Asgard's Conquerors

by Brian Stableford

  ASGARD'S

  CONQUERORS

  THE ASGARD TRILOGY

  BOOK TWO

  BRIAN

  STABLEFORD

  Five Star • Waterville, Maine

  Copyright © 2004 by Brian Stableford. An earlier version of this text, copyright © 1982 by Brian Stableford, was published by DAW Books, Inc., under the title Invaders from the Center.

  All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  First Edition

  First Printing: December 2004

  Published in 2004 in conjunction with Tekno Books and Ed Gorman.

  Set in 11 pt. Plantin.

  Printed in the United States on permanent paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stableford, Brian M.

  Asgard's conquerors / by Brian Stableford.

  p. cm. — (The Asgard trilogy ; bk. 2) "An earlier version of this text, copyrighted c1982 by Brian Stableford, was published by DAW Books, Inc., under the title “Invaders from the Center"—T.p. verso. ISBN 1-59414-209-2 (he : alk. paper) 1. Life on other planets—Fiction. I. Stableford, Brian M. Journey to the center. II. Title. PR6069.T17A93 2004

  823'.914—dc22 2004056274

  an ebookman scan

  ASGARD'S

  CONQUERORS

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  1

  I sometimes have the disturbing impression that the universe is determined to force my life into the mould of an exemplary tale. I have done my best to resist, but I am beginning to believe that resistance is useless. I fear that fate has it in for me, and that destiny has me marked down for something big.

  I will explain to you, if I may, how I arrived at this awful conclusion.

  There is supposed to be an ancient Chinese curse which implies that the worst fate which could possibly befall a man is to live in interesting times. I had always been aware of this saying, but had never considered its logical corollaries, the first of which must surely be that one is similarly cursed if one is drawn, moth-to-flame fashion, to interesting places. So I, as a young man, was lured by my good friend Mickey Finn to cross half the known universe to the artificial macroworld which Earthmen had learned to call Asgard: the home of the technocratic "gods."

  Various members of the galactic community, representing as many as three hundred different humanoid species, had been digging around for technological artefacts in the topmost levels of Asgard for many years. The Co-ordinated Research Establishment organised the efforts of most of these good people—guided and supervised by the Tetrax, who are very much the top dogs in the galactic community— but I never joined it, preferring to be my own master and go wherever the mood took me into those cold and desolate spaces.

  It was not I who made the breakthrough discovery that opened up the warmer and more interesting levels beneath those which had caught a dreadful chill in some unlucky cosmic accident. It was my fellow human Saul Lyndrach, who was quickly murdered by evil persons desirous of prising the secret out of him. It was then that I fell afoul of the second corollary of that ancient Chinese curse, which is that one can get into very deep trouble if one happens to become an interesting person. Through no fault of my own, I was suddenly very interesting indeed.

  I was interesting to the gangsters who had murdered Saul because I happened to be the only person on Asgard who could read French, the language in which Saul had recorded his notes. I was also interesting to several members of Earth's Star Force, who had come to Asgard fresh from concluding a genocidal war against the planet Salamandra. Their commanding officer, Star-Captain Susarma Lear, was convinced that a large man to whom Saul had generously given shelter, was actually a Salamandran android mysteriously equipped to take revenge on humankind; she also became convinced that I was the one man who could help her catch and kill this person.

  To cut a long story short (you can read about it, if you wish, in the first volume of my memoirs) the android disappeared into the bowels of Asgard, with myself and the starship troopers in hot pursuit. We were tracked in our turn by an assorted rabble of vormyr and Spirellans, bent on mayhem.

  And mayhem was what ensued.

  When everything was finally sorted out, the star-captain and her merry men set off back to Earth, feeling smug about having completed their nasty mission, and I was left to sell the secret of the gateway into inner Asgard to the highest bidder.

  I wasn't used to being rich. All my life I'd lived on the margin, never having to worry about long-term ambitions because it was quite hard enough figuring out where next week's food was going to come from. My lucky strike changed that, and suddenly I was precipitated into a premature mid-life crisis, faced with the awful prospect of making plans.

  Asgard began to seem like a pricked balloon. Its mysteries were far from being solved, but the process had begun, and with hundreds of levels now open for exploration the contribution which might be made by any one man seemed pretty small. Even though I hadn't really got near the enigmatic centre of the world, I felt that my hour of glory had come and gone. I began to wonder what there was in the rest of the galaxy to attract the attentions of a nouveau riche recluse like myself. Inevitably, I began to think of home: the solar system; the asteroid belt; the microworlds; Mother Earth.

  I'd never actually been to Earth. Asgard, which was more than a thousand light years away from my birthplace in the belt, was the only planet-sized mass I'd ever been on. It began to seem a little odd that I'd come so far from home without ever bothering to visit the homeworld of my species, which was only a lousy couple of hundred million miles away from where I'd started from. The more I thought about it, the more peculiar it seemed.

  So I decided to make a pilgrimage to Earth.

  Mistral, the ship in which I'd come to Asgard, in the company of Mickey Finn, Helmut Belinski, and Jean Averaud, was still strung up to an umbilical, quietly trailing the Tetron satellite at the top of the skychain. She was evacuated and sealed. No dust, no decay, no wear and tear. She'd been Finn's ship, really, though it had taken our combined fortunes to get her fitted out for the long trip to

  Asgard. Finn, Belinski, and Averaud had all been killed in an accident downstairs, on one of the trips when it was my turn to stay at home. Under our agreement, I inherited the ship. It was all I did inherit, along with a bill for Mickey's back taxes, which the Tetrax kindly forwarded to me.

  That had been a bad time for me—to be one of a group of four on a world mostly populated by aliens is one thing, to be a man alone is another. I'd gotten used to it; in a way, I'd gotten to like it. In the course of adjusting, I'd pushed Mistral into some quiet corner of my consciousness, where she didn't intrude upon my thoughts. But she'd always been there, waiting.

  I used part o
f my small fortune to have her fitted out all over again. I had the fusion reactor overhauled and the space-stresser checked. I don't know the first thing about the tortuous physics of the frame force, which lets us play origami with raw space in order to wormhole ourselves around the universe, and I wanted to make quite sure that the ship would end up back in Sol-space when I pressed the right buttons. I bought new navigational software, and the best troubleshooting programmes I could find, just to make sure. Then, relishing the thought that I could splash out without pauperizing myself, I installed some brand new Tetron organics—an integrated thermosynthetic system that would do food, waste-disposal, atmosphere regulation, bioluminescence, and minor electrics with pure organic technology; not an adapted organism in it. When we'd flown out, we'd had to make do with bacterial soup and adapted fungi. The food had been unbearable, the stink disgusting.

  When it was all done, and my ship was rigged up for first- class service, I trundled up the skychain, and I said au revoir to dear old Asgard. I wasn't sure that I'd ever be back.

  I wasn't sure of anything, much.

  Starships are very fast. They make light seem like viscous treacle oozing across a flat tabletop. But galactic distances are not small; in fact, they are unimaginably huge. So the ship's flight back to Earth was no mere ferry-crossing. It took months, and it became very boring.

  I had text-discs and I had sound-discs. I had a centrifuge to put weight on me, and various gadgets for keeping various bits of me fighting fit. They kept me occupied for a while, but in the end I was forced to seek some new distraction, some pleasure whose delights I had never tasted before.

  That was when I conceived the plan of writing the memoirs to which I referred, and immediately reached for my tape recorder. I won't say that it was an entirely joyful experience inscribing it all, because I am not a literary man, and sometimes found composition hard work. On the other hand, I am sure that my reconstructed dialogue sounds a good deal slicker than what was actually said at the time; poetic license can be fun! I had no intention of publishing what I had recorded—not immediately, anyhow—because there was some very sensitive information in there regarding the real fate of the android which Susarma Lear thought she had destroyed, but I took a certain satisfaction in setting the record straight.

  I finished the job a couple of days before I had to de-stress in order to enter solar space.

  When I came out of my wormhole, I was nowhere near where I actually wanted to be. That was only to be expected. I guess it takes a near-miracle for navigational software to get a ship into such a tiny target as a solar system—you really can't expect to be neatly delivered to a particular planetary doorstep. I wasn't within spitting distance of

  Earth, or even the asteroid belt. In fact, the only object of any conceivable interest within easy travelling distance was Uranus.

  I'd never been to Uranus. To the best of my knowledge, very few people had, though some intrepid individuals had begun poking around the moons and the rings before I left the system. A routine scan by my equipment told me that there was now a microworld in the vicinity of the planet, which rejoiced in the name of Goodfellow. My ship was automatically logged in by the microworld's scanners, and my software transmitted all the usual data, receiving the customary cartload of rubbish in return: the size, specifications, population, etc. of Goodfellow. I didn't bother getting my screens to display it, but I got a digest of the essentials. There were eight hundred people aboard, all but a dozen of them civilians. They were supposedly engaged in scientific data-collection and mapping. All very cosy, but not particularly interesting.

  They made contact first. I assumed that this was because their machines chewed up the data which mine had sent a little more quickly than mine could process theirs, or possibly because the microworlders were more scrupulously polite than me. They sent me an invitation to dock, couched in very friendly terms. I figured that they probably didn't see many strangers out here, and in a small microworld everybody really does know everybody else. A traveler with tales to tell of the mysterious universe would surely be a popular dinner-guest.

  I reckoned that I could put up with being a social lion for a while. In any case, the microworld would be spinning fast enough to produce a decent gee-force, and though it wouldn't be very spacious, its walls wouldn't be crowding me quite as closely as the walls of my little star-skipping

  cocoon. So I decided to visit for a day or two. It can't hurt, can it? I asked myself. Which just goes to show that a man can very easily jump to entirely wrong conclusions when he happens to be living in interesting times, and when fate has it in for him.

  2

  It took nearly two days to get to the microworld, with the stresser working very gently indeed. You have to be very careful when you're around large lumps of mass, and you can't wormhole short distances.

  On the way in my software and the microworld's software continued to exchange friendly chitchat, but voice contact wasn't possible while the stresser was functioning. By the time it was possible to start a dialogue, it didn't seem to be worth bothering, because I'd be meeting my hosts face to face soon enough.

  So I let the machines negotiate the tedious details of the docking while I cleaned myself up and unpacked my best clothes. I put a thinfilm overall over the top so I wouldn't get smeared climbing through the umbilical to the docking- bay. Civilization is supposed to have left dirt behind in the Earth's gravity-well, but you know how things are.

  I squirmed my way through the umbilical, thinking how good it would be to feel the grip of a good spin again. When I came out the other end into the docking bay I was contentedly looking forward to basking in the sensation of fake gravity. The bay, of course, was at the hub of the station and wasn't spinning, but I knew that the reassuring pull would be only a short distance away.

  There was no one in the docking bay, which was unusually crowded with equipment. As well as the usual lockers there were several big steel drums about a metre-and-a-half high and a metre in diameter, with dials and warning notices jostling for space around knots of feeder-pipe connections. I didn't pay them much attention, but made directly for the hatchway that led to the ladder that would take me out into the station's living quarters. I knew that the microworlders would have someone waiting for me at the end of the spur.

  I was so preoccupied with the sensations associated with slowly gaining weight as I climbed "down" the ladder that I didn't immediately notice, when I got to the other end and came through the hatchway, that the welcoming party wasn't quite what I had expected.

  It took me a second or two to get my up and down properly sorted out, and then I began reaching for the seal on my overall as I looked around for a friendly face.

  There were several faces, but they weren't very friendly. I felt a sinking sensation as I realised that the faces were all attached to bodies wearing Star Force uniforms, and the sinking got worse when I noticed belatedly that one of them—a lieutenant—was pointing a gun at me.

  Merde, I thought. I think I've been here before.

  Looking down the wrong end of a Star Force weapon is one of those experiences you never want to repeat.

  Reflexively, although I'd no real intention of doing anything as absurd as making a run for it, I turned back to the hatch through which I'd just come. A trooper had already moved round behind me to block the way, and as my eyes met his he launched a punch at my head. I was too slow, and too unaccustomed to the new gee-force, to dodge. I took it on the jaw, and it lifted me off my feet, sending me sprawling in an untidy heap at the lieutenant's feet. It's slightly easier to take a thump like that in low-gee than in the depths of a real gravity well, but that doesn't make it pleasant. The punch hurt, and the hurt was compounded with humiliation. I wanted to hit back, but the muzzle of the lieutenant's gun was now only a

  couple of centimetres away from the end of my nose.

  "Blackledge," drawled the officer, "you shouldn't have done that. Nobody told you to hit him."

  "
No sir," said Trooper Blackledge, and added in a stage whisper: "Bastard!"

  It was obvious that he wasn't talking about the lieutenant.

  "Michael Rousseau," said the lieutenant, calmly. "I arrest you on a charge of desertion from the United Nations Star Force. You will be held in safe custody on Goodfellow pending the arrival of the Star Force cruiser Leopard Sharks when a lawyer will be appointed to defend you and a court martial will be held, according to the provisions of emergency martial law. Your ship is hereby impounded, and is subject to confiscation, according to the provisions of that same legislation."

  I was still down, half-kneeling and half-sitting. Absurdly, all I could think of to say was that Leopard Shark was a really stupid name for a warship.

  I didn't say it.

  I also didn't bother to tell them that they wouldn't find it easy to impound my ship. Her inner airlock was programmed to check the retinal pattern of anyone trying to get in, even if they could produce the right passwords.

  "On your feet," said the lieutenant. He pointed the gun away from me, obviously having had his fill of melodrama for the time being.

  I got to my feet, touching the tender spot on my jaw. The punch hadn't drawn blood, but I suspected that I was going to have one hell of a bruise.

  "I don't suppose you'd be interested in seeing my discharge papers?" I inquired. "They bear the signature of one Star-Captain Susarma Lear—almost illegible, I fear, but quite legitimate."

  The lieutenant gave me a stony smile. "Every station in the system has been alerted to arrest you," he said. "We knew you were coming back here—you'd have been better to stay out on the fringe, with all your alien friends. And you'd better know that if there's one thing you can do that will make people like you any less, it's to insult Star-Captain Lear. Star-Captain Lear is a hero."

  "I believe she mentioned that fact," I said sourly.

  I figured that I had every right to be sour. I hadn't thought Susarma Lear mean-spirited enough to pull a trick like this, after we had parted on fairly good terms. I didn't doubt for a moment that she could get away with it, though.