Asgard's Conquerors (11 page)

That was news to me. I was puzzled, but glad to hear it.

She turned her Medusan expression upon me, then. "Just what the
hell do you think you're doing, Rousseau?"

"I was trying to escape," I told her, meeting her gaze as
steadily as I could. "We'd have got away with it, too, if some bastard
hadn't stolen my starship."

"Lieutenant Kramin," she said, in that same ominously smooth
tone. "What happened to Rousseau's spaceship?"

"We put grabs on it and hauled it into the belly of a
scavenger," said Kramin, not quite certain whether it was safe to be proud
of his initiative. "It's on its way to Oberon. Major Kar Ping wanted to . .
. investigate it."

"Are you aware, Lieutenant Kramin, of the regulations

concerning
looting?" she said.

"Looting! This man's a Star Force. ..." He bit off the rest
of the sentence, remembering to whom he was talking. He began again:
"Major Kar Ping . . ." He put just a slight stress on the word
"Major," and this time he deliberately let the rest of the sentence
hang.

When in doubt, pass the buck. Quickly.

Susarma Lear pulled some kind of printout flimsy from her pants pocket,
and handed it to Kramin. "Your orders, lieutenant," she said.
"But first—there's a man floating around in the docking bay. We don't want
him bumping into anything, do we?" She jerked a thumb in the direction of
the hatchway through which we'd come. Then she reached out to put her hand on
my shoulder, and said: "I'll take care of Trooper Rousseau."

I expected to be taken back to my makeshift cell, but this turned out
to be undue pessimism on my part. Instead, we were shown by one of Kramin's men
to a guest cabin. It wasn't so very different from the one where I'd been
imprisoned, but it was bigger, with a side-door that connected to a
sitting-room. On a microworld, this was what passed for the height of luxury.
Star-Captain Lear was clearly an honoured guest. She looked around, then told
the trooper to get the spare room ready.

"We're having a little dinner party," she told me. "I
suppose it's nearer breakfast time, for you, but the microworlders will be
pleased to fall in with ship's time. They haven't had this much fun in years.
Ayub Khan will be along, and a diplomat named Valdavia. Also a Tetron
bioscientist named 673-Nisreen. You do know enough about protocol to handle
yourself, don't you?"

By now, I was beginning to realise that things were not quite as they
had seemed. Deserters are not often

invited to
dine at the high table.

"What the hell is going on?" I asked her. "You pull a
filthy trick like listing me as a deserter, but now I'm on your guest list. You
put the entire outer system on alert to have me arrested, and now you're
treating me like a long-lost friend—why?"

"Technically," she said, with affected weariness, "you
are a deserter." As she spoke she went back into the cabin and sat down on
the bunk. She didn't invite me to sit, so I didn't. "I had the power to
sign you on, but I didn't have the authority to discharge you. Technically.
Despite what you may think, though, the Star Force is reasonably protective of
its honour, and if circumstances hadn't been what they are, the discharge would
have been allowed to stand.

"I really am sorry about the alert—it wasn't my idea. If it had
been up to me, I'd have waited for your ship to turn up, and asked you nicely
for your co-operation. But my superiors weren't convinced that you were the
volunteering kind, and in the last few years they've got out of the habit of
asking nicely. They just decide what they want done, and then hand down orders.
You were needed, so they decided to fish you out of the pond quickly and
unceremoniously, using the first excuse that came to mind. By 'they' I mean
Star Force Command—and the politicians on Earth. You've become an important
man, Rousseau."

She pulled out another batch of flimsies from her pants, and smoothed
them out on the bunk. She put aside a sheet for herself, and gave three to me.

"The top one drops all outstanding charges against you," she
said. "It restores your clean record with the Force. The second one
confirms your re-conscription and your assignment to special duties. The third
one is your commission."

I shuffled aside the first two to reach the most interesting one. I
read it through quickly, and then again, more slowly. I couldn't believe what
it seemed to be telling me.

"Is this a joke?" I asked. It was a stupid question. She
wasn't given to joking. She shook her head.

"If I'm reading this right," I said, "I'm a
Star-Captain."

"As of this moment," she confirmed. "That's the fastest
rise through the ranks any member of the Star Force ever had. Faster than any
battlefield commission. When I drafted you before, you were just some slob in
the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, you're an expert, and the Star Force
intends to look after you—after its fashion."

There'd be time to ask what kind of an expert I was at a later time.
For the moment, there were more appealing aspects of the situation.

"It means," I said, with a little grin, "that you don't
outrank me."

She shook her head again, and waved the flimsy that she'd kept.
"As of now," she said, "I'm a lieutenant-colonel. I'm having our
new uniforms sent out from the ship, so we can be properly dressed for
dinner."

I shook my head helplessly. "Why?" I demanded.

"Mother Earth needs us," she said. "Very badly, it
seems. I've been told that the political future of the human race may depend on
us. Even allowing for military hyperbole, it signifies that our political
masters are anxious for us to play ball. We aren't pawns any more, Star-Captain
Rousseau—we've been promoted to pieces."

I could tell that she wasn't trying to be infuriating. She didn't have
John Finn's personality defects, though she had a fine collection of her own. I
didn't want to stand there repeating the word "why?" like a parrot,
so I just waited for her to get around to giving me the news. She obviously
approved of my sense of discipline, because she got straight to the point.

"A matter of days after you left Asgard," she told me, "Skychain
City was invaded. The battle, such as it was, lasted a few days—the Tetrax
peace officers weren't equipped to cope with a massive incursion of hostile
troops. The skychain was smashed. The satellite was badly damaged, and it went
into a decaying orbit. Everything that could fly picked up survivors, and a
fleet of small ships crammed with people dispersed as quickly as possible. The
Tetrax have asked for help—they want everyone who has experience down in the
levels. Most of all, they want you. Mother Earth wants to make sure they get
you. Relations with the Tetrax have been strained because of the war, and the
UN men are paranoid about the reduction of our moral credit to zero within the
galactic community. They probably see this as a key opportunity to get into the
good books of the galactic big boys. There's even been talk of the UN hiring
out the Star Force to retake Asgard's surface for them. Where else in the
galaxy can they find experienced fighters kitted out with so much heavy
metal?"

"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.

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