Asgard's Secret

23

I don’t know what kind of weird instinct Saul Lyndrach had used to guide him, but it was nothing I could share. I was continually mystified by the turns he had taken and by the decisions he had made. Maybe he was being deliberately perverse when he found the way to the centre—maybe perversity is what it takes to get to the heart of any matter. One thing is for sure, though: the route we were following guided us into some very peculiar territory.

Scavengers almost always did their hunting in regions of the underworld that were given over to some kind of intensive technological enterprise. After all, what we were searching for was artefacts, and what every scavenger hoped to discover was some state-of-the-art gadget that no one’s ever come across before. The places we tended never to go were the wilderness areas.

No one really knew how much wilderness there was in the cave-systems on levels one, two and three. There didn’t seem to be nearly as much on one or two as there was on three. What that meant was unclear, but in the absence of any evidence that the level three cavies were any less technologically sophisticated than their neighbours, my feeling had always been that they simply liked wilderness areas. Maybe they were concerned to conserve as much as they could of their own evolutionary heritage; maybe when they began to manufacture their food by artificial photosynthesis they set free all the other species which they had exploited in more primitive times, giving them back a place to live, where they could make their own destiny. No one knew, and it was generally considered to be one of the less intriguing problems that Asgard posed.

Saul Lyndrach had gone into the wilderness not once but several times, as if he were looking for something in particular; and it was in the wilderness, eventually, that he’d found his bonanza. That was where we had to go to follow the android.

There was nothing left of the wilderness now but trees and a few bones. Everything had died, millions of years ago, and most of it had rotted away before the cold preserved what was left. All the flesh had gone, though the Tetron bioscientists—reputedly the most expert in the galaxy—had managed to recover a good many genome samples, one way and another.

There were no leaves on the whited trees now, just gnarled trunks and knotted branches. My untrained eye couldn’t estimate the number of different species there were, but I could tell which were the oldest trees, with their thick boles and their branches which divided again and again until the ends were no thicker than needles.

The bones were generally clustered, occasionally to be found in meandering grooves and hollows that had once been streams and pools. The water had somehow been drained from them before the great freeze, so they now had the same thin layer of mixed ices that dressed the entire landscape in a cloak of white. The bones themselves were unremarkable, or so it seemed to me. It was all too easy to find leg-bones and hip-bones and jawbones with teeth which would surely have been similar to ones to be found on any of the humanoid worlds, which all had their quasi-cattle and their quasi-chickens just as they had their quasi-men.

There were no humanoid skulls, though. Nor were there any dinosaurs, nor giants in the earth, nor hideous aliens to tantalise the imagination.

Underfoot there had once been grass, but the grass—like everything else—had died before the advent of the cold, and had shriveled into fragility. Our boots crushed it effortlessly, and it seemed rather as if we were walking on frosted cobwebs.

“This is eerie,” said Crucero, who seemed to like this region far less than the honest and simple tunnel through which the monorail trains had run. “Could anything actually be alive down here?”

It wasn’t such a stupid question as it seemed.

“When it’s as cold as this,” I told him, “no living system can function. On the other hand, nothing changes. There are some very simple things that were still alive when the cold came, and which can be restored to activity even after millions of years of cryonic oblivion. So far, the biotechs haven’t revived anything more complex than a bacterium, but in its way that’s not unspectacular. The day they bring back an amoeba will be a really big deal.”

“If the cold had come more quickly,” the star-captain mused, “there might be whole plants and animals preserved.”

“It didn’t come as quickly as all that,” I told her. “Not even on one. We’re sixty or seventy metres beneath the surface here, and the artificial rock which they used to make the walls and ceilings is a very good insulator. It might have been thousands of years after whatever disaster overtook the outside that the cold seeped down here, and the decline in temperature was probably very gradual. By the time the cold took control, there was very little left for it to claim for its own—the inhabitants were long gone. Maybe they took all the birds and beasts with them.”

“I can think of another scenario,” she said.

It didn’t surprise me. Ever since she’d found out that I wasn’t keen on the fortress-Asgard hypothesis she’d taken a certain delight in embroidering it, bringing little bits of evidence into line with it one by one.

“Go ahead,” I told her. I figured I was tough enough to take it.

“Suppose there really is a central power-source down there in the centre,” she said. “A starlet, as you call it. And suppose its power-lines really did extend through thousands of levels, including this one, to give power and heat. If that were so, then there’s no reason at all why the cold should ever have seeped down this far. Maybe it didn’t seep down at all. Maybe this level and the ones above it were deliberately refrigerated, and the atmosphere of the world deliberately destroyed. Maybe it was all part of a strategy of war.”

“You think this was the result of some alien offensive?” I said.

I couldn’t see her face, but I could imagine the grin on it.

“Quite the reverse,” she answered. “I think it was a defensive move. I think the reason they had to evacuate these levels was that there was no way they could continue to hold them, and I think the reason they froze them was to try and stop the rot that was taking them over.”

I remembered Seme’s descriptions of the kind of fighting the Star Force had been formed to do. The Salamandrans had been biotech-minded, and had used biotech weapons: engineered plagues.

“You might be right,” I conceded reluctantly.

“And if I am,” she pointed out. “Your Tetron friends might get a very nasty shock one day, if they keep on trying to revive the bacteria they find beneath the snowdrifts.”

I knew that she might be right about that, too, but I wasn’t about to say so. She didn’t need any further encouragement to keep her nasty mind ticking over. Anyhow, I could follow the rest of the train of thought without her help. If Asgard was a fortress, whose outer defences had been penetrated, the reason why the exiled cavies hadn’t come out of hiding a million years ago might not be too difficult to figure out. Maybe the surrender of the outer levels hadn’t stopped the invasion—maybe there was nothing beneath our boots but layer upon layer of dead worlds.

I knew it couldn’t be quite that bad. I knew because of the few tantalizing jottings which Saul had left in his notebook. The level he had reached at the bottom of his dropshaft wasn’t cold, and there were living creatures there. There was light, and there was plant life, and there were animals. He’d seen enough, before he was forced to return because he was at the very limit of his exploratory range, to make that plain. But what Saul had seen wasn’t sufficient to demonstrate that there was still intelligent life inside Asgard. It wasn’t sufficient to prove that if a war had been fought, it hadn’t been lost.

The star-captain’s scenario was still a lively contender— and if she was right, then the warm, living part of Asgard into which we were headed might be far more dangerous than I had previously supposed.

Eventually, we came to the next big wall.

It looked like most of the other walls in the levels: frosted, curving, windowless. There was a doorway in front of us, which Saul had opened with the aid of levers and a torch, so that it presented itself to us as a narrow and jagged slash of shadow. We approached it very carefully, knowing it to be the ideal spot for another of Myrlin’s little traps. Perhaps for that very reason there was nothing untoward to be found. The android probably figured that if he had got this far without being caught then he was virtually home and dry. Once he moved away from the bottom of the dropshaft he was making his own way, and all he had to do was cover his tracks.

The corridors inside the wall were like those in any other complex, but the doors that Saul had opened showed us rooms that were different from any I had seen before. For one thing, they hadn’t been entirely emptied. There was payload here—enough to have made Saul rich even without the shaft to the interior.

There were no bare walls inside the rooms; there was storage space of one kind or another, all of it packed tight. There were shelves for objects, and big pieces of equipment with display screens, keyboards and instrument panels. Even the chairs were still in place. There were sinks and benches, and sealed chambers fitted with artificial manipulators. There was a great deal of glassware.

Obviously, this was one place the cavies had intended to come back to. Equally obviously, they hadn’t actually been back for a very long time.

“It’s a laboratory,” said Crucero, looking around one of the bigger rooms.

“Damn right,” I replied, abstractedly. I was examining some big steel boxes, which might have been refrigerators, ovens, radiation chambers or autoclaves, and wondering whether there was any way to get inside them.

“It’s a biotech lab,” said Susarma Lear, by way of amplification. I could tell that her imagination was showing her ranks of technicians trying to solve the problem of defending a closed world against a plague-attack… and failing.

“The C.R.E. would pay plenty for a place like this,” I told her. “If it’s been stripped at all, it doesn’t show. They may have closed it down, but they left it ready to be started up again. Everywhere else, we’ve found nothing but the litter they left behind because they considered it useless. This is the real thing.”

Even so, there was a kind of desolation about the place. It was too tidy. It hadn’t been deserted in a panic; whatever work had gone on here had been brought to a conclusion. It looked as if you could simply find the main power-switch, and turn everything right back on, but that was misleading.

Khalekhan brushed his suited forefinger over one of the keyboards, as though he expected the keys to click and the screen above it to light up. But the keys were stuck solid, immovable, and whatever data had been enshrined in the silicon chips inside the machine must have long since decayed into chaos. Even at twenty degrees Kelvin—and it was no colder than that here—entropy takes its slow toll. Electronic systems can last for millions of years, because silicon is tough stuff, but they need use and maintenance. The unnatural stillness of the deep-freeze isn’t such a wonderful preservative as some people make out.

“Let’s not waste time,” said the star-captain, gruffly. “You can play games to your heart’s content when we come back. We have a job to do, remember?” The reason she sounded gruff was that her last hopes of catching Myrlin in the upper levels had now evaporated. If she was going to catch and kill him, she was going to have to do it much closer to the centre of the world.

I didn’t protest against her haste. I was as keen to find the dropshaft as she was, albeit for very different reasons. These laboratories were exciting, but they paled into insignificance by comparison with what might be waiting for us down below.

So we moved on, passing doors which Saul had never got round to forcing, barely glancing into the rooms which he had opened up. There was only one where I lingered a little while, letting my curiosity off the bit; that was when I found myself beside one of the sealed transparent chambers where artificial hands were poised above a small assortment of equipment: pipettes, reagent jars, beakers. It was a touch of untidiness that seemed fascinating, and somehow very promising. Whatever was inside that sealed chamber might have been the very last thing that the cavies were working on before they left—before they made their exit down the deep elevator shaft which might have taken them all the way to the mysterious centre.

While I paused momentarily, Serne went ahead, scanning the path for tripwires. He didn’t find any booby-traps, but he found the shaft.

He called out for us to come quickly, but he was out of sight; we all went through the standard pantomime of asking “Where?” so that he could reply, unhelpfully, “Here.” Eventually, though, we managed to find him.

If we had been in any doubt as to whether Myrlin was still ahead of us, what we found in the shaft settled the question. There were two doubled-up cords secured at the top, and there were half a dozen pieces of equipment abandoned there. It was my equipment, taken from my truck. There was no sled—Myrlin had been strong enough to carry all that he needed, at a pace we couldn’t match.

There was an air current drifting up the shaft. We couldn’t feel it inside our suits, but we could see its effects in the corridor, where some of the ices had begun to melt or sublimate. This was one little corner of level three that had begun to warm up, though our instruments confirmed that the effect was as yet slight. It was one hell of a chimney that the warm air had to climb, and the top of it was still pretty cold. Saul had only drilled a small hole in the door at the bottom of the shaft—just enough to let him look around— but the flow we monitored implied that there was a much bigger breach now. Myrlin had obviously made a gap big enough to let him through.

We had made very good progress, despite the pauses caused by Myrlin’s one real trap and several fake ones, and I was pretty sure that our advantages would have allowed us to catch up with any normal fugitive. The android, though, was still a step and a half in front of us. I hoped that we never would catch up.

“It’s going to be a long ride down to the bottom,” I said. “It’s obviously possible to abseil down, but we should rig some kind of cradle using the winch. We’ll have to come up again soon enough, and I don’t relish the thought of having to climb. The temperature’s high enough for us to leave a block-and-tackle for some time without the pulley freezing solid, but we ought to leave a man here anyhow.”

“Why?” asked Crucero.

“Because if we don’t,” the star-captain put in, “those goons who are following us might simply squat here and wait for us. Someone has to make this place seriously defensible, and lay a much better series of traps than the one the android left for us. If those fail, he has to take the bastards from behind. I don’t mind if they follow us down, so that we can meet them on equal terms, but I’m not going to let them take us one by one as we come up. Okay?”

“You want a volunteer?” asked Serne.

“No,” she said. “I want Crucero.”

She didn’t explain why. That was one of the prerogatives of being a star-captain. I think Crucero had mixed feelings about the job, but he followed the logic of the case well enough. He didn’t have the same curiosity about what was down below as I had, and he wasn’t about to howl with anguish at the lost opportunity. He was probably more worried about the number of men Amara Guur might have sent after us, and whether one lousy lieutenant and a dozen cunning booby-traps could hold the fort against them all.

“They also serve who only stand and wait,” I assured him.

He didn’t laugh.

“Let’s get to work,” said Susarma Lear.

We began preparing for our descent into the abyss—our passage from the seventh circle of hell to what I hoped would be the hinterlands of paradise.

I am not by nature an optimist, but as we worked to rig the makeshift cradle I felt almost rigid with excitement. I really did hope that I was on my way to some kind of paradise run by men like gods; the allure of the centre had a very powerful hold on me.

But as the star-captain had remarked, sometimes hope just isn’t enough.