Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

So we moved on, passing doors which Saul had never got round to forcing, barely glancing into the rooms which he had opened up. There was only one where I lingered a little while, letting my curiosity off the bit; that was when I found myself beside one of the sealed transparent chambers where artificial hands were poised above a small assortment of equipment: pipettes, reagent jars, beakers. It was a touch of untidiness that seemed fascinating, and somehow very promising. Whatever was inside that sealed chamber might have been the very last thing that the cavies were working on before they left—before they made their exit down the deep elevator shaft which might have taken them all the way to the mysterious centre.

While I paused momentarily, Serne went ahead, scanning the path for tripwires. He didn’t find any booby-traps, but he found the shaft.

He called out for us to come quickly, but he was out of sight; we all went through the standard pantomime of asking “Where?” so that he could reply, unhelpfully, “Here.” Eventually, though, we managed to find him.

If we had been in any doubt as to whether Myrlin was still ahead of us, what we found in the shaft settled the question. There were two doubled-up cords secured at the top, and there were half a dozen pieces of equipment abandoned there. It was my equipment, taken from my truck. There was no sled—Myrlin had been strong enough to carry all that he needed, at a pace we couldn’t match.

There was an air current drifting up the shaft. We couldn’t feel it inside our suits, but we could see its effects in the corridor, where some of the ices had begun to melt or sublimate. This was one little corner of level three that had begun to warm up, though our instruments confirmed that the effect was as yet slight. It was one hell of a chimney that the warm air had to climb, and the top of it was still pretty cold. Saul had only drilled a small hole in the door at the bottom of the shaft—just enough to let him look around— but the flow we monitored implied that there was a much bigger breach now. Myrlin had obviously made a gap big enough to let him through.

We had made very good progress, despite the pauses caused by Myrlin’s one real trap and several fake ones, and I was pretty sure that our advantages would have allowed us to catch up with any normal fugitive. The android, though, was still a step and a half in front of us. I hoped that we never would catch up.

“It’s going to be a long ride down to the bottom,” I said. “It’s obviously possible to abseil down, but we should rig some kind of cradle using the winch. We’ll have to come up again soon enough, and I don’t relish the thought of having to climb. The temperature’s high enough for us to leave a block-and-tackle for some time without the pulley freezing solid, but we ought to leave a man here anyhow.”

“Why?” asked Crucero.

“Because if we don’t,” the star-captain put in, “those goons who are following us might simply squat here and wait for us. Someone has to make this place seriously defensible, and lay a much better series of traps than the one the android left for us. If those fail, he has to take the bastards from behind. I don’t mind if they follow us down, so that we can meet them on equal terms, but I’m not going to let them take us one by one as we come up. Okay?”

“You want a volunteer?” asked Serne.

“No,” she said. “I want Crucero.”

She didn’t explain why. That was one of the prerogatives of being a star-captain. I think Crucero had mixed feelings about the job, but he followed the logic of the case well enough. He didn’t have the same curiosity about what was down below as I had, and he wasn’t about to howl with anguish at the lost opportunity. He was probably more worried about the number of men Amara Guur might have sent after us, and whether one lousy lieutenant and a dozen cunning booby-traps could hold the fort against them all.

“They also serve who only stand and wait,” I assured him.

He didn’t laugh.

“Let’s get to work,” said Susarma Lear.

We began preparing for our descent into the abyss—our passage from the seventh circle of hell to what I hoped would be the hinterlands of paradise.

I am not by nature an optimist, but as we worked to rig the makeshift cradle I felt almost rigid with excitement. I really did hope that I was on my way to some kind of paradise run by men like gods; the allure of the centre had a very powerful hold on me.

But as the star-captain had remarked, sometimes hope just isn’t enough.

There was, of course, another dispute once we’d rigged up our scaffold and were ready to start lowering Earth’s first ambassador to the heartland of Asgard. I wanted to be the first one down, but I was overruled. After some argument, Serne was given the job. Apparently, the star-captain was worried in case Myrlin was lying in wait at the foot of the shaft, waiting to pick us off one by one. She graciously agreed that I could go third, after her and before Khalekhan.

I was not entirely out of sympathy with her logic, but I found the waiting well-nigh unbearable. It took a long time to lower Serne into the depths, and even longer to haul the cradle back up again once he was down. I wasn’t able to calculate the exact depth of the shaft, but it seemed to be several thousand metres—just a pinprick with respect to the actual radius of the planet, but pretty deep; deep enough to be a dozen or a hundred levels down, if there were caveworlds all the way.

“Why isn’t there an elevator in the shaft?” asked Crucero, when we had wound the cradle all the way back up to the top again.

“Good question,” I said. “Maybe what’s left of it is a tangled heap of scrap at the bottom.” We couldn’t ask Serne, because the shaft was no good for radio communication—all we could get from him was fuzzy static. But there was no cable already in the shaft, and no sign of any fitment in the ceiling from which a cable might once have been suspended. There were ridged grooves on each side-wall, though, into which a car could have slotted. It wasn’t immediately obvious how it might have been secured or powered.

“Even if there’s no way past the floor where Serne is,” I said, more to myself than to my companions, “this shaft could give us access to two hundred levels, each one containing a cave-system as big as a world. It would take centuries to explore. You could lose the entire human race down there, let alone one android.”

And when the Tetrax get here, I added, silently, we’ll have skychain number two, built inside the world instead of outside. And all the galactics on Asgard will be setting forth on voyages of exploration. Things will never be the same again. Never.

I was getting a bit ahead of myself. There was a murderous android up ahead of me, who posed some mysterious threat to my entire species. There was a gang of bad-tempered humanoid crocodiles behind me, eager to claim this momentous discovery for their own loathsome kind. And there were the heroes of the Star Force all about me, lusty with genocidal fervour and their own brand of paranoia. These were not circumstances which were conducive to a sense of security, and if I had paused to reflect on my predicament I could hardly have faced the future with joyous confidence; nevertheless, I felt that I was entitled to a certain frisson of triumph and exultation, and I indulged myself as far as I was able.

When the star-captain was halfway down, we discovered that it was possible for her to hear Serne while still being able to hear us, so that communication of a sort became possible.

“He says that there’s mould, or something like it, growing all over the walls,” she reported. “No sign of the android—he cut his way through the door without much difficulty… zzz… There’s dim light outside—not electric bulbs… maybe the artificial bioluminescence you talked about. Some kind of corridor… no sign of present use… zzz… zzz… beyond the shaft… no wreckage of any elevator-car… zzz… zzzzz…”