Asgard's Secret

by Brian Stableford

  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."

  "No more than you," I pointed out.

  "You shouldn't give me any grief, either," he told me. "I can't beat the shit out of you, because you're in my unit— but that doesn't mean that accidents can't happen."

  "Thanks for the warning," I said, sardonically. "It's bad enough that Amara Guur and his Spirellan sidekick are after me, without wondering whether my Star Force buddies are itching to put a bullet in my back."

  "We don't use bullets," he observed. "But no matter how cold it gets, flame-pistols work just fine."

  "I can tell that you've been under a lot of strain lately," I said, "so I'll try to tread as softly as I can. I'm not the enemy, though. You wiped out the enemy, almost to the last not-quite-man. I'm not sure that it's necessary to be so obsessive about the mopping up. One lousy android can't be much of a threat to the whole human race, no matter what he did to Saul's kidnappers."

  "I just follow orders," he repeated. "So should you. I mean that."

  I didn't doubt it. He was crazy, of course, but that wasn't entirely surprising, in the circumstances. There was obviously more to his devotion to his senior officer than mere military discipline, but that was understandable too, in the circumstances. There were probably as many women as men on the ship that had brought Susarma Lear to Asgard, but her little troop was all male, and she had one hell of a glare when she cared to use it—no bigger than a run-of-the-mill G-type glare, perhaps, but a lot more powerful.

  "I'm very grateful to the star-captain," I assured him. "She got me out of a nasty jam back there at the Hall of Justice. I'd never actually thought about joining the Star Force, but it was definitely the better alternative. I know my place. You from Earth?"

  He shook his head. "Space-born," he said. "The belt."

  "Me too," I said.

  "Really? Ceres? I'm from the Trojans." It was the first sign of real humanity I'd seen in him.

  "Vesta, mostly," I told him. "My father came out from Canada to help build microworlds, so we moved around the ring a lot. We shipped out of the system when things became complicated after the contacts, but we were just crew—we didn't see a lot of the Tetrax or any of the other humanoids. That was when I heard about Asgard. When the time came to fly the nest . . . well, it was a long time ago. I'm older than I look."

  "I guessed," he said. "Tetron biotech. Still mortal, though."

  "Yes. And no more durable, at a guess, than you."

  "You came here alone?"

  "No. I was with a party. At first I worked with a guy named Michael Finn—he was Mickey so I was Mike—but he got himself killed. I thought about going home, but I never took the plunge. I still have Mickey's ship in dock, but can't afford to fit it out for the haul."

  "You missed the war," he observed. His voice was level, but somewhere behind the words there was an accusation. In his carefully-shielded eyes, I was a deserter, or a draft-dodger.

  "Yes," I said, tiredly. "I missed the war."

  This time, the pause was enough to prompt him. "They never got to Earth," he said. "The belt wasn't so easy to defend. Must have been more than a million people there by then. Scattered, of course—but the Trojans were a target. Everyone I ever knew outside the force was killed."

  "I'm sorry."

  "They paid for it," he assured me.

  "I guess so," I agreed, keeping my tone carefully neutral.

  He wasn't fooled. "You think we shouldn't have done what we did to Salamandra?"

  "I wasn't there," I reminded him—and myself. "I was here, where everybody works overtime to get along, even with the vormyr. Even the vormyr make the effort, most of the time. You had your experience, I have mine. If we see things differently, it's understandable. We can try to get along anyway, can't we? Isn't that what we're doing?"

  "What we're doing," he said, stonily, "is mopping up." He looked away, out across the glittering plain, as if he were trying to lose himself in the eerie, alien radiance. He seemed to me to be already lost. I think he felt that way too.

  18

  When I woke up again after my next turn in the bunk I found the star-captain and her lackey in a bad mood. There didn't seem to be any particular reason for it—they were just jittery. Nothing was happening, and they wanted action.

  "Have your people still got a fix on my truck?" I asked, subtly making the point that if we weren't getting anywhere, neither was Myrlin.

  "He's stopped," Serne reported tersely.

  "You mean he's reached his destination—Saul's portal to one?" I asked. The one thing the notebook hadn't told me about the journey I had to make was the exact location of the effective starting-point: the entry-point to level one. That he had retained in his memory—until he confided it to his belated saviour.

  "We don't know for sure," the star-captain said. "He may be resting—we don't know whether he needs sleep as much as we do, but he was designed to pass for human, so he must need some."

  "If so, it gives us a chance to make up some ground," I said. "Amara Guur can't be gaining on us."

  "We could take him out so easily," Serne said, wistfully. "Just one missile. It wouldn't even dent the surface, let alone take out any innocent bystanders—but your friends in Skychain City won't hear of it, and the warship's captain is playing it their way. He's a frame jockey, of course—not Star Force."

  "The commander agrees with him," Susarma Lear told him, with a slight sympathetic sigh. "He trusts us to get the job done. It is our job." Hers seemed an odd combination of resentment and fatalism, less straightforward than Seme's grim frustration.
r />   "Doesn't this snow ever melt?" Serne wanted to know.

  "Eventually," I said. "Nothing happens in a hurry out here. Besides which, it's even less convenient when it's running water. We'll have to be more careful from now on. So will Guur's drivers—I don't suppose, by any chance, that they've suffered any mishaps?"

  "No," said Serne, as he got up, rather ungraciously, to let me take his seat beside the star-captain. "They haven't gained an inch—but they haven't lost one either. I can't see why we don't just shoot and have done with it—take them out as well as the android. Ten seconds and it's all sorted— we could argue with the Tetrax afterwards."

  "And communication between humankind and the galactic community would be fouled up for a couple of hundred years," I pointed out. "The war with the Salamandrans ruined our image, but at least they started it. Now it's over; we have a lot of repair work to do."

  "They don't need to track him to find out where he's going once he's reached the doorway to level one," Susarma Lear said. "Now that you've got the book, they don't need him at all."

  "You just don't get it, do you?" I said, exasperatedly. "They let him through Immigration Control. He's a citizen. To them, he's entitled to exactly the same consideration as you or me. The Tetrax take these things seriously. Even if they thought he was guilty of mass murder on account of what happened to Balidar and his vormyr friends, they'd consider him innocent until he'd been proven guilty, and they'd want to put him on trial. This shoot-first-and-answer-questions-later mentality is doing us enough harm as a mere display. Gunning down the android in the levels might be getting your dirty work done out of sight, but don't imagine that the Tetrax will simply put it out of mind. The whole future of the human species might be at stake here."

  "Indeed it might," she said, bleakly. "That's exactly what I've been trying to tell you. You have no conscientious objection to our gunning down the guys who are following us, I hope? Will that blight our image too?"

  "It won't do us any good," I said, "but the Tetrax might be quietly pleased to see the last of Amara Guur. They might look on that as doing their dirty work for them—but they don't have anything against Myrlin. In fact, he probably interests them for much the same reasons that your warship's cargo interests them, now that they know he's not human."

  "I'd figured that one out," she said, sourly. "Salamandrans and the Tetrax are both biotech-minded. The Salamandrans weren't as advanced, but they doubtless had their own style. I listen, you know, and I'm not dumb. Thousands of humanoid worlds and a whole damn humanoid zoo right here on Asgard—maybe passengers, maybe slaves, maybe androids. I can see why they might think that he's a piece of the puzzle. I can understand why they don't want us firing missiles every which way. But I've got a job to do, and I'm going to do it, even if I do have to chase the bastard all the way to the planet's core and annoy the hell out of the Tetrax. Okay?"

  "We won't be going down that far, even if we don't get to him first," I told her. "We don't have a long enough rope. Saul's shaft probably isn't much more than ten levels deep—maybe only a couple."

  "Good," she said. "Let's hope that we don't have to find out." But she hardly paused before adding: "How many do you reckon there are, altogether?"

  "The radius of the planet is about ten thousand kilometres," I told her. "If it were hollow shells all the way to the centre there might be a hundred thousand. Nobody makes a serious guess as high as that, but some are prepared to talk about tens of thousands. I'm with them—but it's hope, not knowledge."

  "What's the mean density of the megastructure?" she wanted to know.

  "About three and a half grams per cubic centimetre. You'll have noticed that the surface gravity is approximately Earth-normal, even though Asgard is so much bigger than Earth. We don't know how to interpret that, of course—the density is highly unlikely to be uniform, and it could vary any way you can imagine."

  She was no mathematician, but she could do simple mental arithmetic. "If the radius of this world is half as much again as Earth's," she said, "it must have twice the surface area, or thereabouts. Even if there were only fifty levels, each one with not much more than half the area of the surface, there'd still be as much living-space inside as in fifty Gaia-clone worlds. More, given that they probably don't go in much for oceans."

  "Right," I agreed. "And if there are a thousand, or ten thousand ..."

  "That's one hell of a construction job," she observed.

  "It would need a lot of labour," I agreed, "and a lot of time. A biotech-minded species might well think about androids . . . except for the fact that even the limited production-lines that humanoid species have ready-built-in tend to be cheaper to run than any artifice we can imagine."

  "Any artifice we can imagine," she repeated, adding the emphasis.

  "If the levels are warm and light only half a dozen floors down," I observed, in case her own mental arithmetic had stalled, "there might be more humanoids inside Asgard than there are in the entire galactic arm—and more species too."

  "That would put our diplomatic problems with the Tetrax into a different context," she observed. "Do you know whether there are any Salamandrans in Skychain City?"

  "I don't think so," I said. "I never heard of any—but I don't even know what they look like. You're wondering why the android came here, aren't you?"

  "Don't push it, Rousseau," she warned.

  "Your secrets are safe," I assured her. "But I had wondered that myself. I guess the Salamandrans would know about Asgard, even if none of them had ever made their way here. They seem to have educated your android pretty thoroughly. Maybe he thought that a cosmopolitan arena like Skychain City would be an easier place to hide than a world where ninety-nine percent of the inhabitants looked the same. A giant stands out anywhere, but in a circus like this . . . you could imagine the train of thought. There are a hundred worlds where he might have sought sanctuary, including the Tetron homeworld, but he might not have been confident of his welcome on any of them. He'd be entitled to be a trifle paranoid, wouldn't he?"

  "The Salamandrans couldn't possibly know anything about Asgard that the Tetrax don't know," she said.

  "No," I said.

  "He's just following up an opportunity that arose by chance when he arrived here."

  "I think so," I agreed. "It was a freaky stroke of luck, but it couldn't have been anything else, could it?"

  "No," she said. "It couldn't. But Tetrax biotech is good enough to clone the android, isn't it? They could do that, if they wanted to. They clone themselves all the time, don't they? That's why they all have numbers instead of names."

  "That's not the explanation they give when asked," I said, "but they're biotech-minded, so cloning technology must be child's play to them. Even we can do cloning, and we're not biotech-minded at all. I don't think they'd be interested in turning out an army of supermen to wreak vengeance on the human race on behalf of Salamandra, though. It's not their style."

  She looked at me. Even through the shades I could see the hardness of her eyes. "We have to kill him," she told me. "Whatever it costs us, in terms of image or human lives. I want you to understand that."

  She didn't. If she'd wanted me to understand, she'd have told me exactly what it was that she and her military masters feared. In the absence of a good explanation, I was inclined to think that she and they were merely paranoid— understandably paranoid, but merely paranoid.

  I reminded myself that she'd just taken part in the murder of a planetary biosphere. She was still in a state of shock. The guilt was probably getting to her, in peculiar ways.

  "Don't mind me," I said, insincerely. "I'm just a starship trooper. My job is to follow orders."

  19

  Two days out we had to bear eastwards in order to skirt the southeastern arm of one of the northern hemisphere's larger seas. It had hardly begun to melt, and the bergs still stood up like rows of jagged teeth against the horizon, gleaming where they caught the sunlight that flickered over them. For a while,
the glittering play of the light made a pleasant contrast with the featureless plain, but in its own way it was just as constant.

  "Is the whole damn world all as boring as this?" growled Serne in one of his rare communicative moments when the two of us were sharing the cab.

  "Pretty much," I told him. "The seas are shallow, and there are no mountains to speak of. It's not like Earth, with all those tectonic plates grinding against one another, heaving up mountain ranges, and all those volcanoes blasting away. This surface was designed. There are no cities either. The Tetrax found a few clusters of what used to be buildings scattered here and there, but no ghost towns, no ancient temples, no pyramids. People certainly worked up here, but they probably went home to the levels when their shifts finished. When they abandoned the surface they took virtually everything that they could carry—they left far less machinery here than in the subsurface levels.

  "Most people figure that the cavies retired to live underground long before they deserted the upper levels. They may have used the surface purely for growing crops—but the C.R.E. palaeobiologists who work with the seeds and microfossils haven't found that much evidence of disciplined agricultural activity. Maybe this level was just the roof of the world, and they left it more-or-less to its own devices. It may not have been anything more than some kind of roof-garden. The sea over there might conceivably be a reservoir or a lake, but some C.R.E. people think it was just a glorified puddle in the guttering. We'll pass a C.R.E. dome soon—that should break up the tedium of your day."

  "Is that where we're going—to some kind of dome?" he asked.

  "Hardly," I replied. "C.R.E. people are essentially mean-spirited. They don't allow the likes of you and me to use their routes into the underworld. They wouldn't even invite us in for a cup of tea if we knocked on their door. They're so proud of the fact that they have members of a hundred different species working together that they've become rather paranoid in their insularity. People like me find our own ways down into level one; we'll be using one of Saul's holes."