Asgard's Secret

by Brian Stableford

  I checked the temperature; it was 276 degrees Kelvin— three degrees above the freezing point of water, assuming that the pressure was close to Skychain City's norm. It couldn't be comfortable for the insects, if they were exothermic, but it was obviously tolerable. Since the shaft had been open the local air temperature must have dropped very noticeably; outside, it would surely be warmer.

  I led the way along the passage, following the glaring traces left by the giant android as his feet had scuffed the organic slick that covered the floor. We passed through two more doorways, each one opened by means of brute force and left agape. It wasn't until we reached the main door that we found more evidence of cutting, and the gap had been closed again. I had to lever the flap open again, but I set to it with a will. I'd seen virtually nothing of the establishment itself—I hadn't the slightest idea whether it was a laboratory or a Laundromat—but I didn't want to waste a minute. My only ambition was to get outside, into the cavies' version of open territory.

  I held my breath as I forced a way through, not letting it out again until I was out. I might have said something to the people behind me, but I really can't remember.

  The light was brighter on the outside. It was diffuse light, pure white in colour; it seemed to emanate from everywhere overhead, but not quite uniformly. The "sky" was faintly mottled, with occasional black spots. It was almost like a negative image of a planetary sky, with dark stars and shadowy clouds set against a radiant background the absolute opposite of night-black.

  The ground glistened like the skin of a patterned snake or frog, mostly in shades of grey. There were dendritic forms like trees and bushes clustered about the door, gathered densely enough to qualify as a forest, but they were festooned with glistening strands of some gossamer-like substance, as if each and every one had been turned into a massive trap by a giant funnel-web spider. The tallest of the "trees" grew to twice my height; the "sky" was only twice as far from the floor.

  In spite of the brighter light, the suggestion was of a misty dusk rather than full daylight. We'd have been able to see easily enough without our headlamps, but I wasn't in any hurry to switch mine off. Its light reflected eerily from the spider-silk, but the material would have seemed even more sinister by what passed hereabouts for natural light.

  "What is that stuff?" the star-captain asked—but I had no answer.

  "It's just as colourless as the surface," Serne complained.

  "I guess the trees don't need chlorophyll," I told him. "Whatever fuels this ecosystem, it's not simulated sunlight.

  The trees are probably thermosynthetic, drawing heat from Asgard's superstructure. It's not like the surface-simulation on level one."

  I only had to take a single step to bring myself within easy reach of a cobweb-strewn branch. The impression of gossamer wasn't misleading; the stuff really was as fragile as spider-silk, and as clingy. The branch itself was brittle; it snapped the moment I put pressure on it. I crumbled the fragment in my gauntleted hand; it disintegrated into tiny shards.

  Tiny flying creatures were flocking about our heads, presumably attracted by the light. They resembled tiny moths with wings patterned in black and white. As they accumulated, it became obvious that the lamps weren't going to be helpful for much longer.

  Susarma Lear cursed.

  "Might as well switch off," I said.

  When they'd complied with the suggestion, I moved away from the doorway. The living cloud evaporated. It was easy enough to walk between the trees, even though they filled most of the available space; they were too fragile to impede our progress.

  The "boles" of the trees were thick and bulbous, and the junctions from which the branches sprouted were decked with a much thicker overgrowth than the external spider-silk veils. There were creepy-crawlies a-plenty, but I still couldn't see anything bigger than my thumbnail.

  Myrlin's boots had left huge footprints in the ground, which was thickly carpeted—to a depth of two or three centimetres—by some kind of fungal mass. If he wanted to conceal his tracks, he was going to have to get out of the forest first.

  "Look there," said the star-captain, pointing up at an angle of forty-five degrees. The flyers she was pointing at were obviously bigger than insects, although it was difficult to judge their distance accurately enough to estimate their size. Some were gliding, others flapping wings in a laborious fashion that suggested considerable size, but I didn't want to infer too much. A few shone very faintly, either with bioluminescence of their own or because they were infected with some kind of parasitic growth.

  "It's not a garden," Serne observed, drily.

  "Nor a vegetable field," I agreed. "Wilderness, pure and—"

  I broke off very abruptly. I hadn't heard the slightest warning sound, because my cold-suit wasn't equipped with pick-up mikes. I wouldn't have had any warning at all, if I hadn't caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye, hurtling towards me with astonishing speed.

  It was coming from my right, and it was much bigger than it had any right to be, considering the speed with which it was moving through a very cluttered environment— but it wasn't smashing a way through the elaborately- festooned branches the way I was; it was moving discreetly, with remarkable agility.

  I had no way of knowing how much it weighed, although I knew that it had to be lightly-framed, but I caught a glimpse of the spikes on its head and the claws on its feet. I certainly didn't want to get in its way. If my cold-suit had been built for sprinting I'd have run, even though I knew that I wouldn't have had a chance of getting away—but I had to stand and face it, because I had no alternative. I raised my hands, ready to grapple.

  I didn't need to. When it was no more than a metre away, a thin beam of liquid light leapt out of Seme's flame- pistol and drilled a hole right through its head. The creature was light enough to be hurled sideways by the impact, and its ability to flow through the gaps in the forest abruptly deserted it. It crashed into a bush, sending splinters flying in every direction.

  "Hey!" I said. "That was a little too close for comfort."

  "No trouble," he said, just as if I'd thanked him kindly.

  For a moment, I thought the dead thing was vaguely humanoid, but it was just that it had reared up on its hind legs to attack me and had been jerked rigid by the shock of having its brain instantaneously spit-roasted. It was more like a cat—except for the spikes.

  Susarma Lear and Khalekhan had their guns out too. They had formed a triangle, each covering a hundred and twenty degrees of arc, as if they expected a horde of naked savages to leap out of ambush brandishing spears. They seemed so purposeful that I'd gladly have laid a thousand to one against the horde.

  The animal's skin was smooth and hairless. Its feet were large, with splayed toes as long as the claws that projected from them. Its shoulders seemed ridiculously large until I realised that it had some kind of extendable frill draped like a cloak about its upper torso. The spikes on its head didn't look like horns, until I'd figured out how it held its head when it was charging, and then they did. I doubted that they'd have been able to penetrate my cold-suit, even if I hadn't been ready to fend off the attack with my brawny arms, but I was glad that I hadn't had to wrestle with the beast.

  "Well," I said, "it's not quite as big as a man, but if there are things like that around, there could be humanoids too."

  "Let's get moving," Susarma Lear said. "The android's getting further away. He's a lot faster than we anticipated, and he just keeps on going."

  She had had enough of letting me lead. She set off in front herself, striding out purposefully.

  "We could get Crucero to send more equipment down," I suggested—but she wouldn't hear of it.

  "No time," she said.

  I fell into step at the rear of the group. I couldn't see her, but I could talk to her easily enough over the radio link. "Keep a sharp lookout," I said. "Logic says that there must be worse things than that around these parts."

  "I didn't think the spikes on
its head were for decoration," she retorted. "And I saw how fast it moved. Natural selection doesn't favour agility like that unless it's a matter of life or death. When it saw you, it charged—no time wasted in hesitation. I can read the signs too, Rousseau. Trust me."

  "You're in command," I said a trifle resentfully.

  "That's right," she said. "There must have been a path here once, Rousseau, if not a road. That place we just came from was built to last, and it's lasted, but the infrastructure supporting it has been obliterated. Maybe if we stripped this glutinous carpet we'd find the roadway with all its markings intact, but it wouldn't tell us much more than we already know. Nobody like us has been this way for a very long time—except for the android."

  "You're right," I conceded. "But there's built to last and built to last. The station up on four has been deep-frozen, but this one hasn't. I doubt that we're talking about an ecosystem that ran wild a million years ago, let alone hundreds of millions. This is degeneracy of a more recent vintage."

  "I'll let you worry about the implications of that," she said.

  "Thanks. What did you make of the frill?"

  "What frill?" she said, before she realised what I meant.

  "Sorry, Rousseau—I don't read frills. Arms and armour, speed and skill are my things. What did you make of the frill?"

  "It could have been an arbitrary embellishment, used in sexual display," I said. "On the other hand, it could have been a mechanism for radiating excess heat. If so, keeping warm is no problem hereabouts—quite the reverse, in fact."

  "So the power's still on, and the provision it makes for life-support is generous. Big deal. Try to keep up, will you?"

  "I am keeping up," I assured her. What she meant was: Don't even think about deserting. I wasn't intimidated. If I were to set off in the opposite direction to the one Myrlin had gone, she'd keep chasing Myrlin—but I had to pick my moment. If they weren't sufficiently distracted, they might just decide to shoot me.

  When we finally paused to rest, though, the star-captain made a gesture of trust that I hardly deserved—she offered me a gun. I hadn't accepted the one Serne had offered me, but this one seemed far more significant. I took it, and thanked her for the kind thought.

  Now that I had my very own flame-pistol, I felt that I had finally been awarded full membership in her gang. That, I supposed, was how she'd intended me to feel.

  "Try to use it wisely," she said. "And whatever else you do, make sure that none of us is in the line of fire before you set it off."

  "I'll do my best," I promised.

  26

  I had expected to find water, and it didn't take long for the expectation to materialise. There was a lot more of it than I had anticipated, in fact. It didn't look deep, but it looked distinctly noisome—stagnant was too weak a word to do it justice.

  Myrlin's trail led us straight to it, no more than six hours' march from the bottom of the dropshaft. Perhaps, once upon a time, it had been a system of reservoirs or a vast hydroponic farm. Now it was a swamp whose waters were as thick as soup, choked with drifting mats of vegetation and pockmarked with small islets crowded with skeletal dendrites decked out with the usual anaemic tinsel. The air was thick with flying insects. Every now and again marsh gas would bubble to the surface, sending slow ripples across it.

  "Pity we didn't pack a boat," I murmured, as we stood contemplating the dimly lit vastness of the swamp. Our eyes were well-accustomed to the twilight, but the visibility was a lot poorer over the still water.

  "Shut up, Rousseau," said the star-captain. What she meant was: don't bother to tell us that we've lost any chance we ever had of finding him.

  I didn't have to. "We couldn't track a bulldozer across that," Serne observed.

  "Shut up, Serne," said the star-captain. "We're not giving up. We are not going back to report that we simply stopped trying. When our life-support systems reach the

  limit of their range, we can turn back. Not before."

  It was obvious, though, that she no longer expected to catch up with Myrlin. He must be extremely weary by now, but he'd done it. He'd beaten her.

  "Follow me," the star-captain said, in her most determined tone.

  She was out of her mind, but I hadn't the courage to tell her so. She walked slowly into the water, testing its depth as she went, heading directly away from the shore. I assumed that she would try to guess as best she could which way Myrlin would turn, given that he'd have to avoid the islets and the floating mats.

  She was no more than thigh-deep when the bottom leveled out.

  "Look!" she said, triumphantly, pointing at the fringe of one of the fibrous masses; it had certainly been disturbed, probably by Myrlin. I had to grant that we might not be entirely lost, until we got far enough out to find larger expanses of open water.

  I sighed, and walked into the water after the others, still content to bring up the rear but not yet ready to turn tail and run. It was laborious ploughing through the murky water, but I wasn't afraid of getting out of my depth. If necessary, I could have walked along the bottom in my cold-suit with a metre of water over my head. I did pause to wonder whether there might be creatures lurking below with teeth like sharks or crocodiles, or drilling worms, but I figured they'd just get toothache if they tried to get through the fabric.

  Susarma Lear shouted "Look!" three times more—and I could hear the hope creeping back into her voice—while we covered another kilometre or so. We were moving more slowly now, no longer in a straight line, and I was getting very tired—but I knew that Myrlin had been going without sleep a lot longer than I had, and I could hardly blame the star-captain for conserving the hope that we might find him fast asleep on an islet at any moment.

  Eventually, though, we came to a much greater expanse of open water, and the signs of Myrlin's passage vanished entirely.

  The wild goose had flown.

  "We'd better rest a while," the star-captain said. Her voice had the texture of ground glass, but she still wasn't prepared to say out loud that she admitted defeat.

  "If you were to report that you'd caught and killed him," I pointed out, delicately, as we sprawled on the last of a chain of islets, looking out over the placid lake, "no one would ever know the difference."

  "That's not the Star Force Way," she said, severely.

  "This isn't Star Force territory," I told her.

  "The Star Force doesn't have territory," she informed me, frostily. "But wherever the Star Force goes, it does things the Star Force Way."

  "Sure," I said. "If you don't win the Star Force Way, you lose the Star Force Way. No ifs or buts, just—"

  "I heard the joke the first time, Rousseau," she said. "I don't want to hear it again. Here's the plan. We make our way back to the edge of the swamp as quickly as we can, and then we make our way around it. He's got to come out somewhere. It's just a matter of picking up his trail there."

  I suppressed a groan. I suspect that I wasn't the only one. I began to shake my head instead, and then I stopped, because my eye had caught a movement in the dark surface of the lake. It was a ripple, rolling in towards the shore.

  It was a very big ripple, and it wasn't alone.

  "Captain," Serne whispered. He'd seen it too, and he

  was drawing his gun even as he spoke.

  I didn't reach for mine. They were only ripples, even if it did look as if whatever was causing them might be vast.

  We all waited for something substantial to break the surface, but it seemed just as vitreous as ever, even though it had a curiously marbled effect, and no longer seemed quite as flat as it had been.

  Whatever was there had to be moving under its own power, because there was no current for it to drift on, but it was hard to figure out exactly where it might be or exactly how fast it might be moving.

  Khalekhan had drawn and raised his gun, but he lowered it again. "There's nothing—" he began—but Serne had leveled his own weapon; he was taking aim.

  All I could see was mur
ky water. Nasty water, but only water—except that it wasn't.

  It was obvious now that the surface was no longer flat, but it really did seem as if the lake itself had come to life, and that it was the water itself that was flowing towards us. It wasn't the water, although it was just as transparent, and seemingly just as fluid. It was something very big and very strange, oozing along the bottom of the lake, but now that it was close it was rearing up like some kind of giant domelike wave.

  There were thin pinpricks of light inside it.

  It was a gargantuan blob of protoplasm: an amoeboid leviathan. It must have been more than sixty metres across, although it probably wasn't round; it probably wasn't any easily definable shape.

  The pseudopods were already out of the water, flowing at us like giant hands with too many fingers. "Flowing at us" doesn't sound all that threatening, but I felt well and truly threatened.

  So did Serne. He had already opened fire, and he had altered the setting of his flame-pistol, so that it was letting out great gouts, like the gun in Myrlin's trap, rather than the delicate beam he'd used to kill the spiky predator.

  Khalekhan raised his gun again. So did Susarma Lear.

  My own instinct was to flee. I danced backwards, away from the groping jelly. It was like trying to jump out of a stream of treacle, but I managed to haul myself away, and once I was free I could move faster than the protoplasm could flow, at least while I was still on the islet.

  I'd like to be able to say that I knew that my moment had finally arrived, and that I was boldly and gladly seizing my opportunity, but it wouldn't be true. The Star Force code compels me to admit that I simply panicked. While three tongues of lethal fire turned substantial—but relatively tiny—parts of the amazing creature to murky steam, I ran like hell.

  If the creature had had a brain, Serne would doubtless have picked it out and made his fire-power tell—but it didn't. It kept on flowing, the coenocytic mass splitting here, there and anywhere in response to the flame-flood, but not dying. The creature didn't mind being boiled and sliced, and it was very, very big indeed.