Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

“Did it go off?” he said. “When you arrived safely, I assumed that you’d seen the tripwire.” It wasn’t exactly an answer to my question, but it was all I got.

“Anyway,” I said, “even if Guur does get down here with eight or ten men, he’s still got the star-captain, Serne and Khalekhan to reckon with. She may not know that he’s tracking her, but she won’t be an easy target.”

“You didn’t warn her that he’d planted bugs on her?”

“No,” I admitted. “I always intended to give her the slip sooner or later, and I figured that if Guur went after her instead of me… okay, so I should have warned her. We all make tactical misjudgments—we’re only humanoid. Silence seemed like a good idea at the time, but things were moving so fast. It won’t make any difference. She can handle Guur—and the chances are that he won’t even try to pick a fight with Crucero, or risk the booby traps once he knows approximately where the dropshaft is. Why bother?”

“He wouldn’t, if all he wanted to know was the location of the prize,” Myrlin admitted. “But he does have a score to settle. It’s not the Star Force personnel that Guur wants dead—or you, come to that. It’s me. Everybody wants me dead—except, perhaps, for you.”

I realised that he was probably right. Not that Guur would care overmuch about the loss of seven lives—what he’d care about was the loss of face. If a crime-lord loses seven of his henchmen, not to mention a kidnap-victim, he has to do something about it, or look like a fool. People like Guur and Heleb took that sort of thing seriously.

I looked from side to side as I led the way, but the tracks were no longer raised on an embankment. We were no longer skirting the swamp but moving through the gossamer-embalmed forest. The taller trees loomed large on either side, and the undergrowth had crept to the very edges of the parallel rails, although the space between them was still clear. It was an easy road to follow—so easy that anyone else who stumbled across it would undoubtedly start following it, unless they had a very pressing reason for going in another direction.

“You’re right,” I told him. “I don’t have anything against you. In fact, I feel guilty about not having taken responsibility for you when 74-Scarion asked me to. It was my fault that you became a target for Guur—and you tried to help my friend, killing that slimeball Balidar in the process. I don’t have anything against you at all. I might have, if Susarma Lear wasn’t so careful of her military secrets, but I’m not prepared simply to take her word for it that you have to be killed. I’m an Asgarder, not a starship trooper.”

It all sounded rather hollow, even to me, even though every word of it was true.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you the truth,” he said.

“That makes us even,” I told him. “I just told you the truth, but you don’t believe me. But I’m not as paranoid as you—and I’m certainly not as paranoid as the star-captain. If anyone’s ever going to believe you, it’s me. So why don’t you try me—unless, of course, it’s a military secret that you can’t divulge.”

“All right,” he said, seemingly grateful for the opportunity. “I’ll tell you the story.”

And he did.

Earth, it seemed, had always had the upper hand in the war. The Salamandrans had started it, but it had been a desperation move. The Salamandrans were never a match for Earth’s firepower—although they underestimated the extent of their deficit, and tried hard to conceal it from the humans when they discovered the awful truth.

Earth’s heavy metal technology was only a little more advanced than Salamandra’s, just as Salamandra’s biotech was only a little more advanced than Earth’s, but technology is art as well as science, perhaps more art than science. When it came to the art of war, Earth had the Star Force Way, and the Salamandrans didn’t. Human had more guns, more powerful guns, and much sexier guns.

The Salamandrans had a much wider range of biotech weapons, but biotech weapons always have delivery problems. Tailoring biotech weapons to attack human flesh while leaving Salamandran flesh untouched was easy enough, but introducing those weapons to human flesh was a different matter. Biological warfare is essentially intimate, in a way that heavy metal warfare isn’t. In a clash of styles, heavy metal always wins—but the Salamandrans, having only the history of their own species to draw on, hadn’t quite realised that when they started the war.

They realised it soon enough thereafter. The Salamandrans had killed a lot of humans in the early phases of the war, before Earth’s high command had figured out exactly what kind of defences they needed, but they never got to Earth itself. Once the human defences were properly mobilised, the backlash began—and the Salamandrans understood soon enough that they were in deep shit.

They tried to fight a holding action, while they tried to formulate a Plan B. Biotech-minded species like the Tetrax always tend to take the long view, so they began making contingency plans for the way they’d have to fight in a second war, a couple of hundred years down the line, to recover everything they’d lost in the first—even if that “everything” turned out to include their homeworld and everything else they held… and even if that “everything” brought them to the brink of extinction.

As I said, the big problem with biotech weaponry is delivery. Insulation against airborne agents is too easy. Delivery of a biotech weapon requires personal contact. The Salamandrans had the lessons of their own troubled history to draw on, and what those lessons had taught them was that the success of biological warfare depended on the efficiency of its carriers. So they set out to design carriers who could take their weapons to the human race: androids, designed not merely to look like humans but to be humans, in every sense that mattered except one; androids who would believe, as sincerely as any other human, that they were human, and wouldn’t even know about that one subtle difference.

Unfortunately, androids suffer from the same problems as any other kind of biological weaponry: their own delivery takes a long time. All the biotech-minded humanoid races have the technics to make androids, but few of them bother, because growing and educating an android requires just as much trouble as growing and educating a person by natural means. If you need slaves, the economical way to provide them is the Tetron way—but the Salamandrans had other priorities. The Salamandrans had—or thought they had—a strong incentive for grappling with the problems of accelerated growth and accelerated education, so that they could bring their human-seeming androids to full maturity in less than half the time it took a natural human.

They’d experimented before, of course, but only in the manufacture of pseudo-Salamandrans. For humans they needed moderately different technics and a whole new DNA-recipe. It’s not surprising that the trial runs threw up some unexpected glitches. They would probably have sorted them out if they’d had time.

They didn’t have time. Their holding-action wasn’t good enough. The war ended before they’d got any kind of production-line set up. All they had was the final set of prototypes.

They were pretty good prototypes, except for one small detail: the accelerated growth had built up a little too much momentum. They were too big—not beyond the natural range of human variation, but close to its upper limit. They would be too easily identifiable, maybe not in the first instance, but soon enough. One near-giant might not seem suspicious, but a whole set would be certain to attract attention and invite careful investigation.