We had too much work to do, though, to allow me to spend time pondering such questions. We handed out a couple more invitations for delivery to Tetrax in the city— one to a Zabaran, one to a Turkanian. We didn't see any Tetrax, nor did we get close enough to any invaders to be seen by them.
By the time we set off for home we figured that we could count the day a modest success. We'd spent about six hours in the paddy-fields—during which time we failed to find anything much that Serne, Vasari, and I cared to eat, though 74-Scarion picked up a couple of snacks.
Once we were on the way back we didn't expect that anything much would go wrong. I was already thinking ahead to the next danger point—when we turned up for the meeting we'd arranged, to see what transpired.
As I've observed before, though, plans have a terrible tendency to go wrong.
When we got back to the broken seal through which we'd entered, two of the four cold-suits had vanished.
12
It didn't take a genius to work out what must have happened.
We'd even heard someone moving around as we came out, and I cursed myself now for having let it go so easily. I looked at Serne, and could almost hear him thinking that we ought to have left a guard. It was all too obvious now, but at the time I hadn't thought about it, and he hadn't made the suggestion. So much for the value of Star Force training.
"A lone scavenger," I said, bitterly, "hiding out from the invasion."
"Surely there must have been two," said Scarion. "There are two suits gone."
"No," I said. "If there'd been two, we'd have lost the lot. He's taken a cutting-tool as well as the suits—that would be about the limit of what one man could carry."
In a way, we had been lucky—if the scavenger had been cleverer, he'd have stashed the two suits and the tool in some hidey-hole of his own, and then come back for the rest. Maybe he simply hadn't had that much nerve. In all probability, he'd gleefully made his grab and then set off into the distance, making sure that he was as far away as possible from the scene of the crime when we got back.
I realised, though, that his intemperate exit didn't necessarily mean that he wouldn't come back for the rest. It just meant that he wouldn't come back alone.
It was bad enough to find that our doorway to the city was useless. We also had to face the fact that it might now become a magnet drawing all the undesirables in the vicinity.
With two suits left and further trouble in store, our options were limited. We could pick up the rest of our gear and move on, trying to find a safer exit-point, but that seemed rather pointless. It looked to me that we had to split up. Two of us would have to remain in the city, cut off from our base, while the other two took the sad tale back to the colonel and 994-Tulyar.
"What use are the cold-suits to him?" complained 74- Scarion. "Unless he belongs to a species closely related to yours or mine, the drip-feed won't be adjusted to his metabolism." On investigation, we had found that 74- Scarion's was one of the suits that had been taken.
The other was mine.
"He might not find it entirely satisfactory," I answered, "but it would keep him alive long enough to make a trip through the levels, if that's what he wants. Any humanoid could get by using your suit or mine for a couple of days. But I don't think he's going to use either suit himself. I think he's got the black market in mind. The stupid thing is that he'll sell the damn things to someone on our side— someone who desperately wants to get information out of the city to one of the C.R.E. bubbles, in the hope that it can then be transmitted to the Tetrax in orbit. If the buyer realises where he got the suits from. ..."
"It's not so bad," said Serne. "We have spare suits back at base. Do you want to take my suit? You could have the spares back here in a couple of hours. I'll be safe here for as long as it takes."
"No," I said. "You and Vasari go. But don't come back here—it's too dangerous. The Turkanian will have to guide you to the second of our planned entry points. Scarion and I will go directly there, on the inside—it's on this level and it's no more than ten kilometres away. We'll meet you there at . . . damn this idiotic City time ... at 25.00 tomorrow."
Serne frowned. "We don't know that the second point is any safer than this one," he pointed out.
He was right—we didn't.
"Sometimes," I reminded him, "you just have to guess. Anyhow, with only the mud guns to protect us, we're not really in a position to defend ourselves here. Better to get out. We've spent all day out there, and it's reasonably safe. I'd rather be under the lights than waiting here like rats in a trap."
He still didn't like it, but he conceded the point. While he and Vasari suited up, 74-Scarion and I came back to the city side of the old plug, so that Serne and Vasari could re- seal it before opening up the outer one.
"Perhaps you should have gone," said the Tetron. "The sergeant's suit would have fitted you well enough."
"I have a feeling," I told him, "that a star-captain is expected to stay with his sinking mission. It's probably the Star Force way."
I was being sarcastic, of course, but the Tetron thought it a perfect answer. "I understand," he said. Matters of duty and obligation were things that low-status Tetrax understood only too well.
There was a rustling sound close at hand, and when I flashed the torch round the beam caught some furry thing scampering away, illuminating it for a fraction of a second. I let out my breath slowly.
"Let's get out of the tunnels," I said. "I'll feel better when we're back in the light."
We moved back along the dark corridor, quickly but cautiously.
But we were already too late.
When we got back to the place where the corridor let us out into the fields, and took a look outside, the first thing we saw was a group of humanoids hastening toward us.
"Merde!" I said, with feeling.
One glance was enough to tell me that it couldn't be much worse. There were three vormyr and three Spirellans, looking as ugly and as vicious as all their kind, and I had more than a suspicion that our chances of recruiting them to the noble fight against the alien invaders were not good. Clearly, the bastard who'd lifted our cold-suits had made his contact.
74-Scarion and I backed off a short way into the corridor. I wondered whether we had any chance of hiding out, but I didn't like the idea. These scavengers might know the territory, and as soon as they found the rest of our gear gone they'd be after us. Vormyr are said to have good low-light vision, and I didn't fancy playing hide-and-seek with them. Our only possible advantage was the fact that they couldn't know we were back yet. We had a chance to surprise them.
I wished that I had Serne or Vasari with me. They were combat soldiers, who could probably have taken out this gang comfortably. 74-Scarion was a Tetron immigration officer, and fighting was definitely not his line.
"Got to try the ambush," I told him.
He nodded uneasily.
We waited, mud guns at the ready. I felt anything but confident. My quick glance had told me that one of the vormyr had a needle-gun, and it would be lunatic optimism to suppose that any of the six might be weaponless.
To make things worse, I had a dreadful suspicion that they might know who I was. Amara Guur wasn't the kind of man who had friends, but the vormyr notion of vendetta wasn't based on friendship. If they did recognise me, they'd be all the more enthusiastic to tear my head off.
"Take out the three vormyr first," I whispered to 74- Scarion. "Spirellans are dangerous, but vormyr are worse."
He nodded to show me that he understood.
As soon as they came around the corner, while they were still silhouetted against the light, I let fly at the one whose needier I'd seen. I kept my finger down on the firing-stud of the gun, hoping to spray the knockout juice over as many of them as possible. 74-Scarion seemed to be firing even faster, with panic-driven wildness.
The trouble with a mud gun is that its effects aren't usually instantaneous. I'd shot John Finn in the open mouth, and even he'd c
rumpled up slowly. It was the shock rather than the anaesthetic that had stopped him from firing back while his presence of mind remained.
These guys had very good reflexes, and some of the shots had to soak through clothing. Having just come in from the bright light they were virtually blind, but they didn't need to see in order to react. The one with the needier was hit clean, and didn't manage to fire it—although he did draw it. One of the Spirellans hauled out an old-fashioned pistol, but he didn't manage to get the hammer back before crumpling at the knees. The others, alas, had knives—and they were very quick to lash out with the blades.
A vormyran dived at me, and I brought my boot up very sharply into his midriff, then smacked him sideways with the edge of my left hand. The Spirellan behind him nearly got me, but his thrust went past me into the wall as he tripped over the vormyran. I only had to hit him once before an eyeful of mud put him out.
But I was lucky. It could easily have gone the other way.
74-Scarion wasn't so lucky.
When everyone had gone down, I stopped firing, although my gun was already empty. Scarion was down along with the nasties, and my hope that he'd simply been caught by a little stray mud died almost immediately.
I had to untangle him from a fallen vormyran, and when I kicked the body off him I found that he was bleeding to death from a stab-wound in the chest. He tried to speak, but the blade had ripped his lung, and all he could do was cough up blood. There was nothing I could do to help him, and he died within a minute.
I prised the gun gently from his leathery fingers—it still had a small charge left in it. I put it inside my shirt, and threw my own away.
Then I turned my attention to the six scavengers. They were all unconscious. I stirred them with my boot, not wanting to risk wetting my hands with any mud that might be clinging to their clothing. I picked up the needier and the pistol gingerly.
I knew that it would be reckless simply to walk away. The logical thing to do would be to pump them full of needles, then drag their bodies further into the dark, so that the vermin could help themselves to a nice square meal. Seme wouldn't have hesitated for a moment, and neither would Susarma Lear. After all, there had to be some sort of chance that I'd run into these beauties again, and they weren't going to say "thank you"—they'd kill me as soon as look at me.
But I couldn't do it. I couldn't just kill them as they lay there. I cursed myself for being a squeamish fool, and I certainly didn't take any satisfaction from my reluctance. I knew that I was a disgrace to my Star Force uniform.
I took the needier and the pistol with me, and left them all to sleep it off.
The brief, brutal encounter left me feeling weak at the knees, and I couldn't get the image of Scarion's blood- gushing torso out of my mind. I was glad I hadn't had anything to eat for a long time. I was feeling sick, although I knew I wasn't actually going to vomit.
While I walked swiftly along a catwalk we'd crossed earlier, the queasiness gradually changed into a raging thirst, and I had to stick my face into one of the irrigation channels feeding the artificial fields, to suck up some mineral-loaded water. That cleared my head a little, and reminded me that the scavengers weren't the only danger I had to keep in mind. It wouldn't do to forget the invaders.
I ducked down into a ditch at the edge of one of the fields, trying to get everything straight inside my mind. I tried to fix my attention on the memory of the city maps that Tulyar and I had spent so much time poring over.
The place we'd selected as the second-best site for breaking in was—as I'd told Serne—less than ten kilometres away. I could walk it in a matter of hours, and I was reasonably certain that I could find the exact spot, even in the darkness. With luck, it would be easy—but it would be stupid to be overconfident. If there were scavengers here, there might be scavengers there too—there was no way to know how many people had run from the invaders into the darker corners of the city. In the meantime, I had to stay away from invaders.
I set out again in a more sensible frame of mind, to walk to the place where I'd arranged to meet Serne.
My temper was bad, and it got worse while I silently cursed my luck, asking myself what I could possibly have done to deserve such evil treatment at the cruel hands of fate. The last shreds of my earlier optimism were gone, and I now expected things to get even worse.
Like most of my more doleful expectations, this one turned out to be right.
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 primiti
ve 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.
Asgard's Conquerors Page 9
