Brian Stableford - Asgard's Conquerors

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.

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.