Asgard's Conquerors (15 page)

The purpose of this clumsy speech was simply to set up a question.

"Could that be done?" Valadavia asked me.

I shrugged my shoulders. "The city sprawls a bit in the lower
regions," I said. "The C.R.E. was always reclaiming more space. They
opened up huge factory-fields down there to produce food for the city, so
there's a lot of ground for the defenders to cover. The locks are on the surface—down
below, the interface between the city's basements and the cold habitats is an
extensive and untidy web of pressurized plastic bubbles. Some of the plugs are
in dark corners. We couldn't cut in directly without triggering leak-alarms,
but if we built our own plastic wall behind us and then pressurized, we could
get in. They can't have posted guards everywhere, but they'll presumably be
running patrols. What about the C.R.E. people in outlying pockets, though— haven't
they been asked to try it? They'd have all the right equipment ready to
hand."

"We have been reluctant to order any major project of that
kind," 994-Tulyar replied. "In any case, the groups which were not
captured were a long way from the city—all but two are actually in different
cave-systems. We thought it best not to draw attention to the one closest to Skychain
City until we could bring in reinforcements."

That translated as: "No way—we were waiting for you suckers."

"One further aspect of your mission," added 1125- Camina,
"will be to carry various sophisticated surveillance devices into the
city, so that we can continue to gather intelligence of what is happening
there even if all else fails. I believe that you have a man with you who has
experience of the city, and who has some training in the use of surveillance
devices."

I didn't immediately cotton on to what she meant, and was slightly
distracted by the implications of her off-hand remark about all else failing.
Then I realised that she must be talking about John Finn, and remembered what
he'd said about using his time on Asgard to learn something about Tetron
"security systems." I was about to make a comment on that, but I was
interrupted before I had the chance.

"When do we leave?" demanded the colonel, showing once again
her marvelous talent for bulldozing through the bureaucratic niceties.

"As soon as possible," 994-Tulyar told her. "We have already
made the necessary preparations here. I am at your disposal. When your men are
ready. ..."

She glanced sideways, at me.

I managed a small sardonic smile, and murmured "Gung Ho!" I
said it in English, of course. Pan-galactic parole has no need of any such
expression. After all, the Tetrax invented parole, and they always let other
people do their gung-hoing for them.

10

We were split
into three groups, scheduled to go down in three different shuttles. Each one
was to put down beyond Skychain City's horizon, close to a trapdoor that would
give easy access to level one. There were plenty of trapdoors like that,
painstakingly identified and made functional by the C.R.E. teams which had
spread out from Skychain City into the level one habitation at whose hub the
city had been built.

Susarma Lear and I were in the same group. Crucero took command of the
Star Force personnel in the second; Kramin was attached to his group and so was
Finn, whose temper was dramatically improved by the news that the Tetrax
remembered him, and considered his knowledge of bugging devices adequate to
warrant giving him further training and extra responsibilities. His
self-esteem, which must have taken a battering in recent weeks, was boosted
back to the level of intolerable arrogance.

871-Alpheus was the Tetron in charge of Crucero's team. Both 994-Tulyar
and 74-Scarion were assigned to my crew, apparently confirming that the Tetrax
considered us the lynch-pin of the mission, and the group most likely to
succeed.

Each group of would-be spies had a couple of experienced scavengers
allotted to it. My group had me and a Turkanian named—as nearly as I could
pronounce it—Johaxan. I'd never met him before, but he was an old C.R.E. hand
who'd worked the levels even longer than I had. He'd been on the

satellite
when the skychain was destroyed.

Turkanians must have been forest-dwellers for most of their
pre-sentient phase, because they still have long arms and bent legs with clever
toes. They wear very little in the way of clothing and their skins are lightly
furred, the colour of the fur being an oddly mottled mixture of greens and
browns. Very few humanoid species exhibit that kind of camouflage colouring,
because humanoids are usually big enough not to be too worried about hiding
from predators. Turkanians, though, exhibit "prey mentality"—they
have a wide streak of natural paranoia, and are very shy of fighting, though it
would be a mistake to put them down as non- aggressive. In their own way they
can be very assertive indeed, and they have the reputation of breeding the
best pickpockets in the galaxy.

In terms of equipment, we were reasonably well supplied. We had a
cold-suit each, and a couple of spares, and life-support backpacks enough to
keep us all going for several months; we were told that further supplies would
be dropped when needed. We also had various kinds of cutting-tools,
bubble-building equipment, and sleds. Given that we had to travel light, we had
everything we needed.

By the time we went down, Susarma Lear had obviously managed to have a
meaningful discussion with someone about weaponry, and we were issued with guns—but
not killing guns. All the weapons training I'd done aboard
Leopard
Shark
was for nothing; each and every one of us was issued a mud
gun. Out in the levels, of course, they'd be no more useful than water pistols,
but if and when we did get into Skychain City, we'd be able to defend ourselves
without doing anyone any lasting damage. This was another little reminder of
the fact that our goal was to bring peace and harmony to Asgard, the galactic
community, and the entire universe.

Or so we were frequently told.

The colonel did once express the opinion—in private— that the Tetrax
were not entirely to be trusted, and that she was not prepared to take anything
at face value. This was professional paranoia at its finest, but I had to admit
to her that the Tetrax were a cunning bunch, who would not shrink from being
wickedly underhanded, if they thought the situation warranted deceit. I
reserved my own judgment.

The drop was nerve-racking, especially the landing. Atmospheric
pressure on the surface of Asgard is low, and there was no way that we could be
dropped quietly out of the shuttle to parachute down. The shuttle had to come
with us all the way, using its AM jets to soften up the landing. It wasn't a
very big craft, but anything zooming around close to a planet's surface
blasting away with AM jets can hardly be considered discreet. It's all very
well to have a horizon in between you and the enemy once you're on the floor,
but when you're coming down from a long way up it's not easy to hide. We were
hoping that the invaders hadn't got any spaceship-spotting equipment of their
own; certainly they weren't going to get any help from the Tetron satellites.
Logic suggested that radar and the like wouldn't be very useful to an army
which did most of its fighting under a twenty-metre ceiling, but nerves are
notoriously unready to listen to logic.

Once we were down, though, we had reason to be grateful to the
efficiency of Tetron targeting; we were practically on top of a hatchway, and
it took us less than ten "hours" (local metric) to go underground.

We abandoned the shuttle entirely; our first mission was to get to
another hatchway, two days' hike away in the direction of the city, to put up
our communications aerial and establish some kind of semi-permanent base of
operations. That way, we figured, it wouldn't make too much difference if the
invaders did find the shuttle.

Except, of course, that we'd have to hitchhike home if the time ever
came to get the hell out.

The first trek was pretty easy. The hatchway let us down to an arterial
highway on level one. We sent two troopers on ahead to act as scouts, and then
began to haul our sleds right down the middle of the road, skimming over the thin
coat of ices. Level one is fairly benign, of course—the temperature rarely
drops below two-thirty K, and sometimes gets up almost to freezing point.

If we had been following the highway to its end we would have taken a
straight-line course smack into the middle of Skychain City, but we didn't
intend to go quite that far. Once we were close to the city, our intention was
to fade quietly into the forgotten back alleys.

We lit our way with torches mounted on the sleds, conserving our
helmet-lights. Everybody took turns at hauling, including the colonel and the
two Tetrax. There were no passengers on this trip. We'd already arranged a
timetable for rest-periods; whenever we rested, a man would go on ahead to
relieve one of the scouts. It all went like clockwork.

We had no trouble at all that first day; the invaders weren't using the
highway, and if they had any guards out on it, they were patrolling much closer
to home.

On the second day, things didn't go quite so smoothly.

About 37.50 (we were on Skychain City metric time, though there was no
reason to take it for granted that Skychain City had retained its old schedule
since the new tenants arrived) the scouts reported that they had run into some
kind of light-sensitive device on the highway. They said that it was a
relatively primitive device, but good enough to do its job. They had every
reason to suppose that they had triggered it simply by spotting it, and that it
had told Skychain City that we were on our way. It meant that we had to leave
the highway immediately.

This was by no means a disaster, because we were so far out it would
take hours for an invader patrol to get here even in a fast, wheeled vehicle,
and by that time we'd be long gone. But it did seem as if the first point on
the board had been clocked up to the opposition.

In the late afternoon we were close enough to go down to level two,
where the temperature is mostly an unfriendly one- thirty K. It was as far down
as I intended to go. There was no point in risking the men and the equipment in
the really cold regions. I thought of level three as a place to retreat to if
the going got rough. We had no idea, of course, how well the invaders might be
able to operate in three and four. Maybe they were used to moving about in
levels that were warm and brightly lit, and had no experience in really cold
conditions. We couldn't depend on that assumption, though—their army might have
been lurking in three and four for some considerable time before the attack on
the city. For all we knew, they might go to the cold layers for their summer
holidays.

For me, the return to a world of silvery walls and icy floors was
almost like coming home. I felt more relaxed on level two than I had aboard
Leopard
Shark.
Joxahan also felt comfortable, and did his bit to jolly
along the troopers who found it all very alien and very disturbing. You'd think
that anyone who spent the greater part of life aboard a starship couldn't
possibly be claustrophobic, but the levels can engender their own special
unease. Oddly enough, the person who seemed most uneasy was 74-Scarion, who had
spent many years in Skychain City, including the underground parts of the

city, but who
had never been out in the deep cold.