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 to zero of our moral credit 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 rumored,” she said, carefully, “that some of the Tetrax think it’s our fault. Yours and mine, that is. They think that our little expedition into the lower levels was a trifle reckless, and may have given the people we contacted an unfavorable 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 that 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. Or so 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.
CHAPTER SEVEN
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. The Star Force was a whole new way of life, though, 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 that 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