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.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I was keen to have a discussion with the Tetron bioscientist, 673-Nisreen, but this proved difficult, partly because I was kept so busy, partly because the Tetron hardly ever left his cabin, and partly because Valdavia seemed to want all communication with the Tetron channeled through him.
Eventually, though, I did manage to speak to Nisreen long enough to arrange an assignation of sorts in his cabin. He seemed as pleased as I was to have the meeting set up, and I gathered that he would have issued an invitation himself had he not been as worried as Valdavia was about the necessity of observing protocol.
I let him ask me the first few questions, as if I were briefing him about Asgard. He’d never been there, and everything he knew about it was from memory chips that were long out of date.
I gave him a selective account of my adventures before moving on to what they implied.
“The people who thought there were no more than half a dozen levels always had a strong case,” I observed, “because the technology we were digging out of the top levels wouldn’t have been capable of erecting much more than that. The romantics who wanted Asgard to be an artifact from top to bottom had to credit its builders with technological powers far beyond anything known in the galactic community. We still can’t say, of course, whether there’s an ordinary planet inside the shells, but even if there is, we now know that the levels constitute a feat of engineering beyond anything your people or mine could contemplate. Imagine how long it must have taken to put that thing together!”
“It would seem to have been a remarkable achievement,” he opined, in typical Tetron fashion.
“And it begins to look,” I continued, “that it might be much older than many investigators thought. That might have interesting bearings on the question of the origin of the galactic races. I understand that your own researches also have some relevance to that?”
