Asgard's Conquerors

13

The second place we’d marked out in advance as a likely point of entry to the city’s subterranean regions was very much like the first. It was a sealed-off tunnel in a maze of corridors at the edge of a field-system.

The Tetrax had reclaimed these fields just as they’d reclaimed the ones close to our first entry-point; they’d built their own system on the skeleton of the one the cavies had left behind, but they’d never found any use for the living quarters on the edge, and had left them derelict, without installing lights. By our reckoning, those corridors should have been just as deserted now as they had been for countless years.

But they weren’t—the invaders had moved in to occupy them.

I could see from some way off that the walkways and railways in this area were swarming with uniformed neo- Neanderthalers. I went down into the cramped tunnels underneath the photosynthetic carpets, where the stuff they were producing was harvested, and found invaders thick on the ground there too. After sniffing around for a while, edging in as close as I dared without running any real risk of giving myself away, I realised why.

This was one corner of the field-system—maybe the only corner—where the Tetrax had been producing the kind of manna that was best fitted to the human diet. Humans weren’t the only species on Asgard who thrived on that version of the one-item diet. Kythnans, who look very like us, ate it too.

Many other races, though, found it unpalatable, and in general each species preferred the flavours and textures that were routinely applied to their own kinds of manna.

Our Ksylian informant had told us that the invaders were having trouble with food production. If this was the place that produced the food which suited them best, then of course they would congregate here, trying to figure out how to turn other parts of the system over to the production of human-brand manna.

I guessed that the invaders had one hell of a problem getting food to their troops. Their route up from the levels where they lived was probably tortuous, and their elevator shafts would be overburdened shipping large amounts of food as well as armoured vehicles and men. If they wanted to secure their hold on Skychain City and run it efficiently, they would have to produce food locally. It would be a matter of urgent necessity for them to understand both the Tetron biotechnics that were in use hereabouts, and the control-systems governing the transportation and distribution of the manna. A handful of automated trains chugging gently back and forth to the areas beneath the big singlestacks that were the heart of Skychain City’s residential district had undoubtedly been sufficient to carry food for a couple of hundred humans, five hundred Kythnans, and a few assorted extras. But the invaders wanted to move in tens of thousands of men, and everyone knows that an army marches on its stomach.

I saw a few Tetrax with the invaders, going around under escort. Their hosts seemed to be trying hard to communicate with them—which suggested that the language lessons were beginning to bear fruit and that at least some of the invaders could communicate in parole. What I knew of the Tetrax, though, suggested that those problems in communication would not be easily solved. As the old saying has it, you can drive a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. You can learn to talk to a Tetron, but you can’t necessarily make him understand. I would have laid odds that the Tetrax were being as polite and seemingly helpful as they could be, without ever getting close to telling their captors what it was they wanted to know.

The more I watched the invaders, and the more I saw of their own technology, the more obvious it became that the Ksylian had been right in telling us how primitive they were. Because they were so nearly human in appearance, it was easy to look at them as if they were people out of our own past, and everything told me that they weren’t even as sophisticated as contemporary humans. They might have marched out of our twentieth century—the twenty-first at the very latest. A battalion of Star Force troopers with standard equipment could have made mincemeat of a force of neo-Neanderthalers three or four times their number.

This calculation disturbed me. It was easy enough to understand how a barbarian army with the advantage of surprise could overrun Skychain City, which had no defences to speak of and only a small corps of peace officers. But I couldn’t see how an army such as this could possibly hold on to the city if the Tetrax were to organise a properly planned rebellion. I began to wonder whether our commission to open up lines of communication was simply a way to set up a route by which weapons—maybe chemical or biological weapons—could be shipped into the city to support an armed insurrection.

If that were the case, there was no particular cause for surprise in the fact that the Tetrax hadn’t mentioned it to us. I couldn’t help being suspicious, though, about the way they had let us believe that the invaders were much more sophisticated than they had turned out to be. They must have known the true situation, given that they had continued to receive intelligence from the city for some time after the invasion. There was something about the way this whole operation had been set up which just wasn’t right. There was a distinct ratlike odour about it all.

I found a hiding place behind a stack of empty crates in a gigantic “warehouse” beneath the carpet. It seemed a useful place to be because food was being stored here, and I was getting pretty hungry. Unfortunately, it looked as if it would be difficult for me to get my hands on any, because the place was so busy. At one end of the open space was the terminus where the trains came to load up, and there was a big computer console nearby from which the routing of the trains could be controlled. It was only a tiny substation— the main control centre for the entire field-system was thirty kilometres away—but a system that large needs a good many entry-points for information and minor control-points for exactly the same reason that a nervous system needs bundles of sensory cells and ganglia. I wasn’t at all surprised to see a party of uniformed invaders in front of the screens, deep in conversation with a couple of galactics.

The galactics were both Kythnans. Ninety percent of the galactic races claim not to be able to tell humans and Kythnans apart, though neither humans nor Kythnans have much difficulty. Almost the first thing I was told by a fellow human when I first arrived on Asgard was that the fact that Kythnans looked like us was no reason to start trusting them. Maybe Kythnans told each other the same thing about humans.

Anyhow, my own experience with Kythnans hadn’t prejudiced me in their favour—the last one I’d come into contact with was Jacinthe Siani, who had worked for Amara Guur. Given this, I was quite ready to jump to the conclusion that the Kythnans were probably being a lot more obliging in their dealings with the invaders than the Tetrax.

After a little while of watching the group by the control panels in deep discussion, I guessed that the co-operation the neo-Neanderthalers were getting from the Kythnans wasn’t doing them much good. The Kythnans probably didn’t understand Tetron technology much better than the invaders. They would have learned how to operate those systems up on the surface that were useful in everyday life, but this would be a new world to them.

I was trying to get closer, in order to overhear what was being said, when another group joined the party. There were two more invaders, in the fancier uniforms which I took to be those of officers, and what I first assumed to be an invader in civilian clothes. It wasn’t until I caught a snatch of conversation in parole that I realised he was human. I didn’t recognise him, but I wasn’t acquainted with more than half of the two hundred and fifty of the humans on Asgard, so that wasn’t too surprising.

The sight of the human gave my spirits the first uplift they’d had in some time. I hoped, paradoxically, that he would turn out to be a full-blown collaborator and a dyed-in-the-wool traitor to the galactic cause—because if he were, he might have the freedom to walk around on his own, and that meant that I might be able to walk where I wanted to without being seized or shot on sight.

As I strained my ears to catch some of the conversation, though, my enthusiasm dwindled somewhat. The human didn’t seem to be in a helpful mood, and what he was trying to tell his interlocutors, not very politely, was that he was a starship pilot, not a biotech engineer, and that he didn’t know the first thing about manufacturing manna.

There was an exchange of words between the newcomers and the group that was already there. Then they moved away from me, to the beginning of the underground tracks. There was a passenger-car already attached to the train that was waiting there, and the invaders put the Kythnans and the human aboard, along with half a dozen guards. The two officers who’d come in with the human stayed behind.

I watched them walk back to the console. They seemed to be arguing. I inferred that they couldn’t find anyone who could or would tell them how to do what they wanted, and that they were getting very impatient about it. In the meantime, they were afraid to tamper with the computers for fear of accidentally shutting down the entire operation, or otherwise messing things up. So far, it seemed, they’d mastered the manual controls on the trains, and that was about it.

It isn’t easy to take over a highly-automated city when you don’t understand the language or the machines. On the other hand, these guys seemed to have made virtually no progress at all in months of occupation. Stupid, the Ksylian had said. It was easy to see why he thought so. I wondered, though, whether I could have done much to help them myself, if I were actually trying to. You get used to taking technology very much for granted, especially when there’s always a Tetron repairman at the other end of the phone. The horrible thought struck me that, given his interest in certain kinds of electronic systems, a man like John Finn might have been much more use to the invaders than me.

I looked at my wristwatch, and was dismayed to discover that time had been passing more quickly than I thought. It was 22.50, and my hastily arranged rendezvous with Serne was not much more than half a human hour away. Was there a chance, I wondered, that I could still make it, and get out of the city without being taken prisoner?

I was seized by a terrible temptation to try something desperately reckless. I had just enough charge left in Scarion’s mud gun to drop both the officers.

In an invader uniform, I thought, I just might be able to walk straight through the crowds and into the corridors.

There was every chance that the section of tunnel leading to the plug was still dark and unused—or so, at least, I persuaded myself. And I had a golden opportunity here to create something of a diversion. Like the luckless human they’d been questioning, I was no biotech engineer, but it’s a lot easier to sabotage an automated system than it is to make it work as you want it to. Like John Finn on Goodfellow, I thought I could create a little emergency.

I suppose my commission had finally soaked into my personality; I was thinking like a Star Force commando. Anyhow, I was getting rather tired of discretion. I’d always had a submerged reckless streak. If I hadn’t, I never would have come to Asgard in the first place.

The two officers were too deep in discussion to see me coming, until one glimpsed me out of the corner of his eye. By then, it was too late; I had two clear shots at their naked faces. One yelped as the stuff hit him in the eye, and they both tried to haul their sidearms out, but they crumpled slowly to their knees as their nervous systems gave up the ghost.

I went to the console first, and studied the keyboards and the displays on the screens. I managed to conjure up a system-map with lights to indicate the positions of the trains both underground and on top. I knew better than to try to arrange a real crash; what I wanted to do was convince the system that something awful had happened, to get each and every one of its emergency systems going.

I typed in a mayday message, and told the machine there was a blocked tunnel just in front of one of the moving trains. The tell-tale light stopped moving, and I knew that the machines had slammed the brakes on. Then I told the system that there was a fire under the surface, that lives were endangered. It wouldn’t necessarily believe me—it had its own smoke detectors—but the system wasn’t rigged to take risks, and it would take appropriate action pending a check.

Somewhere in the distance alarm bells were beginning to ring.

I tried to think of something else—a crack opening into the cold on level two ... a medical emergency involving some workers. But I was already glancing round fearfully at the main body of the warehouse. There were three or four doorways where people were only too likely to appear at any moment.

I decided that there wasn’t time for further subtlety. I took out the needier I’d borrowed from one of Scarion’s killers, stood well back to avoid the danger of ricochets, and held down the firing stud. I sprayed the slivers of metal all around the console—keyboards, screens, junction-boxes.

The systems believed that emergency, all right. Alarm bells began ringing all around me now, setting up a terrible clamour. Quickly, I dragged one of the officers behind the crates, to buy me an extra couple of minutes when the crowds began to arrive, and stripped off his jacket and trousers. It was more difficult than I had expected, because he was a dead weight and an awkward shape. By the time I was able to start pulling the garments on—without bothering to remove my own first—people did start arriving, over by the tracks and from the farther region of the warehouse as well. I left all the weapons behind except the stricken man’s sidearm, and walked out of hiding with a purposeful stride.

There were soldiers everywhere, plus a couple of neo-Neanderthal civilians and a handful of galactics. I just walked to the side door and went out. Nobody said a word, and I doubt that they even saw me—all attention was focused on the wrecked console and the unconscious officer.

Up on top, no one had a clue what was happening. There were people running along the walkways in several different directions. I didn’t want to be left out, so I ran too. The only difference was that I knew where I was going. I got out of the fields and into the corridors that crisscrossed the solid mass holding up the topmost of all Asgard’s layers. I ran purposefully past dozens of invader troopers, trying my very best to look like a man with an urgent mission, who must at all costs not be interrupted.

It worked like a dream for fully nine-tenths of the distance I had to cover, but then—in a corridor far too narrow to allow me to pass—I ran into a whole bunch of the enemy, including two men with such fancy decoration on their torsos that they had to outrank the poor sap whose uniform I’d stolen.

One of them—a big, bald man—barked an order at me. I don’t know what he said, but all I could do was stop and look foolish. There was nowhere to go—I couldn’t get past and as I half-turned, the man in charge barked again. I was grabbed, and pulled forward.

I could tell by the way he stared that the bald man had jumped to the right conclusion. My brow-ridges obviously weren’t prominent enough, given my inability to respond in any way whatsoever to his challenge. It probably helped that he’d been shipping humans down here to try and help his own boys out. He was quick to conclude that I was a member of the species Homo sapiens.

I had been feeling very good about my boldness until that moment—high on my own adrenalin, and pleased to take credit for my brilliance. Now, all of a sudden, I began to feel nauseous and extremely foolish.

The guns came out, and suddenly I was in the middle of a very hostile crowd. I stuck my empty hands up into the air, hoping fervently that they could recognise the symbol of surrender. I let them take the sidearm from my belt, having made no attempt to reach it myself.

There was nothing very gentle about the way they hustled me along. Stupid they might be, but they could put two and two together well enough to figure out who was responsible for all the alarms that were ringing. They had no way of knowing where I’d been headed, so Serne should be safe enough, but I was going to be treated as a saboteur.

I wondered, as they hustled me along, what they did to saboteurs. On good old Earth, I remembered, they used to shoot them.