Asgard's Secret (33 page)

"You're
right," I told him. "I don't have anything against you. In fact, I feel
guilty about not having taken responsibility for you when 74-Scarion asked me
to. It was my fault that you became a target for Guur—and you tried to help my
friend, killing that slimeball Balidar in the process. I don't have anything
against you at all. I might have, if Susarma Lear wasn't so careful of her
military secrets, but I'm not prepared simply to take her word for it that you
have to be killed. I'm an Asgarder, not a starship trooper."

It all sounded
rather hollow, even to me, even though every word of it was true.

"You wouldn't
believe me if I told you the truth," he said.

"That makes us
even," I told him. "I just told you the truth, but you don't believe
me. But I'm not as paranoid as you—and I'm certainly not as paranoid as the
star-captain. If anyone's ever going to believe you, it's me. So why don't you
try me—unless, of course, it's a military secret that you can't divulge."

"All
right," he said, seemingly grateful for the opportunity. "I'll tell
you the story."

And he did.

28

Earth, it seemed, had always had the upper
hand in the war. The Salamandrans had started it, but it had been a desperation
move. The Salamandrans were never a match for Earth's firepower—although they
underestimated the extent of their deficit, and tried hard to conceal it from
the humans when they discovered the awful truth.

Earth's heavy metal
technology was only a little more advanced than Salamandra's, just as
Salamandra's biotech was only a little more advanced than Earth's, but technology
is art as well as science, perhaps
more
art than
science. When it came to the art of war, Earth had the Star Force Way, and the
Salamandrans didn't. Human had more guns, more powerful guns, and much sexier
guns.

The Salamandrans
had a much wider range of biotech weapons, but biotech weapons always have
delivery problems. Tailoring biotech weapons to attack human flesh while
leaving Salamandran flesh untouched was easy enough, but introducing those
weapons to human flesh was a different matter. Biological warfare is
essentially intimate, in a way that heavy metal warfare isn't. In a clash of styles,
heavy metal always wins—but the Salamandrans, having only the history of their
own species to draw on, hadn't quite realised that when they started the war.

They realised it
soon enough thereafter. The Salamandrans had killed a lot of humans in the early
phases of the war, before Earth's high command had figured out exactly what
kind of defences they needed, but they never got to Earth itself. Once the
human defences were properly mobilised, the backlash began—and the Salamandrans
understood soon enough that they were in deep shit.

They tried to fight
a holding action, while they tried to formulate a Plan B. Biotech-minded
species like the Tetrax always tend to take the long view, so they began making
contingency plans for the way they'd have to fight in a second war, a couple of
hundred years down the line, to recover everything they'd lost in the
first—even if that "everything" turned out to include their
homeworld and everything else they held . . . and even if that
"everything" brought them to the brink of extinction.

As I said, the big
problem with biotech weaponry is delivery. Insulation against airborne agents
is too easy. Delivery of a biotech weapon requires personal contact. The
Salamandrans had the lessons of their own troubled history to draw on, and what
those lessons had taught them was that the success of biological warfare
depended on the efficiency of its carriers. So they set out to design carriers
who could take their weapons to the human race: androids, designed not merely
to look like humans but to
be
humans, in every sense that mattered
except one; androids who would believe, as sincerely as any other human, that
they
were
human, and wouldn't even know about that one subtle
difference.

Unfortunately,
androids suffer from the same problems as any other kind of biological
weaponry: their own delivery takes a long time. All the biotech-minded humanoid
races have the technics to make androids, but few of them bother, because
growing and educating an android requires just as much trouble as growing and
educating a person by natural means. If you need slaves, the economical way to
provide them is the Tetron way—but the Salamandrans had other priorities. The
Salamandrans had—or thought they had—a strong incentive for grappling with the
problems of accelerated growth and accelerated education, so that they could
bring their human-seeming androids to full maturity in less than half the time
it took a natural human.

They'd experimented
before, of course, but only in the manufacture of pseudo-Salamandrans. For
humans they needed moderately different technics and a whole new DNA-recipe.
It's not surprising that the trial runs threw up some unexpected glitches. They
would probably have sorted them out if they'd had time.

They didn't have
time. Their holding-action wasn't good enough. The war ended before they'd got
any kind of production-line set up. All they had was the final set of
prototypes.

They were pretty
good prototypes, except for one small detail: the accelerated growth had built
up a little too much momentum. They were too big—not beyond the natural range
of human variation, but close to its upper limit. They would be too easily
identifiable, maybe not in the first instance, but soon enough. One near-giant
might not seem suspicious, but a whole set would be certain to attract
attention and invite careful investigation.

The problems of
delivering biological weapons don't stop with finding carriers, of course. As
soon as a tailored plague manifests itself, defences can be mobilised against
it. Cases can be quarantined; vaccines can be sought. Those plagues spread
furthest that have the longest incubation period—but incubation periods
sufficient to allow an agent to be carried undetected to every corner of a
Gaia-clone world, let alone a fledgling interstellar empire, require the users
of the weaponry to take a very long view indeed.

Even humans had
worked out, while fighting their own petty plague wars, that the most effective
biological weapons—in the long term—were those which debilitated without
killing, so that every sufferer would be a burden as well as an infective
agent. They'd figured out, too, that it mustn't show itself too soon, and
mustn't be too easily identifiable as an enemy agent when it did. The basic theory
required a two-step process: infect first, trigger later.

The Salamandrans
knew all that too. They had built an infective agent into Myrlin and his kin,
but it was a subtle one; it wouldn't run riot for a long time, and when it did,
it would cause a long, slow social meltdown rather than a modern Black Death.

It was a good plan,
in its way, but it had one all-important proviso attached to it. It was a good
plan,
so long as nobody knew about it.
Once someone did, it could be
short- circuited. The defenders didn't even have to devise a defence against
the primary agent, if that proved too difficult; they only had to devise a
defence against the trigger.

As things turned
out, the Salamandran homeworld fell too soon, too abruptly, and far too
messily. They lost, or sacrificed, most of their prototype androids, but they
didn't manage to obliterate every last trace of the program. They provided
Myrlin with a believable cover-story—representing him, of course, as a prisoner
of war—but it wasn't quite good enough. It passed the first inspection, but it
fell apart on closer examination.

When Myrlin was
initially picked up, he was treated as a liberated captive, in spite of his
unusual size, but he never got off the surface of Salamandra—not, at least,
until he had to make his escape, because he'd been spotted for what he was.

Nobody knew the
details of the plan, but the invaders had eventually figured out that there
had
been a plan, and that he was part of it. Nobody knew exactly what it was that
he was carrying, or how it was ultimately to be triggered, or when—but nobody
was overly interested in niceties like that. They just wanted him dead. After
all, from the Star Force viewpoint, he was only an alien android: a bioweapon.

From his own point
of view, of course, things seemed very different. He had been grown in a tank
and his developing brain had been fed by unorthodox methods, discreetly
filled with synthetic memories and stocks of knowledge, but he thought of
himself as fully and authentically human. He didn't want to be a weapon of
war. He didn't intend to be a weapon of war. His only ambition was to be
disarmed, if any disarmament were necessary.

He didn't think it
was. He didn't think that the first phase of the operation had been completed,
let alone the second stage of the programme. He thought that he had never even
been primed to be infectious, and that even if he had, he was a weapon without
a trigger, a bomb without a detonator—but it was in his interests not merely to
think all those things but to believe them with all the passion and certainty
of which a synthetic human mind was able.

Even if he had been
primed, he explained, he wasn't a problem that needed to be solved the Star
Force Way. He could be disarmed. He could be quarantined. In fact, he had only
escaped from custody in order to get himself disarmed, and quarantined. He had
come to Asgard because the Tetrax were the cleverest biotechnicians in the
humanoid community—and because there were so few humans here.

"You were
never in any danger, Mr. Rousseau," he assured me. "Even if you'd
taken me in, you'd have been in no danger. Saul Lyndrach was in no danger
from me—
although he was, alas, from others."

Well,
I thought, when he told me that,
you
would say that, wouldn't you?

What I said aloud
was: "It's personal, isn't it? You and the star-captain. She was the one
who liberated you. She was the one who mistook you for a Salamandran prisoner
of war. It was a natural mistake, but she thinks she screwed up. She's trying
to make amends—to finish the mopping up. She thinks you might have infected
her—her and all her men."

"No!"
he
said. "They never took off their battle-suits. They didn't dare. No one
who came down to the surface of Salamandra and into the bunkers was licensed to
breathe the air or touch the surfaces. I haven't infected anyone. But you're
right—it
is
personal, for her. She was the one who liberated me."

"Saul wasn't
wearing a battle-suit," I pointed out. "Saul, whose dead body you
left in
my
bed. I wasn't wearing a battle-suit when I found him. Nor was
Susarma Lear."

"I haven't
infected
anyone,"
he insisted. "I hadn't been primed. Even if I had,
the infection would be harmless. There isn't a trigger. Even if there was, it
wouldn't be timed to go off for a long time.
I'm not dangerous
,
Mr. Rousseau."

I didn't doubt that
he believed it, or that his belief was absolutely unshakable. But that didn't
mean that it was true. On the other hand, it did make sense. Even the worst
situation imaginable wasn't that bad. There was plenty of time to take
precautions, if any turned out to be necessary. There was no reason for the
Star Force to be so intent on hunting him down and killing him—except that that
was the Star Force Way, and that Star-Captain Susarma Lear had made a mistake
she was extremely keen to repair.