Asgard's Secret

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.”

“What do you expect me to do—follow his footprints in the snow?”

“If that’s what’s necessary,” she said. “And don’t ever lie to me again, Trooper Rousseau. I don’t like it. Believe me, now you’re in the Star Force, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of your commanding officer. How soon can we get the truck ready to depart?”

She was crazy, but she wasn’t a fool. I saw my mistake immediately. I’d told the Tetron peace-officer that I didn’t know where Saul’s truck was, but I’d told her en passant that he and I had had a reciprocal arrangement. He’d had the codes necessary to get into my apartment and secure my keys. I had the codes necessary to get into his and secure his.

It occurred to me then that the peace-officer must also have known that I was lying. He hadn’t taken the trouble to ask me where the truck was in the hope that I’d tell him, but in order to let me know that he didn’t have it.

The Tetrax had no intention of chasing Myrlin—but they had no objection to letting me do it, if I were crazy enough. Their hands might be tied by their own law, but they must have figured out by now that Saul Lyndrach had really been on to something, and they didn’t want some mysterious outworlder monopolizing the discovery any more than they wanted Amara Guur to get his dirty hands on it. The game was bigger than I’d imagined—and the bigger it got, the smaller its hapless pawns came to seem.

“Merde,” I murmured.

“Never mind that,” the star-captain said, mistaking the reason for my distress. “How soon can we start?”

“What are you going to do with the android if you catch him?” I wanted to know.

“Kill him,” she replied. It didn’t surprise me.

“Why?”

“How many times do I have to tell you, Trooper? I give orders; you follow them. How soon?”

“I still say that it’s impossible. If he knows we’re following—and he’s bound to suspect that someone will, even if he doesn’t know you’re here—he’ll cover his tracks.”

“In that case,” she said, “we’ll have to make sure we use a big enough bomb to get him while we still can.” She was smiling, but I knew that she was threatening me. If I wasn’t going to help her, she was implying, then she would have to take extreme measures, no matter what the cost.

I’d already concluded that she was crazy, but I hadn’t quite realised how crazy she was. She still had a big moral credit balance, though. I had to try to help.

“The Tetrax really aren’t going to let you bomb Asgard,” I told her, as gently as I could. “Even if you can pinpoint Myrlin’s position without their help, they’ll put political pressure on your commander that he’d be insane to resist. Having just brought one humanoid species to the brink of extinction, you’re probably prepared to take on anyone and anything by the same means, but the United Governments and Military Forces really wouldn’t like it if you upset the Tetrax. They have a lot of friends. We’re effectively outnumbered by… oh, let’s say five hundred million to one, although that may be a conservative estimate, given that we don’t really know how far around the rim galactic civilization extends. You have big responsibilities, Star-Captain Lear, and I know you want to discharge them sensibly. You’ve come to me for local knowledge. So trust me when I tell you you’ll need to think long and hard before you so much as take the safety-catch off your flame-pistol while you’re on Asgard. If you’re lucky, the peace-officers won’t have left any recording devices behind to spy on this conversation—and if you’re really lucky, they won’t take it seriously even if they did—but if I were you, I’d stop talking about the possibility of your starship opening fire. It isn’t going to happen.”

The silence that descended then seemed very heavy indeed. It was as if the sleeping troopers had stopped breathing—as if they were spellbound, waiting for the star-captain to explode.

She didn’t. “Trooper Rousseau,” she said. “This is a private conversation, protected by military confidentiality. I’m just trying to impress upon you the seriousness of our mission. We need that android dead—and when I say we, I mean the human race. I have to kill him—and you’re right. I need you to tell me how to do it, so I’m being extra nice to you. But if you don’t start being a lot more helpful, you have no idea of the depth of the trouble you’ll be in. So tell me—when do we start?”

There are some people you just can’t argue with. Not all of them are Tetrax. I had already started formulating a timetable in my head when I was interrupted by the trill of the wallphone.

I leapt to my feet, extremely grateful for the opportunity to get away from Susarma Lear, if only for a moment. I tripped over three recumbent troopers on my way to the phone, but I got there in the end.

My gratitude drained away as soon as the caller’s image appeared on the viewscreen. It was a vormyran.

All vormyr look alike to the inexpert human eye, but I didn’t need three guesses to figure out who this one was.

“Michael Rousseau?” he inquired, in awkwardly broken parole. “My name is Amara Guur. We need to talk.”