Asgard's Secret

14

As soon as I looked around, Susarma Lear followed the direction of my gaze—and as soon as she saw the other woman, she went up the steps two at a time. Her men followed, guns leveled. They checked the dark vestibule very carefully, then went to look into the gloomy hall—but it seemed that the Kythnan was alone. Susarma Lear patted her down personally, but she was unarmed too.

“Your friends are drawing attention to us, Mr. Rousseau,” Jacinthe Siani said, when I arrived on the top step.

I kept my distance from her as I said: “That’s okay. The Tetrax are keeping their distance, for the time being. They always take a tentative approach when they don’t understand what’s going on—or when they want someone else to take their risks for them. Where does Guur want us to go now?”

“You have a suspicious mind, Mr. Rousseau,” she said. “I merely came to make a delivery.”

“So where is it?” I asked, glancing at Susarma Lear. The star-captain shook her head, to indicate that the Kythnan didn’t have anything substantial concealed in her neatly tailored clothing.

“You will find the notebook in the Hall,” the Kythnan said. “Look on the platform where you so nearly signed the contract I offered you. There is a niche in the clerk’s podium. You might want to hurry—it would be unfortunate if the night-watchman were to be roused from his peaceful slumber and stumble across it by accident.”

Serne made as if to grab the Kythnan as she moved to go, but the star-captain said: “Let her go. If she’s lying, there’s no point in holding on to her.” I watched the femme fatale trip down the steps, as if she hadn’t a care in the world.

Khalekhan was already moving through the inner door into the deserted Hall. He moved his gun slowly back and forth. There was only a single light burning, but it was enough to let us see that no one was lurking in the hall. Save for our footfalls, the whole building was silent; one thing that could be said for the Tetron criminal justice system was that it didn’t encourage heavy traffic. The jail had been empty when I left, and it was apparently still empty. Serne and Khalekhan covered the star-captain from the doorway as she made her way to the podium. Saul Lyndrach’s notebook was exactly where Jacinthe Siani had said it would be; Susarma Lear picked it up and looked at it quizzically before jumping back down to the floor.

“You can look at it later, Rousseau,” she said, when I extended my hand to take it from her. “Let’s get out of here and find somewhere where the lights are bright enough to read by.”

“I’ll look at it as we go,” I said.

She shrugged her shoulders and let me take it, but she held on to it just long enough before letting go to let me know that, in her opinion, I ought to be grateful for the favour.

I flipped the notebook open and angled the page toward the meagre light, eager to get an impression of what it contained even if I couldn’t read every word. In spite of the gloom, one glance was enough to tell me why Simeon Balidar had told Amara Guur that it might be a good idea to send Heleb round to see me—and why, when Saul hadn’t cracked under the threat of being slowly torn apart and permanently crippled, Balidar had suggested to Guur that he had better increase the pressure.

Saul’s notes weren’t written in code. They were written in French.

Out of the two hundred or so humans living in Skychain City, there’d be dozens who spoke Spanish or Chinese, and more than a handful who spoke Russian or Japanese, but French was a different matter.

Myrlin, I remembered, had been able to speak English, Russian, and Chinese, but not French. Myrlin had got Saul out before Saul lapsed into unconsciousness, though— which had been long enough for Saul to tell him the codes he needed to sneak into my apartment and order a ton of equipment. It had probably been long enough for Saul to make other provisions, too. Maybe he had had time to explain to Myrlin how to read the score-marks that he left when he was out in the cold, to make sure that he could always find his way back to his starting-point, and where to look for them… and, most important of all, where to start. More probably, he had made a tape of the relevant information, whose instructions Myrlin would have to follow as best he could. It wouldn’t be easy for Merlin to retrace Saul’s last journey with the aid of that sort of information, and he wouldn’t be able to do it quickly. Anyone chasing him, with instructions of their own in hand, would have a chance to catch up with him. The star-captain’s near-impossible mission suddenly seemed practicable—with my expert help.

“Come on, damn you,” my commanding officer ordered— and like a loyal Star Force man, I obeyed.

“Well,” she said, as soon as we were out in the open and hurrying along a static pavement. “What is it?”

I explained what it was, and why I had been the only man on Asgard, so far as Amara Guur knew, who could read it. I didn’t bother adding the rider that it was at least possible that there might be another French speaker around by now, on the crew of her trusty warship; it wasn’t a train of thought I wanted her to follow, if it could possibly be avoided.

“It will help us to catch him, won’t it?” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “He’s got a long head start, but we’ll still be traveling at a good pace when he has to slow down. Now that we can figure out exactly where he’s going, we can probably catch him.”

“In which case,” Serne put in, “he’ll go somewhere else.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “The miracle is that there’s anywhere at all to go. I’m going to have to read through this very carefully, but if what Jacinthe Siani told me is true and there really is a way down to the lower levels that no one’s found before, that’s what he’ll aim for. It’s his only chance of avoiding the necessity of having to come back—or of finding something so valuable that the Tetrax will protect him against you.”

“That’s good,” the star-captain said, after checking with Crucero. “We’ll have the equipment and supplies ready not long after dawn. We’ll start immediately—we can catch up on our sleep in relays, once we’re on the move.”

“What I can’t understand,” I said, pensively, “is why Guur would just hand it over to us.”

“Because the android got a head start,” she told me. “And because he knows that we’ll chase the android, now we have the means to do it. He intends to chase us.”

It was obvious, of course—just as it was obvious, to me if not to her, that while the star-captain had been patting Jacinthe Siani down, the Kythnan had probably sprinkled half a dozen showerproof bugs in her bright blonde hair. I thought about mentioning that, but decided against it. After all, she was the commanding officer, and the one who was determined to track Myrlin down. The moment she caught up with him—if she caught up with him—she intended to gun him down. That was the extent of her interest in him.

At which point, I figured, she would want to bring her men safely back to Skychain City. All her men. But I had Saul Lyndrach’s notebook now, and I was probably the only man on Asgard, for the moment, who could read it. I didn’t really care one way or the other what happened to Myrlin, even though I had nothing against him personally—but I did care a great deal about what happened to me, and that notebook, after Susarma Lear had collected her bounty.

I hadn’t gone within two metres of Jacinthe Siani; she hadn’t had a chance to bug my hair. If it should happen that the star-captain and I were separated somehow, down in the levels, she would be the one that Amara Guur would track—which was only fair, considering that she had all the flame-pistols. I was the one with the local knowledge, and I was the one who had always been destined to find a way to the centre of Asgard. That was my business, whether I’d been drafted or not—and I hadn’t actually signed the papers, because Susarma Lear was in too much of a hurry to bother with formalities of that sort.

My conscience was clear—or clearish, at any rate. When the time came, I intended to desert my newfound compatriots and go my own way.

Susarma Lear was right to hurry, though, just as Amara Guur had been right to hand over the notebook to me. If it had fallen into Tetron hands, it would only have been a matter of time before they found someone else to read it for them. If it fell into Tetron hands now, the whole game might be over—but the Tetrax didn’t know that. They were playing it the clever way, like the civilized folk they were. Slave-owners always get other people to do their dirty work, if they can.

I figured that there had to be a microtransmitter or two in the book as well, and that Amara Guur must be reckoning on tracking me by that means—but I had faith in my memory and my suit’s tape-recorder. Even before the time came to dump the star-captain and her merry men, I figured I’d jettison the book. It would be a risk, but a worthwhile one. After all—the prize that was at stake was the ultimate prize, the one I’d been after all my life.

It was mine, by rights. I was Saul’s legitimate heir. He and I had had an arrangement. And I was the one who had passed the android on to him, even if the resultant rescue had come a little too late. That was his fault, in a way. If he’d only told me what he had before he went to the C.R.E., so that we could tackle the problem together, everything would probably have been all right.

Not that I blamed him, of course. If I’d been in his shoes, I probably wouldn’t have done anything differently— except, of course, break under torture and hand the whole thing over to Amara Guur.