Asgard's Secret

by Brian Stableford

  I'd recorded the vital data from the notebook on one of the sound-tapes woven into my shoulderpads; I could use my tongue to call up the tape, and to wind it forward or back at my convenience. Saul's trail would be blazed, with his private symbols scored on the wall at every junction, but I still needed the tape to help me decipher the symbols. As for the rest of the commentary Saul had thought it desirable to append to his notes—most of that was snugly stored in my memory, or so I hoped.

  "Saul says it's a main road," I told Crucero. "Probably runs the entire length of this arm of the system. Other roads branch off at regular intervals, and they have their own sub- branches, et cetera. A lucky find, that trapdoor—they don't all bring you down to such a handy spot."

  I had deduced from the notebook that Saul had used this door a dozen times, and there were plenty of tracks around to confirm the deduction. Allowing twenty-five days per trip that meant he'd been coming here on a regular basis for something over an Earthly year. He'd come back from most of those trips with nothing more than commonplace stuff, picked up by the wayside down in three or four. Then, out of the blue, he'd hit the big one: the biggest bonanza in the history of galactic prospecting.

  And he'd lined himself up to be tortured and slaughtered by the likes of Amara Guur.

  It doesn't seem adequate, sometimes, simply to shrug your shoulders and say, c'est la vie.

  "Let's get going," said Susarma Lear.

  We set off along the highway, travelling northwest. We didn't talk much, though my companions were inclined to ask the occasional question. Mostly, it was Crucero who did the asking—perhaps curiosity was part of the second-in- command's duties. His requests for practical advice were easily answered; the big questions remained undebated, save for one medium-sized one.

  "If he never read the book," the lieutenant asked, having observed the abundance of signs of previous passage, "how does the android know which set of tracks to follow?"

  "Saul told him," I said. "Maybe he's got an eidetic memory. After all, once you can design your own androids, you can start improving on nature's equipment, in more ways than one. If I had to guess, though, I'd say that he's probably working from a tape that Saul made for him while they were at my place, to explain the meaning of the symbols in his private code. Either way, the android won't find it as easy to find the way as we will—that's why we stand a reasonable chance of catching up with him."

  "Only if he makes for the dropshaft," said Serne darkly.

  "There's nowhere else for him to go," I pointed out. "If he doesn't intend to come up again, he's got to get down into the warm. If he does intend to come up, he'll need to bring something worthwhile out of the depths in order to make himself so useful to the Tetrax that they'll protect him against all his enemies."

  "Let's concentrate on making good time," the star-captain said. "Drop the chatter and pay attention to what you're doing."

  The troopers obeyed the order without demur.

  The highway was empty. The layer of ice that dressed it was very thin; little water had found its way in here, and level one was warm enough for frozen water to be the only kind of ice there was. The surface was smooth enough for the sleds to glide over it as easily as anyone could wish—I didn't even mind taking my turn to haul one.

  Once or twice we passed lumps of slag, which were all that remained of the vehicles the indigenes had driven along the road in the unimaginably distant past. They were parked in alcoves, so as not to block the way—the cavies had been tidy-minded people.

  "How do you ever recover anything useful from those?" asked Crucero, after the star-captain had given him tacit permission by pausing to inspect a lump of debris.

  "We don't," I told him. "It's not even honest rust—the cavies were biotech-minded, like the Tetrax and your late enemies the Salamandrans. That was an organic car. Most of its materials were probably made by some kind of artificial photosynthetic process, though its electronics will have used silicon and all the normal stuff. It's pure garbage now.

  Scavengers find nothing worth a damn on level one . . . the best loot comes from three and four, where time stood still once the cold worked its way down in the days of the big blackout. Hardly a molecule stirred until the C.R.E. operatives began opening doors again. The heat of the sun hasn't percolated down there yet, and we scavengers tend to be reasonably careful with our plugs and our little bubble- domes."

  "Move!" said the star-captain tersely.

  We moved.

  21

  We must have marched past thousands of wide-open side- roads. Some had flash-marks where Saul had engraved the record of his past explorations with a cutting-torch, but most of them he'd simply ignored. How he'd decided which ones to explore, I don't know: he'd just followed his instincts, or his whims.

  We took a rest after three hours on the road. It had been a very long haul and I was dog-tired, but the troopers seemed to be taking it in their stride. It was a picnic, I supposed, by comparison with mopping up on the surface of a firestormed planet. They didn't say.

  Where my suit's systems were plugged into my body at the torso and the groin I was beginning to feel sore. I also felt a little sick, because it always took a while for my body to get used to the chemical tyrant on my back. My stomach was still expecting food, and was complaining because it wasn't going to get any. It's not easy turning yourself into a cyborg.

  I wondered if the android was having similar problems, or whether he had been built to be adaptable.

  We had already lost contact with the outside world; the roof over our heads was opaque to radio waves. I wasn't quite sure what kind of bugs Amara Guur had planted on us, but I couldn't see how he intended to track us. The piddling little things that Jacinthe Siani had put in the star-captain's hair and the device they'd put in the binding of the book couldn't transmit much of a signal. If he was using electronics, any obscuring of our trail we could do once we were off the highway would probably throw him— he surely didn't have any idea what Saul's flashmarks meant.

  I felt that I had no cause to feel complacent, though. Amara Guur might be an evil-minded reptile, but he was clever, and although I knew next to nothing about them, I'd heard of Tetron-built pseudo-olfactory tracking devices that would allow people carrying certain special organics to be trailed halfway across a world after a five-year lapse of time. We'd had to buy a lot of equipment, and any item of that might have been set up to leak something that might be quite imperceptible to us but stink like a skunk to some kind of artificial bloodhound.

  By the time we set forth again, the silence and the sameness were beginning to get on the nerves of the troopers. Serne and Khalekhan began swapping irrelevances, while the rest of us listened in. They were aware that they were putting on a kind of performance, but it was obviously something they'd done before. They must have been on other long missions communicating on an open channel, and they'd built up strategies to cope with the fact that there were others—including officers—listening to their every irreverence. But the chatter soon palled, and it fell to me to take over the role of talker-in-chief. After all, I was the one who was on home ground, and had some relevant things to say.

  What I didn't say, even after I'd made enough observations to know that it was true, was that Myrlin was making better time than I had thought possible. His tracks showed no sign of hesitation, and he had an enormous stride. I was glad about that, but I knew that it would only make the star-captain's tight-lipped mood even worse.

  The going became even easier once we had turned off the highway on to a side road, which quickly brought us to a different kind of territory.

  I could see that the troopers were impressed by the wider open spaces, where the ceiling was twenty metres up instead of ten, the roof being held up by great pillars spaced at wide but regular intervals.

  "This is farmland, cavie-style," I told them. "As far as the experts can judge, much of the farming would have used artificial photosynthetic processes, some of them liquid- based an
d some solid. There's some debate as to whether they ever used actual organisms at all. Where the Tetrax have built their own primary-production facilities under Skychain City, they've put in vast carpets of green stuff driven by light, heat, or direct electrics—they produce various kinds of single-product foodstuffs adapted to the needs of the various races, which we generally call 'manna.' The carpets also churn out other useful materials, extruding and dumping them underneath. There has to be a complicated irrigation-system, and a transportation-system for packaging and distribution of the products. The cavies' original system was probably similar—down on two you'll see the channels which carried water and the tracks that carried the trains."

  "Were there lights up there?" asked Crucero, pointing his searchlight up at the ceiling.

  "Sure," I said. "But it's the devil's own job trying to track the power cables. There seem to have been a lot of authentic electric light bulbs, but not everywhere. Other places there are what we think was some kind of artificial bioluminescence—the Tetrax can do that, too, after a fashion. There are probably cables of some kind connecting all the levels, maybe running deep down to the starlet itself . . . the central fusion reactor, if there is one. But the walls are so thick and so hard it's almost impossible to get into any conduits or expose any integral systems."

  "Are we heading for some kind of city?" asked Khalekhan.

  "Probably," I told him. "Difficult to tell, sometimes, what's a city and what isn't. We'll come to a big wall with lots of entrances which give way to a maze of corridors. Doors by the million—all shut. No way to know how many rooms there are, or how much is solid through and through. To explore a complex like that takes a C.R.E. team years— they'll probably be centuries working their patient way through the big ones at the hub of each system. They've always figured that there must be dropshafts in the hubs which could take them all the way down, and that they'll find them in the end, if they're patient enough and methodical enough. They're probably right . . . but in the meantime, Saul's hare tactics seem to have prevailed over their tortoise strategy."

  We trudged on across the desolate landscape. Everything showed white in the light of our torches. The territory was sectioned with geometrical precision, broken up into diamonds and rectangles, with the pillars holding up the roof sprouting at each corner. We were walking along the walls that had once separated the sections, where there had once been carpets or lakes of artificial photosynthetic, electrosynthetic and thermosynthetic substances. Now there were only empty holes. The cavies had wrapped up their fields and drained their reservoirs, and taken it all with them when they had set forth on their exodus into the interior.

  This entire system had once been a self-sustaining ecological unit: a complete, functioning ecosphere. Now it was dead, like the surface of a world that had passed through a cosmic catastrophe or a nuclear holocaust. It was a ghost- world, utterly abandoned. But had its people simply removed themselves to some other closed ecosphere, a hundred metres, or a hundred thousand metres, beneath our feet? I tried to imagine the queue that might have formed at the elevator, and remembered old jokes about standing on one spot while the entire population of China passed by in a line ... a line which could never end, because new Chinamen were being born faster than the old ones could pass by.

  The cavies, I presumed, didn't have that kind of problem—a race that lived in a closed and sealed ecology must surely have been able to maintain population stability. But I couldn't be sure. Maybe I had it the wrong way around. Maybe it was because the cavies didn't have a stable population that they had to keep adding layer after layer to the surface of their world, to supply ever more living space. If that had been the case, once upon a time, then it was possible that the disaster that pulled them back from the outer levels was something that happened deep inside Asgard, and not the destruction of the outer atmosphere after all.

  I tried to stop thinking about it by telling myself that when we got to the end of our expedition, we'd have much more evidence to go on, and that it was futile to speculate in the meantime. But I couldn't stop. The closer I got to the answer, the more eagerly the question preyed upon my thoughts. I guess I became preoccupied.

  Too preoccupied, as it turned out.

  We came, as I had anticipated, to a floor-to-ceiling wall—a vast, long face that curved away in either direction as far as we could see. There was an open doorway in front of us, scored on either side by Saul Lyndrach and Myrlin: three mysterious hieroglyphs, two to the left and one to the right. The hole was just wide enough to steer a sled through.

  I was in the lead, and my attention was split two ways. I looked back at my companions, then squinted at Saul's marks, all the while teasing the tape with my tongue to bring it to the precise point at which any relevant comment would have been recorded.

  All the while I was doing these things I was walking forward without pause, and I never saw the tripwire that was waiting for me in the darkness just beyond the doorway. I felt the impedance to my foot the moment I made contact, but by then it was too late.

  I barely had time to look about in wild panic before something that seemed to my untutored eye to be the size of a small sun came hurtling out of the darkness toward my head.

  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 th
at 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.