Asgard's Conquerors

9

By the time we reached Asgard I had just about readjusted to one-gee, and my muscles—not without a little help from the medics—were ready to go into the levels and give of their best. The men were all trained in the use of cold-suits, and had been as fully briefed on the geography of Skychain City as I could manage. I wouldn’t in all honesty say that they were raring to go, but the idea of another tour of dangerous duty was hardly new to them. The only ones not combat-hardened were Kramin’s little bunch of thieves.

We made rendezvous in the Asgard system with a small fleet of galactic ships—not all of them Tetron. There was a makeshift station providing an anchorage for the group, but it was a thing of thread and patches, not a custom-designed microworld. Months had now passed since the invasion, and the Tetrax had carefully picked up all the pieces, but they hadn’t begun to rebuild. Support ships were arriving from the Tetra system, and from a couple of closer ones, but as far as I could judge it would probably take a year or more to put together any convincing base by means of which the Tetrax could establish a respectable permanent habitation—whether to serve as an embassy in which the galactic community could re-establish friendly relations with Asgard’s inhabitants, or as a launching-point for an invasion, remained to be seen.

Meetings with our hosts, including the briefings, took place aboard one of their ships. We had to edge in very close to string an umbilical between the vessels, and ours wasn’t the only link they set up. I don’t know what we looked like from outside—probably like a lot of wind-blown debris caught in a tattered spiderweb.

The earliest meetings involved Valdavia and 673-Nisreen, but no Star Force personnel. I had the uneasy feeling that Valdavia was acting as a salesman, dickering with the Tetrax to fix a fair price for our services. I had an even uneasier suspicion that the Tetrax saw it that way as well; their whole social order seemed to be based on elaborate service contracts whereby individuals bought limited control of others. Humans tended to translate the word describing the system in pan-galactic parole as “slavery,” but that just made the Tetrax laugh at us for being horrified by the idea. From their viewpoint, selling themselves in whole or in part was quite routine, and there was a parallel system of quasi-feudal duties and obligations which meant that they all stood ready to act as civil servants—maybe even as military personnel too—at a moment’s notice. Thus, it was neither surprising nor upsetting to 673-Nisreen that he had been snatched away from his biological work to become a liaison man with the UN nabobs. I couldn’t help wondering what Dr. Ayub Khan’s attitude would have been had the UN sent him orders to forget Uranus and go to Asgard as a diplomat.

When the haggling was over (Valdavia carefully refrained from giving us the details) the colonel, Crucero, and I went over with him to the Tetron ship so that we could find out what it was that Earth and Tetra expected of us in the line of duty. The Tetrax, with their usual sharp eye for formality, confronted us with their own committee of four.

One of them, I already knew very slightly. His name was 74-Scarion, and he’d been an officer with immigration control. He’d been the one who’d contrived to get me involved with Myrlin in the first place. He was very much the junior member of the Tetron team, though, and had presumably been included because he and I had already met.

The other three announced themselves as 994-Tulyar, 871-Alpheus, and 1125-Camina. 673-Nisreen wasn’t present. Camina was a female, though it wouldn’t have been obvious if she hadn’t taken the trouble to tell us. All Tetrax have round faces, wizened features, and black skin with a highly-polished look to it. They do have hair, of a sort, but it’s black and very short, and doesn’t differ in length or style between individuals. Their dress is unisex and they don’t seem to make any attempt to adopt small tokens of individuation. You can tell one from another by the shapes of their noses and the patterns of the markings on their faces, but it isn’t easy. They profess a horror of excessive individuation, which is why they give themselves numbers as well as names. I never had figured out whether the names they had were more akin to our Christian or family names, or what kind of relationship was likely to exist between two Tetrax with the same name. I did know, though, that high numbers were in some loose way connected with high status. Four-figure numbers were rare, and it wasn’t surprising that 1125-Camina turned out to be the chief spokesman.

“We are most honoured and very grateful for your willingness to assist us in this tragic hour,” she assured us. “This is a time of trouble for all the galactic community, and I know of no homeworld which does not mourn for lost sons and daughters. The Asgard project was one that brought together all races in a common endeavour, and was therefore precious to us all as a symbol of harmony. These have been dreadful happenings.”

All of this tripped very smoothly from her tongue in pangalactic parole, which is a language perfectly suited to Tetron mouth-parts. Human tongues, which are flatter and wider, can’t quite get to grips with the full range of syllables, and the fact that we have to substitute a couple of nonstandard consonants means that we sound very awkward when we try to use the language. Alas, there’s no other way to get by in the community. One could hardly expect the Tetrax to learn English.

For this reason, Valdavia’s official reply to the greeting was more succinct than his natural inclination would have prompted him to be, and the words did not flow like verbal honey.

“We regret,” 1125-Camina explained, speaking directly to the colonel because Valdavia had presumably already heard the news, “that we have been unable to establish communication with the people who have seized Skychain City. There is, of course, a language barrier, but no attempt seems to have been made by the invaders to begin the work of overcoming it. Our transmissions are ignored. We have sent down unarmed emissaries, but none have returned, although we have no evidence that any of them has been harmed. There are still galactics beneath the surface who have not yet been captured—people who were working in bubble-domes established by the Co-ordinated Research Establishment. We have been able to communicate sporadically with these groups, though we are wary of attracting attention to them. We did manage to receive communications from our people in the city for some time after the invasion, but we have not picked up any transmissions for some time. With your permission, we will summarize briefly what we now know about the invaders.”

Valdavia inclined his head, gesturing that she should continue. The colonel simply raised a blonde eyebrow. She was well into her tough-guy routine. 1125-Camina promptly passed the buck to 994-Tulyar.

“The invaders came from beneath the city,” he said. “They emerged from at least five different points in levels two and three, using doorways of whose existence we had been quite ignorant. We infer that the invaders must have been grouping in levels three and four for some time before the attack; it is possible that they were there even before Mr. Rousseau first penetrated to the lower levels, and that the attack was in no way a response to that penetration.

“There is one remarkable coincidence, of whose significance we are uncertain. If you will look at these. . . .”

He took some flimsies from a bag beneath the table. They were photographs, presumably taken in the aftermath of the battle for Skychain City and transmitted before communication was closed down.

The invaders looked human.

Of all the starfaring races in the community, about half a dozen are near enough to human for at least some of their members to pass. Humans are pretty various, of course, so it only has to be the case that some members of a near- human race could be mistaken for some humans for us to be able to speak of there being a coincidence. The invaders in the photographs were all white-skinned—rather pasty- faced, in fact—and they all had light-coloured hair. Their features were a little on the Neanderthal side, with heavy brow-ridges and Eskimo-type noses, but they could have walked the streets of a dozen Earthly cities without attracting too much notice, and on a multiracial microworld anyone would have been happy to shake hands with them.

I realised that my newfound interestingness was not entirely determined by my experience in the levels.

“The people who once inhabited levels one, two, and three were humanoid,” I pointed out. “We’ve always known that. There’s no reason to be particularly surprised.”

“Perhaps not,” said the Tetron. “It is possible that the coincidence can now be turned to our advantage. Colonel . Lear could certainly be mistaken for one of the aliens, and so could you, Star-Captain Rousseau. This may assist in the gathering of intelligence. It might conceivably be the case that the invaders would be more ready to make contact with a race which resembles them so very closely than with the Tetrax, who unhappily do not.”

It’s difficult to import subtle inflections into pan-galactic parole, but he managed to make the word “unhappily” sound ironically insincere. What he was implying was that the invaders were barbarians just like us, and would probably have more in common with us than with civilized and cultured folk like the Tetrax.

“Is that why we’re here—to make contact?” asked Susarma Lear, bluntly, in parole that sounded coarse even by human standards.

1125-Camina intervened, quickly but smoothly. “It is our considered opinion that your group should attempt to make contact only if the circumstances seem very favourable. Our own diplomats, aided by members of several races who resemble the invaders closely, are making overt attempts to open a dialogue. Mr. Valdavia will be able to assist us, and he has kindly offered to do so. What we ask of you, if you are willing to help, is that you should help us to reopen channels of communication with the Tetrax in the city. We need the information which they have been gathering since our links were cut, and it appears that we will need them to act as intermediaries in communicating with the invaders.”

I was trying hard to read between the lines, to judge how anxious she was, and about what. I thought her words overlaid a real sense of urgency, and I guessed that what was worrying the Tetrax was the fear that this affair might not have finished yet—that there might be manpower enough and firepower enough in Asgard’s depths to allow the macroworld’s inhabitants to carry their campaign out into the star-worlds. I guessed that they were afraid that the invaders wouldn’t ever start talking peace, but would instead erupt into the galaxy, guns ablaze, in exactly the same fashion as they had erupted into Skychain City.

“Whose orders are we under, once we’re down?” asked the colonel, again defying Valdavia’s suggestions by being brutally frank. The diplomat looked annoyed, but she ignored him.

“994-Tulyar will direct operations,” replied the female Tetron. “He has lived on the surface of Asgard for some years, and knows the city well. Your own Star Force personnel will of course be under your command, but we respectfully ask that you take no action without careful consultation with 994-Tulyar.”

Or, to put it another way, you do as this guy tells you. Susarma Lear didn’t challenge the position.

“And what sort of equipment are we taking down?” she asked.

1125-Camina was sharp enough to know that “equipment” was a euphemism for guns. “We do not consider the circumstances appropriate for the carrying of weapons,” she replied. “Our principal objective is to establish friendly relations with the invaders, and your mission is a means to that end. We are determined to make no hostile moves. You should make every attempt to operate in secret, without attracting the attention of the invaders and certainly without trying to kill any of them.”

I was slightly surprised when Susarma Lear just nodded, keeping her face quite straight. Valdavia must have warned her that the Tetrax would take this stand, and had presumably instructed her not to protest. She’d already made an effort to show that she might take an independent line if necessary, but she was a colonel now, and colonels have to be extra-careful about expressing their displeasure openly. She had her orders, and she knew that in the end she had to take whatever crap the Tetrax cared to hand out. One more heroic sacrifice for the cause of Mother Earth.

I wasn’t a colonel. That meant I didn’t have a voice, let alone an opinion. I could make myself heard some other time.

“The interests of both our races—of the entire galactic community—are identical in this matter,” added 871- Alpheus, who seemed to be there simply as a yes-man.

My old friend 74-Scarion, who was a yes-man of an even lower order, echoed him with the observation: “It is our duty to serve as we may.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to translate that into ordinary language, but it sounded to me like: “We’re expendable, pal—you and me both—and we don’t have a choice.” I had a feeling he might be right. I gave him a little smile, but I don’t suppose he understood it.

“Ideally,” said 1125-Camina, now making a show of addressing herself to Valdavia, “we would like to bring some of our people out of the city, and establish routes by which they could go back and forth unobserved. No doubt the airlocks which provide the principal means of egress are heavily guarded, but it should not be too difficult to find covert points of entry into the lower levels.”

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.