Asgard's Secret

25

I stepped across the threshold between the worlds without much difficulty. The door yielded easily enough to the pressure of my hand. I wasn’t surprised to find myself in a corridor; it seemed only logical that there’d be some kind of establishment here similar to the one at the top of the shaft. This corridor, however, was very much warmer than the one up above, and like the room from which we’d come it was dimly lit by some kind of bioluminescence. The beam of my headlight picked out scuttling white insects as they hurriedly disappeared into various cracks and coverts. The largest of them was no bigger than my thumbnail.

I checked the temperature; it was 276 degrees Kelvin— three degrees above the freezing point of water, assuming that the pressure was close to Skychain City’s norm. It couldn’t be comfortable for the insects, if they were exothermic, but it was obviously tolerable. Since the shaft had been open the local air temperature must have dropped very noticeably; outside, it would surely be warmer.

I led the way along the passage, following the glaring traces left by the giant android as his feet had scuffed the organic slick that covered the floor. We passed through two more doorways, each one opened by means of brute force and left agape. It wasn’t until we reached the main door that we found more evidence of cutting, and the gap had been closed again. I had to lever the flap open again, but I set to it with a will. I’d seen virtually nothing of the establishment itself—I hadn’t the slightest idea whether it was a laboratory or a Laundromat—but I didn’t want to waste a minute. My only ambition was to get outside, into the cavies’ version of open territory.

I held my breath as I forced a way through, not letting it out again until I was out. I might have said something to the people behind me, but I really can’t remember.

The light was brighter on the outside. It was diffuse light, pure white in colour; it seemed to emanate from everywhere overhead, but not quite uniformly. The “sky” was faintly mottled, with occasional black spots. It was almost like a negative image of a planetary sky, with dark stars and shadowy clouds set against a radiant background the absolute opposite of night-black.

The ground glistened like the skin of a patterned snake or frog, mostly in shades of grey. There were dendritic forms like trees and bushes clustered about the door, gathered densely enough to qualify as a forest, but they were festooned with glistening strands of some gossamer-like substance, as if each and every one had been turned into a massive trap by a giant funnel-web spider. The tallest of the “trees” grew to twice my height; the “sky” was only twice as far from the floor.

In spite of the brighter light, the suggestion was of a misty dusk rather than full daylight. We’d have been able to see easily enough without our headlamps, but I wasn’t in any hurry to switch mine off. Its light reflected eerily from the spider-silk, but the material would have seemed even more sinister by what passed hereabouts for natural light.

“What is that stuff?” the star-captain asked—but I had no answer.

“It’s just as colourless as the surface,” Serne complained.

“I guess the trees don’t need chlorophyll,” I told him. “Whatever fuels this ecosystem, it’s not simulated sunlight.

The trees are probably thermosynthetic, drawing heat from Asgard’s superstructure. It’s not like the surface-simulation on level one.”

I only had to take a single step to bring myself within easy reach of a cobweb-strewn branch. The impression of gossamer wasn’t misleading; the stuff really was as fragile as spider-silk, and as clingy. The branch itself was brittle; it snapped the moment I put pressure on it. I crumbled the fragment in my gauntleted hand; it disintegrated into tiny shards.

Tiny flying creatures were flocking about our heads, presumably attracted by the light. They resembled tiny moths with wings patterned in black and white. As they accumulated, it became obvious that the lamps weren’t going to be helpful for much longer.

Susarma Lear cursed.

“Might as well switch off,” I said.

When they’d complied with the suggestion, I moved away from the doorway. The living cloud evaporated. It was easy enough to walk between the trees, even though they filled most of the available space; they were too fragile to impede our progress.

The “boles” of the trees were thick and bulbous, and the junctions from which the branches sprouted were decked with a much thicker overgrowth than the external spider-silk veils. There were creepy-crawlies a-plenty, but I still couldn’t see anything bigger than my thumbnail.

Myrlin’s boots had left huge footprints in the ground, which was thickly carpeted—to a depth of two or three centimetres—by some kind of fungal mass. If he wanted to conceal his tracks, he was going to have to get out of the forest first.

“Look there,” said the star-captain, pointing up at an angle of forty-five degrees. The flyers she was pointing at were obviously bigger than insects, although it was difficult to judge their distance accurately enough to estimate their size. Some were gliding, others flapping wings in a laborious fashion that suggested considerable size, but I didn’t want to infer too much. A few shone very faintly, either with bioluminescence of their own or because they were infected with some kind of parasitic growth.

“It’s not a garden,” Serne observed, drily.

“Nor a vegetable field,” I agreed. “Wilderness, pure and—”

I broke off very abruptly. I hadn’t heard the slightest warning sound, because my cold-suit wasn’t equipped with pick-up mikes. I wouldn’t have had any warning at all, if I hadn’t caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye, hurtling towards me with astonishing speed.

It was coming from my right, and it was much bigger than it had any right to be, considering the speed with which it was moving through a very cluttered environment— but it wasn’t smashing a way through the elaborately-festooned branches the way I was; it was moving discreetly, with remarkable agility.

I had no way of knowing how much it weighed, although I knew that it had to be lightly-framed, but I caught a glimpse of the spikes on its head and the claws on its feet. I certainly didn’t want to get in its way. If my cold-suit had been built for sprinting I’d have run, even though I knew that I wouldn’t have had a chance of getting away—but I had to stand and face it, because I had no alternative. I raised my hands, ready to grapple.

I didn’t need to. When it was no more than a metre away, a thin beam of liquid light leapt out of Seme’s flame-pistol and drilled a hole right through its head. The creature was light enough to be hurled sideways by the impact, and its ability to flow through the gaps in the forest abruptly deserted it. It crashed into a bush, sending splinters flying in every direction.

“Hey!” I said. “That was a little too close for comfort.”

“No trouble,” he said, just as if I’d thanked him kindly.

For a moment, I thought the dead thing was vaguely humanoid, but it was just that it had reared up on its hind legs to attack me and had been jerked rigid by the shock of having its brain instantaneously spit-roasted. It was more like a cat—except for the spikes.

Susarma Lear and Khalekhan had their guns out too. They had formed a triangle, each covering a hundred and twenty degrees of arc, as if they expected a horde of naked savages to leap out of ambush brandishing spears. They seemed so purposeful that I’d gladly have laid a thousand to one against the horde.

The animal’s skin was smooth and hairless. Its feet were large, with splayed toes as long as the claws that projected from them. Its shoulders seemed ridiculously large until I realised that it had some kind of extendable frill draped like a cloak about its upper torso. The spikes on its head didn’t look like horns, until I’d figured out how it held its head when it was charging, and then they did. I doubted that they’d have been able to penetrate my cold-suit, even if I hadn’t been ready to fend off the attack with my brawny arms, but I was glad that I hadn’t had to wrestle with the beast.

“Well,” I said, “it’s not quite as big as a man, but if there are things like that around, there could be humanoids too.”

“Let’s get moving,” Susarma Lear said. “The android’s getting further away. He’s a lot faster than we anticipated, and he just keeps on going.”

She had had enough of letting me lead. She set off in front herself, striding out purposefully.

“We could get Crucero to send more equipment down,” I suggested—but she wouldn’t hear of it.

“No time,” she said.

I fell into step at the rear of the group. I couldn’t see her, but I could talk to her easily enough over the radio link. “Keep a sharp lookout,” I said. “Logic says that there must be worse things than that around these parts.”

“I didn’t think the spikes on its head were for decoration,” she retorted. “And I saw how fast it moved. Natural selection doesn’t favour agility like that unless it’s a matter of life or death. When it saw you, it charged—no time wasted in hesitation. I can read the signs too, Rousseau. Trust me.”

“You’re in command,” I said a trifle resentfully.

“That’s right,” she said. “There must have been a path here once, Rousseau, if not a road. That place we just came from was built to last, and it’s lasted, but the infrastructure supporting it has been obliterated. Maybe if we stripped this glutinous carpet we’d find the roadway with all its markings intact, but it wouldn’t tell us much more than we already know. Nobody like us has been this way for a very long time—except for the android.”

“You’re right,” I conceded. “But there’s built to last and built to last. The station up on four has been deep-frozen, but this one hasn’t. I doubt that we’re talking about an ecosystem that ran wild a million years ago, let alone hundreds of millions. This is degeneracy of a more recent vintage.”

“I’ll let you worry about the implications of that,” she said.

“Thanks. What did you make of the frill?”

“What frill?” she said, before she realised what I meant.

“Sorry, Rousseau—I don’t read frills. Arms and armour, speed and skill are my things. What did you make of the frill?”

“It could have been an arbitrary embellishment, used in sexual display,” I said. “On the other hand, it could have been a mechanism for radiating excess heat. If so, keeping warm is no problem hereabouts—quite the reverse, in fact.”

“So the power’s still on, and the provision it makes for life-support is generous. Big deal. Try to keep up, will you?”

“I am keeping up,” I assured her. What she meant was: Don’t even think about deserting. I wasn’t intimidated. If I were to set off in the opposite direction to the one Myrlin had gone, she’d keep chasing Myrlin—but I had to pick my moment. If they weren’t sufficiently distracted, they might just decide to shoot me.

When we finally paused to rest, though, the star-captain made a gesture of trust that I hardly deserved—she offered me a gun. I hadn’t accepted the one Serne had offered me, but this one seemed far more significant. I took it, and thanked her for the kind thought.

Now that I had my very own flame-pistol, I felt that I had finally been awarded full membership in her gang. That, I supposed, was how she’d intended me to feel.

“Try to use it wisely,” she said. “And whatever else you do, make sure that none of us is in the line of fire before you set it off.”

“I’ll do my best,” I promised.