Читать книгу Asgard's Conquerors - Brian Stableford - Страница 10

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 of the branch of the Star Force to which I now belonged were only passengers while Leopard Shark was in flight, and we had nothing to do with the actual running of the ship. The reason why star-captains are so called is to distinguish their title from that of the captains who command ships, who are of a rather grander species. The man in command of Leopard Shark was Captain Khaseria, a white-haired old campaigner of a somewhat acid temperament. His was the ‘naval’ branch of the Star Force. When the ship was in its wormhole, he outranked everyone. Leopard Shark’s crew of thirty, responsible to the Captain, had the duty of defending the ship and making sure it got to wherever it was supposed to be going.

Our ‘army’ staff had no authority while the ship was in flight—our job began when it was time to come out of the ship and get on with the mission. Susarma Lear was the top-ranking officer on the ship; my old acquaintance Lieutenant Crucero—now a star-captain—was still her right-hand man. We had three junior officers, half a dozen assorted sergeants, and only fifty troopers—less than half the force which the ship had been designed to carry. We were not expected to re-invade Asgard; ours was a special task-force. Even so, training them all was no simple matter, and the more training and aching I did, the less attractive the prospect of taking these men into the levels came to seem.

There were a few petty compensations. For one thing, Lieutenant Kramin and his merry men had been relieved of the not-very-onerous job of guarding Goodfellow and had been added to the complement of Leopard Shark. That meant that I could give him orders. I could give Trooper Blackledge orders, too. There are, alas, no really awful jobs to do on a starship, and if there were, they’d be done by the crew, but I managed to find a couple of small ways of making life uncomfortable for Kramin and Blackledge. The mere fact that I was an officer caused them as much chagrin as anything I actually dropped on them. They had grown fat and out of condition while stationed on Goodfellow, and it made my own aches and pains a little less distressing when I knew I could always add a little bit more to the burden of their aches and pains.

John Finn had also been press-ganged into service, saved from a penal battalion by the fact that he had spent time on Asgard and knew a little about working in the levels. With John Finn the situation was different. Kramin and Blackledge didn’t like me, but John Finn hated me. He didn’t seem at all pleased by the fact that he wasn’t going to be sent to a penal battalion. Nor was he in the least amused by the fact that he was getting what he had so ardently desired—a free ride to Asgard. He felt himself to be a man much wronged and betrayed, and he had talked himself into an unshakeable belief that it was all my fault. I didn’t try to harass or inconvenience him—if anything, I was easy on him—but the mere sight of me was enough to set a peculiar fury seething in his breast. I decided early on that there was no way I was going down to the surface of Asgard in the company of John Finn. Accidents happen too easily in the levels.

My other relationships were easier to handle. My other old acquaintance, Trooper Serne—now a sergeant—was entirely prepared to be amicable. Crucero wasn’t in the least disturbed by having to share his new rank with me, and we fell into the role of equals quite readily. The colonel was careful to maintain an appropriate distance from us all—she carefully cultivated the proverbial loneliness of command—but she didn’t put any undue pressure on. She didn’t try to get heavy when she handed down orders. She didn’t talk to me, as she sometimes had on Asgard, as if I were something the cat had dragged in. It made a pleasant change.

I saw very little of our civilian passengers. The diplomat Valdavia was a thin, lugubrious man with a Middle European accent and an overly precise manner. I guessed that he had landed this job only because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I might have been underestimating him. It’s easy to underestimate politicians. The Tetron bioscientist, 673-Nisreen, interested me far more, but he spent most of the time secluded in his cabin.

Once Leopard Shark was wormholing we couldn’t communicate with the home system or with the Tetrax. A pick-up station had relayed us everything that had come in by stress-pulse, just before we exited from normal space, but it didn’t tell us much more than we already knew. Until we reached the Asgard system and talked to the Tetrax, we couldn’t make specific plans. All we could do was make sure that we’d be ready to carry them out. Naturally, it didn’t stop us having many a heartfelt discussion about what we might be asked to do, and what our chances of surviving it might be.

I wasn’t overly optimistic about our chances of becoming successful spies—although we had no official confirmation as yet that the Tetrax did indeed want us to be spies. All those years I had spent poking around in levels two and three, the evidence had suggested that the missing Asgardians were in pretty much the same league as the galactic civilizations—it was their technical style that was distinct, not its capability. What I had proved when I went down the dropshaft into the heart of the macroworld was that those appearances were misleading. Deep down inside, there were more advanced races, with technical capabilities that made ours look very clumsy indeed. If those races were now coming out of their shell, with hostile intent, the entire galactic community might get swept aside like a house of cards. A handful of human secret agents would hardly be able to achieve much in that kind of game. I had thought, on the basis of what little I had learned about the super-scientists, that they were a shy and peaceable crowd, but this invasion suggested that I might have formed the wrong impression. When contemplating the possibility that they had lied, I found it easy to scare myself with theories about what might happen if they decided to go to war with the galaxy.

I wasn’t overconfident about the reliability of my memories of what had happened in the depths of Asgard. After all, the person I’d had my enlightening conversation with was the same person that Susarma Lear remembered having killed. If her memory of what happened was an illusion calculated to reassure her, then so might mine be.

Needless to say, I didn’t want to mention this to Susarma Lear, because I didn’t want to admit just yet that I knew—or thought I knew—that Myrlin was still alive. I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether it might have been Myrlin who had led the attack on Skychain City, maybe in command of a whole army of beings like himself. It was just possible that he was being used in much the same way I was—as a mercenary soldier.

If he was, I sure as hell wasn’t looking forward to taking up arms against him. The Salamandrans had built him big and tough, and the godlike men of Asgard probably had the ability to make him tougher still. The thought that we might be sent down to the surface to keep tabs on an army of giant soldiers armed by super-scientists was enough to make anyone’s blood run cold.

I didn’t feel disloyal about neglecting to confide these fears to Susarma Lear. I preferred to play my cards close to my chest, and keep my head down.

Some people are born interesting, some make themselves interesting, and some have interestingness thrust upon them. But you can fight it, if you try.