Asgard's Secret (9 page)

There's an
addictive aspect to card playing, which keeps losers in the game when the voice
of reason tells them they should quit. It also keeps winners in the game, even
when the voice of reason is whispering that something suspicious is going on. I
don't think the Sleath would have let me go even if I'd tried, but the fact is
that I didn't try. I just kept on playing, until he threw the last of his
bankroll into the pot.

It was a bad bet,
and he duly lost it—to me.

That was when he
accused me of cheating.

I wasn't scared. He
was adapted for fast movement in an environment where the gravity was only
four-fifths of Asgard's surface gravity, and he was such a puny specimen of his
kind that he had to wear supportive clothing just to get around. Anyway, I thought
I could calm him down, with a little help from the Zabarans.

"It's just a
run of bad luck," I lied, as soothingly as I could. "Your day will
come—and it's just loose change. Hardly enough to buy a meal and a couple of
rounds of drinks."

The Sleath turned
to the Zabarans. "They are in it together," he said, pointing at
Balidar, who'd dealt the fatal hand. "He has been throwing his friend
perfect cards ever since I sat down."

The Zabarans looked
down at their own depleted stocks of cash, but they shook their heads. They had
no intention of backing him up. That annoyed him even more.

"You are in it
too!" the Sleath said. "This whole game is fixed."

"You obviously
know these people better than I do," I pointed out. "I just bumped
into Simeon by chance. I've never seen either of these two before. You didn't
get good cards, I'll grant you—but you didn't exactly play them well, did
you?"

That was a mistake.
The Sleath let out a torrent of verbiage in his own language, which was
presumably a concatenation of curses, and then he pulled a knife.

I got up and moved
away, grabbing my chair as I did so and making sure it was between us. He
hesitated for a moment, and I hoped he'd thought better of it, but then he
lunged. I plucked the chair off the ground and used the legs to fence him off.
I clipped his wrist with the tip of one leg, but my only concern was to make
sure that he couldn't get at me with the knife—it was his own fault that he ran
his face into another leg and poked himself in the eye.

The howl he let out
had far more rage in it than pain, so I figured that it wasn't going to stop
him. I jabbed at him, catching him in the chest and the forehead. He fell over,
but he hadn't actually been knocked down, and certainly wasn't unconscious.

For the moment,
though, he'd lost interest in trying to impale me. He wasn't in any hurry to
get up. He dropped the knife, quite deliberately, to signal that he'd given up.

The door to the bar
was behind me. I heard it open, but I didn't turn round until I was certain
that the Sleath wasn't going to change his mind again. When I did, I was all
set to tell the bartender that everything was okay and that there was no need
to call a peace-officer.

The bartender was
there, but he wasn't alone. There were two Spirellans with him: Heleb and his
little brother.

I was confused, but
the feeling I'd had that things weren't right suddenly increased by an order of
magnitude. I was still holding the chair, and I abandoned any thought of
putting it down. I looked at Simeon Balidar, expecting a little moral support.
He was studiously looking at the ceiling, absent-mindedly shuffling the cards.

I looked back at
Heleb. He met my eye. I looked away immediately, but I knew that it was too
late.

"Hello
again," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "I'm still thinking
about your offer."

The bartender
closed the door behind him, leaving Heleb and Lema on the inside. It was the
only door there was, and the room had no window. I looked at the two Zabarans,
but they were backing off. The Sleath had been right. They were all in it
together—but he wasn't the sucker the trap had been set to catch.

"I get the
message," I said to Heleb. "You really want me to join your
expedition. This wasn't necessary, you know—it was probably the best offer I was
going to get."

"Everyone
knows that humans are barbarians," Heleb observed, in his
scrupulously-pronounced parole, "but cheating at cards is not the kind of
conduct that can be tolerated in a civilized society."

The Sleath was
getting to his feet now, with a new gleam in his eye. He didn't seem to be in on
the conspiracy—he thought his irrational convictions had just been proved
right. He didn't pick up the knife, though—he just leaned over the table to
pick up the money I'd had in front of me.

"It's not all
yours," I pointed out, mildly.

"It would have
been," the Sleath said, "if the game had been honest."

"No it
wouldn't," I said, speaking softly even though it was pure indignation
that made me do it. "You're a truly terrible player, and the sooner you
face up to that, the better."

He probably
sneered, but I couldn't tell. He picked up the money—all of it.

I didn't try to
stop him. I knew that it wasn't worth it. I didn't look directly at Heleb
again, either—but I saw him coming out of the corner of my eye. I still had the
chair in my hand, so I lashed out with all the force I could muster.

Unfortunately, I was
cramped for room. He was expecting it, of course, and he was trained in unarmed
combat. He grabbed the chair legs and twisted, adding his own strength to the
force of my awkward thrust. If I hadn't let go, I'd have gone crashing into the
wall.

I dived for the
door, but even if I'd got past Heleb, Lema would still have been in the way.
One of them hit me on the back of the neck with a rigid hand.

I was on my knees,
dazed but not unconscious. I put both my hands on top of my head and tried to
curl up into a ball, but it was no good. Stiff fingers closed on my neck,
groping for the carotid arteries.

The trouble with convergent
evolution
,
I thought, as I passed out,
is that it makes us all anatomically
similar without making us all equal. It just gives the bad guys transferable
skills.

5

I woke up with a terrible hangover, reeking
of some kind of aromatic liquor. It took me several seconds to remember that
I'd only had a couple of drinks, and that neither of them had contained
anything that human taste-buds would deem exotic.

The insides of my
eyelids were red, and I spent another few seconds wondering whether that might
be a symptom of something dreadful. Then I realised that, wherever I was, the
lights were on—and very bright. I struggled to unglue the eyelids, squinting
until the dazzle faded. Unfortunately, the headache didn't. When I managed to
sit up and look around, I discovered that I was in a cell. The floor and
walls—one of which was made of clear glass—were spotlessly clean. There was no
mistaking the Tetron workmanship.

I was on a
low-slung bunk. There was no mattress, but the surface was smart enough to
soften up when someone lay down on it; the dent my recumbent body had left was
slowly evening out. At the third attempt I managed to stand up. The glass wall
was solid, although there was a marbled section just above head height that was
emitting a stream of fresh, cool air. I stood on tiptoe to let the current stir
my hair. I contrived a couple of deep breaths that didn't fill my lungs with
the sickly stench. Then I banged on the glass with my fist.

During the two
minutes that it took for the guard to respond to my summons I reconstituted
the memory of the fight in the bar. It didn't seem so terrible—but I knew that

I'd been set up by Amara Guur, and I knew
that things had to be a lot worse than mere memory could tell me.

The guard was a
Tetron, dressed in the sort of informal uniform that almost all Tetrax wear,
whether they're street- sweepers, public administrators or
schoolteachers—except, of course, for the ones that are wearing formal kinds of
uniforms, like policemen.

"What time is
it?" I asked.

"Thirty-two
ninety," he replied. I'd slept through most of yesterday and a fair slice
of today.

"How did I get
here?"

"The police
brought you."

The answer was a
trifle over-literal, but my head was hurting too much to allow me to frame one
that might elicit the information I needed. All I could manage was: "Where
from?"—which was pretty stupid, because I knew that too.

He didn't.
"I'm afraid that I haven't read the arresting officer's report, Mr.
Rousseau. Would you like me to display a copy on the wallscreen?"

"Later,"
I said. "Do you happen to know what I'm charged with?"

"Murder,"
he told me.

It should have been
a lot more surprising than it was. Even though it wasn't particularly
surprising, the sound of the word made me want to vomit.

"Who am I supposed
to have murdered?" I asked, hoarsely.

"A person
named Atmin Atmanu."

"The
Sleath?" I hadn't even known his name; somehow, slimy Simeon Balidar had
forgotten to introduce us.

"I believe Mr.
Atmanu was a Sleath."

I groaned, but I didn't
bother to tell him that I had been framed. He was a Tetron, and he would simply
have reminded me that I would be presumed innocent until I'd actually been
proven guilty in a court of law, just like any other item of filthy scum the
peace-officers swept up from the gutter. Not that he'd actually have
said
the last part, but he'd have reminded me anyway.

"I need to get
cleaned up," I told him. "Then I need something to soothe my aching
head. Then I need a lawyer—can you find me one?"

"The
control-panel operating the bathroom facilities is located at the head of the
bed," he told me, patiently. "The cubicle has a medicare facility,
although you will have to volunteer a second blood sample if you require
controlled drugs. Did you have any particular lawyer in mind?"

"No. Can you
call Aleksandr Sovorov at the Co-ordinated Research Establishment and tell him
that I'm here? He probably knows half a dozen lawyers who'll take humans as
clients, if there are that many in Skychain City."

"I will do
that," the guard said. "Is there anyone else you would like me to
notify regarding your arrest and incarceration?"

"Saul
Lyndrach," I said. "He lives in sector six. I can't remember his
number, but he's on the database. I can get a drink of water in the bathroom, I
suppose?"

"Of
course," he said, seeming mildly offended at the implied slur on the
quality of Tetron prisons. "There is also a laundry facility. Do you need
instruction in the operation of these fitments?"

"No, I live in
a Tetron-built apartment—it's not as luxurious as this, of course, but I think
I can figure out which virtual buttons to press. Thanks. What's your name, by
the way?"

"69-Aquila,"
he told me, with a slight inclination of the head.

When he'd gone, I went
to the bed head control panel and found the button that would open the
bathroom. Once I'd managed to display the virtual keyboard underneath the
bathroom wallscreen, it wasn't too difficult to figure out how to activate the
water-fountain, open the laundry chute and switch on the shower. I didn't
bother with the medicare facility; I figured that it would be simpler to live
with the headache than work my way through an interrogation in parole, complete
with blood samples, just to get a Tetron aspirin. By the time my clothes and I had
both been thoroughly cleaned I felt better anyway—or would have done, if I hadn't
been so acutely conscious of the fact that I'd been fitted up for murder.