Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

“He’s got drilling equipment,” I said. “If he takes it with him all the way down to the head of the dropshaft, he can make a way through.”

“But we can catch up with him before that?”

“Probably.”

“Probably isn’t good enough,” she said. “We have to stop him before he reaches the dropshaft. If there’s light, and life, there’s probably a whole world down there for him to get lost in. He’d be very difficult to find—and we couldn’t be sure that he’ll come back any time soon.”

“Would that be such a bad thing?” I asked, innocently.

“Yes,” she said. “But we can catch him. He doesn’t have the detailed instructions that we do. He’ll take more time finding his way. We can catch him before he gets there.”

“It’s not going to be that much easier for us than it is for him,” I warned her. “He’s a novice, but so are you and your men. We all have to get down to four, and then trek for miles through the cold. It’s going to be difficult for all of us. He might go astray without our knowing it, so we might get to where he’s going ahead of him—and once he’s behind us, he won’t be the only one. This isn’t a turkey-shoot, captain.”

“It had better be,” she said, ominously. “If he gets away, my superior officers aren’t going to forgive us, nor is the human race, if things go bad some time down the line.” She seemed to remind herself then that this was exactly what she wasn’t supposed to be talking about. She changed the subject, deciding to give me proof that she could do the conjectures herself. “When you say building,” she mused, “you mean the kind of building that humanoids make. Even through a peephole, you could see that—technological style being what it is. So if there are people down there, they really will be people.”

“Probably,” I agreed. “Close kin, if the evidence of the outer layers can be trusted. Part of the great big humanoid family. In fact, some people think…”

“That Asgard is where the humanoid races came from,” she finished for me, to demonstrate her conjectural prowess. “The home of our various ancestors—and of our common ancestor too. Now that people will actually be able to get down there, they won’t be free to make up any damn story they like any longer. When the news gets out, it’ll kill a lot of idle fantasies. But that’s life, I guess. All the idle fantasies get gunned down in the end.”

“Quite a Romantic, in your own way, aren’t you?” I said.

She scowled. Perhaps she thought I was insulting her. “No, I’m not,” she said. “I have a job to do, but I can’t get on with it until I get to where I’m going. The devil makes work for idle minds—but that’s why they call it Asgard, right?”

“It’s why we call it Asgard,” I confirmed. “The home of the gods. Except that the Tetrax don’t really think in terms of gods the way our ancestors used to do—and if they ever did, they certainly wouldn’t have thought of hard-drinking warrior gods like the Norse pantheon. The Tetron word some human pioneer translated as Asgard means something more like ‘the essence of mystery’—except that the Tetron concept of mystery implies a lot more than our word. Maybe ‘metaphysics’ would be…”

“Okay,” she said. “As a dictionary-maker, you’re a pretty good scavenger, Rousseau.”

She was definitely insulting me. I tried not to scowl.

“Maybe our guy got it right and the Tetrax got it wrong,” she said. “Maybe Asgard is the home of the warrior-gods, ever-ready to do battle.” She was still thinking about those well-concealed, probably non-existent guns.

“I don’t know about ever-ready,” I said. “I dare say you’d like to think that there’s some kind of Valhalla down there where all good star-captains go when they die so they can spend eternity committing genocide—but up here it’s been a bitterly cold winter for a long, long time, and in Norse myth that kind of winter was the prelude to the final battle: the twilight of the gods, before they all got wiped out.”

“Now you’re catching on,” she said. “Hold that thought, and you’ll begin to see what kind of universe we’re living in.”

Her eyes were harder than steel—maybe as hard as the stuff of which Asgard’s fabric is actually made. It would be a neat tricky I thought, to be able to play the gorgon like that— but it wasn’t my personal technical style. It was a Star Force thing.

They’d had giants in Norse mythology too, I vaguely remembered. The warrior-gods had killed them all. Or had they?

I was driving again when the sun came up. Susarma Lear was asleep in her bunk, but Serne was sitting beside me, waiting patiently to take another turn at the wheel. He was fidgeting, although he couldn’t possibly have been unused to long periods of inactivity. Life in the Star Force had to be ninety-nine percent waiting and one percent action.

When the rim of the sun suddenly appeared, as a slowly expanding yellow arc away to our right, he drew in his breath sharply. There had been a silvery glow in the sky for some little while, but this was different. The sunlight spilled across the plain like a flood, turning the dead white carpet of snow into a sea of glittering gold. The sky lightened from jet black to a deep, even blue, uninterrupted by the slightest wisp of cloud.

Serne shielded his eyes and tried to look into the glare, but he couldn’t bear it. I took two pairs of sun-goggles from the dashboard compartment and passed one to him.

“It’s big,” he observed. “It doesn’t seem as bright, but it’s… very strange.”

“Not much like home?” I queried.

“Not much,” he agreed.

“It’s larger than Earth’s star,” I told him. “A different spectral type. Its association with Asgard is probably a cosmic accident. I suppose you did most of your fighting in the systems of G-type suns?”

“That was the territory we were fighting for,” he said. “We were always suited up, though. Even the so-called Gaia-clones didn’t look like home.”

“Wait till you see the sunset,” I said. “There’s a lot more vapour in the air then, and the sea of gold’s more like an ocean of blood. Very symbolic.”

He looked out over the illuminated plain, drinking in the sight as if he were avid for sensory stimulation—but there wasn’t a lot to see once he’d savoured the changing colours to the full. The undulations were still so shallow that it looked quite flat.

“Crazy landscape,” he said. “No benchmarks—trees, hills, whatever. Makes the distances seem unreal. Driving through limbo.”

I called the other truck to make sure that Crucero had found the eyeshades. He had. He reported that everything was satisfactory, and made no comment on the quality of the sunrise or the landscape.

“How long have you served with the star-captain?” I asked Serne, for the sake of introducing a human note into the conversation.

He looked at me suspiciously, as if he thought I might be trying to worm some kind of military secret out of him.

“Three tours,” he said, finally. “She was only a lieutenant first time around.”

“A long time,” I observed, although the only clue I had as to how long a tour might be was the casual remark that the latest one had been uncommonly long at nineteen months. “All the way to the actual invasion, I presume.”

“It wasn’t much of an invasion,” he told me. “The fleet pounded all hell out of Salamandra from orbit. The battle in the system lasted a full month, but it wasn’t our show. We only went down to mop up. There wasn’t a lot to mop.”

“But there were survivors—on the ground, I mean.”