Brian Stableford - Asgard's Conquerors

As we hurried past these windows, I was able to see that our guides were tall and thin, long-limbed like gibbons. I’d seen one or two of their race during exercise periods before I was laid low, and had assumed that they were one of the races conquered and displaced by the invaders while they were building their little empire. It seemed that the invaders’ perfect prison was not quite as perfect as it had seemed, and that their dominion over the races whose habitats they had seized might not be entirely secure either.

We reached the relevant lock, and found that there were, as promised, a number of suits inside. They were not heavy- duty pressurized suits of the kind that one would wear in a vacuum, but loose and lightweight plastic suits. They had no complicated life-support or waste-disposal systems—just a pair of oxygen-recycling cylinders each. The sight of them didn’t fill me with enthusiasm or confidence. Their air- supply would be good for perhaps four hours, no more. When that time had elapsed, we had to be somewhere where the air was breathable. Racing out into the alien atmosphere, without knowing where we were going, or whether there was anywhere to go, suddenly didn’t seem like such an attractive prospect.

“What’s this all about?” I asked the furry humanoid who’d taken the lead in guiding us. “Where are we going?”

“No time,” he said—or was he a she? I got the impression that his or her parole was a bit limited.

“Get into the suits!” snapped Susarma Lear in a gruff whisper. She had got the bit between her teeth and nothing was going to stop her now. It was a philosophy of life that had already made her a hero. I hoped that today wouldn’t be the day when it would make her a dead hero.

I had to take my boots off to put the suit on, but I put them on again afterwards, over the plastic feet of the suit— there might be a long walk ahead of me, and I didn’t want blisters. While I was struggling into the suit the lock became even more crowded. There were several new arrivals, and although it was impossible to guess who was who in the near-darkness, I remembered what the note had said about Tetrax.

The inner door of the lock swung shut behind us, and the light came on automatically. I blinked furiously to dispel the glare, desperate to see what was going on. The tall furry humanoids had all stayed outside. There were, as promised, two Tetrax with us, just beginning to scramble into their suits. It’s not easy to tell one Tetron from another, but one of them caught my eye and looked back with what seemed to be recognition.

“Tulyar?” I said, not entirely certain that it was he.

It’s never safe to guess what a Tetron might be feeling by his expression, but the way he looked at me by no means gave me the impression that he was in control here. He looked bewildered—even frightened.

“Rousseau!” he said, forgiving me my indelicacy in addressing him without referring to his number. “Do you know . . . ?”

That might have been a fascinating question, but he was only halfway through framing it when the alarm bells began to sound. The two Tetrax were already pulling their suits on as fast as they could, but the sound of the alarms panicked them into further haste. I jumped immediately to the conclusion that 994-Tulyar and his companion had no better idea than I did what was going on. The Tetrax weren’t behind this break, after all.

I turned around to give the benefit of my sudden insight to the colonel, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was puzzling over something that had been pressed into her plastic- clad hand before the furry men had faded away. As homing devices went, it lacked sophistication. It was just a glorified compass, with a swinging needle which always pointed the same way no matter how much the case was rotated. I knew it wasn’t pointing to the north pole.

The lock worked on a double cycle—first the Earthlike atmosphere was replaced by nitrogen, then that was replaced by the mixture outside. The pumps were quick, but the seconds were dragging by. Even inside the suits in the closed lock we could hear those alarm bells trilling away. I saw Serne looking at his hands, nervously, wishing there was something he could do with them. I had sealed my suit now, and so had the Tetrax, and though we could still be heard if we shouted, the possibility of holding an intelligible conversation was remote. I looked at Tulyar’s face, still trying to read it, though there was no longer anything in those alien eyes which I could call an expression.

Then the outer door was released, and we shoved it open, hurling ourselves through. We ran for the cover of the mist and the “trees,” and I prayed that the direction-finder the colonel had clutched in her fist would lead us to somewhere safe, and not just to a quiet spot where we could asphyxiate in private.

At first I reckoned we’d have a good four or five minutes’ start, because that was the time it would take to put the airlock through another complete cycle. I’d forgotten that there were a lot of locks, and that the neo-Neanderthalers could pile into any one of them. It can’t have been more than two minutes before a dendrite to our left suddenly exploded, showering us with debris. It had only been hit by a single bullet, but the main structure of the thing must have been as brittle as glass. It didn’t have to cope with any sharp impacts in the normal course of its affairs.

As we ran deeper into the “forest,” we had to let the colonel lead, because she had the device that was showing us which way to go. At first, she’d dodged around the twisting networks with their multifarious coloured light- bulbs, but as she brushed the outer tips of the branches they broke, hardly impeding her at all, and she began to take a less sinuous course. She still couldn’t go straight through the middle of one of the tangled bushes, but she became much less bothered about the fringes, despite the danger that sharp shards posed to our suits, and as we went we were virtually blasting a path for ourselves. The thought of all that wreckage in the delicate quasi-crystalline forest upset me, but the damage that was done by the bullets they were shooting at us was ten times as bad, so it was an angry kind of feeling rather than guilt.

The insectile gliding creatures were all around us, seemingly incapable of getting out of our way. In the misty semi-darkness it was like stumbling through a cloud of wind-swirled dead leaves and flickering candle-flames. When the dendrites shattered their lights didn’t go out as if they’d been switched off, but faded slowly into oblivion, so that the trail we left behind us was decaying gradually into greyness.

I was profoundly glad when we came out of the coloured forest into a region where we didn’t have to commit such evident vandalism as we moved. But the change of terrain was not greatly to our advantage in respect of the pursuit we were trying to evade. The mist was thinner here, and the ground became soft and muddy, slowing us down. The one consolation was that instead of the trees there were big bulbous mounds which could cut us off from the line of sight of the chasing invaders.

There was little colour here: it was basically a monochrome landscape in shades of grey. Bioluminescent “flowers” lived a more peripheral existence in this milieu, growing in small squat clumps between the fungoid mounds. I did not doubt that the mounds were in fact life forms, because their “skin” moved in slow ripples, and seemed slightly moist, like the skin of a frog. There were very few tree-like structures, and they bore no coloured lights. Their branches hung listlessly, and their paleness made it easy to think of them as dead, though there was no reason at all to assume that what would in another life- system be considered symptoms of morbidity might not here be signs of health and vitality.