Asgard's Secret (31 page)

I had expected to find water, and it didn't
take long for the expectation to materialise. There was a lot more of it than I
had anticipated, in fact. It didn't look deep, but it looked distinctly
noisome—stagnant was too weak a word to do it justice.

Myrlin's trail led
us straight to it, no more than six hours' march from the bottom of the
dropshaft. Perhaps, once upon a time, it had been a system of reservoirs or a
vast hydroponic farm. Now it was a swamp whose waters were as thick as soup,
choked with drifting mats of vegetation and pockmarked with small islets
crowded with skeletal dendrites decked out with the usual anaemic tinsel. The
air was thick with flying insects. Every now and again marsh gas would bubble
to the surface, sending slow ripples across it.

"Pity we
didn't pack a boat," I murmured, as we stood contemplating the dimly lit
vastness of the swamp. Our eyes were well-accustomed to the twilight, but the
visibility was a lot poorer over the still water.

"Shut up, Rousseau," said the star-captain. What
she meant was:
don't bother to tell us that we've lost
any chance we ever had of finding him.

I didn't have to.
"We couldn't track a bulldozer across that," Serne observed.

"Shut up,
Serne," said the star-captain. "We're not giving up. We are not going
back to report that we simply stopped trying. When our life-support systems
reach the

limit of their range, we can turn back. Not
before."

It was obvious,
though, that she no longer expected to catch up with Myrlin. He must be
extremely weary by now, but he'd done it. He'd beaten her.

"Follow
me," the star-captain said, in her most determined tone.

She was out of her
mind, but I hadn't the courage to tell her so. She walked slowly into the
water, testing its depth as she went, heading directly away from the shore. I assumed
that she would try to guess as best she could which way Myrlin would turn,
given that he'd have to avoid the islets and the floating mats.

She was no more
than thigh-deep when the bottom leveled out.

"Look!"
she said, triumphantly, pointing at the fringe of one of the fibrous masses; it
had certainly been disturbed, probably by Myrlin. I had to grant that we might
not be
entirely
lost, until we got far enough out to find larger expanses
of open water.

I sighed, and
walked into the water after the others, still content to bring up the rear but
not yet ready to turn tail and run. It was laborious ploughing through the
murky water, but I wasn't afraid of getting out of my depth. If necessary, I could
have walked along the bottom in my cold-suit with a metre of water over my
head. I did pause to wonder whether there might be creatures lurking below with
teeth like sharks or crocodiles, or drilling worms, but I figured they'd just
get toothache if they tried to get through the fabric.

Susarma Lear shouted "Look!"
three times more—and I could hear the hope creeping back into her voice—while
we covered another kilometre or so. We were moving more slowly now, no longer
in a straight line, and I was getting very tired—but I knew that Myrlin had
been going without sleep a lot longer than I had, and I could hardly blame the
star-captain for conserving the hope that we might find him fast asleep on an
islet at any moment.

Eventually, though,
we came to a much greater expanse of open water, and the signs of Myrlin's
passage vanished entirely.

The wild goose had
flown.

"We'd better
rest a while," the star-captain said. Her voice had the texture of ground
glass, but she still wasn't prepared to say out loud that she admitted defeat.

"If you were
to report that you'd caught and killed him," I pointed out, delicately, as
we sprawled on the last of a chain of islets, looking out over the placid lake,
"no one would ever know the difference."

"That's not
the Star Force Way," she said, severely.

"This isn't
Star Force territory," I told her.

"The Star Force
doesn't have
territory,"
she informed me, frostily. "But wherever
the Star Force goes, it does things the Star Force Way."

"Sure," I
said. "If you don't win the Star Force Way, you lose the Star Force Way.
No ifs or buts, just—"

"I heard the
joke the first time, Rousseau," she said. "I don't want to hear it
again. Here's the plan. We make our way back to the edge of the swamp as
quickly as we can, and then we make our way
around
it. He's got
to come out somewhere. It's just a matter of picking up his trail there."

I suppressed a
groan. I suspect that I wasn't the only one. I began to shake my head instead,
and then I stopped, because my eye had caught a movement in the dark surface of
the lake. It was a ripple, rolling in towards the shore.

It was a very big
ripple, and it wasn't alone.

"Captain,"
Serne
whispered. He'd seen it too, and he

was drawing his gun even as he spoke.

I didn't reach for
mine. They were only ripples, even if it did look as if whatever was causing
them might be vast.

We all waited for
something substantial to break the surface, but it seemed just as vitreous as
ever, even though it had a curiously marbled effect, and no longer seemed quite
as flat as it had been.

Whatever was there
had to be moving under its own power, because there was no current for it to
drift on, but it was hard to figure out exactly where it might be or exactly
how fast it might be moving.

Khalekhan had drawn
and raised his gun, but he lowered it again. "There's nothing—" he
began—but Serne had leveled his own weapon; he was taking aim.

All I could see was
murky water. Nasty water, but only water—except that it wasn't.

It was obvious now
that the surface was no longer flat, but it really did seem as if the lake
itself had come to life, and that it was the water itself that was flowing
towards us. It wasn't the water, although it was just as transparent, and
seemingly just as fluid. It was something very big and very strange, oozing
along the bottom of the lake, but now that it was close it was rearing up like
some kind of giant domelike wave.

There were thin
pinpricks of light inside it.

It was a gargantuan
blob of protoplasm: an amoeboid leviathan. It must have been more than sixty
metres across, although it probably wasn't round; it probably wasn't any easily
definable shape.

The pseudopods were
already out of the water, flowing at us like giant hands with too many fingers.
"Flowing at us" doesn't sound all that threatening, but I felt well
and truly threatened.

So did Serne. He
had already opened fire, and he had altered the setting of his flame-pistol, so
that it was letting out great gouts, like the gun in Myrlin's trap, rather than
the delicate beam he'd used to kill the spiky predator.

Khalekhan raised
his gun again. So did Susarma Lear.

My own instinct was
to flee. I danced backwards, away from the groping jelly. It was like trying to
jump out of a stream of treacle, but I managed to haul myself away, and once I was
free I could move faster than the protoplasm could flow, at least while I was
still on the islet.

I'd like to be able
to say that I knew that my moment had finally arrived, and that I was boldly
and gladly seizing my opportunity, but it wouldn't be true. The Star Force code
compels me to admit that I simply panicked. While three tongues of lethal fire
turned substantial—but relatively tiny—parts of the amazing creature to murky
steam, I ran like hell.

If the creature had
had a brain, Serne would doubtless have picked it out and made his fire-power
tell—but it didn't. It kept on flowing, the coenocytic mass splitting here,
there and anywhere in response to the flame-flood, but not dying. The creature
didn't mind being boiled and sliced, and it was very, very big indeed.

I only glanced back
the once, to see the glutinous grey gel flowing up and up and up the legs and
torsos of the intrepid soldiers of Old Earth; then I concentrated on making my
own escape. I plunged into the water on the far side of the islet and kept on
going, heading for the next in the chain. I crossed that one, and the next, and
the next.

A scream was
ringing in my ears. There were probably three voices, but there was only one
interminable scream. It wasn't a scream of agony or anguish, but of pure
unadulterated horror. I tolerated it for what seemed like twenty or thirty

seconds, and then I switched off the radio.
It was easier, then, to keep on going. I was safe, but I kept going anyway. I was
alone, and I was free. Their game was over, and the only one left to play was
my own.

27

In the urgency of my flight from the lake
monster I had come well away from the trail the four of us had blazed as we
followed the fugitive indications of Myrlin's passage. I wasn't even sure of
the direction I had taken, or which direction we had been facing after all our
zigs and zags in the swamp.

I was lost—but
after cursing myself briefly, I calmed down. I figured that I had to be heading
back in the direction of the edge of the swamp, and that wherever I came out,
I'd be able to follow the star-captain's last plan and make my way around
it—partially, at least—before retracing my steps and trying the other
direction, until I found the place where we'd gone in. I had plenty of time;
there was no problem, provided that I didn't encounter any more nasty denizens
of the swamp.

To keep myself
company I tongued in the music tape that I always had set up in my helmet. It
helped to steady me, because it restored the familiarity of the situation, to
the extent that it could be restored. I was alone, in semi- darkness, beneath
the surface of Asgard—and that had become, in the course of the years, the
existential situation of the real me.

I began to feel
confident, and even slightly cheerful. I had made the great discovery at last.
I had found the way to Asgard's heart.

I put the
star-captain and her troopers out of my mind. I blotted them out of my
consciousness and memory. They had interrupted the course of my destiny, and
now they were gone. I was back on track. I couldn't afford to dwell on the
tragedy that had overtaken them; I had other things to think about, and new
plans to make.

Eventually, plan
one paid its first dividend. I reached the edge of the swamp. It was only then
that I realised how utterly exhausted I was. I put a good ten metres between
myself and the water's edge, and I sank down on to the ground, lying there
quite still, listening to the music.

I didn't really intend
to sleep, but I couldn't help drifting off into a doze.

I didn't sleep for
long—not long enough, in fact. I was still very tired when I forced my eyes
open and sat up again. The music was still playing. The pipes in my suit had
kept right on pumping nourishment into my bloodstream and carrying my various
wastes away. The oxygen/nitrogen mix had continued to flow into my headspace,
always carefully refreshed, purged of carbon dioxide. The music had soothed my
auditory canals like a drug.

I forced myself to
my feet and took stock of my situation. I could see further here than I'd been
able to while trekking through the forest earlier. There was a slope, and a
ridge that seemed to be skirting the marshland. I went up it, confident that
I'd be able to get a much better view from the top.