Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

It occurred to me then that the peace-officer must also have known that I was lying. He hadn’t taken the trouble to ask me where the truck was in the hope that I’d tell him, but in order to let me know that he didn’t have it.

The Tetrax had no intention of chasing Myrlin—but they had no objection to letting me do it, if I were crazy enough. Their hands might be tied by their own law, but they must have figured out by now that Saul Lyndrach had really been on to something, and they didn’t want some mysterious outworlder monopolizing the discovery any more than they wanted Amara Guur to get his dirty hands on it. The game was bigger than I’d imagined—and the bigger it got, the smaller its hapless pawns came to seem.

“Merde,” I murmured.

“Never mind that,” the star-captain said, mistaking the reason for my distress. “How soon can we start?”

“What are you going to do with the android if you catch him?” I wanted to know.

“Kill him,” she replied. It didn’t surprise me.

“Why?”

“How many times do I have to tell you, Trooper? I give orders; you follow them. How soon?”

“I still say that it’s impossible. If he knows we’re following—and he’s bound to suspect that someone will, even if he doesn’t know you’re here—he’ll cover his tracks.”

“In that case,” she said, “we’ll have to make sure we use a big enough bomb to get him while we still can.” She was smiling, but I knew that she was threatening me. If I wasn’t going to help her, she was implying, then she would have to take extreme measures, no matter what the cost.

I’d already concluded that she was crazy, but I hadn’t quite realised how crazy she was. She still had a big moral credit balance, though. I had to try to help.

“The Tetrax really aren’t going to let you bomb Asgard,” I told her, as gently as I could. “Even if you can pinpoint Myrlin’s position without their help, they’ll put political pressure on your commander that he’d be insane to resist. Having just brought one humanoid species to the brink of extinction, you’re probably prepared to take on anyone and anything by the same means, but the United Governments and Military Forces really wouldn’t like it if you upset the Tetrax. They have a lot of friends. We’re effectively outnumbered by… oh, let’s say five hundred million to one, although that may be a conservative estimate, given that we don’t really know how far around the rim galactic civilization extends. You have big responsibilities, Star-Captain Lear, and I know you want to discharge them sensibly. You’ve come to me for local knowledge. So trust me when I tell you you’ll need to think long and hard before you so much as take the safety-catch off your flame-pistol while you’re on Asgard. If you’re lucky, the peace-officers won’t have left any recording devices behind to spy on this conversation—and if you’re really lucky, they won’t take it seriously even if they did—but if I were you, I’d stop talking about the possibility of your starship opening fire. It isn’t going to happen.”

The silence that descended then seemed very heavy indeed. It was as if the sleeping troopers had stopped breathing—as if they were spellbound, waiting for the star-captain to explode.

She didn’t. “Trooper Rousseau,” she said. “This is a private conversation, protected by military confidentiality. I’m just trying to impress upon you the seriousness of our mission. We need that android dead—and when I say we, I mean the human race. I have to kill him—and you’re right. I need you to tell me how to do it, so I’m being extra nice to you. But if you don’t start being a lot more helpful, you have no idea of the depth of the trouble you’ll be in. So tell me— when do we start?”

There are some people you just can’t argue with. Not all of them are Tetrax. I had already started formulating a timetable in my head when I was interrupted by the trill of the wallphone.

I leapt to my feet, extremely grateful for the opportunity to get away from Susarma Lear, if only for a moment. I tripped over three recumbent troopers on my way to the phone, but I got there in the end.

My gratitude drained away as soon as the caller’s image appeared on the viewscreen. It was a vormyran.

All vormyr look alike to the inexpert human eye, but I didn’t need three guesses to figure out who this one was.

“Michael Rousseau?” he inquired, in awkwardly broken parole. “My name is Amara Guur. We need to talk.”

Politeness required that I should switch on the eye above my own phone so that Amara Guur could see me too, but I didn’t bother. I felt that I could happily live out my life without ever letting him see my face.

“What do you want?” I asked harshly.

He smiled. Unusual for humanoids, the vormyr are a predatory species, irredeemably carnivorous. I’d been told that they had very bad breath, and it was easy enough to imagine that, even though I was only looking at a picture. Guur looked like a cross between a wolf and a crocodile, slightly favouring the reptilian side of the family. It wasn’t a harmonious combination. His smile was unattractive in the extreme.

“I’d like to discuss some matters of mutual interest, if you’re willing.”

“I’m not,” I told him.

He didn’t seem put out.

“I can understand that,” he said. “It has come to my attention that you feel that I am in some way responsible for your recent troubles. I can assure you that I am not, but I should like to make a gesture of good will in any case—a small gift, to assure you of my friendship. It cannot make up for your unfortunate experience, of course, but I think you might be very glad to receive it.” His accent wasn’t incomprehensible once I’d got used to it.

“I don’t want it,” I said.

“I think that you do,” he retorted. “In any case, it belongs to you by reason of both legal and moral entitlement—if, as I understand, you are the sole beneficiary of Saul Lyndrach’s will. Not that I had anything to do with his unfortunate demise, of course—I have offered the peace-officers my full co-operation in the matter of apprehending the homicidal giant.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. I had to use the English word for “hell,” but he got my drift. He smiled again.

“It is a small item that… happened to come into my possession.” So saying, he lifted something up to his phone’s eye so that I could see it. It was a black-bound notebook. It had to be Saul’s log, containing his personal record of his last trip. It had to contain the location of the doorway down to level five—encrypted, I presumed. Obviously, Simeon Balidar hadn’t been able to decipher it, and Saul hadn’t been willing to divulge the key even under extreme pressure. Amara Guur obviously thought that I had a better chance of cracking the code—which explained why he thought we should talk, but not why he was apparently ready to make me a gift of the book, and to risk displaying it on a phone-channel that was almost certainly being monitored by the police. I presumed that he was lying, laying down bait for the next phase of the game.

“Put it in the post,” I said.

“We don’t have time,” he replied. “I can send it by courier, or you can come and collect it, as you please. To be perfectly honest, I would rather not run the risk of a courier being intercepted by… other interested parties. If you would care to name a public meeting-place, where two innocent citizens could meet without fear of interference, I shall be happy to bring it there myself. You are welcome to bring your military escort with their flame-pistols at the ready. If it will help you to reach a decision, your companions might care to know that it will assist them greatly in their pursuit of the multiple murderer Myrlin.”