Asgard's Secret (21 page)

"Actually,"
I pointed out, "I've told you a whole lot more than you've told me. I've
told you practically everything I know, in fact—but you still haven't told me
why you're so hell-bent on catching and killing Myrlin."

"It's a
military secret," she told me. "Strictly need-to- know. You don't
need to know. You just have to guide me to him."

"Right,"
I said. "The proverbial Star Force Way. Everybody follows orders, and
shoots when they hear the word 'Fire!' No ifs and buts, just blood and
guts."

"Sometimes,"
she said, "it's the way things have to be done. Sometimes, it works."

"And sometimes
it doesn't," I countered. "This is Asgard. Here, we generally do
things the Tetron way. That works most of the time."

"Maybe
so," she said. "But even here, it's the Tetrax who do things the
Tetron way—not the vormyr or the Spirellans, apparently. Personally, I do
things the Star Force Way—and so do you.
Your
choice was
between my way and Amara Guur's way, and you chose mine. It was a wise
choice—but now you're stuck with it. So stop asking questions that I can't
answer, and tell me exactly what Lyndrach's notebook says. Never mind what it
implies— just tell me what it
says."

Sleep had soothed
her temper for a while, but the kind of stress she was carrying obviously
wasn't the kind you could sleep off in a matter of hours.

"Saul found
some kind of dropshaft," I told her, meekly repeating what I'd deduced
from the notebook. "He managed to rig some ropes so that he could get
down to the bottom, but he didn't have the equipment he needed to cut his way
out. All he could manage was to drill a peephole. On the other side it was warm
and it was
light.
He couldn't see much, because he was looking into a room
inside a building—a deserted building, in an advanced state of dilapidation.
He could see what looked like fungi, plants, insects . . . but he couldn't see
out through the window because it was blocked. Very frustrating. But a building
is evidence of builders—and decay of that sort isn't the work of millions of
years. It implies ..."

"I can do the
conjectures myself. This is where the android's going?"

"He's got
drilling equipment," I said. "If he takes it with him all the way
down to the head of the dropshaft, he can make a way through."

"But we can
catch up with him before that?"

"Probably."

"Probably
isn't good enough," she said. "We have to stop him before he reaches
the dropshaft. If there's light, and life, there's probably a whole world down
there for him to get lost in. He'd be very difficult to find—and we couldn't be
sure that he'll come back any time soon."

"Would that be
such a bad thing?" I asked, innocently.

"Yes,"
she said. "But we
can
catch him. He doesn't have the
detailed instructions that we do. He'll take more time finding his way. We can
catch him before he gets there."

"It's not
going to be that much easier for us than it is for him," I warned her.
"He's a novice, but so are you and your men. We all have to get down to
four, and then trek for miles through the cold. It's going to be difficult for
all of us. He might go astray without our knowing it, so we might get to where
he's going ahead of him—and once he's behind us, he won't be the only one. This
isn't a turkey-shoot, captain."

"It had better
be," she said, ominously. "If he gets away, my superior officers
aren't going to forgive us, nor is the human race, if things go bad some time
down the line." She seemed to remind herself then that this was exactly
what she wasn't supposed to be talking about. She changed the subject, deciding
to give me proof that she
could
do the conjectures herself.
"When you say
building,"
she mused, "you mean the kind of building
that humanoids make. Even through a peephole, you could see that—technological
style being what it is. So if there are people down there, they really will be
people."

"Probably,"
I agreed. "Close kin, if the evidence of the outer layers can be trusted.
Part of the great big humanoid family. In fact, some people think ..."

"That Asgard
is where the humanoid races came from," she finished for me, to
demonstrate her conjectural prowess. "The home of our various
ancestors—and of our common ancestor too. Now that people will actually be able
to get down there, they won't be free to make up any damn story they like any
longer. When the news gets out, it'll kill a lot of idle fantasies. But that's
life, I guess. All the idle fantasies get gunned down in the end."

"Quite a
Romantic, in your own way, aren't you?" I said.

She scowled.
Perhaps she thought I was insulting her. "No, I'm not," she said.
"I have a job to do, but I can't get on with it until I get to where I'm
going. The devil makes work for idle minds—but that's why they call it Asgard,
right?"

"It's why
we
call it Asgard," I confirmed. "The home of the gods. Except that the
Tetrax don't really think in terms of gods the way our ancestors used to do—and
if they ever did, they certainly wouldn't have thought of hard-drinking warrior
gods like the Norse pantheon. The Tetron word some human pioneer translated as
Asgard means something more like 'the essence of mystery'—except that the
Tetron concept of mystery implies a lot more than our word. Maybe 'metaphysics'
would be . . ."

"Okay,"
she said. "As a dictionary-maker, you're a pretty good scavenger,
Rousseau."

She was definitely
insulting me. I tried not to scowl.

"Maybe our guy
got it right and the Tetrax got it wrong," she said. "Maybe Asgard
is
the home of the warrior-gods, ever-ready to do battle." She was still
thinking about those well-concealed, probably non-existent guns.

"I don't know
about ever-ready," I said. "I dare say
you'd
like to think
that there's some kind of Valhalla down there where all good star-captains go
when they die so they can spend eternity committing genocide—but up here it's
been a bitterly cold winter for a long, long time, and in Norse myth that kind
of winter was the prelude to the final battle: the twilight of the gods, before
they all got wiped out."

"Now you're
catching on," she said. "Hold that thought, and you'll begin to see
what kind of universe we're living in."

Her eyes were
harder than steel—maybe as hard as the stuff of which Asgard's fabric is
actually made.
It would be a neat tricky
I thought,
to be able to play the gorgon like
that—
but it wasn't my personal technical style. It was a Star
Force thing.

They'd had giants
in Norse mythology too, I vaguely remembered. The warrior-gods had killed them
all. Or had they?

17

I was driving again when the sun came up.
Susarma Lear was asleep in her bunk, but Serne was sitting beside me, waiting
patiently to take another turn at the wheel. He was fidgeting, although he
couldn't possibly have been unused to long periods of inactivity. Life in the
Star Force had to be ninety-nine percent waiting and one percent action.

When the rim of the
sun suddenly appeared, as a slowly expanding yellow arc away to our right, he
drew in his breath sharply. There had been a silvery glow in the sky for some
little while, but this was different. The sunlight spilled across the plain
like a flood, turning the dead white carpet of snow into a sea of glittering gold.
The sky lightened from jet black to a deep, even blue, uninterrupted by the
slightest wisp of cloud.

Serne shielded his
eyes and tried to look into the glare, but he couldn't bear it. I took two
pairs of sun-goggles from the dashboard compartment and passed one to him.

"It's
big," he observed. "It doesn't seem as bright, but it's . . . very
strange."

"Not much like
home?" I queried.

"Not
much," he agreed.

"It's larger
than Earth's star," I told him. "A different spectral type. Its
association with Asgard is probably a cosmic accident. I suppose you did most
of your fighting in the systems of G-type suns?"

"That was the
territory we were fighting for," he said. "We were always suited up,
though. Even the so-called

Gaia-clones didn't look like home."

"Wait till you
see the sunset," I said. "There's a lot more vapour in the air then,
and the sea of gold's more like an ocean of blood. Very symbolic."

He looked out over
the illuminated plain, drinking in the sight as if he were avid for sensory
stimulation—but there wasn't a lot to see once he'd savoured the changing
colours to the full. The undulations were still so shallow that it looked quite
flat.

"Crazy
landscape," he said. "No benchmarks—trees, hills, whatever. Makes the
distances seem unreal. Driving through limbo."

I called the other
truck to make sure that Crucero had found the eyeshades. He had. He reported
that everything was satisfactory, and made no comment on the quality of the
sunrise or the landscape.

"How long have
you served with the star-captain?" I asked Serne, for the sake of
introducing a human note into the conversation.

He looked at me
suspiciously, as if he thought I might be trying to worm some kind of military
secret out of him.

"Three tours,"
he said, finally. "She was only a lieutenant first time around."

"A long
time," I observed, although the only clue I had as to how long a tour
might be was the casual remark that the latest one had been uncommonly long at
nineteen months. "All the way to the actual invasion, I presume."

"It wasn't
much of an invasion," he told me. "The fleet pounded all hell out of
Salamandra from orbit. The battle in the system lasted a full month, but it
wasn't our show. We only went down to mop up. There wasn't a lot to mop."

"But there
were
survivors—on the ground, I mean."

"Quite a few,
mostly dug in very deep. What was left of the high command had surrendered, of
course, but not everyone knew that. Messy job, at first—then it got tedious.
Picking up litter."

"More relaxing,
though?"

"Too
relaxing," he said, tersely. He didn't add anything, although I gave him
the opportunity of a long pause.

"And then you
came to Asgard, directly from the battleground," I said, taking up the
burden of keeping things going. "A long haul."

He looked at me
suspiciously again. He was right, of course—I
was
trying to worm a
military secret out of him.

"Yeah,"
he said. "Long, but fast. I've been on slower trips that lasted a lot
longer."

"Still mopping
up," I went on, inexorably. "Chasing a lone android who managed to
get off the surface of Salamandra in spite of the odds stacked against him. A
human android, made by alien biotech."

"I wouldn't
know about that," he lied. "I just follow orders. So should you. You
shouldn't give the captain any grief— she's already had more than her fair
share."