Asgard's Secret (32 page)

I found more than I
had bargained for. The ridge proved to be an embankment, and there were rails
running along it. They hadn't been used for a very long time—it was difficult
to guess exactly how long, given that they weren't metallic and that the
encrustation on them wasn't rust, but the important thing was that they really
were rails. Rails have termini, one at each end. Sometimes, they have stations
along the way.

I forgot about
skirting the marsh in search of my old trail, and set out to follow the rails.

I was
half-entranced, and the rails made it easy to slip into a quasi-mechanical
mode. I continued to put one foot in front of the other without giving the
matter any conscious thought, and didn't even bother to look around myself to
any considerable extent. The landscape had become tedious in its seeming
familiarity: trees and more trees, all thickly clad in cobwebs. Had another
predator appeared, I hope I would have been able to react with appropriate alacrity,
but none did.

I was between the
buildings almost before I realised that they were there. I refocused my eyes
abruptly, wondering whether I'd accidentally wandered into a city, but there
were only two of them, one to either side of the track. There was no platform,
and the buildings were in a very bad state of repair, their roofs collapsed and
their walls crumbling. There didn't seem to be any furniture inside what
remained of the rooms that had been exposed by fallen walls—but even so, they
were buildings, of an appropriate size and design to have been erected by
humanoid hands. They warranted farther investigation.

I picked out the
one that seemed to be in a slightly better state of repair, and stepped through
the door into a shadowed hallway.

Then one of the
shadows moved, extended an impossibly long arm, and pressed the muzzle of a
gun to my faceplate.

Unlike the rails,
the gun was made of metal, and it wasn't old. I hadn't the slightest doubt that
if it went off, the faceplate would shatter—and so would my skull.

"Merde,"
I said,
with feeling. No one could hear me, of course. My suit radio was still switched
off.

Having just stepped
into the darkness, I couldn't see the person holding the gun, but I formed the
impression of a mass of shadow larger than any man—or larger than any man
should have been.

He switched on his
headlamp, dazzling me. I felt the pressure of his hand as he removed my
flame-pistol from my belt. When my eyes had recovered sufficiently to begin to
discern the muzzle of his gun again, it was moving over my faceplate in a very
strange manner. I watched it go through the routine twice before I realised
that it was writing out a series of numbers. It took me a while longer to work
out that he was indicating a channel code. I deduced that he was instructing me
to turn on my radio and retune it so that I could talk to him.

I did as I was
told.

"I'm on,"
I said, to let him know I'd done it.

"Mr. Rousseau,
I presume," he said, with the easy confidence of a man who'd just mounted
a successful ambush. He must have seen me coming from a long way off. I hadn't
even seen the buildings.

"You can call
me Mike," I said. "Welcome to Asgard. I did come to see you the day
after you landed, to apologise for my churlishness—but events had moved on. I seem
to have caused us both a certain amount of trouble."

I could see him
now, after a fashion—or his suit, at least. He was enormous, but not beyond the
bounds of everyday possibility. The suit-manufacturer had been able to supply
him out of stock, albeit with a unit that might have sat in the storeroom for a
long time if he hadn't come along when he did.

"That's all
right," he said. "I'm used to trouble. I'm sorry about your truck—and
the body in your bed. I should have called for medical help as soon as I got
Saul out, but I had no idea who my enemies were—and nor had Saul. He thought
the Tetrax had tipped off Amara Guur."

"Somebody
did," I agreed. "I can't believe that it was a Tetron—but the inner
workings of the C.R.E. are a mystery to me."

"Do you know
what happened back in Skychain City?" he asked.

"Not for
certain. The story, as I see it, is that Guur's men came to snatch Saul and
found you there too—asleep, I presume. They took you both along, and put you on
ice while they chatted to Saul. They had the notebook but couldn't read it.
Balidar told them that I might be able to. They checked, just in case—and when
they couldn't break Saul, they launched plan B. It had almost paid off when the
Star Force arrived. By that time, you'd broken loose and indulged in a little
payback—but Saul was past saving so you went on your way. Guur gave us the
notebook. We followed you. He followed us. Did I miss anything? Can I sit down,
by the way? I had a cat-nap, but I'm exhausted."

"Go
ahead," he said. "How did you find me?"

"I
didn't," I said, surprised. "When the star-captain and her men picked
a fight with a giant amoeba I took the opportunity to run. When I got out of
the swamp I found the tracks. I followed them. I guess you did the same."

"How many Star
Force men are guarding the dropshaft?"

"Only one, at
present," I said. "There's another on the surface. Amara Guur could
have passed the first without any trouble, if he wanted to, but getting past
the second will be a different matter. The warship must be able to shuttle more
men down if the need arises, though, and if Guur did pick a fight with the man
they left on the surface to watch the hole, they'd interpret that as need—and
the Tetrax would probably agree. Why? Were you thinking of going back?"

"I'm not
thinking of taking off my helmet just yet," he said. "As you've
doubtless ascertained, the air here has enough oxygen in it to be breathable,
but the biotoxin assay doesn't look promising."

"I hadn't
quite got around to that kind of routine labour," I confessed. "The
star-captain was in a hurry."

"So I heard. I
was able to listen in on you as soon as you reached the bottom of the
dropshaft."

"Really? You
should have said something."

"I didn't know
whether you'd be able to get a fix on me if I started transmitting. The risk
didn't seem worthwhile."

"It was
probably a wise decision," I confirmed. "The star-captain wasn't in a
negotiating mood."

"How much did
she tell you?" he wanted to know.

"That you're
an android manufactured by the Salamandrans, for reasons shrouded in the
deepest military secrecy. She seems to feel that you're a threat to the human
race, but she wasn't at liberty to tell me why. My orders were to shoot first
and not to expect any answers to any questions that I might care to ask, before
or after. I never intended to carry them out—it's not my style. Still—you're
safe now. There's only the two of us left down here, and you have both
guns."

"If only that
were true," he said.

It took me a moment
or two to figure out what he meant. I ought to have realised when he told me to
change channels when I switched the radio on. I was
very
tired.

"One of them's
still alive?" I guessed.

"They're all
still alive."

"Well, praise
the Lord and pass the ammunition. The damn thing must have flowed right over
them. Its juices couldn't pick a hole in their cold-suits. I should have known
that. It was all the screaming ... I bet they're as embarrassed as all hell
about that."

"They've put
it behind them," Myrlin said, drily. "I shouldn't have told you that,
I suppose. Now you can let
them
listen in on
us,
if you care to—but you'd have worked it out anyway, wouldn't you?"

"I'd prefer to
keep things simple," I told him. "Anyway, I'm a deserter now. I suppose
the star-captain is more than a little annoyed about that."

"She certainly
is."

"So we're in
the same boat now, aren't we?" He was way too paranoid to believe it, but
I felt that I had to try.

"I prefer to
keep things simple myself," he told me. "If I shot you, I'd have one
thing less to worry about."

"True," I
admitted. "Why didn't you?"

"Because the
time will come, sooner or later, when the air will have to be tested. No
biospectral analysis is ever as good as a clinical trial."

"You want me
to take my helmet off?"

"Not
yet," he said. "First, I want to find out where the tracks go. There
might be other alternatives. Humanoids lived here once. They still might, even
though the trains stopped running. If they're in contact with other levels . .
. with the builders themselves . . . That's enough rest for now. Get up."

I didn't argue. I got
up, and we moved out of the shadows into the permanent twilight. He looked just
as big out in the open, but he wasn't really a giant. He was just a very big
humanoid—the kind of humanoid a genetic engineer might design if he'd been
asked to provide a blueprint for a warrior, and hadn't quite caught on to the
fact that the last few hundred years of progress had rendered that kind of
physical power redundant. Nowadays, war is all about the kind of hardware you
can carry; weaklings can be supermen too.

Unfortunately, he
had two guns and I had none.

I walked ahead of
him, following the tracks as I had before, fighting to stay alert.

"If Guur's men
were able to get past the Star Force rearguard," he said, "would
they be able to find us?"

"I doubt
it," I said. "They might be able to find the star- captain—Guur's
Kythnan
femme fatale
almost certainly bugged her hair. They bugged the
book too, but I left that behind. I think I'm clean, but it's not impossible
that I picked up some traceable contamination from it."

"Is that why
they gave it to you?"

"Maybe. On the
other hand, they'd run out of time. Plan B had gone up in smoke, and they were
desperate. They had to get things moving somehow. For a Salamandran android,
you speak very good English."

"I was
well-educated," he said. "It was an unorthodox process, but highly
effective. They'd never tried it before, of course, so whoever designed the
technics deserves congratulation. Can we stick to more pressing matters, for
the time being? How many men does Guur have? How dangerous are they?"

"Not
many," I told him. "A dozen, maybe—but that's the number he'll have
started out with when he arrived at the hole on the surface. If he tries to
fight his way past Crucero, he'll take casualties. Then again, they're petty
gangsters, not down-level men. He probably has a couple of scavengers with him,
acting as guides, but you killed at least one of those when you broke Saul out.
He might have lost some men just following the trail down to four. Why didn't
you put that flamer further along the corridor, where it

would have roasted at least one of us when
it went off?"

"Did it go
off?" he said. "When you arrived safely, I assumed that you'd seen
the tripwire." It wasn't exactly an answer to my question, but it was all
I got.

"Anyway,"
I said, "even if Guur does get down here with eight or ten men, he's still
got the star-captain, Serne and Khalekhan to reckon with. She may not know that
he's tracking her, but she won't be an easy target."

"You didn't
warn her that he'd planted bugs on her?"

"No," I admitted.
"I always intended to give her the slip sooner or later, and I figured
that if Guur went after her instead of me . . . okay, so I should have warned
her. We all make tactical misjudgments—we're only humanoid. Silence seemed like
a good idea at the time, but things were moving so fast. It won't make any
difference. She can handle Guur—and the chances are that he won't even try to
pick a fight with Crucero, or risk the booby traps once he knows approximately
where the dropshaft is. Why bother?"

"He wouldn't,
if all he wanted to know was the location of the prize," Myrlin admitted.
"But he does have a score to settle. It's not the Star Force personnel
that Guur wants dead—or you, come to that. It's me.
Everybody
wants me
dead—except, perhaps, for you."

I realised that he
was probably right. Not that Guur would care overmuch about the loss of seven
lives—what he'd care about was the loss of face. If a crime-lord loses seven of
his henchmen, not to mention a kidnap-victim, he has to do something about it,
or look like a fool. People like Guur and Heleb took that sort of thing
seriously.

I looked from side
to side as I led the way, but the tracks were no longer raised on an
embankment. We were no longer skirting the swamp but moving through the
gossamer- embalmed forest. The taller trees loomed large on either side, and
the undergrowth had crept to the very edges of the parallel rails, although the
space between them was still clear. It was an easy road to follow—so easy that
anyone else who stumbled across it would undoubtedly start following it,
unless they had a very pressing reason for going in another direction.