Asgard's Secret

21

We must have marched past thousands of wide-open side-roads. Some had flash-marks where Saul had engraved the record of his past explorations with a cutting-torch, but most of them he’d simply ignored. How he’d decided which ones to explore, I don’t know: he’d just followed his instincts, or his whims.

We took a rest after three hours on the road. It had been a very long haul and I was dog-tired, but the troopers seemed to be taking it in their stride. It was a picnic, I supposed, by comparison with mopping up on the surface of a firestormed planet. They didn’t say.

Where my suit’s systems were plugged into my body at the torso and the groin I was beginning to feel sore. I also felt a little sick, because it always took a while for my body to get used to the chemical tyrant on my back. My stomach was still expecting food, and was complaining because it wasn’t going to get any. It’s not easy turning yourself into a cyborg.

I wondered if the android was having similar problems, or whether he had been built to be adaptable.

We had already lost contact with the outside world; the roof over our heads was opaque to radio waves. I wasn’t quite sure what kind of bugs Amara Guur had planted on us, but I couldn’t see how he intended to track us. The piddling little things that Jacinthe Siani had put in the star-captain’s hair and the device they’d put in the binding of the book couldn’t transmit much of a signal. If he was using electronics, any obscuring of our trail we could do once we were off the highway would probably throw him— he surely didn’t have any idea what Saul’s flashmarks meant.

I felt that I had no cause to feel complacent, though. Amara Guur might be an evil-minded reptile, but he was clever, and although I knew next to nothing about them, I’d heard of Tetron-built pseudo-olfactory tracking devices that would allow people carrying certain special organics to be trailed halfway across a world after a five-year lapse of time. We’d had to buy a lot of equipment, and any item of that might have been set up to leak something that might be quite imperceptible to us but stink like a skunk to some kind of artificial bloodhound.

By the time we set forth again, the silence and the sameness were beginning to get on the nerves of the troopers. Serne and Khalekhan began swapping irrelevances, while the rest of us listened in. They were aware that they were putting on a kind of performance, but it was obviously something they’d done before. They must have been on other long missions communicating on an open channel, and they’d built up strategies to cope with the fact that there were others—including officers—listening to their every irreverence. But the chatter soon palled, and it fell to me to take over the role of talker-in-chief. After all, I was the one who was on home ground, and had some relevant things to say.

What I didn’t say, even after I’d made enough observations to know that it was true, was that Myrlin was making better time than I had thought possible. His tracks showed no sign of hesitation, and he had an enormous stride. I was glad about that, but I knew that it would only make the star-captain’s tight-lipped mood even worse.

The going became even easier once we had turned off the highway on to a side road, which quickly brought us to a different kind of territory.

I could see that the troopers were impressed by the wider open spaces, where the ceiling was twenty metres up instead of ten, the roof being held up by great pillars spaced at wide but regular intervals.

“This is farmland, cavie-style,” I told them. “As far as the experts can judge, much of the farming would have used artificial photosynthetic processes, some of them liquid-based and some solid. There’s some debate as to whether they ever used actual organisms at all. Where the Tetrax have built their own primary-production facilities under Skychain City, they’ve put in vast carpets of green stuff driven by light, heat, or direct electrics—they produce various kinds of single-product foodstuffs adapted to the needs of the various races, which we generally call ‘manna.’ The carpets also churn out other useful materials, extruding and dumping them underneath. There has to be a complicated irrigation-system, and a transportation-system for packaging and distribution of the products. The cavies’ original system was probably similar—down on two you’ll see the channels which carried water and the tracks that carried the trains.”

“Were there lights up there?” asked Crucero, pointing his searchlight up at the ceiling.

“Sure,” I said. “But it’s the devil’s own job trying to track the power cables. There seem to have been a lot of authentic electric light bulbs, but not everywhere. Other places there are what we think was some kind of artificial bioluminescence—the Tetrax can do that, too, after a fashion. There are probably cables of some kind connecting all the levels, maybe running deep down to the starlet itself… the central fusion reactor, if there is one. But the walls are so thick and so hard it’s almost impossible to get into any conduits or expose any integral systems.”

“Are we heading for some kind of city?” asked Khalekhan.

“Probably,” I told him. “Difficult to tell, sometimes, what’s a city and what isn’t. We’ll come to a big wall with lots of entrances which give way to a maze of corridors. Doors by the million—all shut. No way to know how many rooms there are, or how much is solid through and through. To explore a complex like that takes a C.R.E. team years— they’ll probably be centuries working their patient way through the big ones at the hub of each system. They’ve always figured that there must be dropshafts in the hubs which could take them all the way down, and that they’ll find them in the end, if they’re patient enough and methodical enough. They’re probably right… but in the meantime, Saul’s hare tactics seem to have prevailed over their tortoise strategy.”

We trudged on across the desolate landscape. Everything showed white in the light of our torches. The territory was sectioned with geometrical precision, broken up into diamonds and rectangles, with the pillars holding up the roof sprouting at each corner. We were walking along the walls that had once separated the sections, where there had once been carpets or lakes of artificial photosynthetic, electrosynthetic and thermosynthetic substances. Now there were only empty holes. The cavies had wrapped up their fields and drained their reservoirs, and taken it all with them when they had set forth on their exodus into the interior.

This entire system had once been a self-sustaining ecological unit: a complete, functioning ecosphere. Now it was dead, like the surface of a world that had passed through a cosmic catastrophe or a nuclear holocaust. It was a ghost-world, utterly abandoned. But had its people simply removed themselves to some other closed ecosphere, a hundred metres, or a hundred thousand metres, beneath our feet? I tried to imagine the queue that might have formed at the elevator, and remembered old jokes about standing on one spot while the entire population of China passed by in a line… a line which could never end, because new Chinamen were being born faster than the old ones could pass by.

The cavies, I presumed, didn’t have that kind of problem—a race that lived in a closed and sealed ecology must surely have been able to maintain population stability. But I couldn’t be sure. Maybe I had it the wrong way around. Maybe it was because the cavies didn’t have a stable population that they had to keep adding layer after layer to the surface of their world, to supply ever more living space. If that had been the case, once upon a time, then it was possible that the disaster that pulled them back from the outer levels was something that happened deep inside Asgard, and not the destruction of the outer atmosphere after all.

I tried to stop thinking about it by telling myself that when we got to the end of our expedition, we’d have much more evidence to go on, and that it was futile to speculate in the meantime. But I couldn’t stop. The closer I got to the answer, the more eagerly the question preyed upon my thoughts. I guess I became preoccupied.

Too preoccupied, as it turned out.

We came, as I had anticipated, to a floor-to-ceiling wall—a vast, long face that curved away in either direction as far as we could see. There was an open doorway in front of us, scored on either side by Saul Lyndrach and Myrlin: three mysterious hieroglyphs, two to the left and one to the right. The hole was just wide enough to steer a sled through.

I was in the lead, and my attention was split two ways. I looked back at my companions, then squinted at Saul’s marks, all the while teasing the tape with my tongue to bring it to the precise point at which any relevant comment would have been recorded.

All the while I was doing these things I was walking forward without pause, and I never saw the tripwire that was waiting for me in the darkness just beyond the doorway. I felt the impedance to my foot the moment I made contact, but by then it was too late.

I barely had time to look about in wild panic before something that seemed to my untutored eye to be the size of a small sun came hurtling out of the darkness toward my head.