Asgard's Secret

20

The most tedious phase of the journey came eventually to its close.

That filled me with relief, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I had to be pleased about. I was still being hustled along by a gang of lunatics, chasing a giant who was in the habit of making a real mess of people who annoyed him, with a dozen or more of the nastiest characters in galactic society trailing along in my wake.

It was enough to make anyone feel insecure.

Anyhow, there were the trucks, standing in lonely splendour on an empty plain. The snow had begun to drift around their wheels, carried by the keen wind which was blowing out of the nightside toward the hotspot where the sun stood at its temporary zenith.

We were only leaving one man—Vasari—to guard the trucks, which numbered three now that we had caught up with the one which Myrlin had “borrowed” from me. The star-captain gave Vasari orders to say clear of Amara Guur if he could, and not to fire unless he was fired on.

“He probably won’t take the risk of trying to kill you,” she told him, “and if you’re here, he’ll have to leave some of his own men here too. Don’t start anything—but be careful.”

“You could ask the navy one more time to take the bastards out,” Vasari suggested. “Laser, bomb, or particle-beam—I don’t mind at all.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Politics.” Her tone was neutral, but she really was sorry.

“With luck,” I told him, “you won’t be alone with the bad guys for long. Now that news has leaked out… well, by the time we get back, there could be a real circus up here. Even if that doesn’t happen, they won’t want to make a move against you, because it would give the Tetrax the excuse they needed to come down on the whole expedition. Guur has to stay on the right side of the Tetrax now.”

“I’ll be okay,” Vasari assured me.

What I’d said was true; other people would be headed this way—but none of them had a tape of the juicy bits in Saul Lyndrach’s notebook, and none of them would be able to read the original now that I’d made a few careful alterations. They might be able to track us, but the Tetrax wouldn’t even try; they’d wait to see who emerged, and what news they brought with them.

I hoped Vasari would be able to follow his orders. It wouldn’t be so bad to come back from our little expedition to find the peace-officers waiting for me instead of the gangsters, but whatever we found down below, the location of Saul’s dropshaft to the warm levels was a secret that the Tetrax and the C.R.E. would pay very dearly to know. If and when I decided to sell it, I didn’t want them to have a reason to get it out of me by some less pleasant method than paying through the nose for it.

I didn’t point out to Vasari or to the star-captain that if it should chance that Myrlin returned to the surface before we did, the Tetrax wouldn’t take any more kindly to Vasari killing him than they would to Amara Guur’s rearguard killing Vasari. That was another little bit of business which could only be safely conducted in the privacy of the lower levels, beyond the reach of the long arm of the law.

Our five-man expedition hauled our sleds across the melting snow to Saul’s portal. Saul’s tracks had long gone but Myrlin’s fresh ones were obvious. Myrlin hadn’t bothered to replace the plug Saul had put in to conceal his drillhole, so we were able to start putting equipment through it without delay.

The trapdoors the cavies had set in the roof of their world were designed to react to some kind of transmitted signal, in response to which the barrier would retreat downwards and then slide sideways into a slot. Needless to say, no such mechanism had ever been found in working order. Drilling through the traps was extremely laborious—they weren’t metal but some kind of artificial bioproduct, like super-hard dental enamel—but galactic technology was easily good enough to supply appropriate tools. The principal structural material of which Asgard seemed to be made was a very different matter, as it had to be if it was going to permit hundreds of hollow levels to be excavated in it without collapsing. Drilling or blasting through the actual walls of Asgard wasn’t quite impossible, but it was near enough to impossible to make the trapdoors seem inviting. Down below, it was the same: where there were no open doorways, we had to look for closed ones, which wouldn’t be too difficult to break through. There were probably millions of doorways that we couldn’t even see—doorways that might open up all the lower levels, if only we knew where they were.

No one, alas, had ever found a map to show us how the levels were connected.

Getting the sleds down to level one took us more than an hour. Myrlin had left one of his own ropes dangling from a piton at the rim, but I had to rig another one to let the equipment down. It was biotech cord, made out of tangled monomolecular strands, and phenomenally tough. It didn’t mind the cold in the least and could be reeled up so tightly that one man could carry the best part of a million metres of it if he wanted to. We didn’t need that much; we didn’t intend to play Theseus while we were searching down there in the Labyrinth for Myrlin the Minotaur.

There had once been a ladder of sorts in the vertical shaft, but corrosion had got at it since the days when the cold had put paid to all kinds of rot. On level one chemical processes had been operating again for a long time.

Eventually, we got down into a semicircular covert, and were then able to move along a short and narrow tunnel to a much bigger one, which must have been one of the cavies’ main arterial highways. The torch mounted on my helmet was just powerful enough to pick out the far wall.

“Where are we?” asked Lieutenant Crucero. We were keeping a single open channel for collective communication, so that everyone could hear and speak to everyone else. Crucero turned to me when he asked the question, and his searchlight dazzled me. That can be a real headache when you’re working with a team in the levels—people need to get used to looking anywhere but at the face of the person they’re addressing.

I’d recorded the vital data from the notebook on one of the sound-tapes woven into my shoulderpads; I could use my tongue to call up the tape, and to wind it forward or back at my convenience. Saul’s trail would be blazed, with his private symbols scored on the wall at every junction, but I still needed the tape to help me decipher the symbols. As for the rest of the commentary Saul had thought it desirable to append to his notes—most of that was snugly stored in my memory, or so I hoped.

“Saul says it’s a main road,” I told Crucero. “Probably runs the entire length of this arm of the system. Other roads branch off at regular intervals, and they have their own sub-branches, et cetera. A lucky find, that trapdoor—they don’t all bring you down to such a handy spot.”

I had deduced from the notebook that Saul had used this door a dozen times, and there were plenty of tracks around to confirm the deduction. Allowing twenty-five days per trip that meant he’d been coming here on a regular basis for something over an Earthly year. He’d come back from most of those trips with nothing more than commonplace stuff, picked up by the wayside down in three or four. Then, out of the blue, he’d hit the big one: the biggest bonanza in the history of galactic prospecting.

And he’d lined himself up to be tortured and slaughtered by the likes of Amara Guur.

It doesn’t seem adequate, sometimes, simply to shrug your shoulders and say, c’est la vie.

“Let’s get going,” said Susarma Lear.

We set off along the highway, travelling northwest. We didn’t talk much, though my companions were inclined to ask the occasional question. Mostly, it was Crucero who did the asking—perhaps curiosity was part of the second-in-command’s duties. His requests for practical advice were easily answered; the big questions remained undebated, save for one medium-sized one.

“If he never read the book,” the lieutenant asked, having observed the abundance of signs of previous passage, “how does the android know which set of tracks to follow?”

“Saul told him,” I said. “Maybe he’s got an eidetic memory. After all, once you can design your own androids, you can start improving on nature’s equipment, in more ways than one. If I had to guess, though, I’d say that he’s probably working from a tape that Saul made for him while they were at my place, to explain the meaning of the symbols in his private code. Either way, the android won’t find it as easy to find the way as we will—that’s why we stand a reasonable chance of catching up with him.”

“Only if he makes for the dropshaft,” said Serne darkly.

“There’s nowhere else for him to go,” I pointed out. “If he doesn’t intend to come up again, he’s got to get down into the warm. If he does intend to come up, he’ll need to bring something worthwhile out of the depths in order to make himself so useful to the Tetrax that they’ll protect him against all his enemies.”

“Let’s concentrate on making good time,” the star-captain said. “Drop the chatter and pay attention to what you’re doing.”

The troopers obeyed the order without demur.

The highway was empty. The layer of ice that dressed it was very thin; little water had found its way in here, and level one was warm enough for frozen water to be the only kind of ice there was. The surface was smooth enough for the sleds to glide over it as easily as anyone could wish—I didn’t even mind taking my turn to haul one.

Once or twice we passed lumps of slag, which were all that remained of the vehicles the indigenes had driven along the road in the unimaginably distant past. They were parked in alcoves, so as not to block the way—the cavies had been tidy-minded people.

“How do you ever recover anything useful from those?” asked Crucero, after the star-captain had given him tacit permission by pausing to inspect a lump of debris.

“We don’t,” I told him. “It’s not even honest rust—the cavies were biotech-minded, like the Tetrax and your late enemies the Salamandrans. That was an organic car. Most of its materials were probably made by some kind of artificial photosynthetic process, though its electronics will have used silicon and all the normal stuff. It’s pure garbage now.

Scavengers find nothing worth a damn on level one… the best loot comes from three and four, where time stood still once the cold worked its way down in the days of the big blackout. Hardly a molecule stirred until the C.R.E. operatives began opening doors again. The heat of the sun hasn’t percolated down there yet, and we scavengers tend to be reasonably careful with our plugs and our little bubble-domes.”

“Move!” said the star-captain tersely.

We moved.