Asgard's Conquerors

23

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.

These globules seemed to me to be neither resting on the ground nor growing from it, but rather to be aggregations of the quasi-protoplasmic goo over which we walked, whose inner warmth I could feel even through my boots. It was as if we were walking upon a vast marbled-white tegument which welled up at irregular intervals into giant puff-balls.

It was easy to imagine that we were tiny endoparasites migrating across the skin of some vast scaly-skinned beast, and in my fanciful way I tried to enhance the illusion by trying to imagine the surroundings as verrucose growths on the hide of some albino giant. The globules varied in diameter from a metre to thirty metres; the larger ones towered above us and seemed almost to touch the ill-lit ceiling.

We dared not stop to rest, but Serne moved into step with Susarma Lear, touching helmets occasionally in order to be more easily heard. Their voices reached me as a low and distant murmur, and I couldn’t see most of the hand- signals they were exchanging, but I knew they were discussing tactical options. I deduced that Serne wanted to try to get us some guns—feeling, no doubt, that two experienced Star Force commandos were easily the equal of half a dozen savages armed with vulgar popguns. I guessed that the further we went without reaching any sign of a destination, the more that idea might come to seem attractive to the colonel. She knew, though, that there wasn’t time to lay an intricate ambush. We had no idea how much further we had to go, and our recyclers would supply us with oxygen for only three more hours.

Had I been fully fit, the pace at which we were moving would have been quite comfortable, but I had only just begun to recover from a bad bout of fever, and I was now beginning to feel weak at the knees. My stomach was sending me mutinous signals, and I became fearful that I might vomit. Throwing up inside a plastic suit is absolutely no fun at all, and can be very dangerous. You don’t need a reducing atmosphere to choke you to death when a rebellious body feels like making its own arrangements.

The colonel and the sergeant were showing no obvious signs of similar distress, but as we went on I noticed a slight faltering of their strides. They might have been giving the Tetrax a fair chance to stay with us, but it seemed more likely that the sickness was beginning to take its toll on them, too. To my annoyance, Finn seemed to be having no difficulty at all.

I soon began to have distinct feelings of deja vu, remembering that last time I’d broken out of jail, I’d quickly begun to wish heartily that I’d never left the comfortable safety of my cell. I reminded myself that the invaders had been all set to treat me like a good friend, until they had been disconcerted by the plague I’d unwittingly unleashed among them. Now my ingratitude in opting out of their hospitality had persuaded them to try to kill me. And for what? We still hadn’t a clue where we were going, or why.

I was seized by a distinct impression that ever since I had last been trapped deep inside Asgard with Susarma Lear and her loyal follower, with pursuers on our tail and the unknown up ahead, life had been one long bizarre dream. Maybe, I thought, I’ll wake up in a moment to find my head aching from that stupid mindscrambler, and discover that I’m right back at square one.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. What happened instead was that a whole section of the sky got ploughed up, and bits of it began to fall on the fungoid jungle like a black rainstorm. Just for a fraction of a second, it did look like the fancy mindscrambler Myrlin’s friends had used during our final encounter, but it wasn’t. The sound and the shockwave, arriving just behind the shattering of the sky, told us what it really was. The invaders had fired a shell at us from some kind of tank. They had miscalculated the attitude of the gun—the arc of the shell had been just a fraction too high and it had hit the ceiling.

It all struck me as being rather unsporting—it was like spearing fish in a bathtub. But I could hardly doubt that it would be effective, even if they only kept hitting the sky and bringing tons of debris down on our hapless heads.

Terror lent strength to my legs which I had been sure they did not have, and I ran. So did we all. There are times when you just have to let panic take over, and deliver your future into the unreliable hands of fate, even when you know full well that fate is out to get you.