Asgard's Secret

17

I was driving again when the sun came up. Susarma Lear was asleep in her bunk, but Serne was sitting beside me, waiting patiently to take another turn at the wheel. He was fidgeting, although he couldn’t possibly have been unused to long periods of inactivity. Life in the Star Force had to be ninety-nine percent waiting and one percent action.

When the rim of the sun suddenly appeared, as a slowly expanding yellow arc away to our right, he drew in his breath sharply. There had been a silvery glow in the sky for some little while, but this was different. The sunlight spilled across the plain like a flood, turning the dead white carpet of snow into a sea of glittering gold. The sky lightened from jet black to a deep, even blue, uninterrupted by the slightest wisp of cloud.

Serne shielded his eyes and tried to look into the glare, but he couldn’t bear it. I took two pairs of sun-goggles from the dashboard compartment and passed one to him.

“It’s big,” he observed. “It doesn’t seem as bright, but it’s… very strange.”

“Not much like home?” I queried.

“Not much,” he agreed.

“It’s larger than Earth’s star,” I told him. “A different spectral type. Its association with Asgard is probably a cosmic accident. I suppose you did most of your fighting in the systems of G-type suns?”

“That was the territory we were fighting for,” he said. “We were always suited up, though. Even the so-called Gaia-clones didn’t look like home.”

“Wait till you see the sunset,” I said. “There’s a lot more vapour in the air then, and the sea of gold’s more like an ocean of blood. Very symbolic.”

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.