Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

“Oh shit,” she said. “I told you to be careful.”

“I couldn’t get close enough to use the wire,” Serne complained. “I had to take the bastard out with the flame.”

“Let’s hope they have a fire brigade,” I said.

The star-captain didn’t want to wait. “This way,” she said, pointing along the curving path which ran its narrow course round the edge of the burning garden. She began to run. Crucero didn’t hesitate, and neither did Serne. Jacinthe Siani was still backed up against the wall, and though her eyes were fixed upon the smoke rising from the bushes she didn’t seem inclined to move.

“Come on!” I said, grabbing her arm. I pulled her away from the wall and pushed her in the direction which the others had taken. “Run!” I commanded.

At last, she ran. I ran behind her, taking great bounding strides. Unused to the gravity, she fell over three times, but I kept picking her up and urging her on, thrusting her forward along the curve of the featureless wall. We both bumped into the wall more than once, because the path was so narrow, and the reaction of our bouncing confused even me. We must have fallen thirty or forty metres behind the others within three minutes.

The fire hadn’t seemed to be spreading very quickly, and we soon outran the smoke, but I couldn’t help remembering the way that the door had closed behind me. As far as we knew, we were in a sealed cylinder, and we had no real reason to believe that the people who’d put us there would be inclined to let us out. They hadn’t lifted a finger to interfere when we’d started slaughtering one another—why should they intervene now to save the killers from the consequences of their shooting party? I hoped that they might at least care about their hothouse plants, and would put out the fire if only to save the forest.

I was so preoccupied with hustling Jacinthe Siani along the narrow track, and with worrying about the fire, that I didn’t realise when the star-captain and her merry men stopped. I had to bring myself up short when I saw Seme’s broad back in front of me, and even my long experience in low gee wasn’t sufficient to cope with the problem. I missed him, but I ended up sprawled full-length under yet another bush, away to one side of him.

When I crawled out, feeling as if there were bruises all over my body, I saw that he’d gone into a defensive crouch, and that his gun was once again in his hand. Crucero had already faded into the undergrowth. When I tried to stand up my shoulder was grabbed by the star-captain, who forced me down again, pulling me sideways into the cover of a broad-leaved plant.

“What is it?” I asked, trying to make myself heard over the racket of the insects without actually shouting. “More vormyr?” I realised that no one had ever specified exactly how many men Amara Guur had had with him when he was ambushed, or how many had survived to be captured by robots.

But it wasn’t more vormyr. She didn’t reply to my question, but I was close enough to her to see the avid glint in her eye. I knew then that she’d seen Myrlin.

She let go of my shoulder, but I promptly grabbed her arm, causing her to look round at me with a furious countenance. As she tried to shake me off, her lips drew back from her teeth in a kind of snarl that I’d never before seen on a human face.

“Don’t do it,” I said. “He isn’t any danger to you. I swear it!”

She tried to shake me off, but the angry oath that was on her lips suddenly died as the implications of what I’d said sunk in.

“What the hell do you know about it?” she demanded. Her face was close to mine; otherwise I would never have been able to hear the words, which came out in a forceful hiss.

“I was with him,” I told her. “After we got split up. He told me everything. He isn’t any danger!”

“He told you that, I suppose!” she retorted.

He had told me, and I had believed him. But as I looked at Susarma Lear’s sweat-stained face, at the blonde hair now matted and tangled, and the blue eyes colder than any eyes I had ever seen before, I knew that there was no way on Earth, or on Asgard, or anywhere in the universe you could name, that she was ever going to take my word for it.

“Don’t kill him,” I begged. “Please, don’t kill him.”

I wouldn’t let go of her arm. I don’t know exactly why I cared so much. After all, it was his word against hers… or his word against her instincts. What had he done for me in the few hours we’d been together? What sense was there in my trying to defend him?

But I did care. Maybe I had simply reached the end of my tolerance for death and destruction. Maybe I was suffering from a nasty bout of that old omnivore confusion.

She brought her pistol round and pointed it at my face.

“If you don’t let go,” she said, “I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

She’d already set the world on fire—what had she to lose?

There was no doubting that she meant it. Her special paranoia was well and truly unconfined, and there was not a thing I could do to contain it.

I let go of her arm.

Jacinthe Siani was still out in the open, crouching on the path. Nobody had bothered to pull her out of the way. She looked very miserable, brought into as much disarray by her falls and collisions as anyone else. Her hair was a mess and the expression on her nearly-human face was sheer blind panic. She was staring out along the curving path, and though I couldn’t see him from where I crouched, I knew who she was staring at.

Susarma Lear had turned away from me, and I was utterly forgotten.

I guess there comes a time in every man’s life when he does something totally stupid, for no good reason at all.

I leapt to my feet, and shouted with all my might: “Run, you bastard, run!”

Once I was standing, I could see him. He was seven or eight metres away, in the middle of an unusually large patch of bare ground. He had been looking at Jacinthe Siani, his eyes wide in apparent puzzlement. As I rose, he turned to me, but he gave not the slightest sign that he had heard what I said, and the noise of the fire-startled insects was so clamorous that he probably could not make out the words. It was only the sight of me that had attracted his attention, and he stared at me as though I was a madman. He did not appear to be armed, and all he was wearing was a pair of underpants. For all his gargantuan bulk, he looked supremely vulnerable—the easiest target in the world.

Susarma Lear rose in front of me, emitting incomprehensible obscenities. Without the slightest pause or hesitation she thrust her gun out before her and fired. The flame-bolts sizzled like fireworks as they shot through the air, striking him full in the chest: one, two, three.

He went over backwards, collapsing into himself as the hot gases opened up his pleural cavity, frying his heart and his lungs.

The star-captain let out a mighty scream of triumph, and then the sky went crazy too.

All the blazing lights began flickering and flashing, and I felt for the second time that nightmarish sensation of having acid poured into my skull. I reached up with my hands to cover my face, trying to shut my eyes against the assault of the mindscrambler, but I had no chance.

The last thing I saw before I was rudely thrust into insensibility was Myrlin’s shattered body, lying with arms outstretched on that patch of bare ground.

It was shimmering, like a distorted video-picture about to flicker out and disappear.

But it was me who flickered out.

When I woke up again I felt anything but good. My stomach was queasy, my head was spinning and I had a dreadful metallic taste in my mouth. My eyelids felt as if they were glued down and the muscles in my legs were aching.