Asgard's Secret

26

I had expected to find water, and it didn’t take long for the expectation to materialise. There was a lot more of it than I had anticipated, in fact. It didn’t look deep, but it looked distinctly noisome—stagnant was too weak a word to do it justice.

Myrlin’s trail led us straight to it, no more than six hours’ march from the bottom of the dropshaft. Perhaps, once upon a time, it had been a system of reservoirs or a vast hydroponic farm. Now it was a swamp whose waters were as thick as soup, choked with drifting mats of vegetation and pockmarked with small islets crowded with skeletal dendrites decked out with the usual anaemic tinsel. The air was thick with flying insects. Every now and again marsh gas would bubble to the surface, sending slow ripples across it.

“Pity we didn’t pack a boat,” I murmured, as we stood contemplating the dimly lit vastness of the swamp. Our eyes were well-accustomed to the twilight, but the visibility was a lot poorer over the still water.

“Shut up, Rousseau,” said the star-captain. What she meant was: don’t bother to tell us that we’ve lost any chance we ever had of finding him.

I didn’t have to. “We couldn’t track a bulldozer across that,” Serne observed.

“Shut up, Serne,” said the star-captain. “We’re not giving up. We are not going back to report that we simply stopped trying. When our life-support systems reach the limit of their range, we can turn back. Not before.”

It was obvious, though, that she no longer expected to catch up with Myrlin. He must be extremely weary by now, but he’d done it. He’d beaten her.

“Follow me,” the star-captain said, in her most determined tone.

She was out of her mind, but I hadn’t the courage to tell her so. She walked slowly into the water, testing its depth as she went, heading directly away from the shore. I assumed that she would try to guess as best she could which way Myrlin would turn, given that he’d have to avoid the islets and the floating mats.

She was no more than thigh-deep when the bottom leveled out.

“Look!” she said, triumphantly, pointing at the fringe of one of the fibrous masses; it had certainly been disturbed, probably by Myrlin. I had to grant that we might not be entirely lost, until we got far enough out to find larger expanses of open water.

I sighed, and walked into the water after the others, still content to bring up the rear but not yet ready to turn tail and run. It was laborious ploughing through the murky water, but I wasn’t afraid of getting out of my depth. If necessary, I could have walked along the bottom in my cold-suit with a metre of water over my head. I did pause to wonder whether there might be creatures lurking below with teeth like sharks or crocodiles, or drilling worms, but I figured they’d just get toothache if they tried to get through the fabric.

Susarma Lear shouted “Look!” three times more—and I could hear the hope creeping back into her voice—while we covered another kilometre or so. We were moving more slowly now, no longer in a straight line, and I was getting very tired—but I knew that Myrlin had been going without sleep a lot longer than I had, and I could hardly blame the star-captain for conserving the hope that we might find him fast asleep on an islet at any moment.

Eventually, though, we came to a much greater expanse of open water, and the signs of Myrlin’s passage vanished entirely.

The wild goose had flown.

“We’d better rest a while,” the star-captain said. Her voice had the texture of ground glass, but she still wasn’t prepared to say out loud that she admitted defeat.

“If you were to report that you’d caught and killed him,” I pointed out, delicately, as we sprawled on the last of a chain of islets, looking out over the placid lake, “no one would ever know the difference.”

“That’s not the Star Force Way,” she said, severely.

“This isn’t Star Force territory,” I told her.

“The Star Force doesn’t have territory,” she informed me, frostily. “But wherever the Star Force goes, it does things the Star Force Way.”

“Sure,” I said. “If you don’t win the Star Force Way, you lose the Star Force Way. No ifs or buts, just—”

“I heard the joke the first time, Rousseau,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it again. Here’s the plan. We make our way back to the edge of the swamp as quickly as we can, and then we make our way around it. He’s got to come out somewhere. It’s just a matter of picking up his trail there.”

I suppressed a groan. I suspect that I wasn’t the only one. I began to shake my head instead, and then I stopped, because my eye had caught a movement in the dark surface of the lake. It was a ripple, rolling in towards the shore.

It was a very big ripple, and it wasn’t alone.

“Captain,” Serne whispered. He’d seen it too, and he was drawing his gun even as he spoke.

I didn’t reach for mine. They were only ripples, even if it did look as if whatever was causing them might be vast.

We all waited for something substantial to break the surface, but it seemed just as vitreous as ever, even though it had a curiously marbled effect, and no longer seemed quite as flat as it had been.

Whatever was there had to be moving under its own power, because there was no current for it to drift on, but it was hard to figure out exactly where it might be or exactly how fast it might be moving.

Khalekhan had drawn and raised his gun, but he lowered it again. “There’s nothing—” he began—but Serne had leveled his own weapon; he was taking aim.

All I could see was murky water. Nasty water, but only water—except that it wasn’t.

It was obvious now that the surface was no longer flat, but it really did seem as if the lake itself had come to life, and that it was the water itself that was flowing towards us. It wasn’t the water, although it was just as transparent, and seemingly just as fluid. It was something very big and very strange, oozing along the bottom of the lake, but now that it was close it was rearing up like some kind of giant domelike wave.

There were thin pinpricks of light inside it.

It was a gargantuan blob of protoplasm: an amoeboid leviathan. It must have been more than sixty metres across, although it probably wasn’t round; it probably wasn’t any easily definable shape.

The pseudopods were already out of the water, flowing at us like giant hands with too many fingers. “Flowing at us” doesn’t sound all that threatening, but I felt well and truly threatened.

So did Serne. He had already opened fire, and he had altered the setting of his flame-pistol, so that it was letting out great gouts, like the gun in Myrlin’s trap, rather than the delicate beam he’d used to kill the spiky predator.

Khalekhan raised his gun again. So did Susarma Lear.

My own instinct was to flee. I danced backwards, away from the groping jelly. It was like trying to jump out of a stream of treacle, but I managed to haul myself away, and once I was free I could move faster than the protoplasm could flow, at least while I was still on the islet.

I’d like to be able to say that I knew that my moment had finally arrived, and that I was boldly and gladly seizing my opportunity, but it wouldn’t be true. The Star Force code compels me to admit that I simply panicked. While three tongues of lethal fire turned substantial—but relatively tiny—parts of the amazing creature to murky steam, I ran like hell.

If the creature had had a brain, Serne would doubtless have picked it out and made his fire-power tell—but it didn’t. It kept on flowing, the coenocytic mass splitting here, there and anywhere in response to the flame-flood, but not dying. The creature didn’t mind being boiled and sliced, and it was very, very big indeed.

I only glanced back the once, to see the glutinous grey gel flowing up and up and up the legs and torsos of the intrepid soldiers of Old Earth; then I concentrated on making my own escape. I plunged into the water on the far side of the islet and kept on going, heading for the next in the chain. I crossed that one, and the next, and the next.

A scream was ringing in my ears. There were probably three voices, but there was only one interminable scream. It wasn’t a scream of agony or anguish, but of pure unadulterated horror. I tolerated it for what seemed like twenty or thirty seconds, and then I switched off the radio. It was easier, then, to keep on going. I was safe, but I kept going anyway. I was alone, and I was free. Their game was over, and the only one left to play was my own.