“Well, if there’s a little star in the middle of the artefact,” the star-captain said brutally, “I should think it would be warm down there. It gets very hot if you burrow down far enough on Earth, and that’s only molten iron.”
“Actually,” I said, “chaud is only one of the words he used. The other was vif. That means alive. If he meant it literally…”
“I’m under orders here, Rousseau,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Just like you. Our objectives are limited. Once the android is dead… well, I have obligations to my men as well as to my superior officers. I’m not going chasing wild geese, Rousseau—let’s be clear about that. Neither are you.”
That’s what you think, I thought—but what I said was: “Yes, captain. Understood.”
16
Actually, I did understand. I could see that the star-captain’s priorities were bound to be different from mine. She had orders to follow, and she was on some kind of mopping-up mission in the wake of what must have been a very nasty conflict. Even so, she’d shown a glimmer of interest, a hint of vulnerability. I resolved to work on her again—but I knew that the chance wouldn’t arise for a while. She went back to her bunk long before Serne woke up, and by the time he came to take over the wheel I was utterly exhausted. I didn’t have the energy to give him much of a driving lesson, but he assured me that a truck was a truck, so I left him to it. The star-captain moved in her sleeping bag as I went back into the cabin, but she didn’t wake up. Whatever nightmare she was dreaming had her securely in its grip.
I couldn’t keep my eyes open; the notebook would have to wait.
I slept for eight hours, but the star-captain was still asleep when I woke up again. I checked that Serne was still okay before I began to go through Saul’s notes for a second time, much more assiduously than before. I concentrated hard, even though I intended to go through them as many times more as I possibly could before I ditched the book. I didn’t start cooking breakfast until the star-captain woke up. She had to be feeling a lot better, but she still didn’t seem relaxed.
When we’d eaten, Susarma Lear insisted on taking her turn in the driving-seat. She assured me that she couldn’t possibly make any mistakes driving across a flat plane with not another vehicle in sight from horizon to horizon, but I insisted on sitting beside her to make sure that everything was in order. Not everything was, of course; when she checked with her ship, its watchful observers reported that we were being followed by three trucks, two of which looked conspicuously bigger than ours.
“Have the Tetrax in Skychain City been able to give us any indication what sort of firepower they’re packing?” she asked.
“Needlers, mostly,” the man on the ship reported. “They’re petty criminals, not trained soldiers. If you want to take them on, you could probably eliminate them from consideration—but you’d need cover to mount an ambush. We consulted the Tetrax about the possibility of trying to take them out from up here, but they didn’t like the idea one little bit.”
“No,” said Susarma Lear, grimly. “I have this sneaking suspicion that they’d rather the petty criminals got their hands on the goodies than the Star Force. I don’t think we can expect too much help from them.”
“If they’d been in a co-operative mood, they could have prevented the bad guys from exiting the dome,” the man on the ship agreed.
“That’s true,” I put in, “but if they’d been in an unco-operative mood, they could have stopped us too. We know where they stand—on the sidelines. It may not be the best place, if things get interesting.”
“Keep watching,” the star-captain instructed her contact on the ship. “I’m certainly not going to start a pitched battle up here, even if we do find a likely spot for an ambush. I can’t afford to risk any losses until I catch up with the android. After that… well, anything goes. We’ll do things the Star Force Way.”
I wondered if Amara Guur would have had the sense to quiver in his boots if he’d heard her say that. Probably not—he wouldn’t have understood the niceties of her tone and expression. I did.
I returned to my careful study of the notebook, with all due patience and determination.
After a while, the star-captain said: “I suppose the Tetrax must already have learned quite a lot, from the stuff they’ve already dug out of the upper levels. They must have already stolen quite a march on the rest of us.”
“Not unless they’re keeping a lot of secrets from their esteemed colleagues in the C.R.E.,” I said. “Which isn’t impossible, of course—but I think they’re still waiting for the crucial breakthrough. The technics we’ve excavated so far aren’t significantly more advanced than the devices we already have. No matter how clever Asgard’s builders were, the people who actually lived in the habitats in the outermost levels seem to have been humanoids not much different from us.”
“Passengers, you mean?”
“Maybe. Species rescued from endangered worlds who didn’t have the wherewithal to save themselves is the most popular guess.”
“So if the lower levels are similar,” she said, “it might not matter whether they’re dead or alive—they might be just more of the same.”
“It’s a possibility,” I admitted. “But basing their technics on the same spectrum of scientific knowledge would necessarily make their technology the same as ours. The humanoid races we know about are similar, but they have quite various technological styles. What I mean…”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “Heavy metal-minded, like us. Biotech-minded, like the Salamandrans… and the Tetrax.”
“Well, yes,” I admitted. “Reduced to the crudest possible level, that’s about it. Different kinds of sociopolitical systems tend to be associated with different technologies. When 69-Aquila was lecturing me in my cell, he said that you could ignore one direction of the causal flow and regard the technologies as the ultimate determining factor, but that’s just as brutal an oversimplification as yours. Different humanoid races produce different kinds of social organization for a variety of reasons—some anatomical, some ecological, some historical—but they all have their idiosyncrasies, and those idiosyncrasies are reflected in matters of technological style. Technology is art as well as science, maybe more art than science. That’s one of the reasons why the people at the C.R.E. are so interested in the stuff we find in the levels, even though it doesn’t actually do anything that we can’t already do in our own subtly different fashion. Even if the lower levels are full of passengers, they won’t be uninteresting… and if some of the passengers can talk to us, they might have some very interesting things to say.”
“And Lyndrach’s notebook says that there’s people down there, does it?” she asked, nodding towards the black-bound object in my hand. That was why she’d started the conversation—she wanted me to keep her up to date with what I’d found.
“Not exactly,” I admitted. “Actually, vif is pretty much the full extent of what it says, in actual words. But what that implies…”
She didn’t seem to like the answer, or the way I left it hanging. “Isn’t a whole lot, from what you’ve told me so far. I need details, trooper. Hard data.”
There was plenty of hard data in the book, but not the kind she was fishing for. Even if it had been written in English, she’d still have needed me as an interpreter.
“Actually,” I pointed out, “I’ve told you a whole lot more than you’ve told me. I’ve told you practically everything I know, in fact—but you still haven’t told me why you’re so hell-bent on catching and killing Myrlin.”