Asgard's Secret (22 page)

"No more than
you," I pointed out.

"You shouldn't
give me any grief, either," he told me. "I can't beat the shit out of
you, because you're in my unit— but that doesn't mean that accidents can't
happen."

"Thanks for
the warning," I said, sardonically. "It's bad enough that Amara Guur
and his Spirellan sidekick are after me, without wondering whether my Star
Force buddies are itching to put a bullet in my back."

"We don't use
bullets," he observed. "But no matter how cold it gets, flame-pistols
work just fine."

"I can tell
that you've been under a lot of strain lately," I said, "so I'll try
to tread as softly as I can. I'm not the enemy, though. You wiped out the
enemy, almost to the last not-quite-man. I'm not sure that it's necessary to be
so obsessive about the mopping up. One lousy android can't be much of a threat
to the whole human race, no matter what he did to Saul's kidnappers."

"I just follow
orders," he repeated. "So should you. I mean that."

I didn't doubt it.
He was crazy, of course, but that wasn't entirely surprising, in the
circumstances. There was obviously more to his devotion to his senior officer
than mere military discipline, but that was understandable too, in the
circumstances. There were probably as many women as men on the ship that had
brought Susarma Lear to Asgard, but her little troop was all male, and she had
one hell of a glare when she cared to use it—no bigger than a run-of-the-mill
G-type glare, perhaps, but a lot more powerful.

"I'm very
grateful to the star-captain," I assured him. "She got me out of a
nasty jam back there at the Hall of Justice. I'd never actually thought about
joining the Star Force, but it was definitely the better alternative. I know my
place. You from Earth?"

He shook his head.
"Space-born," he said. "The belt."

"Me too,"
I said.

"Really?
Ceres? I'm from the Trojans." It was the first sign of real humanity I'd
seen in him.

"Vesta,
mostly," I told him. "My father came out from Canada to help build
microworlds, so we moved around the ring a lot. We shipped out of the system
when things became complicated after the contacts, but we were just crew—we
didn't see a lot of the Tetrax or any of the other humanoids. That was when I heard
about Asgard. When the time came to fly the nest . . . well, it was a long time
ago. I'm older than I look."

"I
guessed," he said. "Tetron biotech. Still mortal, though."

"Yes. And no
more durable, at a guess, than you."

"You came here
alone?"

"No. I was
with a party. At first I worked with a guy named Michael Finn—he was Mickey so
I was Mike—but he got himself killed. I thought about going home, but I never
took the plunge. I still have Mickey's ship in dock, but can't afford to fit it
out for the haul."

"You missed
the war," he observed. His voice was level, but somewhere behind the words
there was an accusation. In his carefully-shielded eyes, I was a deserter, or a
draft-dodger.

"Yes," I said,
tiredly. "I missed the war."

This time, the
pause was enough to prompt him. "They never got to Earth," he said.
"The belt wasn't so easy to defend. Must have been more than a million
people there by then. Scattered, of course—but the Trojans were a target.
Everyone I ever knew outside the force was killed."

"I'm
sorry."

"They paid for
it," he assured me.

"I guess
so," I agreed, keeping my tone carefully neutral.

He wasn't fooled.
"You think we shouldn't have done what we did to Salamandra?"

"I wasn't
there," I reminded him—and myself. "I was here, where everybody works
overtime to get along, even with the vormyr. Even the vormyr make the effort,
most of the time. You had your experience, I have mine. If we see things
differently, it's understandable. We can try to get along anyway, can't we?
Isn't that what we're doing?"

"What we're
doing," he said, stonily, "is mopping up." He looked away, out
across the glittering plain, as if he were trying to lose himself in the eerie,
alien radiance. He seemed to me to be already lost. I think he felt that way
too.

18

When I woke up again after my next turn in
the bunk I found the star-captain and her lackey in a bad mood. There didn't
seem to be any particular reason for it—they were just jittery. Nothing was
happening, and they wanted action.

"Have your
people still got a fix on my truck?" I asked, subtly making the point that
if we weren't getting anywhere, neither was Myrlin.

"He's
stopped," Serne reported tersely.

"You mean he's
reached his destination—Saul's portal to one?" I asked. The one thing the
notebook hadn't told me about the journey I had to make was the exact location
of the effective starting-point: the entry-point to level one. That he had
retained in his memory—until he confided it to his belated saviour.

"We don't know
for sure," the star-captain said. "He may be resting—we don't know
whether he needs sleep as much as we do, but he was designed to pass for human,
so he must need
some."

"If so, it
gives us a chance to make up some ground," I said. "Amara Guur can't
be gaining on us."

"We could take
him out
so
easily," Serne said, wistfully. "Just one missile.
It wouldn't even dent the surface, let alone take out any innocent
bystanders—but your friends in Skychain City won't hear of it, and the
warship's captain is playing it their way. He's a frame jockey, of course—not
Star Force."

"The commander
agrees with him," Susarma Lear told him, with a slight sympathetic sigh.
"He trusts us to get the job done. It
is
our job."
Hers seemed an odd combination of resentment and fatalism, less straightforward
than Seme's grim frustration.

"Doesn't this
snow ever melt?" Serne wanted to know.

"Eventually,"
I said. "Nothing happens in a hurry out here. Besides which, it's even
less convenient when it's running water. We'll have to be more careful from
now on. So will Guur's drivers—I don't suppose, by any chance, that they've
suffered any mishaps?"

"No,"
said Serne, as he got up, rather ungraciously, to let me take his seat beside
the star-captain. "They haven't gained an inch—but they haven't lost one
either. I can't see why we don't just shoot and have done with it—take them out
as well as the android. Ten seconds and it's all sorted— we could argue with
the Tetrax afterwards."

"And
communication between humankind and the galactic community would be fouled up
for a couple of hundred years," I pointed out. "The war with the Salamandrans
ruined our image, but at least they started it. Now it's over; we have a lot of
repair work to do."

"They don't
need to track him to find out where he's going once he's reached the doorway to
level one," Susarma Lear said. "Now that you've got the book, they
don't need
him
at all."

"You just
don't get it, do you?" I said, exasperatedly. "They let him through
Immigration Control. He's a citizen. To them, he's entitled to exactly the same
consideration as you or me. The Tetrax take these things seriously. Even if
they thought he was guilty of mass murder on account of what happened to
Balidar and his vormyr friends, they'd consider him innocent until he'd been
proven guilty, and they'd want to put him on trial. This
shoot-first-and-answer-questions-later mentality is doing us enough harm as a
mere display. Gunning down the android in the levels might be getting your
dirty work done out of sight, but don't imagine that the Tetrax will simply put
it out of mind. The whole future of the human species might be at stake
here."

"Indeed it
might," she said, bleakly. "That's exactly what I've been trying to
tell you. You have no conscientious objection to our gunning down the guys who
are following us, I hope? Will that blight our image too?"

"It won't do
us any good," I said, "but the Tetrax might be quietly pleased to see
the last of Amara Guur. They might look on that as doing their dirty work for
them—but they don't have anything against Myrlin. In fact, he probably
interests them for much the same reasons that your warship's cargo interests
them, now that they know he's not human."

"I'd figured
that one out," she said, sourly. "Salamandrans and the Tetrax are
both biotech-minded. The Salamandrans weren't as advanced, but they doubtless
had their own
style.
I listen, you know, and I'm not dumb. Thousands of
humanoid worlds and a whole damn humanoid zoo right here on Asgard—maybe
passengers, maybe slaves, maybe androids. I can see why they might think that
he's a piece of the puzzle. I can understand why they don't want us firing
missiles every which way. But I've got a job to do, and I'm going to do it,
even if I do have to chase the bastard all the way to the planet's core and
annoy the hell out of the Tetrax. Okay?"

"We won't be
going down that far, even if we don't get to him first," I told her.
"We don't have a long enough rope. Saul's shaft probably isn't much more
than ten levels deep—maybe only a couple."

"Good,"
she said. "Let's hope that we don't have to find out." But she hardly
paused before adding: "How many do
you
reckon there are,
altogether?"

"The radius of
the planet is about ten thousand kilometres," I told her. "If it
were hollow shells all the way to the centre there might be a hundred thousand.
Nobody makes a serious guess as high as that, but some are prepared to talk
about tens of thousands. I'm with them—but it's hope, not knowledge."

"What's the
mean density of the megastructure?" she wanted to know.

"About three
and a half grams per cubic centimetre. You'll have noticed that the surface
gravity is approximately Earth-normal, even though Asgard is so much bigger
than Earth. We don't know how to interpret that, of course—the density is
highly unlikely to be uniform, and it could vary any way you can imagine."

She was no
mathematician, but she could do simple mental arithmetic. "If the radius
of this world is half as much again as Earth's," she said, "it must
have twice the surface area, or thereabouts. Even if there were only fifty
levels, each one with not much more than half the area of the surface, there'd
still be as much living-space inside as in fifty Gaia-clone worlds. More, given
that they probably don't go in much for oceans."

"Right,"
I agreed. "And if there are a thousand, or ten thousand ..."

"That's one
hell of a construction job," she observed.

"It would need
a lot of labour," I agreed, "and a lot of time. A biotech-minded
species might well think about androids . . . except for the fact that even
the limited production-lines that humanoid species have ready-built-in tend to
be cheaper to run than any artifice we can imagine."

"Any artifice
we
can imagine," she repeated, adding the emphasis.

"If the levels
are warm and light only half a dozen floors down," I observed, in case her
own mental arithmetic had stalled, "there might be more humanoids inside
Asgard than there are in the entire galactic arm—and more species too."