Asgard's Secret (17 page)

"What do you
expect me to do—follow his footprints in the snow?"

"If that's
what's necessary," she said. "And don't ever lie to me again, Trooper
Rousseau. I don't like it. Believe me, now you're in the Star Force, you don't
want to get on the wrong side of your commanding officer. How soon can we get
the truck ready to depart?"

She was crazy, but
she wasn't a fool. I saw my mistake immediately. I'd told the Tetron
peace-officer that I didn't know where Saul's truck was, but I'd told her
en
passant
that he and I had had a reciprocal arrangement. He'd had
the codes necessary to get into my apartment and secure my keys. I had the
codes necessary to get into his and secure his.

It occurred to me
then that the peace-officer must also have known that I was lying. He hadn't
taken the trouble to ask me where the truck was in the hope that I'd tell him,
but in order to let me know that
he
didn't have it.

The Tetrax had no
intention of chasing Myrlin—but they had no objection to letting me do it, if I
were crazy enough. Their hands might be tied by their own law, but they must
have figured out by now that Saul Lyndrach had really been on to something, and
they didn't want some mysterious outworlder monopolizing the discovery any more
than they wanted Amara Guur to get his dirty hands on it. The game was bigger
than I'd imagined—and the bigger it got, the smaller its hapless pawns came to
seem.

"Merde,"
I murmured.

"Never mind
that," the star-captain said, mistaking the reason for my distress.
"How soon can we start?"

"What are you
going to do with the android if you catch him?" I wanted to know.

"Kill
him," she replied. It didn't surprise me.

"Why?"

"How many
times do I have to tell you, Trooper? I give orders; you follow them.
How
soon?"

"I still say
that it's impossible. If he knows we're following—and he's bound to suspect
that
someone
will, even if he doesn't know you're here—he'll cover his
tracks."

"In that
case," she said, "we'll have to make sure we use a big enough bomb to
get him while we still can." She was smiling, but I knew that she was
threatening me. If I wasn't going to help her, she was implying, then she would
have to take extreme measures, no matter what the cost.

I'd already
concluded that she was crazy, but I hadn't quite realised how crazy she was.
She still had a big moral credit balance, though. I had to try to help.

"The Tetrax
really aren't going to let you bomb Asgard," I told her, as gently as I could.
"Even if you can pinpoint Myrlin's position without their help, they'll
put political pressure on your commander that he'd be insane to resist. Having
just brought one humanoid species to the brink of extinction, you're probably
prepared to take on anyone and anything by the same means, but the United
Governments and Military Forces really wouldn't like it if you upset the
Tetrax. They have a
lot
of friends. We're effectively outnumbered by . . . oh, let's
say five hundred million to one, although that may be a conservative estimate,
given that we don't really know how far around the rim galactic civilization
extends. You have big responsibilities, Star-Captain Lear, and I know you want
to discharge them sensibly. You've come to me for local knowledge. So trust me
when I tell you you'll need to think long and hard before you so much as take
the safety-catch off your flame-pistol while you're on Asgard. If you're lucky,
the peace-officers won't have left any recording devices behind to spy on this
conversation—and if you're really lucky, they won't take it seriously even if
they did—but if I were you, I'd stop talking about the possibility of your
starship opening fire. It isn't going to happen."

The silence that
descended then seemed very heavy indeed. It was as if the sleeping troopers had
stopped breathing—as if they were spellbound, waiting for the star-captain to
explode.

She didn't.
"Trooper Rousseau," she said. "This is a private conversation,
protected by military confidentiality. I'm just trying to impress upon you the
seriousness of our mission. We need that android dead—and when I say
we,
I mean the human race. I have to kill him—and you're right. I need you to tell
me how to do it, so I'm being extra nice to you. But if you don't start being a
lot more helpful, you have no idea of the depth of the trouble you'll be in. So
tell me—
when
do we start?"

There are some
people you just can't argue with. Not all of them are Tetrax. I had already
started formulating a timetable in my head when I was interrupted by the trill
of the wallphone.

I leapt to my feet,
extremely grateful for the opportunity to get away from Susarma Lear, if only
for a moment. I tripped over three recumbent troopers on my way to the phone,
but I got there in the end.

My gratitude
drained away as soon as the caller's image appeared on the viewscreen. It was a
vormyran.

All vormyr look
alike to the inexpert human eye, but I didn't need three guesses to figure out
who this one was.

"Michael
Rousseau?" he inquired, in awkwardly broken parole. "My name is Amara
Guur. We need to talk."

13

Politeness required that I should switch on
the eye above my own phone so that Amara Guur could see me too, but I didn't
bother. I felt that I could happily live out my life without ever letting him
see my face.

"What do you
want?" I asked harshly.

He smiled. Unusual
for humanoids, the vormyr are a predatory species, irredeemably carnivorous.
I'd been told that they had very bad breath, and it was easy enough to imagine
that, even though I was only looking at a picture. Guur looked like a cross
between a wolf and a crocodile, slightly favouring the reptilian side of the
family. It wasn't a harmonious combination. His smile was unattractive in the
extreme.

"I'd like to
discuss some matters of mutual interest, if you're willing."

"I'm
not," I told him.

He didn't seem put
out.

"I can
understand that," he said. "It has come to my attention that you feel
that I am in some way responsible for your recent troubles. I can assure you
that I am not, but I should like to make a gesture of good will in any case—a
small gift, to assure you of my friendship. It cannot make up for your
unfortunate experience, of course, but I think you might be very glad to
receive it." His accent wasn't incomprehensible once I'd got used to it.

"I don't want
it," I said.

"I think that
you do," he retorted. "In any case, it belongs to you by reason of
both legal and moral entitlement—if, as I understand, you are the sole
beneficiary of Saul Lyndrach's will. Not that I had anything to do with his
unfortunate demise, of course—I have offered the peace- officers my full
co-operation in the matter of apprehending the homicidal giant."

"What the hell
are you talking about?" I demanded. I had to use the English word for
"hell," but he got my drift. He smiled again.

"It is a small
item that . . . happened to come into my possession." So saying, he lifted
something up to his phone's eye so that I could see it. It was a black-bound
notebook. It had to be Saul's log, containing his personal record of his last
trip. It had to contain the location of the doorway down to level
five—encrypted, I presumed. Obviously, Simeon Balidar hadn't been able to
decipher it, and Saul hadn't been willing to divulge the key even under extreme
pressure. Amara Guur obviously thought that I had a better chance of cracking
the code—which explained why he thought we should talk, but not why he was
apparently ready to make me a gift of the book, and to risk displaying it on a
phone-channel that was almost certainly being monitored by the police. I presumed
that he was lying, laying down bait for the next phase of the game.

"Put it in the
post," I said.

"We don't have
time," he replied. "I can send it by courier, or you can come and
collect it, as you please. To be perfectly honest, I would rather not run the
risk of a courier being intercepted by . . . other interested parties. If you
would care to name a public meeting-place, where two innocent citizens could
meet without fear of interference, I shall be happy to bring it there myself.
You are welcome to bring your military escort with their flame-pistols at the
ready. If it will help you to reach a decision, your companions might care to
know that it will assist them greatly in their pursuit of the multiple murderer
Myrlin."

Susarma Lear had
overheard every word. She shouldered me out of the way, and said: "I'll be
in that square near the foot of the skychain in whatever the local equivalent
of twenty Earth minutes is," she said. "On the steps of the building
where we found Rousseau this morning. Don't keep me waiting too long."

"I am
delighted to know that Mr. Rousseau has such decisive friends," the
vormyran said. "I look forward to meeting you in person."

He broke the
contact.

"Thanks a
lot," I said. "He might still have time to set up a trap, even on the
steps of the Hall of Justice. It's nighttime out there, you know."

"Don't be
paranoid," she said. "Anyway, you don't have to go. I'll even leave
Serne to look after you, if you want." While she was speaking, she started
kicking her men, although most of them had been woken up when I tripped over
them on the way to the phone, and they'd all started paying attention when
she'd walked over them to shoo me out of the way.

"It can't be
as straightforward as it seems," I said. "If that book has directions
to where Myrlin's going, why would Guur hand it over to us?"

"I don't
know," she admitted. "But I know the easiest way to find out. Are you
ready to go?"

"You just said
I didn't have to!"

"Yes, I did—but
that's like accusing you of being a coward. You're a trooper in the Star Force
now, Rousseau— when someone suggests that you might be a coward, you're
supposed to show them that they're wrong. That's a little local knowledge for
your
edification. Now
move."
Her men didn't seem in the least perturbed by the
fact that they'd only had the briefest of cat-naps. They were already moving.

"Do I get a
flame-pistol?" I asked, bitterly.

"Not
yet," she said. "But if you come through this little expedition like
a good Star Force man, I'll think about it."

We attracted a
certain amount of attention as we made our way through the streets, even though
it was the dead of night. The Tetrax set the clocks, but other species'
circadian rhythms weren't always able to comply. There were enough people about
to be seriously inconvenienced as we hurried along, considerably faster than
the moderate pace at which the road-strips ran. Usually, people who ran on the
moving strips, barging past other pedestrians, attracted a continual barrage of
loud complaints, but there's something about bulky sidearms that reduces all
complaints to mute resentful stares. We attracted a good many of those.

As we went, the
star-captain made further plans.