Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

“If the cold had come more quickly,” the star-captain mused, “there might be whole plants and animals preserved.”

“It didn’t come as quickly as all that,” I told her. “Not even on one. We’re sixty or seventy metres beneath the surface here, and the artificial rock which they used to make the walls and ceilings is a very good insulator. It might have been thousands of years after whatever disaster overtook the outside that the cold seeped down here, and the decline in temperature was probably very gradual. By the time the cold took control, there was very little left for it to claim for its own—the inhabitants were long gone. Maybe they took all the birds and beasts with them.”

“I can think of another scenario,” she said.

It didn’t surprise me. Ever since she’d found out that I wasn’t keen on the fortress-Asgard hypothesis she’d taken a certain delight in embroidering it, bringing little bits of evidence into line with it one by one.

“Go ahead,” I told her. I figured I was tough enough to take it.

“Suppose there really is a central power-source down there in the centre,” she said. “A starlet, as you call it. And suppose its power-lines really did extend through thousands of levels, including this one, to give power and heat. If that were so, then there’s no reason at all why the cold should ever have seeped down this far. Maybe it didn’t seep down at all. Maybe this level and the ones above it were deliberately refrigerated, and the atmosphere of the world deliberately destroyed. Maybe it was all part of a strategy of war.”

“You think this was the result of some alien offensive?” I said.

I couldn’t see her face, but I could imagine the grin on it.

“Quite the reverse,” she answered. “I think it was a defensive move. I think the reason they had to evacuate these levels was that there was no way they could continue to hold them, and I think the reason they froze them was to try and stop the rot that was taking them over.”

I remembered Seme’s descriptions of the kind of fighting the Star Force had been formed to do. The Salamandrans had been biotech-minded, and had used biotech weapons: engineered plagues.

“You might be right,” I conceded reluctantly.

“And if I am,” she pointed out. “Your Tetron friends might get a very nasty shock one day, if they keep on trying to revive the bacteria they find beneath the snowdrifts.”

I knew that she might be right about that, too, but I wasn’t about to say so. She didn’t need any further encouragement to keep her nasty mind ticking over. Anyhow, I could follow the rest of the train of thought without her help. If Asgard was a fortress, whose outer defences had been penetrated, the reason why the exiled cavies hadn’t come out of hiding a million years ago might not be too difficult to figure out. Maybe the surrender of the outer levels hadn’t stopped the invasion—maybe there was nothing beneath our boots but layer upon layer of dead worlds.

I knew it couldn’t be quite that bad. I knew because of the few tantalizing jottings which Saul had left in his notebook. The level he had reached at the bottom of his dropshaft wasn’t cold, and there were living creatures there. There was light, and there was plant life, and there were animals. He’d seen enough, before he was forced to return because he was at the very limit of his exploratory range, to make that plain. But what Saul had seen wasn’t sufficient to demonstrate that there was still intelligent life inside Asgard. It wasn’t sufficient to prove that if a war had been fought, it hadn’t been lost.

The star-captain’s scenario was still a lively contender— and if she was right, then the warm, living part of Asgard into which we were headed might be far more dangerous than I had previously supposed.

Eventually, we came to the next big wall.

It looked like most of the other walls in the levels: frosted, curving, windowless. There was a doorway in front of us, which Saul had opened with the aid of levers and a torch, so that it presented itself to us as a narrow and jagged slash of shadow. We approached it very carefully, knowing it to be the ideal spot for another of Myrlin’s little traps. Perhaps for that very reason there was nothing untoward to be found. The android probably figured that if he had got this far without being caught then he was virtually home and dry. Once he moved away from the bottom of the dropshaft he was making his own way, and all he had to do was cover his tracks.

The corridors inside the wall were like those in any other complex, but the doors that Saul had opened showed us rooms that were different from any I had seen before. For one thing, they hadn’t been entirely emptied. There was payload here—enough to have made Saul rich even without the shaft to the interior.

There were no bare walls inside the rooms; there was storage space of one kind or another, all of it packed tight. There were shelves for objects, and big pieces of equipment with display screens, keyboards and instrument panels. Even the chairs were still in place. There were sinks and benches, and sealed chambers fitted with artificial manipulators. There was a great deal of glassware.

Obviously, this was one place the cavies had intended to come back to. Equally obviously, they hadn’t actually been back for a very long time.

“It’s a laboratory,” said Crucero, looking around one of the bigger rooms.

“Damn right,” I replied, abstractedly. I was examining some big steel boxes, which might have been refrigerators, ovens, radiation chambers or autoclaves, and wondering whether there was any way to get inside them.

“It’s a biotech lab,” said Susarma Lear, by way of amplification. I could tell that her imagination was showing her ranks of technicians trying to solve the problem of defending a closed world against a plague-attack… and failing.

“The C.R.E. would pay plenty for a place like this,” I told her. “If it’s been stripped at all, it doesn’t show. They may have closed it down, but they left it ready to be started up again. Everywhere else, we’ve found nothing but the litter they left behind because they considered it useless. This is the real thing.”

Even so, there was a kind of desolation about the place. It was too tidy. It hadn’t been deserted in a panic; whatever work had gone on here had been brought to a conclusion. It looked as if you could simply find the main power-switch, and turn everything right back on, but that was misleading.

Khalekhan brushed his suited forefinger over one of the keyboards, as though he expected the keys to click and the screen above it to light up. But the keys were stuck solid, immovable, and whatever data had been enshrined in the silicon chips inside the machine must have long since decayed into chaos. Even at twenty degrees Kelvin—and it was no colder than that here—entropy takes its slow toll. Electronic systems can last for millions of years, because silicon is tough stuff, but they need use and maintenance. The unnatural stillness of the deep-freeze isn’t such a wonderful preservative as some people make out.

“Let’s not waste time,” said the star-captain, gruffly. “You can play games to your heart’s content when we come back. We have a job to do, remember?” The reason she sounded gruff was that her last hopes of catching Myrlin in the upper levels had now evaporated. If she was going to catch and kill him, she was going to have to do it much closer to the centre of the world.

I didn’t protest against her haste. I was as keen to find the dropshaft as she was, albeit for very different reasons. These laboratories were exciting, but they paled into insignificance by comparison with what might be waiting for us down below.