Asgard's Conquerors (12 page)

So there it
was. Fate wanted me back on Asgard and it was prepared to do whatever it had to
do in order to get me there.

As soon as our little formal gathering was over we were hustled aboard
Leopard
Shark
, and
Leopard Shark
was hurled into the
slickest wormhole she could make, scheduled to make her rendezvous in the
inner reaches of the Asgard system in forty days.

I had always thought of space travel as one of the most boring
activities ever devised by man. A starship pilot doesn't have to do anything,
except tell the machines what needs to be done; artificial intelligences in the
software take care of the rest. But the Star Force was a whole new way of life,
and the business of learning to be a starship soldier left little time for
boredom.

I had to learn how to handle dozens of different bits of equipment,
including weapons of every shape and size. I had to learn combat techniques,
survival strategies, and how to defend myself against all kinds of dangers that
my vivid imagination could never have conjured up on its own.

During the remaining hours of each day I had to tell the men who'd be
going with us everything I knew about the levels, and I had to train them in
the use of cold-suits and all the other items of equipment that scavengers find
handy. There was a certain overlap, it's true, between Star Force equipment and
the kind of stuff the Tetrax and others had devised for getting by in the upper
levels, but the one kind of environment which had never cropped up in all the
skirmishes of the war against the Salamandrans was the one we were going into
now.

All of the practice, needless to say, had to be undertaken in one gee,
and
Leopard Shark
was spun to produce it. I'd been in low-gee, save
for very brief periods, for several months, and at the end of every day on the
Star Force cruiser I ached.

Men of the branch of the Star Force to which I now belonged were only
passengers while
Leopard Shark
was in flight, and we had nothing to do with the
actual running of the ship. The reason why star-captains are so called is to
distinguish their title from that of the captains who command ships, who are
of a rather grander species. The man in command of
Leopard Shark
was
Captain Khaseria, a white-haired old campaigner of a somewhat acid temperament.
His was the "naval" branch of the Star Force. When the ship was in
its wormhole, he outranked everyone.
Leopard Shark's
crew
of thirty, responsible to the Captain, had the duty of defending the ship and
making sure it got to wherever it was supposed to be going.

Our "army" staff had no authority while the ship was in flight—our
job began when it was time to come out of the ship and get on with the mission.
Susarma Lear was the top-ranking officer on the ship; my old acquaintance
Lieutenant Crucero—now a star-captain—was still her right-hand man. We had
three junior officers, half a dozen assorted sergeants, and only fifty troopers—less
than half the force the ship had been designed to carry. We were not expected
to re-invade Asgard; ours was a special task-force. Even so, training them all
was no simple matter, and the more training and aching I did, the less
attractive the prospect of taking these men into the levels came to seem.

There were a few petty compensations. For one thing, Lieutenant Kramin
and his merry men had been relieved of the not-very-onerous job of guarding
Goodfellow and had been added to the complement of
Leopard Shark.
That
meant that I could give him orders. I could give Trooper Blackledge orders,
too. There are, alas, no really awful jobs to do on a starship, and if there
were they'd be done by the crew, but I managed to find a couple of small ways
of making life uncomfortable for Kramin and Blackledge. The mere fact that I
was an officer caused them as much chagrin as anything I actually dropped on
them. They had grown fat and out of condition while stationed on Goodfellow,
and it made my own aches and pains a little less distressing when I knew I could
always add a little bit more to the burden of theirs.

John Finn had also been press-ganged into service, saved from a penal
battalion by the fact that he had spent time on Asgard and knew a little about
working in the levels. With John Finn the situation was different. Kramin and
Blackledge didn't like me, but John Finn hated me. He didn't seem at all
pleased by the fact that he wasn't going to be sent to a penal battalion. Nor
was he in the least amused by the fact that he was getting what he had so ardently
desired—a free ride to Asgard. He felt himself to be a man much wronged and
betrayed, and he had talked himself into an unshakeable belief that it was all
my fault. I didn't try to harass or inconvenience him—if anything, I was easy
on him—but the mere sight of me was enough to set a peculiar fury seething in
his breast. I decided early on that there was no way I was going down to the
surface of Asgard in the company of John Finn. Accidents happen too easily in
the levels.

My other relationships were easier to handle. My other old
acquaintance, Trooper Serne—now a sergeant—was entirely prepared to be
amicable. Crucero wasn't in the least disturbed by having to share his new rank
with me, and we fell into the role of equals quite readily. The colonel was
careful to maintain an appropriate distance from us all—she carefully cultivated
the proverbial loneliness of command—but she didn't put any undue pressure on.
She didn't try to get heavy when she handed down orders. She didn't talk to me,
as she sometimes had on Asgard, as if I were something the cat had dragged in.
It made for a pleasant change.

I saw very little of our civilian passengers. The diplomat Valdavia was
a thin, lugubrious man with a Middle European accent and an overprecise
manner. I guessed that he had landed this job only because he was in the wrong
place at the wrong time, but I might have been underestimating him. It's easy
to underestimate politicians. The Tetron bioscientist, 673-Nisreen, interested
me far more, but he spent most of the time secluded in his cabin.

Once
Leopard Shark
was wormholing we couldn't communicate with the
home system or with the Tetrax. A pick-up station had relayed us everything
that had come in by stress-pulse, just before we exited from normal space, but
it didn't tell us much more than we already knew. Until we reached the Asgard system
and talked to the Tetrax, we couldn't make specific plans. All we could do was
make sure that we'd be ready to carry them out. Naturally, it didn't stop us
having many a heartfelt discussion about what we might be asked to do, and what
our chances of surviving it might be.

I wasn't overly optimistic about our chances of becoming successful
spies—although we had no official confirmation as yet that the Tetrax did
indeed want us to be spies. All those years I had spent poking around in levels
two and three, the evidence had suggested that the missing Asgardians were in
pretty much the same league as the galactic civilizations—it was their
technical style that was distinct, not its capability. What I had proved when I
went down the dropshaft into the heart of the macroworld was that those
appearances were misleading. Deep down inside, there were more advanced races,
with technical capabilities that made ours look very clumsy indeed. If those
races were now coming out of their shell, with hostile intent, the entire
galactic community might get swept aside like a house of cards. A handful of
human secret agents would hardly be able to achieve much in that kind of game.
I had thought, on the basis of what little I had learned about the super-
scientists, that they were a shy and peaceable crowd, but this invasion
suggested that I might have formed the wrong impression. When contemplating
the possibility that they had lied, I found it easy to scare myself with
theories about what might happen if they decided to go to war with the galaxy.

I wasn't overconfident about the reliability of my memories of what had
happened in the depths of Asgard. After all, the person I'd had my enlightening
conversation with was the same person that Susarma Lear remembered having killed.
If her memory of what happened was an illusion calculated to reassure her, then
so might mine be.

Needless to say, I didn't want to mention this to Susarma Lear, because
I didn't want to admit just yet that I knew—or thought I knew—that Myrlin was still
alive. I couldn't help wondering, though, if it might have been Myrlin who had
led the attack on Skychain City, maybe in command of a whole army of beings
like himself. It was just possible that he was being used in much the same way
I was—as a mercenary soldier.

If he was, I sure as hell wasn't looking forward to taking up arms
against him. The Salamandrans had built him big and tough, and the godlike men
of Asgard probably had the ability to make him tougher still. The thought that
we might be sent down to the surface to keep tabs on an army of giant soldiers
armed by super-scientists was enough to make anyone's blood run cold.

I didn't feel disloyal about neglecting to confide these fears to
Susarma Lear. I preferred to play my cards close to my chest, and keep my head
down.

Some are born interesting, some make themselves interesting, and some
have interestingness thrust upon them. But you can fight it, if you try.

8

I was keen to
have a discussion with the Tetron bioscientist, 673-Nisreen but this proved
difficult, partly because I was kept so busy, partly because the Tetron hardly
ever left his cabin, and partly because Valdavia seemed to want all communication
with the Tetron channeled through him.

Eventually, though, I did manage to speak to Nisreen long enough to
arrange an assignation of sorts in his cabin. He seemed as pleased as I was to
have the meeting set up, and I gathered that he would have issued an invitation
himself had he not been as worried as Valdavia was about the necessity of
observing protocol.

I let him ask me the first few questions, as if I were briefing him
about Asgard. He'd never been there, and everything he knew about it was from memory
chips that were long out of date.

I gave him a selective account of my adventures before moving on to
what they implied.

"The people who thought there were no more than half a dozen levels
always had a strong case," I observed, "because the technology we
were digging out of the top levels wouldn't have been capable of erecting much
more than that. The romantics who wanted Asgard to be an artefact from top to
bottom had to credit its builders with technological powers far beyond
anything known in the galactic community. We still can't say, of course,
whether there's an ordinary planet inside the shells, but even if there is, we
now know that the levels constitute a feat of engineering beyond anything your
people or mine could contemplate. Imagine how long it must have taken to put
that thing together!"

"It would seem to have been a remarkable achievement," he
opined, in typical Tetron fashion.

"And it begins to look," I continued, "that it might be
much older than many investigators thought. That might have interesting
bearings on the question of the origin of the galactic races. I understand that
your own researches also have some relevance to that?"

"It would be premature to draw conclusions," he said. I
didn't intend to let him get away with that. I'd told him my side of the story.
Now I wanted his.