Asgard's Conquerors (31 page)

Everything was dark
and silent for hours on end while we waited, pretending to be asleep.
Sometimes, I actually dozed off, but every time I caught myself relaxing too
much I snapped myself out of it. The least noise was enough to wake me. Once or
twice I was sure that the door had opened, but it was just nerves. Long before
the appointed hour actually arrived, I had become impatient with the suspense.

When the
door finally did open, the only light that came on was a tiny torch in the hand
of a person who remained virtually invisible. The person handed me some
clothes, and directed the light at them to show me what they were. My hand
brushed the proffering fingers slightly as I took them. The fingers were hairy,
with nails like claws. Not human, nor invader.

"Put
them on," said an unfamiliar voice, in a purring whisper. The words were
spoken in badly-accented parole. A barbarian, then—certainly not a Tetron.

I could
see other bobbing pinpoints of light, and deduced that there were more of the
visitors. I couldn't count properly, though, because the pinpoints were
continually eclipsed by the bodies of the people who held them. I shoved my
legs into the trousers I'd been handed, and swapped my nightshirt for a lighter
garment. Then I dropped lightly from the bed and groped underneath it for my
boots.

When I
was ready, the hairy hand took me by the arm, and guided me toward the door.
The others seemed to be ready too. They were bringing Susarma Lear, Serne, and
Finn. I heard Serne suggest to Finn that if he made a sound, or slowed us down,
or did anything other than what he was told, he would end up dead. Serne could
be fearsome when he was in that sort of mood, and I didn't doubt that Finn
would obey. In any case, he might be just as keen as the rest of us to get out
of here.

"I
lead," said one of the furry humanoids. "Follow quickly. Make no
sound."

Outside,
the corridor was dark, but the firefly torches gave us something to follow.
There were no lights on at all in this part of the camp, but we came quickly
enough to a curving corridor that led past several of the observation windows,
through which faint streams of coloured light were filtering.

As we
hurried past these windows, I was able to see that our guides were tall and
thin, long-limbed like gibbons. I'd seen one or two of their race during
exercise periods before I was laid low, and had assumed that they were one of
the races conquered and displaced by the invaders while they were building
their little empire. It seemed that the invaders' perfect prison was not quite
as perfect as it had seemed, and that their dominion over the races whose
habitats they had seized might not be entirely secure either.

We
reached the relevant lock, and found that there were, as promised, a number of
suits inside. They were not heavy- duty pressurized suits of the kind that one
would wear in a vacuum, but loose and lightweight plastic suits. They had no
complicated life-support or waste-disposal systems—just a pair of
oxygen-recycling cylinders each. The sight of them didn't fill me with enthusiasm
or confidence. Their air- supply would be good for perhaps four hours, no more.
When that time had elapsed, we had to be somewhere where the air was
breathable. Racing out into the alien atmosphere, without knowing where we
were going, or whether there was anywhere to go, suddenly didn't seem like such
an attractive prospect.

"What's
this all about?" I asked the furry humanoid who'd taken the lead in
guiding us. "Where are we going?"

"No
time," he said—or was he a she? I got the impression that his or her
parole was a bit limited.

"Get
into the suits!" snapped Susarma Lear in a gruff whisper. She had got the
bit between her teeth and nothing was going to stop her now. It was a
philosophy of life that had already made her a hero. I hoped that today wouldn't
be the day when it would make her a dead hero.

I had to
take my boots off to put the suit on, but I put them on again afterwards, over
the plastic feet of the suit— there might be a long walk ahead of me, and I
didn't want blisters. While I was struggling into the suit the lock became
even more crowded. There were several new arrivals, and although it was
impossible to guess who was who in the near-darkness, I remembered what the
note had said about Tetrax.

The
inner door of the lock swung shut behind us, and the light came on
automatically. I blinked furiously to dispel the glare, desperate to see what
was going on. The tall furry humanoids had all stayed outside. There were, as
promised, two Tetrax with us, just beginning to scramble into their suits. It's
not easy to tell one Tetron from another, but one of them caught my eye and
looked back with what seemed to be recognition.

"Tulyar?"
I said, not entirely certain that it was he.

It's
never safe to guess what a Tetron might be feeling by his expression, but the
way he looked at me by no means gave me the impression that he was in control
here. He

looked bewildered—even
frightened.

"Rousseau!"
he said, forgiving me my indelicacy in addressing him without referring to his
number. "Do you know . . . ?"

That
might have been a fascinating question, but he was only halfway through framing
it when the alarm bells began to sound. The two Tetrax were already pulling
their suits on as fast as they could, but the sound of the alarms panicked
them into further haste. I jumped immediately to the conclusion that 994-Tulyar
and his companion had no better idea than I did what was going on. The Tetrax
weren't behind this break, after all.

I turned
around to give the benefit of my sudden insight to the colonel, but she wasn't
looking at me. She was puzzling over something that had been pressed into her
plastic- clad hand before the furry men had faded away. As homing devices went,
it lacked sophistication. It was just a glorified compass, with a swinging
needle which always pointed the same way no matter how much the case was
rotated. I knew it wasn't pointing to the north pole.

The lock
worked on a double cycle—first the Earthlike atmosphere was replaced by
nitrogen, then that was replaced by the mixture outside. The pumps were quick,
but the seconds were dragging by. Even inside the suits in the closed lock we
could hear those alarm bells trilling away. I saw Serne looking at his hands,
nervously, wishing there was something he could do with them. I had sealed my
suit now, and so had the Tetrax, and though we could still be heard if we
shouted, the possibility of holding an intelligible conversation was remote. I
looked at Tulyar's face, still trying to read it, though there was no longer
anything in those alien eyes which I could call an expression.

Then the
outer door was released, and we shoved it open, hurling ourselves through. We
ran for the cover of the mist and the "trees," and I prayed that the
direction-finder the colonel had clutched in her fist would lead us to somewhere
safe, and not just to a quiet spot where we could asphyxiate in private.

At first
I reckoned we'd have a good four or five minutes' start, because that was the
time it would take to put the airlock through another complete cycle. I'd
forgotten that there were a lot of locks, and that the neo-Neanderthalers could
pile into any one of them. It can't have been more than two minutes before a
dendrite to our left suddenly exploded, showering us with debris. It had only
been hit by a single bullet, but the main structure of the thing must have been
as brittle as glass. It didn't have to cope with any sharp impacts in the
normal course of its affairs.

As we
ran deeper into the "forest," we had to let the colonel lead, because
she had the device that was showing us which way to go. At first, she'd dodged
around the twisting networks with their multifarious coloured light- bulbs, but
as she brushed the outer tips of the branches they broke, hardly impeding her
at all, and she began to take a less sinuous course. She still couldn't go
straight through the middle of one of the tangled bushes, but she became much
less bothered about the fringes, despite the danger that sharp shards posed to
our suits, and as we went we were virtually blasting a path for ourselves. The
thought of all that wreckage in the delicate quasi-crystalline forest upset me,
but the damage that was done by the bullets they were shooting at us was ten
times as bad, so it was an angry kind of feeling rather than guilt.

The
insectile gliding creatures were all around us, seemingly incapable of getting
out of our way. In the misty semi-darkness it was like stumbling through a
cloud of wind-swirled dead leaves and flickering candle-flames. When the
dendrites shattered their lights didn't go out as if they'd been switched off,
but faded slowly into oblivion, so that the trail we left behind us was
decaying gradually into greyness.

I was
profoundly glad when we came out of the coloured forest into a region where we
didn't have to commit such evident vandalism as we moved. But the change of
terrain was not greatly to our advantage in respect of the pursuit we were
trying to evade. The mist was thinner here, and the ground became soft and
muddy, slowing us down. The one consolation was that instead of the trees there
were big bulbous mounds which could cut us off from the line of sight of the
chasing invaders.

There
was little colour here: it was basically a monochrome landscape in shades of
grey. Bioluminescent "flowers" lived a more peripheral existence in
this milieu, growing in small squat clumps between the fungoid mounds. I did
not doubt that the mounds were in fact life forms, because their
"skin" moved in slow ripples, and seemed slightly moist, like the
skin of a frog. There were very few tree-like structures, and they bore no
coloured lights. Their branches hung listlessly, and their paleness made it
easy to think of them as dead, though there was no reason at all to assume that
what would in another life- system be considered symptoms of morbidity might
not here be signs of health and vitality.

There
were fewer Hying creatures here, too. The smaller firefly-like things were very
scarce, and the greater part of the "animal" population consisted of
gliders as big as an outstretched human hand, like butterflies and dragonflies
made out of crisp crepe paper.

There
were fewer shots now—our pursuers rarely got a clear view of us, and now that
the first recklessness of their excitement had cooled they were beginning to
conserve ammunition. Serne, who had obviously been paying them closer
attention than I, signaled to me that there were only half a dozen of them, but
Susarma Lear extended the fingers of her left hand several times in rapid
succession to remind him that there would soon be more. We could have shouted
to one another even through the plastic of our helmets, but it would have been
very difficult to make ourselves heard, so we settled for the kind of sign
language that people use in vacuum. I could tell that the colonel was distressed
by the stickiness of the going underfoot, and it wasn't hard to see why. If our
pursuers could bring vehicles into the hunt, they could cover this kind of
territory much more easily than we.

Our
problems were compounded by the fact that Tulyar and the other Tetron were
already struggling to keep up. Even Finn was fit enough and fast enough to keep
pace with the colonel, but the Tetrax are not overly devoted to physical
culture, and Tulyar was a civilian used to all the comforts of advanced
civilization. I saw Susarma Lear look back at them twice, speculatively, and I
could imagine what was in her mind.

To what
extent ought we to take risks ourselves in order to allow them to stay with us?
Did we care if they became separated from the rest of us—and hence lost, given
that we had the only direction-finder?

She
didn't look to me for any advice. I didn't have any confidence at all in her
eagerness to help them out, but I wasn't sure that I was eager myself. No one
could have argued that I owed any favours to the Tetrax in general, or
994-Tulyar in particular

Things
didn't get much better in the course of the first hour. The shooting had
stopped, but we had no reason to think that we had given our pursuers the slip.
We were no longer sprinting and crashing carelessly through anything that got
in our way, but we were still leaving a visible trail. Sometimes the grey mud
was liquid enough to cover up our footmarks as soon as we'd passed on, sometimes
it was set as hard as polystyrene, so that we didn't leave any noticeable
imprints, but mostly it was somewhere in between. The invaders probably had no
experience in tracking, but they certainly wouldn't have needed Cochise to read
the signs and tell which way we had gone.

By the
time the first hour was up we were moving at a purposeful walk. Tulyar and the
other Tetron were still with us, though they were showing signs of distress. We
were surrounded by bulbous white growths, many of which were intricately
patterned in dark grey and black. It wasn't easy to decide whether the dark
tracery was specialised tissue belonging to the same organism or a kind of
parasitic growth.