Asgard's Conquerors (19 page)

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 primitive 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.

I found a hiding place behind a stack of empty crates in a gigantic
"warehouse" beneath the carpet. It seemed a useful place to be because
food was being stored here, and I was getting pretty hungry. Unfortunately, it
looked as if it would be difficult for me to get my hands on any, because the
place was so busy. At one end of the open space was the terminus where the
trains came to load up, and there was a big computer console nearby from which
the routing of the trains could be controlled. It was only a tiny substation— the
main control centre for the entire field-system was thirty kilometres away—but
a system that large needs a good many entry-points for information and minor
control-points for exactly the same reason that a nervous system needs bundles
of sensory cells and ganglia. I wasn't at all surprised to see a party of
uniformed invaders in front of the screens, deep in conversation with a couple
of galactics.

The galactics were both Kythnans. Ninety percent of the galactic races
claim not to be able to tell humans and Kythnans apart, though neither humans
nor Kythnans have much difficulty. Almost the first thing I was told by a fellow
human when I first arrived on Asgard was that the fact that Kythnans looked
like us was no reason to start trusting them. Maybe Kythnans told each other
the same thing about humans.

Anyhow, my own experience with Kythnans hadn't prejudiced me in their
favour—the last one I'd come into contact with was Jacinthe Siani, who had
worked for Amara

Guur. Given
this, I was quite ready to jump to the conclusion that the Kythnans were
probably being a lot more obliging in their dealings with the invaders than the
Tetrax.

After a little while of watching the group by the control panels in
deep discussion, I guessed that the co-operation the neo-Neanderthalers were
getting from the Kythnans wasn't doing them much good. The Kythnans probably
didn't understand Tetron technology much better than the invaders. They would
have learned how to operate those systems up on the surface that were useful in
everyday life, but this would be a new world to them.

I was trying to get closer, in order to overhear what was being said,
when another group joined the party. There were two more invaders, in the
fancier uniforms which I took to be those of officers, and what I first assumed
to be an invader in civilian clothes. It wasn't until I caught a snatch of
conversation in parole that I realised he was human. I didn't recognise him,
but I wasn't acquainted with more than half of the two hundred and fifty of the
humans on Asgard, so that wasn't too surprising.

The sight of the human gave my spirits the first uplift they'd had in
some time. I hoped, paradoxically, that he would turn out to be a full-blown
collaborator and a dyed-in-the-wool traitor to the galactic cause—because if he
were, he might have the freedom to walk around on his own, and that meant that
I might be able to walk where I wanted to without being seized or shot on
sight.

As I strained my ears to catch some of the conversation, though, my
enthusiasm dwindled somewhat. The human didn't seem to be in a helpful mood,
and what he was trying to tell his interlocutors, not very politely, was that
he was a starship pilot, not a biotech engineer, and that he didn't know the
first thing about manufacturing manna.

There was an exchange of words between the newcomers and the group that
was already there. Then they moved away from me, to the beginning of the
underground tracks. There was a passenger-car already attached to the train
that was waiting there, and the invaders put the Kythnans and the human aboard,
along with half a dozen guards. The two officers who'd come in with the human
stayed behind.

I watched them walk back to the console. They seemed to be arguing. I
inferred that they couldn't find anyone who could or would tell them how to do
what they wanted, and that they were getting very impatient about it. In the
meantime, they were afraid to tamper with the computers for fear of
accidentally shutting down the entire operation, or otherwise messing things
up. So far, it seemed, they'd mastered the manual controls on the trains, and
that was about it.

It isn't easy to take over a highly-automated city when you don't
understand the language or the machines. On the other hand, these guys seemed
to have made virtually no progress at all in months of occupation. Stupid, the
Ksylian had said. It was easy to see why he thought so. I wondered, though,
whether I could have done much to help them myself, if I were actually trying
to. You get used to taking technology very much for granted, especially when
there's always a Tetron repairman at the other end of the phone. The horrible
thought struck me that, given his interest in certain kinds of electronic
systems, a man like John Finn might have been much more use to the invaders
than me.

I looked at my wristwatch, and was dismayed to discover that time had
been passing more quickly than I thought. It was 22.50, and my hastily arranged
rendezvous with Serne was not much more than half a human hour away. Was there
a chance, I wondered, that I could still make it, and get out of the city
without being taken prisoner?

I was seized by a terrible temptation to try something desperately
reckless. I had just enough charge left in Scarion's mud gun to drop both the
officers.

In an
invader uniform,
I thought,
I just might be
able to walk straight through the crowds and into the corridors.

There was every chance that the section of tunnel leading to the plug
was still dark and unused—or so, at least, I persuaded myself. And I had a
golden opportunity here to create something of a diversion. Like the luckless
human they'd been questioning, I was no biotech engineer, but it's a lot easier
to sabotage an automated system than it is to make it work as you want it to.
Like John Finn on Goodfellow, I thought I could create a little emergency.

I suppose my commission had finally soaked into my personality; I was
thinking like a Star Force commando. Anyhow, I was getting rather tired of
discretion. I'd always had a submerged reckless streak. If I hadn't, I never
would have come to Asgard in the first place.

The two officers were too deep in discussion to see me coming, until
one glimpsed me out of the corner of his eye. By then, it was too late; I had
two clear shots at their naked faces. One yelped as the stuff hit him in the
eye, and they both tried to haul their sidearms out, but they crumpled slowly
to their knees as their nervous systems gave up the ghost.

I went to the console first, and studied the keyboards and the displays
on the screens. I managed to conjure up a system-map with lights to indicate
the positions of the trains both underground and on top. I knew better than to
try to arrange a real crash; what I wanted to do was convince the system that
something awful had happened, to get each and every one of its emergency
systems going.

I typed in a mayday message, and told the machine there was a blocked
tunnel just in front of one of the moving trains. The tell-tale light stopped
moving, and I knew that the machines had slammed the brakes on. Then I told the
system that there was a fire under the surface, that lives were endangered. It
wouldn't necessarily believe me—it had its own smoke detectors—but the system
wasn't rigged to take risks, and it would take appropriate action pending a
check.

Somewhere in the distance alarm bells were beginning to ring.

I tried to think of something else—a crack opening into the cold on
level t
wo ...
a medical emergency involving some
workers. But I was already glancing round fearfully at the main body of the
warehouse. There were three or four doorways where people were only too likely
to appear at any moment.

I decided that there wasn't time for further subtlety. I took out the
needier I'd borrowed from one of Scarion's killers, stood well back to avoid
the danger of ricochets, and held down the firing stud. I sprayed the slivers
of metal all around the console—keyboards, screens, junction-boxes.