“That’s good,” she said. “We’re going to need an experienced man. We’ll be depending on you, Rousseau. The Star Force will be depending on you. The human race will be depending on you. So how soon can we get started? And when I say how soon} I want to take your first estimate, cut it in half, and then shave a bit more off.”
“I don’t have a truck any more,” I pointed out, a trifle disingenuously. “Even if I did, I couldn’t track Myrlin over the surface. The Tetrax might be willing—and they’re certainly able—to tell you where he is until he goes down to level one, but after that, it’d be hopeless.”
“We’ll have to take him out from space, then,” she said. “We can do that.”
“No you can’t,” I told her. “The Tetrax won’t permit that. They might help you to chase him, but shooting at the surface from orbit is absolutely out of the question.”
“Nothing is absolutely out of the question,” she assured me, “but we need to stay on the right side of the Tetrax if we can. So we get them to help us track him. We chase him. We follow him down into the levels. What next? And I don’t want to hear the word can’t.”
“What do you expect me to do—follow his footprints in the snow?”
“If that’s what’s necessary,” she said. “And don’t ever lie to me again, Trooper Rousseau. I don’t like it. Believe me, now you’re in the Star Force, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of your commanding officer. How soon can we get the truck ready to depart?”
She was crazy, but she wasn’t a fool. I saw my mistake immediately. I’d told the Tetron peace-officer that I didn’t know where Saul’s truck was, but I’d told her en passant that he and I had had a reciprocal arrangement. He’d had the codes necessary to get into my apartment and secure my keys. I had the codes necessary to get into his and secure his.
It occurred to me then that the peace-officer must also have known that I was lying. He hadn’t taken the trouble to ask me where the truck was in the hope that I’d tell him, but in order to let me know that he didn’t have it.
The Tetrax had no intention of chasing Myrlin—but they had no objection to letting me do it, if I were crazy enough. Their hands might be tied by their own law, but they must have figured out by now that Saul Lyndrach had really been on to something, and they didn’t want some mysterious outworlder monopolizing the discovery any more than they wanted Amara Guur to get his dirty hands on it. The game was bigger than I’d imagined—and the bigger it got, the smaller its hapless pawns came to seem.
“Merde,” I murmured.
“Never mind that,” the star-captain said, mistaking the reason for my distress. “How soon can we start?”
“What are you going to do with the android if you catch him?” I wanted to know.
“Kill him,” she replied. It didn’t surprise me.
“Why?”
“How many times do I have to tell you, Trooper? I give orders; you follow them. How soon?”
“I still say that it’s impossible. If he knows we’re following—and he’s bound to suspect that someone will, even if he doesn’t know you’re here—he’ll cover his tracks.”
“In that case,” she said, “we’ll have to make sure we use a big enough bomb to get him while we still can.” She was smiling, but I knew that she was threatening me. If I wasn’t going to help her, she was implying, then she would have to take extreme measures, no matter what the cost.
I’d already concluded that she was crazy, but I hadn’t quite realised how crazy she was. She still had a big moral credit balance, though. I had to try to help.
“The Tetrax really aren’t going to let you bomb Asgard,” I told her, as gently as I could. “Even if you can pinpoint Myrlin’s position without their help, they’ll put political pressure on your commander that he’d be insane to resist. Having just brought one humanoid species to the brink of extinction, you’re probably prepared to take on anyone and anything by the same means, but the United Governments and Military Forces really wouldn’t like it if you upset the Tetrax. They have a lot of friends. We’re effectively outnumbered by… oh, let’s say five hundred million to one, although that may be a conservative estimate, given that we don’t really know how far around the rim galactic civilization extends. You have big responsibilities, Star-Captain Lear, and I know you want to discharge them sensibly. You’ve come to me for local knowledge. So trust me when I tell you you’ll need to think long and hard before you so much as take the safety-catch off your flame-pistol while you’re on Asgard. If you’re lucky, the peace-officers won’t have left any recording devices behind to spy on this conversation—and if you’re really lucky, they won’t take it seriously even if they did—but if I were you, I’d stop talking about the possibility of your starship opening fire. It isn’t going to happen.”
The silence that descended then seemed very heavy indeed. It was as if the sleeping troopers had stopped breathing—as if they were spellbound, waiting for the star-captain to explode.
She didn’t. “Trooper Rousseau,” she said. “This is a private conversation, protected by military confidentiality. I’m just trying to impress upon you the seriousness of our mission. We need that android dead—and when I say we, I mean the human race. I have to kill him—and you’re right. I need you to tell me how to do it, so I’m being extra nice to you. But if you don’t start being a lot more helpful, you have no idea of the depth of the trouble you’ll be in. So tell me—when do we start?”
There are some people you just can’t argue with. Not all of them are Tetrax. I had already started formulating a timetable in my head when I was interrupted by the trill of the wallphone.
I leapt to my feet, extremely grateful for the opportunity to get away from Susarma Lear, if only for a moment. I tripped over three recumbent troopers on my way to the phone, but I got there in the end.
My gratitude drained away as soon as the caller’s image appeared on the viewscreen. It was a vormyran.
All vormyr look alike to the inexpert human eye, but I didn’t need three guesses to figure out who this one was.
“Michael Rousseau?” he inquired, in awkwardly broken parole. “My name is Amara Guur. We need to talk.”
13
Politeness required that I should switch on the eye above my own phone so that Amara Guur could see me too, but I didn’t bother. I felt that I could happily live out my life without ever letting him see my face.
“What do you want?” I asked harshly.
He smiled. Unusual for humanoids, the vormyr are a predatory species, irredeemably carnivorous. I’d been told that they had very bad breath, and it was easy enough to imagine that, even though I was only looking at a picture. Guur looked like a cross between a wolf and a crocodile, slightly favouring the reptilian side of the family. It wasn’t a harmonious combination. His smile was unattractive in the extreme.
“I’d like to discuss some matters of mutual interest, if you’re willing.”
“I’m not,” I told him.
He didn’t seem put out.
“I can understand that,” he said. “It has come to my attention that you feel that I am in some way responsible for your recent troubles. I can assure you that I am not, but I should like to make a gesture of good will in any case—a small gift, to assure you of my friendship. It cannot make up for your unfortunate experience, of course, but I think you might be very glad to receive it.” His accent wasn’t incomprehensible once I’d got used to it.