Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

“Is the whole damn world all as boring as this?” growled Serne in one of his rare communicative moments when the two of us were sharing the cab.

“Pretty much,” I told him. “The seas are shallow, and there are no mountains to speak of. It’s not like Earth, with all those tectonic plates grinding against one another, heaving up mountain ranges, and all those volcanoes blasting away. This surface was designed. There are no cities either. The Tetrax found a few clusters of what used to be buildings scattered here and there, but no ghost towns, no ancient temples, no pyramids. People certainly worked up here, but they probably went home to the levels when their shifts finished. When they abandoned the surface they took virtually everything that they could carry—they left far less machinery here than in the subsurface levels.

“Most people figure that the cavies retired to live underground long before they deserted the upper levels. They may have used the surface purely for growing crops—but the C.R.E. palaeobiologists who work with the seeds and microfossils haven’t found that much evidence of disciplined agricultural activity. Maybe this level was just the roof of the world, and they left it more-or-less to its own devices. It may not have been anything more than some kind of roof-garden. The sea over there might conceivably be a reservoir or a lake, but some C.R.E. people think it was just a glorified puddle in the guttering. We’ll pass a C.R.E. dome soon—that should break up the tedium of your day.”

“Is that where we’re going—to some kind of dome?” he asked.

“Hardly,” I replied. “C.R.E. people are essentially mean-spirited. They don’t allow the likes of you and me to use their routes into the underworld. They wouldn’t even invite us in for a cup of tea if we knocked on their door. They’re so proud of the fact that they have members of a hundred different species working together that they’ve become rather paranoid in their insularity. People like me find our own ways down into level one; we’ll be using one of Saul’s holes.”

Serne peered out of the windows, looking first at the sullen grey waves lapping gently at the barren shore, then inland at the desolate, foggy wasteland, which was dressed as far as the eye could see in blurred shades of pale grey, with not a patch of green to be seen. Even by the low standards commonly set by the surface of Asgard this was not a particularly appealing spot.

“How in hell do you know where to dig?” said Serne sourly.

“We don’t dig,” I told him. “There are sections of the surface where all the soil blew away millions of years ago— great plastic-surfaced deserts, pitted by meteoric dust. There, we can find the trapdoors the cavies used. It’s not easy, because there’s rarely anything to see except a hairline crack and markings which have virtually worn away—no handles or hinges—but it can be done. It helps if you have some idea where to look.”

“And you have?”

“Damn right. Each cave-system on level one seems to be arrayed rather like the petals of a flower, with arms radiating out from a relatively small central hub. Of course, all the systems may be connected by smaller tunnels, but the big open spaces—the farmlands, as it were—form that kind of pattern. The hub of this system is a long way north. The C.R.E. has a dome there, but the one we’ll pass is on the arm which points down toward the equator. The Tetrax have been here long enough to begin to fathom out the kind of scheme the cavies’ architects used, and a lot of trapdoors are arranged in a fairly orderly manner. Now that Myrlin’s reached his destination, we know that Saul’s hole is in much the same position on the next arm over as the one beneath the dome we pass. It must have taken him a while to find it—searching for a circle a few metres across in an area of a hundred square miles isn’t easy—but he knew where to start searching before he set out.”

“Think we’ll have any problem finding our way once we get there?”

“Not that much. Given that Myrlin’s still so far ahead of us, we ought to hope that it isn’t too easy. If he’s able to see Saul’s sled-tracks, he might make better time than we suppose.”

Secretly, of course, I was hoping that Myrlin might find it easier than we had supposed. I was also praying for a bit of really foul weather, not so much to slow our own trucks down as to cause a few problems to Amara Guur’s pirate crew, which was still toiling in our wake. If one of his trucks were to get stuck, it might make a big difference to any eventual confrontation. We couldn’t stop him following us, at least as far as the gateway to the underworld, but a helpful adjustment to the odds we’d face when we got down there might make the difference between life and death for some of us. I still reckoned that I could come out of this mess alive—with luck. Bad weather was only one potential gift that fortune might throw my way.

“What kind of power-units do the sleds have?” Serne asked.

I laughed.

“Muscle-power,” I told him.

“Jesus!” he complained. “Are you telling me that we couldn’t do better than that?”

“Where we’re going,” I told him, “it can get very cold. Machines don’t work too well down in three or four, where it’s only a few degrees Kelvin on a good day. Atmospheric pressure is pretty weak—most of the familiar gases have crystallized out as snow. But it’s not like being in space. The soles of your feet, and your gauntlets every time you touch something, are in contact with solids colder than anything you find in the inner reaches of a solar system—very much colder than any spaceship hull. Wheeled vehicles are hopeless. The C.R.E. sometimes uses hovercraft, but they’re no use in the narrower corridors, and even hovercraft settle when they stop, which means that they have to lay down some kind of cushion every time they put the brakes on. It’s no way to make progress, and it helps them to maintain their customary snail’s pace.

“If you want to move in the levels, my friend, you have to rely on nature’s way. Two feet and polished skids. Even so, you can run into difficulties if the people who made your boots and gloves were telling lies about their tolerance.”

Serne didn’t seem pleased by this news, nor by the relish I took in telling him how rough it was going to be.

“How long are we going to be down there?” he asked.

I shrugged. “We won’t linger in there a minute longer than necessary,” I assured him. “I want to get through it as fast as I possibly can.” I didn’t mention that my goal wasn’t to catch Myrlin, but to get to the interesting places in good time. “If nothing goes wrong,” I added, “we should be able to get through the cold in a couple of days. You’ll just have to hope that the android won’t. We’ll have plenty of margin for error. The gaspacks will renew our air for at least thirty days, more in an emergency. The suits recycle all our wastes, and input carbohydrates—they’ll easily keep us going until the air begins to go bad, although we’ll lose weight and our digestive systems will get thrown out. I guess you’re used to those kinds of side effects.”

“And then some,” he said. I could just make out his bleak stare behind the goggles. I didn’t want to ask him what his personal best was for getting by in a life-preserving suit—it probably wasn’t anywhere near as long as mine, but when I’d set my record, there was no army of aliens trying to blast, fry or evaporate me.

There never had been—until now.

“I guess you’ve already had your fill of suits and gaspacks,” I said, meekly.

“We only used heavy suits where there wasn’t any atmosphere,” he said colourlessly. “Most of the real fighting was done on surface. The temperature was usually fine and the air would have been breathable—except that the Salamandrans were heavily into biotech weaponry. Viroids, neurotoxin-carrying bacteria, that sort of thing… all human-specific, of course. Mostly, we wore thin sterile suits like glorified plastic bags, which wouldn’t slow us down too much. Skin-huggers, with little networks of capillaries to carry your sweat away. Before we put them on we had to shave all over… they gave us some inhibitor to stop the hair growing back, but it didn’t stop the itching. Five or six days into a mission I could feel my flesh crawling. Couldn’t scratch… not properly, anyway.