on your way. Guur gave us the notebook. We followed you. He followed us. Did I miss anything? Can I sit down, by the way? I had a cat-nap, but I’m exhausted.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “How did you find me?”

“I didn’t,” I said, surprised. “When the star-captain and her men picked a fight with a giant amoeba I took the opportunity to run. When I got out of the swamp I found the tracks. I followed them. I guess you did the same.”

“How many Star Force men are guarding the dropshaft?”

“Only one, at present,” I said. “There’s another on the surface. Amara Guur could have passed the first without any trouble, if he wanted to, but getting past the second will be a different matter. The warship must be able to shuttle more men down if the need arises, though, and if Guur did pick a fight with the man they left on the surface to watch the hole, they’d interpret that as need—and the Tetrax would probably agree. Why? Were you thinking of going back?”

“I’m not thinking of taking off my helmet just yet,” he said. “As you’ve doubtless ascertained, the air here has enough oxygen in it to be breathable, but the biotoxin assay doesn’t look promising.”

“I hadn’t quite got around to that kind of routine labour,” I confessed. “The star-captain was in a hurry.”

“So I heard. I was able to listen in on you as soon as you reached the bottom of the dropshaft.”

“Really? You should have said something.”

“I didn’t know whether you’d be able to get a fix on me if I started transmitting. The risk didn’t seem worthwhile.”

“It was probably a wise decision,” I confirmed. “The star-captain wasn’t in a negotiating mood.”

“How much did she tell you?” he wanted to know.

“That you’re an android manufactured by the Salamandrans, for reasons shrouded in the deepest military secrecy. She seems to feel that you’re a threat to the human race, but she wasn’t at liberty to tell me why. My orders were to shoot first and not to expect any answers to any questions that I might care to ask, before or after. I never intended to carry them out—it’s not my style. Still—you’re safe now. There’s only the two of us left down here, and you have both guns.”

“If only that were true,” he said.

It took me a moment or two to figure out what he meant. I ought to have realised when he told me to change channels when I switched the radio on. I was very tired.

“One of them’s still alive?” I guessed.

“They’re all still alive.”

“Well, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. The damn thing must have flowed right over them. Its juices couldn’t pick a hole in their cold-suits. I should have known that. It was all the screaming… I bet they’re as embarrassed as all hell about that.”

“They’ve put it behind them,” Myrlin said, drily. “I shouldn’t have told you that, I suppose. Now you can let them listen in on us, if you care to—but you’d have worked it out anyway, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d prefer to keep things simple,” I told him. “Anyway, I’m a deserter now. I suppose the star-captain is more than a little annoyed about that.”

“She certainly is.”

“So we’re in the same boat now, aren’t we?” He was way too paranoid to believe it, but I felt that I had to try.

“I prefer to keep things simple myself,” he told me. “If I shot you, I’d have one thing less to worry about.”

“True,” I admitted. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because the time will come, sooner or later, when the air will have to be tested. No biospectral analysis is ever as good as a clinical trial.”

“You want me to take my helmet off?”

“Not yet,” he said. “First, I want to find out where the tracks go. There might be other alternatives. Humanoids lived here once. They still might, even though the trains stopped running. If they’re in contact with other levels… with the builders themselves… That’s enough rest for now. Get up.”

I didn’t argue. I got up, and we moved out of the shadows into the permanent twilight. He looked just as big out in the open, but he wasn’t really a giant. He was just a very big humanoid—the kind of humanoid a genetic engineer might design if he’d been asked to provide a blueprint for a warrior, and hadn’t quite caught on to the fact that the last few hundred years of progress had rendered that kind of physical power redundant. Nowadays, war is all about the kind of hardware you can carry; weaklings can be supermen too.

Unfortunately, he had two guns and I had none.

I walked ahead of him, following the tracks as I had before, fighting to stay alert.

“If Guur’s men were able to get past the Star Force rearguard,” he said, “would they be able to find us?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “They might be able to find the star-captain—Guur’s Kythnan femme fatale almost certainly bugged her hair. They bugged the book too, but I left that behind. I think I’m clean, but it’s not impossible that I picked up some traceable contamination from it.”

“Is that why they gave it to you?”

“Maybe. On the other hand, they’d run out of time. Plan B had gone up in smoke, and they were desperate. They had to get things moving somehow. For a Salamandran android, you speak very good English.”

“I was well-educated,” he said. “It was an unorthodox process, but highly effective. They’d never tried it before, of course, so whoever designed the technics deserves congratulation. Can we stick to more pressing matters, for the time being? How many men does Guur have? How dangerous are they?”

“Not many,” I told him. “A dozen, maybe—but that’s the number he’ll have started out with when he arrived at the hole on the surface. If he tries to fight his way past Crucero, he’ll take casualties. Then again, they’re petty gangsters, not down-level men. He probably has a couple of scavengers with him, acting as guides, but you killed at least one of those when you broke Saul out. He might have lost some men just following the trail down to four. Why didn’t you put that flamer further along the corridor, where it would have roasted at least one of us when it went off?”

“Did it go off?” he said. “When you arrived safely, I assumed that you’d seen the tripwire.” It wasn’t exactly an answer to my question, but it was all I got.

“Anyway,” I said, “even if Guur does get down here with eight or ten men, he’s still got the star-captain, Serne and Khalekhan to reckon with. She may not know that he’s tracking her, but she won’t be an easy target.”

“You didn’t warn her that he’d planted bugs on her?”

“No,” I admitted. “I always intended to give her the slip sooner or later, and I figured that if Guur went after her instead of me… okay, so I should have warned her. We all make tactical misjudgments—we’re only humanoid. Silence seemed like a good idea at the time, but things were moving so fast. It won’t make any difference. She can handle Guur—and the chances are that he won’t even try to pick a fight with Crucero, or risk the booby traps once he knows approximately where the dropshaft is. Why bother?”

“He wouldn’t, if all he wanted to know was the location of the prize,” Myrlin admitted. “But he does have a score to settle. It’s not the Star Force personnel that Guur wants dead—or you, come to that. It’s me. Everybody wants me dead—except, perhaps, for you.”

I realised that he was probably right. Not that Guur would care overmuch about the loss of seven lives—what he’d care about was the loss of face. If a crime-lord loses seven of his henchmen, not to mention a kidnap-victim, he has to do something about it, or look like a fool. People like Guur and Heleb took that sort of thing seriously.

I looked from side to side as I led the way, but the tracks were no longer raised on an embankment. We were no longer skirting the swamp but moving through the gossamer-embalmed forest. The taller trees loomed large on either side, and the undergrowth had crept to the very edges of the parallel rails, although the space between them was still clear. It was an easy road to follow—so easy that anyone else who stumbled across it would undoubtedly start following it, unless they had a very pressing reason for going in another direction.

“You’re right,” I told him. “I don’t have anything against you. In fact, I feel guilty about not having taken responsibility for you when 74-Scarion asked me to. It was my fault that you became a target for Guur—and you tried to help my friend, killing that slimeball Balidar in the process. I don’t have anything against you at all. I might have, if Susarma Lear wasn’t so careful of her military secrets, but I’m not prepared simply to take her word for it that you have to be killed. I’m an Asgarder, not a starship trooper.”

It all sounded rather hollow, even to me, even though every word of it was true.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you the truth,” he said.

“That makes us even,” I told him. “I just told you the truth, but you don’t believe me. But I’m not as paranoid as you—and I’m certainly not as paranoid as the star-captain. If anyone’s ever going to believe you, it’s me. So why don’t you try me—unless, of course, it’s a military secret that you can’t divulge.”

“All right,” he said, seemingly grateful for the opportunity. “I’ll tell you the story.”

And he did.