Asgard's Secret (16 page)

"He isn't
wanted for murder," I told her. "He's just a potential witness. Even
if he were, they wouldn't try to pursue him. It would be pointless. While he's
on the surface he's visible—don't be fooled by that bullshit about not being
able to identify him—but as soon as he goes down to level one he's out of
reach. They'll wait for him to come back, confident in the assumption that
he'll have to, sooner or later. There's nowhere else for him to go. If he
doesn't come back . . . then they'll stop worrying about it."

She didn't like it,
but she could see the logic of it. "Well," she said, "at least
you
must be keen to catch him now."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because he
killed your friend," she said. "Surely you didn't believe what you
told the gorilla about this Guur character having done it?"

"Amara Guur
did
kill Saul," I told her. "Even the Tetrax must have figured
that
out by now. Myrlin killed the seven guys who were busy torturing him—not, alas,
before they'd gone over the top and left him beyond help. I don't know about
you, but that doesn't actually fill me with indignation. You might call it
murder, but I call it heroism."

Her stare wasn't
quite as wrathful as before, but I figured that was because she was getting
tired. She must have had a very long and trying day. "How do you
know?" she said, eventually.

"Elementary
logic," I said. "Saul went to the C.R.E. to ask for a loan, just as I
did—but he had better bait. He knew the location of a doorway down into level
five, maybe further down than that. Unfortunately, rumours of doorways down to
five are a dime a dozen in these parts. Saul's neither a fool nor a con man,
but when a proposition like that goes before a committee there's bound to be
some idiot who'll throw a spanner in the works. Somebody there knew Saul well
enough to know that he was absolutely reliable, but getting the right decision
through the committee would have needed someone much tougher than Myrlin the

Superandroid. Guur knew a good thing when
he heard the rumour, though, and he went after Saul.

"Unfortunately
for Guur, Saul wasn't alone when the kidnappers turned up, so they had to
snatch Myrlin too. Whether they threatened him with fancy blasters like yours
or shot him with anaesthetic darts I don't know, but they made the mistake of
keeping him alive, in case he knew anything useful.

"One way or
another, Myrlin got his chance to fight back—too late to save Saul, alas. By
the time he'd slaughtered the bad guys and got Saul out, Saul must have
figured that he wasn't going to make it, even with the aid of Tetron medicare.
He had no idea that I was in jail, so he told the android to come to me for
help. Saul and I had reciprocal agreements about making use of one another's
stuff if things went bad. He knew that Guur would have a heavy guard on
his
truck, but not on mine. I don't know whether he made the calls himself or gave
Myrlin his codes, but that doesn't matter. Myrlin should have called an
ambulance as soon as he got Saul out of Guur's clutches, even if Saul told him
not to—but he's a stranger here, and Saul was probably insistent about the
necessity of his making a clean getaway. Saul's one remaining ambition must
have been to make absolutely sure that Amara Guur didn't get the big
prize."

The star-captain
shook her head wearily. "Jesus, Russell," she said. "What kind
of madhouse
is
this?"

"Actually,
it's Rousseau," I said. "As in Jean-Jacques."

She looked at me
uncomprehendingly.

"Du
contrat social," I
said, helpfully. "
Discours
sur les sciences et les arts.
That Rousseau. Not Russell." I
could tell that it meant nothing to her; the French was just so much gibberish
to her uneducated ears, and eighteenth-century philosophy obviously wasn't
numbered among her personal interests. But she did catch on to the fact that
she'd got my name wrong.

"Jesus,
Rousseau"
she said scrupulously, "we've got more
important things to worry about than how you spell your name. So where do
you
fit in?"

It was a good
question. Why, given that he must already have had Saul Lyndrach safe in his
evil clutches—or so he must have assumed—had Amara Guur bothered to send Heleb
and Lema to my apartment to make me a polite offer? And why, after a few more
hours had elapsed but long before Myrlin had run amok, had he decided that the
polite offer had been too tentative and that more extreme measures were
required?

"Saul wasn't
giving in," I said. "Maybe Guur figured that the only way to put
pressure on a man like him was by threatening his friends."

"That doesn't
sound very convincing," she observed accurately.

"You haven't
actually told me yet what
your
interest in Myrlin is," I countered.

Her tone frosted
over. "In the Star Force, Trooper
Rousseau
, it's the
officers who ask the questions."

I decided to be
generous and forgive her; it was, after all, only a few hours since she'd saved
my life. "No problem," I said, stoutly. "But we all need
something to eat. I'm not sure my kitchen can cater for this many—might I suggest
that you send your loyal lieutenant out for a takeaway?"

She didn't like my
tone, but she saw the merit in the suggestion, and she was still leaning over
backwards to be diplomatic—by her meagre standards—because I was the one with all
the local knowledge she needed so badly.

She sent the
sergeant out to buy some food, with a couple of men to help him carry it. I didn't
have enough

chairs for the rest of us to sit down, but
the troopers were obviously used to roughing it. They made no objection when
the star-captain and I sat down on the bed.

"Fire
away," I said.

She frowned at my
choice of words, but she had more important things on her mind than criticising
my sense of humour.

12

"What are these levels you keep
talking about?" was the star-captain's first question.

I was mildly
astonished. I knew that she'd only arrived on Asgard that day, but I'd assumed
that she must know something about it. I'd assumed, in fact, that everyone in
the universe must know
something
about Asgard, even if they had
been busy for most of their adult lives fighting an interstellar war.

"This is an
artefact, not a planet," I said. "It might have a planet inside it,
but all the bits we have access to are artificial. The outer surface is a
shell—one of a series of shells nested one inside another like the layers of an
onion. Nobody knows how many shells there are. The levels are the spaces
between them, which are fitted out as sets of habitats—four or five to a
level—with seemingly independent ecospheres. The differences between them are
subtle, but they seem to fill a similar spectrum to that of so-called
Gaia-clone ecospheres . . . the worlds in which humanoids live. We know of
hundreds of negotiable portals down to level one; they're easy enough to find.
We know of a dozen that give access to level two, and a handful that let us
down to three and four—but the further down you go, the more difficult it is to
explore further. They're very, very cold. People lived there once, but they all
went away."

"Where
to?" she wanted to know.

"Opinions
differ. Some think they went lower down, sealing themselves in against whatever
catastrophe devastated the upper layers. Some think they went outwards, maybe
to colonize all the gaiaformable worlds in the galactic arm— which would make
them the ancestors of the present galactic so-called civilization."

"How long ago
did all this happen?"

"Again,
opinions differ. The evidence seems to be ambiguous, although you'd have to ask
a C.R.E. scientist for details. Millions of years ago, at least—maybe hundreds
of millions, or billions."

"And you say
it's got a planet inside it?"

"No, I said
that it
might
have a planet inside it. It's possible that there are only
half a dozen shells, built as a succession of platforms on a natural surface.
On the other hand, it might be shells all the way down to the centre . . .
well, not
all
the way down, because that would be impossible. Maybe there's a core of molten
iron, as there would be at the centre of a planet. Maybe there's some kind of
giant fusion reactor—a starlet. That would make the megastructure into a kind
of multiple Dyson sphere. Nobody knows, although everyone is trying to find
out. In the meantime, we search the habitats on the accessible levels for
clues, and for new technologies. The Tetrax are very interested in the spectrum
of humanoid technologies. Even when they already have gadgets of their own for
doing the same jobs, they like to study all the different ways there are of
doing things. They're very big on matters of technological
style.
That's why they're interested in your cargo, I presume."

"I see,"
she said. She didn't. My explanation had been the barest thumbnail sketch; I'd
hardly scratched the surface of the fabulous enigma that was Asgard.

The food arrived
then, so we took a break. It didn't last long. She was still avid to get on, even
though she seemed to have accepted the fact that it was now too late to do anything
before morning. I was tired, and so were her men, but she had far too much
agitation churning in her skull to allow her to think of sleep just yet. Her
men made themselves as comfortable as they could on the floor, where there was
just enough space for them all to lie down, given a certain amount of
geometrical ingenuity, but she and I kept going.

"So you've
been out into these levels before—dozens of times, or hundreds?" she asked
me, still trying to grasp the situation into which she'd rushed.

"Must be
nearly a hundred by now," I confirmed. "I've been here a long time.
Mickey Finn and I were among the first humans to get here. It seemed like a big
adventure. It
was
a big adventure. Those were the glory days of star travel—I guess things must
have changed a great deal since the war broke out."

"That's
good," she said. "We're going to need an experienced man. We'll be
depending on you, Rousseau. The Star Force will be depending on you. The human
race will be depending on you. So how soon can we get started? And when I say
how
soon
_}
I want to take your first estimate, cut it in
half, and then shave a bit more off."

"I don't have
a truck any more," I pointed out, a trifle disingenuously. "Even if I
did, I couldn't track Myrlin over the surface. The Tetrax might be willing—and
they're certainly able—to tell you where he is until he goes down to level one,
but after that, it'd be hopeless."

"We'll have to
take him out from space, then," she said. "We can do that."

"No you
can't," I told her. "The Tetrax won't permit
that.
They might help you to chase him, but shooting at the surface from orbit is
absolutely out of the question."

"Nothing is
absolutely out of the question," she assured me, "but we need to stay
on the right side of the Tetrax if we can. So we get them to help us track him.
We chase him. We follow him down into the levels. What next? And I don't want
to hear the word
can't."