“If only that were true,” he said.
It took me a moment or two to figure out what he meant. I ought to have realised when he told me to change channels when I switched the radio on. I was very tired.
“One of them’s still alive?” I guessed.
“They’re all still alive.”
“Well, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. The damn thing must have flowed right over them. Its juices couldn’t pick a hole in their cold-suits. I should have known that. It was all the screaming… I bet they’re as embarrassed as all hell about that.”
“They’ve put it behind them,” Myrlin said, drily. “I shouldn’t have told you that, I suppose. Now you can let them listen in on us, if you care to—but you’d have worked it out anyway, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d prefer to keep things simple,” I told him. “Anyway, I’m a deserter now. I suppose the star-captain is more than a little annoyed about that.”
“She certainly is.”
“So we’re in the same boat now, aren’t we?” He was way too paranoid to believe it, but I felt that I had to try.
“I prefer to keep things simple myself,” he told me. “If I shot you, I’d have one thing less to worry about.”
“True,” I admitted. “Why didn’t you?”
“Because the time will come, sooner or later, when the air will have to be tested. No biospectral analysis is ever as good as a clinical trial.”
“You want me to take my helmet off?”
“Not yet,” he said. “First, I want to find out where the tracks go. There might be other alternatives. Humanoids lived here once. They still might, even though the trains stopped running. If they’re in contact with other levels… with the builders themselves… That’s enough rest for now. Get up.”
I didn’t argue. I got up, and we moved out of the shadows into the permanent twilight. He looked just as big out in the open, but he wasn’t really a giant. He was just a very big humanoid—the kind of humanoid a genetic engineer might design if he’d been asked to provide a blueprint for a warrior, and hadn’t quite caught on to the fact that the last few hundred years of progress had rendered that kind of physical power redundant. Nowadays, war is all about the kind of hardware you can carry; weaklings can be supermen too.
Unfortunately, he had two guns and I had none.
I walked ahead of him, following the tracks as I had before, fighting to stay alert.
“If Guur’s men were able to get past the Star Force rearguard,” he said, “would they be able to find us?”
“I doubt it,” I said. “They might be able to find the star-captain—Guur’s Kythnan femme fatale almost certainly bugged her hair. They bugged the book too, but I left that behind. I think I’m clean, but it’s not impossible that I picked up some traceable contamination from it.”
“Is that why they gave it to you?”
“Maybe. On the other hand, they’d run out of time. Plan B had gone up in smoke, and they were desperate. They had to get things moving somehow. For a Salamandran android, you speak very good English.”
“I was well-educated,” he said. “It was an unorthodox process, but highly effective. They’d never tried it before, of course, so whoever designed the technics deserves congratulation. Can we stick to more pressing matters, for the time being? How many men does Guur have? How dangerous are they?”
“Not many,” I told him. “A dozen, maybe—but that’s the number he’ll have started out with when he arrived at the hole on the surface. If he tries to fight his way past Crucero, he’ll take casualties. Then again, they’re petty gangsters, not down-level men. He probably has a couple of scavengers with him, acting as guides, but you killed at least one of those when you broke Saul out. He might have lost some men just following the trail down to four. Why didn’t you put that flamer further along the corridor, where it would have roasted at least one of us when it went off?”
“Did it go off?” he said. “When you arrived safely, I assumed that you’d seen the tripwire.” It wasn’t exactly an answer to my question, but it was all I got.
“Anyway,” I said, “even if Guur does get down here with eight or ten men, he’s still got the star-captain, Serne and Khalekhan to reckon with. She may not know that he’s tracking her, but she won’t be an easy target.”
“You didn’t warn her that he’d planted bugs on her?”
“No,” I admitted. “I always intended to give her the slip sooner or later, and I figured that if Guur went after her instead of me… okay, so I should have warned her. We all make tactical misjudgments—we’re only humanoid. Silence seemed like a good idea at the time, but things were moving so fast. It won’t make any difference. She can handle Guur—and the chances are that he won’t even try to pick a fight with Crucero, or risk the booby traps once he knows approximately where the dropshaft is. Why bother?”
“He wouldn’t, if all he wanted to know was the location of the prize,” Myrlin admitted. “But he does have a score to settle. It’s not the Star Force personnel that Guur wants dead—or you, come to that. It’s me. Everybody wants me dead—except, perhaps, for you.”
I realised that he was probably right. Not that Guur would care overmuch about the loss of seven lives—what he’d care about was the loss of face. If a crime-lord loses seven of his henchmen, not to mention a kidnap-victim, he has to do something about it, or look like a fool. People like Guur and Heleb took that sort of thing seriously.
I looked from side to side as I led the way, but the tracks were no longer raised on an embankment. We were no longer skirting the swamp but moving through the gossamer-embalmed forest. The taller trees loomed large on either side, and the undergrowth had crept to the very edges of the parallel rails, although the space between them was still clear. It was an easy road to follow—so easy that anyone else who stumbled across it would undoubtedly start following it, unless they had a very pressing reason for going in another direction.
“You’re right,” I told him. “I don’t have anything against you. In fact, I feel guilty about not having taken responsibility for you when 74-Scarion asked me to. It was my fault that you became a target for Guur—and you tried to help my friend, killing that slimeball Balidar in the process. I don’t have anything against you at all. I might have, if Susarma Lear wasn’t so careful of her military secrets, but I’m not prepared simply to take her word for it that you have to be killed. I’m an Asgarder, not a starship trooper.”
It all sounded rather hollow, even to me, even though every word of it was true.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you the truth,” he said.
“That makes us even,” I told him. “I just told you the truth, but you don’t believe me. But I’m not as paranoid as you—and I’m certainly not as paranoid as the star-captain. If anyone’s ever going to believe you, it’s me. So why don’t you try me—unless, of course, it’s a military secret that you can’t divulge.”
“All right,” he said, seemingly grateful for the opportunity. “I’ll tell you the story.”
And he did.
28
Earth, it seemed, had always had the upper hand in the war. The Salamandrans had started it, but it had been a desperation move. The Salamandrans were never a match for Earth’s firepower—although they underestimated the extent of their deficit, and tried hard to conceal it from the humans when they discovered the awful truth.
Earth’s heavy metal technology was only a little more advanced than Salamandra’s, just as Salamandra’s biotech was only a little more advanced than Earth’s, but technology is art as well as science, perhaps more art than science. When it came to the art of war, Earth had the Star Force Way, and the Salamandrans didn’t. Human had more guns, more powerful guns, and much sexier guns.