Asgard's Secret (26 page)

"Are we
heading for some kind of city?" asked Khalekhan.

"Probably,"
I told him. "Difficult to tell, sometimes, what's a city and what isn't.
We'll come to a big wall with lots of entrances which give way to a maze of
corridors. Doors by the million—all shut. No way to know how many rooms there
are, or how much is solid through and through. To explore a complex like that
takes a C.R.E. team years— they'll probably be centuries working their patient
way through the big ones at the hub of each system. They've always figured
that there must be dropshafts in the hubs which could take them all the way
down, and that they'll find them in the end, if they're patient enough and
methodical enough. They're probably right . . . but in the meantime, Saul's
hare tactics seem to have prevailed over their tortoise strategy."

We trudged on
across the desolate landscape. Everything showed white in the light of our
torches. The territory was sectioned with geometrical precision, broken up into
diamonds and rectangles, with the pillars holding up the roof sprouting at
each corner. We were walking along the walls that had once separated the
sections, where there had once been carpets or lakes of artificial
photosynthetic, electrosynthetic and thermosynthetic substances. Now there were
only empty holes. The cavies had wrapped up their fields and drained their
reservoirs, and taken it all with them when they had set forth on their exodus
into the interior.

This entire system
had once been a self-sustaining ecological unit: a complete, functioning
ecosphere. Now it was dead, like the surface of a world that had passed through
a cosmic catastrophe or a nuclear holocaust. It was a ghost- world, utterly
abandoned. But had its people simply removed themselves to some other closed
ecosphere, a hundred metres, or a hundred thousand metres, beneath our feet? I tried
to imagine the queue that might have formed at the elevator, and remembered old
jokes about standing on one spot while the entire population of China passed by
in a line
...
a line which could never end, because new
Chinamen were being born faster than the old ones could pass by.

The cavies, I presumed,
didn't have that kind of problem—a race that lived in a closed and sealed
ecology must surely have been able to maintain population stability. But I couldn't
be sure. Maybe I had it the wrong way around. Maybe it was because the cavies
didn't
have a stable population that they had to keep adding layer after layer to the
surface of their world, to supply ever more living space. If that had been the
case, once upon a time, then it was possible that the disaster that pulled
them back from the outer levels was something that happened deep
inside
Asgard, and not the destruction of the outer atmosphere after all.

I tried to stop
thinking about it by telling myself that when we got to the end of our
expedition, we'd have much more evidence to go on, and that it was futile to
speculate in the meantime. But I couldn't stop. The closer I got to the answer,
the more eagerly the question preyed upon my thoughts. I guess I became
preoccupied.

Too preoccupied, as
it turned out.

We came, as I had
anticipated, to a floor-to-ceiling wall—a vast, long face that curved away in
either direction as far as we could see. There was an open doorway in front of
us, scored on either side by Saul Lyndrach and Myrlin: three mysterious
hieroglyphs, two to the left and one to the right. The hole was just wide
enough to steer a sled through.

I was in the lead,
and my attention was split two ways. I looked back at my companions, then
squinted at Saul's marks, all the while teasing the tape with my tongue to
bring it to the precise point at which any relevant comment would have been
recorded.

All the while I was
doing these things I was walking forward without pause, and I never saw the
tripwire that was waiting for me in the darkness just beyond the doorway. I felt
the impedance to my foot the moment I made contact, but by then it was too
late.

I barely had time
to look about in wild panic before something that seemed to my untutored eye to
be the size of a small sun came hurtling out of the darkness toward my head.

22

Fools rush in, they say, where angels fear
to tread.

I can elaborate on
that, by observing that fools trip up where angels would still be on their
feet. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because if there's a flame-pistol
pointed at the place where your face should be, you might be a damn sight safer
tripping up.

A flame-pistol
doesn't actually fire a jet of flame. What it fires is some kind of semi-liquid
artificial plastic which is desperately unstable, and which bursts
spontaneously into flame without requiring an external supply of oxygen. Once
ignited, it burns very quickly and exceedingly hot, so the person at whom the
pistol has been fired is faced with a rapidly expanding cloud of gas. It pays,
sometimes, to be close to such a weapon, because if you duck, it can still miss
you. If you're a bit further away, you have to dive much further to avoid it.

When I tripped over
the piece of rope that Myrlin had left inside the doorway, I was just close
enough. That miniature sun couldn't have missed me by more than ten centimetres,
but it hadn't expanded enough to burn me. The electromagnetic radiation it gave
off wasn't enough to blast a hole in the heavy-duty suit I was wearing. By the
time the second bolt was fired, I was flat on the floor and I
was
determined to stay there until it was all
over.

The flame-pistol
had obviously been set on automatic, because the second bolt was by no means
the last. I lost count after five, but I think the damn thing spat out eight or
ten bolts before it finally gave up. Even at that, the trigger must have
slipped—a fully-loaded flame-pistol carries a lot of ammunition. I waited for
well over a minute, not daring to move, before I finally lifted my head, and
then I came tremulously to my feet.

I turned around,
and looked back at the carnage behind me, half-expecting to be confronted with
the scene of a massacre.

There were great
gouting clouds of gas, smoke and vapour, and great glowing patches where the
ledge along which we had come had suddenly been raised in temperature from a
few degrees Kelvin to a few thousand. One of the sleds had been completely
devastated—it had been turned into a pile of slag every bit as useless as those
million-year-old cars we had passed on the highway. The other one had been too
close to me—the bolts had gone clean over the top of it, without the radiation
doing too much damage.

If the star-captain
and her men had been close enough to me to have entered the tunnel-mouth, they
would have been cooked, but natural caution had held them back. When the firing
started they'd done exactly the right thing, making full use of their
hair-trigger reflexes. They'd moved into the shadow of the solid wall, hurling
themselves forward and sideways so that the bolts had passed harmlessly by,
crouching well away from the explosive impacts which the expanding bolts had
made on the body of the second sled, and hiding their eyes. They were lucky
that they were wearing heavy-duty suits, not the light sterile suits Serne had
described to me as their normal combat gear. Even so, I ordered an immediate
set of tests, to make sure that the radiation hadn't done any fatal damage.

"Rousseau,"
said the star-captain icily, "you're a moron."

"Maybe
so," I said. I actually felt like a moron, for not expecting the tripwire,
and not being properly alert to its presence. "But you ought to thank
whatever god you have that he put the wire so close to the doorway. If we'd
been thirty metres into a narrow corridor, you wouldn't have had a cat in
hell's chance of avoiding those fireballs. You think he's a moron too, or was
that just a warning shot?"

"Can it,
Rousseau," she said, with all her customary charm. "Just tell us how
much we lost, and how much it's going to hurt our chances."

I sighed.

"Well," I
said, "it's certainly not going to help. It's cost us most of our cutting
equipment, and all of our bubbling gear. That means we're going to have
difficulties when we sleep. We'll have to pitch hammocks in the open, and make
damn sure that we don't take a fall. The suits are sound, as far as the tests
can tell, but the material's not really intended to cope with a deluge of
infrared and microwaves. It saved us from being cooked, but its future
tolerance might be affected. We can go on, but all risks are doubled now. Next
time . . . well, next time, whoever goes first had better not trigger the trap.
That's all there is to it."

There wasn't much
more to add to that, and she didn't bother. There was no point in threatening
to do all kinds of horrible things to me if I was so stupid as to get myself
killed. She just had to trust me to be careful. No one else could take over—it
was my territory, and her boys were way out of their depth.

The going got
tougher after that. We eased our way into the corridor, past the point where
Myrlin had fastened the flame-gun to the ceiling, and started picking our way
through the maze following Saul's torchmarks with the aid of my tape. We moved
slowly, always scanning the ground ahead of us. Nobody commented on the obvious
fact that our chances of catching up with Myrlin before he got to the dropshaft
were looking distinctly thin—and nobody suggested that we do anything in
response to that awareness but press on as rapidly as we could.

Before we stopped
to sleep, we found two more tripwires, each one connected to a string that
disappeared into the darkness. Neither of them was attached to anything at
all—they were just mock-ups, set to delay us and to play upon our anxieties.
For an android, Myrlin had one hell of a sense of humour—and he succeeded in
slowing us up.

We slung our
hammocks from plastic frames that touched the ground at the tips of their four
feet. Without our bubbling gear we had no other protection from the cold. The
cold floor couldn't hurt us, of course, while we were insulated from it by a
metre of near-vacuum, and I'd slept that way a dozen times before, but it
wasn't pleasant.

When we started off
again, we followed Saul's directions to a wider corridor, which had two thick
rails raised above its floor—tracks that once had guided monorail trains in
either direction. I was pleased to see them. Tunnels through which trains once
ran tend to be virtually endless, with no closed doors to impede progress. They
also tend to take you to interesting places, like stations. Stations are good
places to hunt around for elevator shafts.

"How much
further?" asked the star-captain, when we had trudged along in the space
between the rails for half a day.

I consulted my
recording of Saul's notes.

"We should be
going down to three within a couple of hours," I told her. "Then
we're
really
in the cold. But we'll only be one more day in the
icehouse. Twelve or fourteen hours after we start again, we'll get to the big
dropshaft.

Saul spent a lot of time down there finding
it for us, but we can go straight to it. We'll be tired, but we can make it
without stopping again."

"Damn
right," she said.

It wasn't quite as
easy as I'd suggested it would be, partly because we found the wreckage of a
train blocking the tunnel. It hadn't posed any real obstruction to Saul, but
that was before the ever-ingenious Myrlin had put an explosive charge in it,
and spread it all over the place. Luckily, he'd blown it into small enough
pieces to make a less-than-efficient barricade. The walls, the ceiling and the
tracks were made of something far too solid to be broken up by the kind of
petard which scavengers carry, so there was no way that Myrlin could engineer a
major cave-in to block our path.