Asgard's Secret (23 page)

"That would
put our diplomatic problems with the Tetrax into a different context," she
observed. "Do you know whether there are any Salamandrans in Skychain
City?"

"I don't think
so," I said. "I never heard of any—but I don't even know what they
look like. You're wondering why the android came here, aren't you?"

"Don't push
it, Rousseau," she warned.

"Your secrets
are safe," I assured her. "But I had wondered that myself. I guess
the Salamandrans would know about Asgard, even if none of them had ever made
their way here. They seem to have educated your android pretty thoroughly.
Maybe he thought that a cosmopolitan arena like Skychain City would be an
easier place to hide than a world where ninety-nine percent of the inhabitants
looked the same. A giant stands out anywhere, but in a circus like this . . .
you could imagine the train of thought. There are a hundred worlds where he
might have sought sanctuary, including the Tetron homeworld, but he might not
have been confident of his welcome on any of them. He'd be entitled to be a
trifle paranoid, wouldn't he?"

"The
Salamandrans couldn't possibly know anything about Asgard that the Tetrax don't
know," she said.

"No," I said.

"He's just
following up an opportunity that arose by chance when he arrived here."

"I think
so," I agreed. "It was a freaky stroke of luck, but it couldn't have
been anything else, could it?"

"No," she
said. "It couldn't. But Tetrax biotech is good enough to clone the
android, isn't it? They could do that, if they wanted to. They clone themselves
all the time, don't they? That's why they all have numbers instead of
names."

"That's not
the explanation they give when asked," I said, "but they're
biotech-minded, so cloning technology must be child's play to them. Even we can
do cloning, and we're not biotech-minded at all. I don't think they'd be interested
in turning out an army of supermen to wreak vengeance on the human race on
behalf of Salamandra, though. It's not their style."

She looked at me.
Even through the shades I could see the hardness of her eyes. "We have to
kill him," she told me. "Whatever it costs us, in terms of image or
human lives. I want you to understand that."

She didn't. If
she'd wanted me to understand, she'd have told me exactly what it was that she
and her military masters feared. In the absence of a good explanation, I was
inclined to think that she and they were merely paranoid— understandably
paranoid, but
merely
paranoid.

I reminded myself
that she'd just taken part in the murder of a planetary biosphere. She was
still in a state of shock. The guilt was probably getting to her, in peculiar
ways.

"Don't mind
me," I said, insincerely. "I'm just a starship trooper. My job is to
follow orders."

19

Two days out we had to bear eastwards in
order to skirt the southeastern arm of one of the northern hemisphere's larger
seas. It had hardly begun to melt, and the bergs still stood up like rows of
jagged teeth against the horizon, gleaming where they caught the sunlight that
flickered over them. For a while, the glittering play of the light made a
pleasant contrast with the featureless plain, but in its own way it was just
as constant.

"Is the whole
damn world all as boring as this?" growled Serne in one of his rare
communicative moments when the two of us were sharing the cab.

"Pretty
much," I told him. "The seas are shallow, and there are no mountains
to speak of. It's not like Earth, with all those tectonic plates grinding
against one another, heaving up mountain ranges, and all those volcanoes
blasting away. This surface was
designed.
There are
no cities either. The Tetrax found a few clusters of what used to be buildings
scattered here and there, but no ghost towns, no ancient temples, no pyramids.
People certainly worked up here, but they probably went home to the levels when
their shifts finished. When they abandoned the surface they took virtually
everything that they could carry—they left far less machinery here than in the
subsurface levels.

"Most people
figure that the cavies retired to live underground long before they deserted
the upper levels. They may have used the surface purely for growing crops—but
the C.R.E. palaeobiologists who work with the seeds and microfossils haven't
found that much evidence of disciplined agricultural activity. Maybe this
level was just the roof of the world, and they left it more-or-less to its own
devices. It may not have been anything more than some kind of roof-garden. The
sea over there might conceivably be a reservoir or a lake, but some C.R.E.
people think it was just a glorified puddle in the guttering. We'll pass a
C.R.E. dome soon—that should break up the tedium of your day."

"Is that where
we're going—to some kind of dome?" he asked.

"Hardly,"
I replied. "C.R.E. people are essentially mean-spirited. They don't allow
the likes of you and me to use their routes into the underworld. They wouldn't
even invite us in for a cup of tea if we knocked on their door. They're so
proud of the fact that they have members of a hundred different species working
together that they've become rather paranoid in their insularity. People like
me find our own ways down into level one; we'll be using one of Saul's
holes."

Serne peered out of
the windows, looking first at the sullen grey waves lapping gently at the
barren shore, then inland at the desolate, foggy wasteland, which was dressed
as far as the eye could see in blurred shades of pale grey, with not a patch of
green to be seen. Even by the low standards commonly set by the surface of
Asgard this was not a particularly appealing spot.

"How in hell
do you know where to dig?" said Serne sourly.

"We don't
dig," I told him. "There are sections of the surface where all the
soil blew away millions of years ago— great plastic-surfaced deserts, pitted by
meteoric dust. There, we can find the trapdoors the cavies used. It's not easy,
because there's rarely anything to see except a hairline crack and markings
which have virtually worn away—no handles or hinges—but it can be done. It
helps if you have some idea where to look."

"And you
have?"

"Damn right.
Each cave-system on level one seems to be arrayed rather like the petals of a
flower, with arms radiating out from a relatively small central hub. Of
course, all the systems may be connected by smaller tunnels, but the big open
spaces—the farmlands, as it were—form that kind of pattern. The hub of this
system is a long way north. The C.R.E. has a dome there, but the one we'll pass
is on the arm which points down toward the equator. The Tetrax have been here
long enough to begin to fathom out the kind of scheme the cavies' architects
used, and a lot of trapdoors are arranged in a fairly orderly manner. Now that
Myrlin's reached his destination, we know that Saul's hole is in much the same
position on the next arm over as the one beneath the dome we pass. It must
have taken him a while to find it—searching for a circle a few metres across in
an area of a hundred square miles isn't easy—but he knew where to start
searching before he set out."

"Think we'll
have any problem finding our way once we get there?"

"Not that
much. Given that Myrlin's still so far ahead of us, we ought to hope that it
isn't
too
easy. If he's able to see Saul's sled-tracks, he might make
better time than we suppose."

Secretly, of
course, I was hoping that Myrlin
might
find it easier
than we had supposed. I was also praying for a bit of really foul weather, not
so much to slow our own trucks down as to cause a few problems to Amara Guur's
pirate crew, which was still toiling in our wake. If one of his trucks were to
get stuck, it might make a big difference to any eventual confrontation. We
couldn't stop him following us, at least as far as the gateway to the
underworld, but a helpful adjustment to the odds we'd face when we got down
there might make the difference between life and death for some of us. I still
reckoned that I could come out of this mess alive—with luck. Bad weather was
only one potential gift that fortune might throw my way.

"What kind of
power-units do the sleds have?" Serne asked.

I laughed.

"Muscle-power,"
I told him.

"Jesus!"
he complained. "Are you telling me that we couldn't do better than
that?"

"Where we're
going," I told him, "it can get very cold. Machines don't work too
well down in three or four, where it's only a few degrees Kelvin on a good day.
Atmospheric pressure is pretty weak—most of the familiar gases have
crystallized out as snow. But it's not like being in space. The soles of your
feet, and your gauntlets every time you touch something, are in contact with
solids colder than anything you find in the inner reaches of a solar
system—very much colder than any spaceship hull. Wheeled vehicles are hopeless.
The C.R.E. sometimes uses hovercraft, but they're no use in the narrower
corridors, and even hovercraft settle when they stop, which means that they
have to lay down some kind of cushion every time they put the brakes on. It's
no way to make progress, and it helps them to maintain their customary snail's
pace.

"If you want
to
move
in the levels, my friend, you have to rely on nature's way.
Two feet and polished skids. Even so, you can run into difficulties if the
people who made your boots and gloves were telling lies about their
tolerance."

Serne didn't seem
pleased by this news, nor by the relish

I took in telling him how rough it was
going to be.

"How long are
we going to be down there?" he asked.

I shrugged.
"We won't linger in there a minute longer than necessary," I assured
him. "I want to get through it as fast as I possibly can." I didn't
mention that
my
goal wasn't to catch Myrlin, but to get to the interesting
places in good time. "If nothing goes wrong," I added, "we
should be able to get through the cold in a couple of days. You'll just have to
hope that the android won't. We'll have plenty of margin for error. The
gaspacks will renew our air for at least thirty days, more in an emergency. The
suits recycle all our wastes, and input carbohydrates—they'll easily keep us
going until the air begins to go bad, although we'll lose weight and our
digestive systems will get thrown out. I guess you're used to those kinds of
side effects."

"And then
some," he said. I could just make out his bleak stare behind the goggles.
I didn't want to ask him what his personal best was for getting by in a
life-preserving suit—it probably wasn't anywhere near as long as mine, but when
I'd set my record, there was no army of aliens trying to blast, fry or
evaporate me.

There never had
been—until now.

"I guess
you've already had your fill of suits and gaspacks," I said, meekly.

"We only used
heavy suits where there wasn't any atmosphere," he said colourlessly.
"Most of the
real
fighting was done on surface. The temperature was usually
fine and the air would have been breathable—except that the Salamandrans were
heavily into biotech weaponry. Viroids, neurotoxin-carrying bacteria, that sort
of
thing ...
all human-specific, of course.
Mostly, we wore thin sterile suits like glorified plastic bags, which wouldn't
slow us down too much. Skin-huggers, with little networks of capillaries to
carry your sweat away. Before we put them on we had to shave all over . . .
they gave us some inhibitor to stop the hair growing back, but it didn't stop
the itching. Five or six days into a mission I could feel my flesh
crawling.
Couldn't scratch . . . not properly, anyway.