Asgard's Conquerors

by Brian Stableford

  "They don't like doing their own dirty work," I murmured, recalling Finn's uncharitable observations. "But somehow I can't quite see them going for a deal like that. They have too much pride to want to be seen accepting help from barbarians. How the hell did they get taken by surprise? The Tetrax know everything that's going on in the whole galactic arm. And who could possibly raise a fleet to take Asgard away from them . . . ah!" Inspiration dawned before I made a fool of myself by having to wait for an answer. "They came from inside! We finally pricked the bubble, and we tapped into a hornet's nest. Oh, Jesus!"

  "It's rumoured," she said, carefully, "that some of the

  Tetrax think it's our fault. Yours and mine. They think that our little expedition into the lower levels was a trifle reckless, and may have given the people we contacted an unfavourable impression of galactics in general."

  That sounded ominous. I was quick to tell myself that it hadn't been my fault. Not mine at all. Maybe Susarma Lear's, but not mine.

  "How many people were killed?" I asked her, my throat a little dry.

  "No way to know," she said. "No communication with the invaders at all. We can only assume that they took over the existing political and manufacturing apparatus of the city without undue difficulty and without the need for excessive bloodshed—they can't have met much real resistance, and the Tetrax ordered their own people to surrender as soon as they saw what the score was. The Tetrax will presumably tell us the latest news when we get back to Asgard. Leopard Shark's the fastest ship we have."

  "It really could be our fault, you know," I said, unhappily.

  "I know," she replied calmly. She didn't seem quite as arrogant and unrepentant as I remembered her. The success of her mission—or what she thought was success—had taken the edge off her temper and allowed her to wind down.

  "Are you sure the Tetrax want to enlist us? They might just want to string us up."

  "What do you think?" she retorted.

  I thought that the Tetrax would be very, very worried. As far as I could judge, the last thing they'd want would be to go to war against Asgard. Not just because it wouldn't be the civilized thing to do, but because they'd be scared of losing. If the builders of Asgard were behind this invasion, then the Tetrax had every reason to believe that they were

  facing a race whose science was very advanced indeed. Even if it wasn't the builders—because the people Myrlin had fallen in with weren't the builders, if what he'd told me was true—they could still be far in advance of any galactic culture. I figured that the Tetrax would want to tread extremely carefully, and that they might well feel that someone like me, with expertise in the levels, could be very useful to them.

  To Susarma Lear, I said: "I suppose they'll want to send us back to Asgard. It's my guess they need spies, and they need people who know their way around down there. They'll want to drop us somewhere on the surface, away from the city, so that we can go underground, and make our way back toward the city in level two or three. Then they'll want us to learn everything we can about who, what, where, and why."

  "That's the way my superiors have it figured, too," she said. "They think we're fortunate to get the job. I suppose there aren't many men with your experience who weren't on Asgard at the time of the attack. Lucky you left Asgard when you did."

  I wasn't so sure that "lucky" was the right word. In any case, I may have left, but I certainly hadn't got away.

  "I don't like it," I said. "I don't like it at all."

  "They guessed that you wouldn't," she pointed out. "That's why they put the word out that you were to be arrested as soon as you made any kind of landfall. They knew you were already rich. They felt they had to make you an offer you couldn't refuse."

  She had the grace not to look too pleased about it. She wasn't about to issue an official apology on behalf of the Star Force, but she'd made it pretty clear that she didn't agree with her superiors. I wondered whether that was just a bit of diplomatic chicanery—Sorry, Rousseau, the big men have it in for you but I'm your pal!—but her expression and her manner implied that she meant what she said.

  "Suppose," I said, speculatively, "that I say no."

  "Do you have any idea what the penalty is for disobeying orders—given that the state of emergency is still in force?"

  I hazarded a guess that I might get shot.

  She passed a hardened hand through her stiff, pale hair, and opined that indeed I might.

  She pursed her lips, and stared me full in the face with her big blue eyes. I could imagine any number of ways she could have used that stare while building her career—she had a very powerful personality.

  "We're in this together," she told me.

  A more impressionable man than me might have been quite won over by a remark like that. Some men go for domineering women, and even those who don't can get a certain satisfaction out of having to be around someone as strikingly handsome as Susarma Lear. Personally, I'd been on my own far too long to be suckered by that kind of attraction. I thought.

  "In that case," I said, "when I get out of it, I'll think about helping you out, too."

  I can make false promises just as easily as the next man.

  7

  So there it was. Fate wanted me back on Asgard and it was prepared to do whatever it had to do in order to get me there.

  As soon as our little formal gathering was over we were hustled aboard Leopard Shark, and Leopard Shark was hurled into the slickest wormhole she could make, scheduled to make her rendezvous in the inner reaches of the Asgard system in forty days.

  I had always thought of space travel as one of the most boring activities ever devised by man. A starship pilot doesn't have to do anything, except tell the machines what needs to be done; artificial intelligences in the software take care of the rest. But the Star Force was a whole new way of life, and the business of learning to be a starship soldier left little time for boredom.

  I had to learn how to handle dozens of different bits of equipment, including weapons of every shape and size. I had to learn combat techniques, survival strategies, and how to defend myself against all kinds of dangers that my vivid imagination could never have conjured up on its own.

  During the remaining hours of each day I had to tell the men who'd be going with us everything I knew about the levels, and I had to train them in the use of cold-suits and all the other items of equipment that scavengers find handy. There was a certain overlap, it's true, between Star Force equipment and the kind of stuff the Tetrax and others had devised for getting by in the upper levels, but the one kind of environment which had never cropped up in all the skirmishes of the war against the Salamandrans was the one we were going into now.

  All of the practice, needless to say, had to be undertaken in one gee, and Leopard Shark was spun to produce it. I'd been in low-gee, save for very brief periods, for several months, and at the end of every day on the Star Force cruiser I ached.

  Men of the branch of the Star Force to which I now belonged were only passengers while Leopard Shark was in flight, and we had nothing to do with the actual running of the ship. The reason why star-captains are so called is to distinguish their title from that of the captains who command ships, who are of a rather grander species. The man in command of Leopard Shark was Captain Khaseria, a white-haired old campaigner of a somewhat acid temperament. His was the "naval" branch of the Star Force. When the ship was in its wormhole, he outranked everyone. Leopard Shark's crew of thirty, responsible to the Captain, had the duty of defending the ship and making sure it got to wherever it was supposed to be going.

  Our "army" staff had no authority while the ship was in flight—our job began when it was time to come out of the ship and get on with the mission. Susarma Lear was the top-ranking officer on the ship; my old acquaintance Lieutenant Crucero—now a star-captain—was still her right-hand man. We had three junior officers, half a dozen assorted sergeants, and only fifty troopers—less than half the force the ship had been designed to carry. We
were not expected to re-invade Asgard; ours was a special task-force. Even so, training them all was no simple matter, and the more training and aching I did, the less attractive the prospect of taking these men into the levels came to seem.

  There were a few petty compensations. For one thing, Lieutenant Kramin and his merry men had been relieved of the not-very-onerous job of guarding Goodfellow and had been added to the complement of Leopard Shark. That meant that I could give him orders. I could give Trooper Blackledge orders, too. There are, alas, no really awful jobs to do on a starship, and if there were they'd be done by the crew, but I managed to find a couple of small ways of making life uncomfortable for Kramin and Blackledge. The mere fact that I was an officer caused them as much chagrin as anything I actually dropped on them. They had grown fat and out of condition while stationed on Goodfellow, and it made my own aches and pains a little less distressing when I knew I could always add a little bit more to the burden of theirs.

  John Finn had also been press-ganged into service, saved from a penal battalion by the fact that he had spent time on Asgard and knew a little about working in the levels. With John Finn the situation was different. Kramin and Blackledge didn't like me, but John Finn hated me. He didn't seem at all pleased by the fact that he wasn't going to be sent to a penal battalion. Nor was he in the least amused by the fact that he was getting what he had so ardently desired—a free ride to Asgard. He felt himself to be a man much wronged and betrayed, and he had talked himself into an unshakeable belief that it was all my fault. I didn't try to harass or inconvenience him—if anything, I was easy on him—but the mere sight of me was enough to set a peculiar fury seething in his breast. I decided early on that there was no way I was going down to the surface of Asgard in the company of John Finn. Accidents happen too easily in the levels.

  My other relationships were easier to handle. My other old acquaintance, Trooper Serne—now a sergeant—was entirely prepared to be amicable. Crucero wasn't in the least disturbed by having to share his new rank with me, and we fell into the role of equals quite readily. The colonel was careful to maintain an appropriate distance from us all—she carefully cultivated the proverbial loneliness of command—but she didn't put any undue pressure on. She didn't try to get heavy when she handed down orders. She didn't talk to me, as she sometimes had on Asgard, as if I were something the cat had dragged in. It made for a pleasant change.

  I saw very little of our civilian passengers. The diplomat Valdavia was a thin, lugubrious man with a Middle European accent and an overprecise manner. I guessed that he had landed this job only because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I might have been underestimating him. It's easy to underestimate politicians. The Tetron bioscientist, 673-Nisreen, interested me far more, but he spent most of the time secluded in his cabin.

  Once Leopard Shark was wormholing we couldn't communicate with the home system or with the Tetrax. A pick-up station had relayed us everything that had come in by stress-pulse, just before we exited from normal space, but it didn't tell us much more than we already knew. Until we reached the Asgard system and talked to the Tetrax, we couldn't make specific plans. All we could do was make sure that we'd be ready to carry them out. Naturally, it didn't stop us having many a heartfelt discussion about what we might be asked to do, and what our chances of surviving it might be.

  I wasn't overly optimistic about our chances of becoming successful spies—although we had no official confirmation as yet that the Tetrax did indeed want us to be spies. All those years I had spent poking around in levels two and three, the evidence had suggested that the missing Asgardians were in pretty much the same league as the galactic civilizations—it was their technical style that was distinct, not its capability. What I had proved when I went down the dropshaft into the heart of the macroworld was that those appearances were misleading. Deep down inside, there were more advanced races, with technical capabilities that made ours look very clumsy indeed. If those races were now coming out of their shell, with hostile intent, the entire galactic community might get swept aside like a house of cards. A handful of human secret agents would hardly be able to achieve much in that kind of game. I had thought, on the basis of what little I had learned about the super- scientists, that they were a shy and peaceable crowd, but this invasion suggested that I might have formed the wrong impression. When contemplating the possibility that they had lied, I found it easy to scare myself with theories about what might happen if they decided to go to war with the galaxy.

  I wasn't overconfident about the reliability of my memories of what had happened in the depths of Asgard. After all, the person I'd had my enlightening conversation with was the same person that Susarma Lear remembered having killed. If her memory of what happened was an illusion calculated to reassure her, then so might mine be.

  Needless to say, I didn't want to mention this to Susarma Lear, because I didn't want to admit just yet that I knew—or thought I knew—that Myrlin was still alive. I couldn't help wondering, though, if it might have been Myrlin who had led the attack on Skychain City, maybe in command of a whole army of beings like himself. It was just possible that he was being used in much the same way I was—as a mercenary soldier.

  If he was, I sure as hell wasn't looking forward to taking up arms against him. The Salamandrans had built him big and tough, and the godlike men of Asgard probably had the ability to make him tougher still. The thought that we might be sent down to the surface to keep tabs on an army of giant soldiers armed by super-scientists was enough to make anyone's blood run cold.

  I didn't feel disloyal about neglecting to confide these fears to Susarma Lear. I preferred to play my cards close to my chest, and keep my head down.

  Some are born interesting, some make themselves interesting, and some have interestingness thrust upon them. But you can fight it, if you try.

  8

  I was keen to have a discussion with the Tetron bioscientist, 673-Nisreen but this proved difficult, partly because I was kept so busy, partly because the Tetron hardly ever left his cabin, and partly because Valdavia seemed to want all communication with the Tetron channeled through him.

  Eventually, though, I did manage to speak to Nisreen long enough to arrange an assignation of sorts in his cabin. He seemed as pleased as I was to have the meeting set up, and I gathered that he would have issued an invitation himself had he not been as worried as Valdavia was about the necessity of observing protocol.

  I let him ask me the first few questions, as if I were briefing him about Asgard. He'd never been there, and everything he knew about it was from memory chips that were long out of date.

  I gave him a selective account of my adventures before moving on to what they implied.

  "The people who thought there were no more than half a dozen levels always had a strong case," I observed, "because the technology we were digging out of the top levels wouldn't have been capable of erecting much more than that. The romantics who wanted Asgard to be an artefact from top to bottom had to credit its builders with technological powers far beyond anything known in the galactic community. We still can't say, of course, whether there's an ordinary planet inside the shells, but even if there is, we now know that the levels constitute a feat of engineering beyond anything your people or mine could contemplate. Imagine how long it must have taken to put that thing together!"

  "It would seem to have been a remarkable achievement," he opined, in typical Tetron fashion.

  "And it begins to look," I continued, "that it might be much older than many investigators thought. That might have interesting bearings on the question of the origin of the galactic races. I understand that your own researches also have some relevance to that?"

  "It would be premature to draw conclusions," he said. I didn't intend to let him get away with that. I'd told him my side of the story. Now I wanted his.

  "I was told on Goodfellow that DNA-based life has been found in the outer system of Earth's star—micro-organisms deep-froze
n for billions of years," I said, broaching the matter as forthrightly as I dared, without running the risk of offending him. "The Tetrax must have had a chance to study thousands of life-bearing solar systems. How many are like ours in this respect?"

  "Nearly all of them," he said, lightly. "I know of one or two anomalous cases, but we have concentrated our researches on stars of the same solar type, whose planetary systems are roughly similar."

  "That seems to indicate that life didn't evolve in any one of them—in fact, that there's no way of knowing where DNA first came from."

  "We certainly have no basis for speculations about the ultimate origin of life," admitted the Tetron.

  "My ancestors always supposed that life evolved on Earth," I said, carefully angling for more information. "Even when we came out into space and found the other humanoid races, we clung to that idea, and invented theories of convergent evolution to save it."

  "Our scientists never supposed that to be the case," he informed me, with a touch of that lofty superiority that the Tetrax love to display. The best way get them to tell you something is to play up to that vanity.

  "How did they work that out?" I asked, trying to sound suitably awed.

  "A simple matter of the elementary mathematics of probability. The basic chemical apparatus of life is very complex. It is not only DNA itself, but all the enzymes associated with it—and the various types of RNA involved in transcription of the genetic code. It was easy to work out the probability of such a system arising by the random accretion of molecules. When we compared that probability to the area of our planet and the length of time since its origin, it was perfectly obvious that the chance of life originating there—or on any other planet—was absurdly small.