Brian Stableford - Asgard's Conquerors

“Move it,” I said to Finn. “We’ve got to get out now.”

I still thought we could make it, with only a short dash ahead of us to the spur that led out to the docking-spindle. They wouldn’t catch us from behind, and even if the Star Force had posted a guard in the dock we had the mud guns. Once we were up the umbilical and into the ship, I thought, all we had to do was detach. I couldn’t believe that they’d actually try to shoot us down.

We got to the hatchway leading to the spur without any obvious alarm having been raised, but climbing the spur seemed to take a long time—subjective time always seems to be distorted when you’re in a gravity-cline. Finn was ahead of me, and he hurled himself through the far end hatch, gun ready to fire. I hung back for a second, intending to appraise the situation.

Fantasies were running through my mind in which Finn immobilised the guards and the guards immobilised Finn, so that I could make it to the ship all on my own. I’d have been prepared to take my chances then, and head out of system cheerfully. I still wasn’t ready for everything to foul up.

Needless to say, everything did foul up.

There was no guard in the docking-bay. When I came through, after my anticipatory peep, Finn was already halfway to the umbilical. I had time for one quick surge of elation before he bounced back from the wall, rebounding into one of those mysterious metal cylinders, and cursed, with feeling.

The airlock protecting the umbilical was sealed tight. According to the instruments, the umbilical was reeled in. There was nothing on the other end of it.

“They’ve moved the bastard ship!” he wailed, obviously somewhat put out by the unexpected turn of events. My heart sank.

“They couldn’t!” I protested. “There’s no way they could get through the lock.” I couldn’t believe it. But there wasn’t any time for further expression of our astonishment. Back in the spur we’d just come along, there was the sound of movement. We were being pursued.

Finn launched himself quickly back to the hatchway which closed off the spur. He shut it, again bracing himself against one of the big cylinders—whose presence certainly made it easier to pull oneself around in the no-gee—and then began to push the buttons on the keyboard beside the lock. All of a sudden, alarm bells began to ring, and a red light began flashing over the hatch.

He turned to me with a toothy grin on his face.

“Created a little emergency,” he said. “Station systems think the bay is breached. All hatchways sealed. They can’t get in.”

“Can we get out?” I asked, ingenuously.

“Not exactly,” he admitted. “But we wouldn’t want to steal a shuttle, anyhow. Couldn’t get further than Uranus in one of those things. We need your ship.”

Things were still moving a little too fast for me. “So where the hell is it?” I asked.

“Only one place it can be. Inside the belly of a cargo- transporter. They couldn’t get into it, so they decided to haul it to Oberon. That’s where local Star Force command is.”

“They said they’d impound it,” I murmured foolishly. It seemed to me that our goose was well and truly cooked, and that the only place to go was back to jail.

But Finn was still busy. He was urgently punching keys beneath the nearest wallscreen. He glanced back over his shoulder and nodded in the direction of a locker.

“Spacesuits,” he said. “In there. You do know how to put one on?”

“Of course I do,” I told him. “So what?”

“Got to create an emergency,” he told me. “A real emergency.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but didn’t have time. The alarm bells stopped ringing and the red lights went out.

Finn cursed, and hurled himself back toward the hatchway, stabbing again at the buttons controlling the electronic lock. It was no good. He wasn’t the only software wizard around. The microworld was full of them.

There was a telephone strung up beside the keyboard, and Finn snatched it from its perch. He punched out what was obviously an emergency code.

“This is Jack Martin,” he snapped. “If anyone comes through that hatchway, you’ll have a real emergency on your hands. You could be trying to breathe vacuum. We’ve got suits, and we’re not bluffing.”

I had an awful suspicion that things were getting out of hand. I wasn’t sure that it was a good idea to threaten to sabotage the microworld. I had no idea what the penalty for that kind of sabotage might be, but it couldn’t be a minor matter, even by comparison with desertion from the Star Force.

The hatchway didn’t open. There was a very long pause. The silence was suddenly rather oppressive.

“Get the bloody suits!” said Finn, impatiently.

“Hell, John,” I said, “that’s not something they’re going to forgive. Maybe we’d better just give up, hey? Cut our losses.”

“You bastard, Rousseau,” he said, as it sunk in just how far over the top he’d gone. “This is all your fault.”

I felt that this was more than a little unjust. I’d only had the problem, when all said and done. He’d supplied his own greed and his own recklessness. I realised that there must be more to this than met the eye, and that it wasn’t just a sudden desire to get rich that had motivated his attempt to spring me. I guessed that he had needed a trip out of the system anyhow. I wondered again what it was that John Finn had done which required him to adopt a phony identity. Nothing trivial, apparently.

He went to the locker, and opened it to expose the neat row of spacesuits inside. There was also a set of lighter suits—sterile suits, I assumed, for working in biologically- contaminated environments. At least one of the spacesuits would be tailored specifically for Finn. He looked at them for a whole minute, then seemed to change his mind, and began fiddling with the sterile suits. He took one out and passed it to me. He took a second one for himself, and began to pull it on.

“It’s no good,” he complained, in a tone as tortured as if he was chewing on powdered glass. “There’s only one thing we can do. We have to get your ship back.”

“How do you propose we do that?” I asked.

“Blackmail,” he replied, succinctly. “We have to make the threat stick. Trouble is, I can’t evacuate anything but the docking-bay. Too many safety-devices. Leaves only one alternative.”

He got his suit on, and sealed it. He picked up the mud gun from where he’d laid it down. I could see his eyes staring at me from behind the faceplate. I could tell that he was thinking hard.

The phone beside the hatchway began to trill. Finn ignored it, so I picked it up.

“Martin?” asked the voice at the other end.

“This is Rousseau,” I replied.

“Ayub Khan here. What exactly do you plan to do, Mr. Rousseau? I’m sure you know as well as we do that any damage you cause will endanger you at least as gravely as it endangers anyone else. There’s nowhere to go, I assure you.”

“Mr. Martin thinks we have nothing to lose,” I told him. “He thinks that now he’s thrown in with me, the Star Force are going to shoot him too. He’s not in a very positive frame of mind.”

“Martin has a lurid imagination,” said Ayub Khan. “This is a civilized world—a scientific research station. The Star Force are not bandits.”

“But they won’t be pleased with him, will they?”

Finn had undone his helmet again, and he took the phone away from me. “Listen to me, Khan,” he said, roughly. “You know as well as I do that I don’t have much to lose. I think you already know who I really am, and what I’m wanted for. I’m not going to start blasting holes in your precious microworld but what I will do is take the plugs out of every one of your bloody incubators. I’ll fill the whole bay with your precious bugs—which not only blows half your experiments, but leaves you facing one hell of a decontamination problem. Rousseau and I are already suited up. Now, how would you feel about ordering the cargo ship to turn around and bring the Mistral back, so that we can get aboard it? That way, we can all be happy—except the Star Force. Rousseau and I leave the system, your people carry on with their happy little lives and their precious research. Okay?”