Asgard's Secret

5

I woke up with a terrible hangover, reeking of some kind of aromatic liquor. It took me several seconds to remember that I’d only had a couple of drinks, and that neither of them had contained anything that human taste-buds would deem exotic.

The insides of my eyelids were red, and I spent another few seconds wondering whether that might be a symptom of something dreadful. Then I realised that, wherever I was, the lights were on—and very bright. I struggled to unglue the eyelids, squinting until the dazzle faded. Unfortunately, the headache didn’t. When I managed to sit up and look around, I discovered that I was in a cell. The floor and walls—one of which was made of clear glass—were spotlessly clean. There was no mistaking the Tetron workmanship.

I was on a low-slung bunk. There was no mattress, but the surface was smart enough to soften up when someone lay down on it; the dent my recumbent body had left was slowly evening out. At the third attempt I managed to stand up. The glass wall was solid, although there was a marbled section just above head height that was emitting a stream of fresh, cool air. I stood on tiptoe to let the current stir my hair. I contrived a couple of deep breaths that didn’t fill my lungs with the sickly stench. Then I banged on the glass with my fist.

During the two minutes that it took for the guard to respond to my summons I reconstituted the memory of the fight in the bar. It didn’t seem so terrible—but I knew that I’d been set up by Amara Guur, and I knew that things had to be a lot worse than mere memory could tell me.

The guard was a Tetron, dressed in the sort of informal uniform that almost all Tetrax wear, whether they’re street-sweepers, public administrators or schoolteachers—except, of course, for the ones that are wearing formal kinds of uniforms, like policemen.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Thirty-two ninety,” he replied. I’d slept through most of yesterday and a fair slice of today.

“How did I get here?”

“The police brought you.”

The answer was a trifle over-literal, but my head was hurting too much to allow me to frame one that might elicit the information I needed. All I could manage was: “Where from?”—which was pretty stupid, because I knew that too.

He didn’t. “I’m afraid that I haven’t read the arresting officer’s report, Mr. Rousseau. Would you like me to display a copy on the wallscreen?”

“Later,” I said. “Do you happen to know what I’m charged with?”

“Murder,” he told me.

It should have been a lot more surprising than it was. Even though it wasn’t particularly surprising, the sound of the word made me want to vomit.

“Who am I supposed to have murdered?” I asked, hoarsely.

“A person named Atmin Atmanu.”

“The Sleath?” I hadn’t even known his name; somehow, slimy Simeon Balidar had forgotten to introduce us.

“I believe Mr. Atmanu was a Sleath.”

I groaned, but I didn’t bother to tell him that I had been framed. He was a Tetron, and he would simply have reminded me that I would be presumed innocent until I’d actually been proven guilty in a court of law, just like any other item of filthy scum the peace-officers swept up from the gutter. Not that he’d actually have said the last part, but he’d have reminded me anyway.

“I need to get cleaned up,” I told him. “Then I need something to soothe my aching head. Then I need a lawyer—can you find me one?”

“The control-panel operating the bathroom facilities is located at the head of the bed,” he told me, patiently. “The cubicle has a medicare facility, although you will have to volunteer a second blood sample if you require controlled drugs. Did you have any particular lawyer in mind?”

“No. Can you call Aleksandr Sovorov at the Co-ordinated Research Establishment and tell him that I’m here? He probably knows half a dozen lawyers who’ll take humans as clients, if there are that many in Skychain City.”

“I will do that,” the guard said. “Is there anyone else you would like me to notify regarding your arrest and incarceration?”

“Saul Lyndrach,” I said. “He lives in sector six. I can’t remember his number, but he’s on the database. I can get a drink of water in the bathroom, I suppose?”

“Of course,” he said, seeming mildly offended at the implied slur on the quality of Tetron prisons. “There is also a laundry facility. Do you need instruction in the operation of these fitments?”

“No, I live in a Tetron-built apartment—it’s not as luxurious as this, of course, but I think I can figure out which virtual buttons to press. Thanks. What’s your name, by the way?”

“69-Aquila,” he told me, with a slight inclination of the head.

When he’d gone, I went to the bed head control panel and found the button that would open the bathroom. Once I’d managed to display the virtual keyboard underneath the bathroom wallscreen, it wasn’t too difficult to figure out how to activate the water-fountain, open the laundry chute and switch on the shower. I didn’t bother with the medicare facility; I figured that it would be simpler to live with the headache than work my way through an interrogation in parole, complete with blood samples, just to get a Tetron aspirin. By the time my clothes and I had both been thoroughly cleaned I felt better anyway—or would have done, if I hadn’t been so acutely conscious of the fact that I’d been fitted up for murder.

It was easy enough to figure out why. The Tetron criminal justice system is based on the principle of reparation rather than punishment, although it makes little enough difference when you’re on the receiving end. A criminal’s debt to society is exactly that: a debt. One way or another, it has to be paid off. If you’re a skilled worker lucky enough to find a generous employer, you can pay off a murder in a matter of ten or twenty years.

If abject slavery isn’t your thing, you have the option of renting out your body as a bioreactor and your unconscious brain as a relay in some fancy hypercomputer. Some people actually prefer that, because it allows them to sleep through their entire sentence—which rarely runs to more than forty or fifty years—but most people don’t, because they fear, very reasonably, that they might not be quite the same person when they wake up again.

Amara Guur wanted me to work for him—on his terms. He’d been prepared to ask politely, or at least to pretend, but either I’d been too slow to respond or something had happened after Heleb’s visit to increase his sense of urgency. I had to admire his efficiency, though. Had he actually planted Balidar in that bar to wait for me? Had he given Saul’s doorman instructions to send me along there if and when I turned up?

It seemed so—the only alternative was that the whole plan had been stitched together in a matter of minutes as soon as the bartender had spotted me with Balidar.

Either way, it was a lot of trouble to go to. Whatever Amara Guur had found that had given him a sudden interest in going out into the cold was obviously a powerful incentive.

If he’d only told me what it was, maybe…

I put that thought aside. Honest dealing wasn’t the sort of thing Amara Guur went in for. If he’d already committed a murder or two to get hold of whatever it was he had, he’d probably got stuck in that particular procedural groove.

My lawyer turned up at forty-one ten, full of apologies for the delay. His name was 238-Zenatta. He explained, regretfully, that it had proved impossible for 69-Aquila to contact Saul Lyndrach, who was currently being sought by Immigration Control. They were apparently anxious to know what had become of a human named Myrlin, who had been entrusted to Saul’s care following his arrival on the surface.

I wasn’t surprised by this news. After all, if Amara Guur’s men had given instructions to Saul’s doorman about where to send me, they must have known that he wouldn’t be at home when I came looking for him. I had more urgent matters to consider, though.

“The evidence for the prosecution has all been filed,” 238-Zenatta told me. “The witness statements seem to be in order and the forensic evidence is entirely consonant with it. It seems to me that your only possible chance to minimize the magnitude of the offence is to plead diminished responsibility due to alcoholic poisoning.”

I could see why he might think that. All DNA-based humanoids react in much the same way to alcohol—except, of course, for the Tetrax, who have apparently modified their entire species by means of genetic engineering to correct nature’s mistake and save them from the indignities of drunkenness.

“I didn’t do it,” I told him. “I was framed.”

“You didn’t kill Mr. Atmanu?”

“No.”

“Then how do you account for the fact that your handprints are arrayed on the murder-weapon, in a configuration suggesting very strongly that you were holding it in such a way as to strike out with it, aggressively.”

“There was nothing aggressive about it. I was trying to hold him off when he came at me with a knife. I tried to hit Heleb with it, but the Sleath was perfectly all right when the Spirellan knocked me out. Heleb killed him.”

“You say that you were knocked unconscious?” 238-Zenatta queried.

I sighed. “No, I don’t have a bruise or a fracture,” I admitted. “He squeezed the arteries at the side of my neck—and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he knew how to do it without leaving a mark.”

“There are five witnesses,” the lawyer pointed out. “Their statements agree in every detail. Simeon Balidar has admitted that you and he were cheating, and the cards entered into evidence do appear to be marked. All five witnesses state that when Mr. Atmanu attempted to take his money back, you attacked him with the chair, and that you continued to beat him with it after you had rendered him helpless. Sleaths are, by nature, a relatively fragile species, and Mr. Atmanu appears to have been a lightly-built individual, so I suppose you might claim that you did not intend to kill him, but the court is likely to take the view that it was your responsibility to take your victim’s seeming fragility into account when…”

“He wasn’t my victim,” I reminded him. “He was Heleb’s victim. Heleb killed him—on Amara Guur’s orders. They wanted to frame me. They were all in on it. They all work for Amara Guur.”

238-Zenatta was a good lawyer. He cut straight to the heart of the matter. “What motive did they have for arranging such a conspiracy?” he asked.

“They came to my apartment,” I said, fully conscious of how feeble it sounded. “Heleb and Lema, that is. They offered me a job I didn’t want to take. Guur wanted to make sure that I had no choice.”

238-Zenatta consulted his wristpad. “Heleb and Lema have stated that they did indeed come to your apartment to offer you a job,” he agreed. “They have made a tape of the conversation available to the court. They have explained that they subsequently discovered that your reason for hesitating over their offer was that the alternative plans for raising capital for your expedition, to which you refer on the tape, involved conspiring with Simeon Balidar to cheat at cards. Balidar confirms this. Heleb claims that when he discovered what you were doing, he made a second attempt to persuade you that it would be far better to swallow your pride and join his expedition than to resort to criminal means.”

“Does he have a tape of that conversation?”

“Alas, no. He explained that because there were Zabarans present, who have particular concerns regarding privacy, he switched off his recording device before entering the room.”

“If we can prove that they were all working for Amara Guur,” I said, hopefully, “that would surely be evidence of a conspiracy.”

“Can we prove that, Mr. Rousseau?” asked 238-Zenatta, sceptically. I couldn’t blame him. Whether he believed me or not—and I was pretty certain that he didn’t—his chances of finding any evidence of a formal contract of employment between any of the five fatal witnesses and our unfriendly neighbourhood crime-lord were a bit slim.

“Can we prove that they dosed me with the alcohol after I was unconscious?” I asked.

“Perhaps, if a sufficiently thorough medical examination were carried out,” he said, even more sceptically. “But it would be severely detrimental to our best defence if we did.”

“I’m not going to admit to killing the Sleath,” I told him, flatly. “Diminished responsibility is not an option. I’m not guilty, and that’s the way I’m going to plead. Whether anyone believes me or not, I’m going to tell the court the truth.”

“I fear, Mr. Rousseau, that the court might not approve of that strategy,” the lawyer said. “It might well seem to the court that you are adding a manifest slander to the burden of your culpability. You would be asking the court to believe that someone would go to extraordinary lengths to obtain your participation in a perfectly ordinary expedition. There are hundreds of people in Skychain City who have skills similar to yours, Mr. Rousseau, many of whom are desperate for employment. Why would Amara Guur, or Heleb, or anyone else commit murder in order to obtain your services, when they could hire a person of almost equal capability for little more than half the wage that Heleb offered you in your apartment?”

Put like that, it did seem impossibly weird. Obviously, I considered myself the best of the best when it came to pioneering the trackless wilderness, but I could see how other people might find it difficult to agree with me. After all, I’d never actually made the big strike for which I felt myself destined. I was so poor, in fact, that if I really had thought that I could finance my next expedition by running a crooked card-school, I might very well have tried it.

I looked at 238-Zenatta, and he looked back. There wasn’t the slightest hint of challenge in his stare; none was necessary.

“I didn’t do it,” I said. “I don’t have any real evidence that Heleb did, or that anyone was working for Amara Guur, so we’ll leave that out of the story—but I’m sticking to the truth. I wasn’t cheating, and I didn’t kill the Sleath. He went for me with a knife, and I defended myself with entirely reasonable force. He was still alive when Heleb attacked me and knocked me out. That’s it.”

238-Zenatta shook his head sadly, but he knew his duty. “Very well,” he said. “That is the case I shall argue.”