Asgard's Secret

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.

“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.”