Asgard's Secret (40 page)

The star-captain
had obviously been trained for low-gee combat. I couldn't see where she'd
stashed her own gun, but it was suddenly in her hand, and the entire upper part
of Kaat's body was suddenly aflame as the flesh boiled away from the bones.

I dived for the
flower where the crash-gun had fallen. Although I'd lost sight of it, my
groping hand caught it up without a fumble. I let the dive carry through,
rolling with it. The enormous flower, crushed beneath my weight, felt like a
sheet of sticky rubber but it didn't stop my forward roll. When my feet touched
the ground again I let myself come upright, stretching with just the right
touch of delicacy, bringing the gun up to fire.

I felt as if
everything were happening in slow motion— as, after a fashion, it was. While I was
up on my feet again I could see that Amara Guur had just about regained control
of his own body. He'd fetched up against the curving wall and with its aid he
was bracing himself, bringing the needier round to aim at my midriff.

I fired, holding
the trigger down to discharge the last three bullets as fast as they would go.
The first one hit him in the navel, the second in the sternum. The third
exploded his head.

The recoil kicked
me backwards and sent me sprawling under a bush, where a congregation of giant
cockroaches was wailing away like a choir of demented sirens. When I landed in
their midst they wriggled away as fast as their scrawny legs could carry them.

When I was able to
stand up again, the star-captain was holding her gun before her, covering
Jacinthe Siani, who was pressed back against the wall with hands thrown wide,
looking terrified. Serne was emerging from the bushes to one side, Crucero from
the other. There was no sign of Heleb or the last vormyran.

I didn't expect
ever to see either of them again.

The noise of the
insects was beginning to die down, and by the time we were all together it was
possible for us to speak and be heard.

"Nice move,
Rousseau," said the star-captain. "Maybe you'll make a starship
trooper after all."

"I grew up in
low-gee," I said, by way of explanation. "Never did any real
fighting, but I played a lot of games. Guur lived all his life on planets, and
he was careless enough to let me know it. I knew he'd be a sitting duck once he
was off-balance."

I looked down at
Guur's shattered body. There was blood everywhere. It looked no different from
human blood—even the stink was the same.

"I could have
taken all three of them," said the star-captain, matter-of-factly.
"But it was nice of you to help, considering. I suppose you didn't
believe me, though, when I said that he was welcome to you."

"I figured you
were marginally less likely to gun me down than he was. You always intended to
blast him, though, didn't you? All the stuff about co-operating was just to
gain time while these two tidied up Heleb and the last vormyran, wasn't
it?"

"Right,"
she said, already turning away to face Crucero.

"The predator
is clever," I murmured. "The predator deceives."

"What's
that?" she asked.

"Just a little
motto I picked up," I told her. "You were bluffing too, I hope, when
you mentioned charging me with cowardice and desertion?"

"It had
crossed my mind," she said. "But when poor Kally started screaming, I
guess we all thought we were dead. I'll trade off that one against the fact
that you backed me up here—okay?"

She didn't seem
exactly over-generous, but I figured that the result was acceptable.

"What do we do
with her?" asked Crucero, waving his flame-pistol at Jacinthe Siani.

"Kill
her," advised Serne casually. For a moment, he reminded me very strongly
of Heleb.

"Wait a
minute," I said. "She might be useful to me. She's probably the only
one left who can tell the Tetrax the

whole truth about my being framed. I need
her."

"That's
okay," said the star-captain. "She's harmless now, and she isn't
going to give us any trouble—are you?"

Jacinthe Siani
shook her head enthusiastically.

"If you want
her," said Serne, "you can look after her." He slapped a gun
into my hand—a needier, which he'd recovered from one of the dead bodies.

I took it, and
glanced at the part of the forest from which he'd emerged. The noise of the
insects hadn't died away, and seemed to be increasing again. I suddenly
realised why. The moment I saw what was happening, the stink of it cut through
the riot of odours like a knife, and my heart skipped a beat.

"Merde!"
I said,
too softly to be clearly heard.

They saw from my
expression that something was wrong, and the star-captain turned quickly to
look at whatever it was that had alarmed me.

The billowing smoke
was gushing furiously now, filling the margin between the topmost leaves and
the twelve- metre sky, already beginning to blot out the vivid electric lights,
bringing night to the jungle for what might have been the first time in
thousands of years.

"Oh
shit," she said. "I
told
you to be careful."

"I couldn't
get close enough to use the wire," Serne complained. "I
had
to take the bastard out with the flame."

"Let's hope
they have a fire brigade," I said.

The star-captain
didn't want to wait. "This way," she said, pointing along the curving
path which ran its narrow course round the edge of the burning garden. She
began to run. Crucero didn't hesitate, and neither did Serne. Jacinthe Siani
was still backed up against the wall, and though her eyes were fixed upon the
smoke rising from the bushes she didn't seem inclined to move.

"Come
on!"
I said, grabbing her arm. I pulled her away from the
wall and pushed her in the direction which the others had taken.
"Run!"
I commanded.

At last, she ran. I
ran behind her, taking great bounding strides. Unused to the gravity, she fell
over three times, but I kept picking her up and urging her on, thrusting her
forward along the curve of the featureless wall. We both bumped into the wall
more than once, because the path was so narrow, and the reaction of our
bouncing confused even me. We must have fallen thirty or forty metres behind
the others within three minutes.

The fire hadn't
seemed to be spreading very quickly, and we soon outran the smoke, but I couldn't
help remembering the way that the door had closed behind me. As far as we knew,
we were in a sealed cylinder, and we had no real reason to believe that the
people who'd put us there would be inclined to let us out. They hadn't lifted a
finger to interfere when we'd started slaughtering one another—why should they
intervene now to save the killers from the consequences of their shooting
party? I hoped that they might at least care about their hothouse plants, and
would put out the fire if only to save the forest.

I was so
preoccupied with hustling Jacinthe Siani along the narrow track, and with
worrying about the fire, that I didn't realise when the star-captain and her
merry men stopped. I had to bring myself up short when I saw Seme's broad back
in front of me, and even my long experience in low gee wasn't sufficient to
cope with the problem. I missed him, but I ended up sprawled full-length under
yet another bush, away to one side of him.

When I crawled out,
feeling as if there were bruises all over my body, I saw that he'd gone into a
defensive crouch, and that his gun was once again in his hand. Crucero had
already faded into the undergrowth. When I tried to stand up my shoulder was
grabbed by the star-captain, who forced me down again, pulling me sideways into
the cover of a broad-leaved plant.

"What is
it?" I asked, trying to make myself heard over the racket of the insects
without actually shouting. "More vormyr?" I realised that no one had
ever specified exactly how many men Amara Guur had had with him when he was ambushed,
or how many had survived to be captured by robots.

But it wasn't more
vormyr. She didn't reply to my question, but I was close enough to her to see
the avid glint in her eye. I knew then that she'd seen Myrlin.

She let go of my
shoulder, but I promptly grabbed her arm, causing her to look round at me with
a furious countenance. As she tried to shake me off, her lips drew back from
her teeth in a kind of snarl that I'd never before seen on a human face.

"Don't do
it," I said. "He isn't any danger to you. I swear it!"

She tried to shake
me off, but the angry oath that was on her lips suddenly died as the
implications of what I'd said sunk in.

"What the hell
do you know about it?" she demanded. Her face was close to mine; otherwise
I would never have been able to hear the words, which came out in a forceful
hiss.

"I was with
him," I told her. "After we got split up. He told me everything.
He isn't
any danger!"

"He told you
that, I suppose!" she retorted.

He had told me, and
I had believed him. But as I looked at Susarma Lear's sweat-stained face, at
the blonde hair now matted and tangled, and the blue eyes colder than any eyes
I had ever seen before, I knew that there was no way on Earth, or on Asgard, or
anywhere in the universe you could name, that she was ever going to take my
word for it.

"Don't kill
him," I begged. "Please, don't kill him."

I wouldn't let go
of her arm. I don't know exactly why I cared so much. After all, it
was
his word against hers ... or his word against her instincts. What had he done
for me in the few hours we'd been together? What sense was there in my trying
to defend him?

But I did care.
Maybe I had simply reached the end of my tolerance for death and destruction.
Maybe I was suffering from a nasty bout of that old omnivore confusion.

She brought her
pistol round and pointed it at my face.

"If you don't
let go," she said, "I'll blow your fucking head off."

She'd already set the
world on fire—what had she to lose?

There was no
doubting that she meant it. Her special paranoia was well and truly unconfined,
and there was not a thing I could do to contain it.

I let go of her
arm.

Jacinthe Siani was
still out in the open, crouching on the path. Nobody had bothered to pull her
out of the way. She looked very miserable, brought into as much disarray by her
falls and collisions as anyone else. Her hair was a mess and the expression on
her nearly-human face was sheer blind panic. She was staring out along the
curving path, and though I couldn't see him from where I crouched, I knew who
she was staring at.

Susarma Lear had
turned away from me, and I was utterly forgotten.

I guess there comes
a time in every man's life when he does something totally stupid, for no good
reason at all.

I leapt to my feet,
and shouted with all my might: "Run, you bastard,
run!"

Once I was
standing, I could see him. He was seven or eight metres away, in the middle of
an unusually large patch

of bare ground. He had been looking at
Jacinthe Siani, his eyes wide in apparent puzzlement. As I rose, he turned to
me, but he gave not the slightest sign that he had heard what I said, and the
noise of the fire-startled insects was so clamorous that he probably could not
make out the words. It was only the sight of me that had attracted his
attention, and he stared at me as though I was a madman. He did not appear to
be armed, and all he was wearing was a pair of underpants. For all his
gargantuan bulk, he looked supremely vulnerable—the easiest target in the
world.

Susarma Lear rose
in front of me, emitting incomprehensible obscenities. Without the slightest
pause or hesitation she thrust her gun out before her and fired. The
flame-bolts sizzled like fireworks as they shot through the air, striking him
full in the chest: one, two, three.

He went over
backwards, collapsing into himself as the hot gases opened up his pleural
cavity, frying his heart and his lungs.

The star-captain
let out a mighty scream of triumph, and then the sky went crazy too.

All the blazing
lights began flickering and flashing, and I felt for the second time that
nightmarish sensation of having acid poured into my skull. I reached up with my
hands to cover my face, trying to shut my eyes against the assault of the
mindscrambler, but I had no chance.

The last thing I saw
before I was rudely thrust into insensibility was Myrlin's shattered body,
lying with arms outstretched on that patch of bare ground.

It was
shimmering,
like a distorted video-picture about to flicker out
and disappear.

But it was me who
flickered out.

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