Asgard's Conquerors

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.

We pulled our scouts back, and moved in single file across what had once been the “farmlands” of level two. The ceiling of the level was only fifteen metres or so here, and was ribbed with what had once been very powerful electric lights. In the Golden Age of Asgard those lights had blazed upon carpets of artificial photosynthetic material, interrupted by occasional lakes of photosynthetic fluid. Underneath the carpets and around the lakes there had been processing machinery which had accumulated the products, and below the machinery there had been another active layer of thermosynthetic materials. It all added up to a sophisticated organic technology, in which real organisms had played a very marginal role. There had been no herds of domestic animals—meat-production for the level-dwellers was entirely a matter of organic synthesis from scratch ... if you can call the products of that kind of synthesis “meat” in any but a metaphorical sense.

Now, of course, the whole shebang was in ruins. Most of the equipment had been stripped before the cavies left, and the whole system had been shut down some time before the big freeze-up. What they’d left behind was mostly garbage, though it was still recognisable as the remains of a highly- sophisticated biotechnological production-system. The Tetrax had much that was similar on their homeworld, and I had heard that dear old Mother Earth was gradually making over her useless tropical deserts for the development of this kind of artificial photosynthetic technology. Needless to say, we were buying some of the technology from the Tetrax, but we were having to do a great deal of the R&D work ourselves because we didn’t have much that the Tetrax actually wanted in exchange.

On the second night we shopped around for an inconspicuous spot in which to erect a small bubble-dome. We investigated a couple of small “villages,” where residential accommodation was organised in floor-to-ceiling blocks four or five stories high, but I’d always found such places to be poor camp-sites. The cavies’ apartments tended to be untidy, their rooms having been stripped and gutted like everything else, and left in a worse state of dereliction. Opening the doors was always a problem, because the locking mechanisms had long since set firm. I’d had many years of experience cutting laboriously through doors, only to discover that there was nothing of any interest on the other side.

In the end, it seemed most convenient for us to take up residence in a building which had presumably served as some kind of barn or storehouse, where there was a space big enough to erect a comfortable dome, but which wasn’t out in the open. We managed to find a place that was clustered around with blocks and pillars, so that it couldn’t easily be observed from a distance. Nowhere in the caves is there any open space of the kind you’d find on the surface of a world, because the whole structure has to be protected against the dangers of collapse, but factory-fields are open enough to cause embarrassment if you’re trying to hide. We were careful to look for somewhere with plenty of cover.

We had power enough to raise the temperature inside the plastic bubble to a tolerable level, but we were determined to conserve our air, and didn’t want to expend enough to give it an atmosphere. For this reason, setting up accommodation wasn’t quite like pitching a tent. We remained in our suits, with the chemistry-sets on our backs feeding our bodies with all the essentials.

We were still communicating with one another on an open channel radio, so there was no real privacy (although I had agreed on a couple of secret wavelengths with my commander, so that we could confer, if necessary, without the Tetrax being able to overhear). It was a relief, though, to be able to lay down the equipment and then lie down ourselves, confident that the environment was as friendly as could be expected.

“Could the invaders track us from the point at which we triggered their alarm device?” 994-Tulyar asked me, once we were cosily set up.

“Very unlikely,” I told him. “I don’t believe they could figure out where we left the highway. We left traces, of course, but there’ve been so many other galactics moving about on level one during the last twenty years that there’s no way of sorting out our tracks from the others. We’re safe here, for now. The traces we leave when we try to break into the lower levels of the city will be a different matter. Then we’ll have to take extra care.”

“We have every reason to believe that the factory-fields will be operating more-or-less normally,” Scarion pointed out. “There will be workers there from many of the galactic races. Once we have stowed away our cold-suits, we will not be conspicuous.”

He was obviously trying to reassure himself rather than the rest of us—Tulyar had appointed him to accompany us on our first foray into the lower levels of the city. It was not a good time for airing anxieties, so I saved up my less uplifting thoughts. In any case, he was probably right. All we had to do on day one was make some preliminary contacts, try to get a message or two through to the top men in the city, and avoid the invaders. It seemed a sufficiently discreet programme, though there was always a danger of our attempts to communicate being intercepted, and giving us away.

We had had a long day, and had worked ourselves pretty hard. In our hammocks, we slept what is euphemistically called the sleep of the just. Just what, I wasn’t entirely sure.