I didn’t really intend to sleep, but I couldn’t help drifting off into a doze.
I didn’t sleep for long—not long enough, in fact. I was still very tired when I forced my eyes open and sat up again. The music was still playing. The pipes in my suit had kept right on pumping nourishment into my bloodstream and carrying my various wastes away. The oxygen/nitrogen mix had continued to flow into my headspace, always carefully refreshed, purged of carbon dioxide. The music had soothed my auditory canals like a drug.
I forced myself to my feet and took stock of my situation. I could see further here than I’d been able to while trekking through the forest earlier. There was a slope, and a ridge that seemed to be skirting the marshland. I went up it, confident that I’d be able to get a much better view from the top.
I found more than I had bargained for. The ridge proved to be an embankment, and there were rails running along it. They hadn’t been used for a very long time—it was difficult to guess exactly how long, given that they weren’t metallic and that the encrustation on them wasn’t rust, but the important thing was that they really were rails. Rails have termini, one at each end. Sometimes, they have stations along the way.
I forgot about skirting the marsh in search of my old trail, and set out to follow the rails.
I was half-entranced, and the rails made it easy to slip into a quasi-mechanical mode. I continued to put one foot in front of the other without giving the matter any conscious thought, and didn’t even bother to look around myself to any considerable extent. The landscape had become tedious in its seeming familiarity: trees and more trees, all thickly clad in cobwebs. Had another predator appeared, I hope I would have been able to react with appropriate alacrity, but none did.
I was between the buildings almost before I realised that they were there. I refocused my eyes abruptly, wondering whether I’d accidentally wandered into a city, but there were only two of them, one to either side of the track. There was no platform, and the buildings were in a very bad state of repair, their roofs collapsed and their walls crumbling. There didn’t seem to be any furniture inside what remained of the rooms that had been exposed by fallen walls—but even so, they were buildings, of an appropriate size and design to have been erected by humanoid hands. They warranted farther investigation.
I picked out the one that seemed to be in a slightly better state of repair, and stepped through the door into a shadowed hallway.
Then one of the shadows moved, extended an impossibly long arm, and pressed the muzzle of a gun to my faceplate.
Unlike the rails, the gun was made of metal, and it wasn’t old. I hadn’t the slightest doubt that if it went off, the faceplate would shatter—and so would my skull.
“Merde,” I said, with feeling. No one could hear me, of course. My suit radio was still switched off.
Having just stepped into the darkness, I couldn’t see the person holding the gun, but I formed the impression of a mass of shadow larger than any man—or larger than any man should have been.
He switched on his headlamp, dazzling me. I felt the pressure of his hand as he removed my flame-pistol from my belt. When my eyes had recovered sufficiently to begin to discern the muzzle of his gun again, it was moving over my faceplate in a very strange manner. I watched it go through the routine twice before I realised that it was writing out a series of numbers. It took me a while longer to work out that he was indicating a channel code. I deduced that he was instructing me to turn on my radio and retune it so that I could talk to him.
I did as I was told.
“I’m on,” I said, to let him know I’d done it.
“Mr. Rousseau, I presume,” he said, with the easy confidence of a man who’d just mounted a successful ambush. He must have seen me coming from a long way off. I hadn’t even seen the buildings.
“You can call me Mike,” I said. “Welcome to Asgard. I did come to see you the day after you landed, to apologise for my churlishness—but events had moved on. I seem to have caused us both a certain amount of trouble.”
I could see him now, after a fashion—or his suit, at least. He was enormous, but not beyond the bounds of everyday possibility. The suit-manufacturer had been able to supply him out of stock, albeit with a unit that might have sat in the storeroom for a long time if he hadn’t come along when he did.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’m used to trouble. I’m sorry about your truck—and the body in your bed. I should have called for medical help as soon as I got Saul out, but I had no idea who my enemies were—and nor had Saul. He thought the Tetrax had tipped off Amara Guur.”
“Somebody did,” I agreed. “I can’t believe that it was a Tetron—but the inner workings of the C.R.E. are a mystery to me.”
“Do you know what happened back in Skychain City?” he asked.
“Not for certain. The story, as I see it, is that Guur’s men came to snatch Saul and found you there too—asleep, I presume. They took you both along, and put you on ice while they chatted to Saul. They had the notebook but couldn’t read it. Balidar told them that I might be able to. They checked, just in case—and when they couldn’t break Saul, they launched plan B. It had almost paid off when the Star Force arrived. By that time, you’d broken loose and indulged in a little payback—but Saul was past saving so you went on your way. Guur gave us the notebook. We followed you. He followed us. Did I miss anything? Can I sit down, by the way? I had a cat-nap, but I’m exhausted.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “How did you find me?”
“I didn’t,” I said, surprised. “When the star-captain and her men picked a fight with a giant amoeba I took the opportunity to run. When I got out of the swamp I found the tracks. I followed them. I guess you did the same.”
“How many Star Force men are guarding the dropshaft?”
“Only one, at present,” I said. “There’s another on the surface. Amara Guur could have passed the first without any trouble, if he wanted to, but getting past the second will be a different matter. The warship must be able to shuttle more men down if the need arises, though, and if Guur did pick a fight with the man they left on the surface to watch the hole, they’d interpret that as need—and the Tetrax would probably agree. Why? Were you thinking of going back?”
“I’m not thinking of taking off my helmet just yet,” he said. “As you’ve doubtless ascertained, the air here has enough oxygen in it to be breathable, but the biotoxin assay doesn’t look promising.”
“I hadn’t quite got around to that kind of routine labour,” I confessed. “The star-captain was in a hurry.”
“So I heard. I was able to listen in on you as soon as you reached the bottom of the dropshaft.”
“Really? You should have said something.”
“I didn’t know whether you’d be able to get a fix on me if I started transmitting. The risk didn’t seem worthwhile.”
“It was probably a wise decision,” I confirmed. “The star-captain wasn’t in a negotiating mood.”
“How much did she tell you?” he wanted to know.
“That you’re an android manufactured by the Salamandrans, for reasons shrouded in the deepest military secrecy. She seems to feel that you’re a threat to the human race, but she wasn’t at liberty to tell me why. My orders were to shoot first and not to expect any answers to any questions that I might care to ask, before or after. I never intended to carry them out—it’s not my style. Still—you’re safe now. There’s only the two of us left down here, and you have both guns.”