Authors: Brian Stableford
The bones were
generally clustered, occasionally to be found in meandering grooves and hollows
that had once been streams and pools. The water had somehow been drained from
them before the great freeze, so they now had the same thin layer of mixed ices
that dressed the entire landscape in a cloak of white. The bones themselves
were unremarkable, or so it seemed to me. It was all too easy to find leg-bones
and hip-bones and jawbones with teeth which would surely have been similar to
ones to be found on any of the humanoid worlds, which all had their
quasi-cattle and their quasi-chickens just as they had their quasi-men.
There were no
humanoid skulls, though. Nor were there any dinosaurs, nor giants in the earth,
nor hideous aliens to tantalise the imagination.
Underfoot there had
once been grass, but the grass—like everything else—had died before the advent
of the cold, and had shriveled into fragility. Our boots crushed it effortlessly,
and it seemed rather as if we were walking on frosted cobwebs.
"This is
eerie," said Crucero, who seemed to like this region far less than the
honest and simple tunnel through which the monorail trains had run. "Could
anything actually be
alive
down here?"
It wasn't such a
stupid question as it seemed.
"When it's as
cold as this," I told him, "no living system can function. On the
other hand, nothing changes. There are some very simple things that were still
alive when the cold came, and which can be restored to activity even after
millions of years of cryonic oblivion. So far, the biotechs haven't revived
anything more complex than a bacterium, but in its way that's not unspectacular.
The day they bring back an amoeba will be a really big deal."
"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.
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.