"We always knew what they thought of the Star Force," I reminded her. "Clumsy barbarians." I didn't add that we now knew what they thought the Star Force was fit to be used for—there was no point in rubbing it in. I could imagine the kind of feeling that must be roiling around inside her. She was Star Force through and through, and the insult the Tetrax had hurled at us must hurt her far worse than any mere physical injury. Her pride would make her hate the Tetrax for this—and that hatred would be increased rather than diminished if they casually secured our release now. There was no point in my pointing out to her that the Tetrax had done what they had done entirely because of their own sense of pride.
I returned to my bed with a disturbing feeling that we might all be in the process of being led up the garden path. It was hard to make sense of this proposed jailbreak, and thinking about it threatened to renew my headache. I decided to get some sleep and recuperate as fully as possible. There was, after all, a certain truth in what Susarma Lear had said. If we wanted to know what the hell was going on, we had to follow the bouncing ball.
Just before I went off to sleep, I remembered the figure
I'd seen from the observation window while I was talking to Sovorov. All of a sudden, the idea that it was a man in a spacesuit began to seem rather encouraging. Was it possible that we had friends out there?
I woke up again for the evening meal, and for once found myself with a ravenous appetite—a sure sign that I was well and truly on the mend. The nurse seemed grateful to be able to hand me the bowl and spoon, instead of having to help out. I saw that all three of my fellow patients were now sitting up and taking notice. The food was the same kind of broth they'd been serving to us all along, with lots of unfamiliar vegetables and lumps of third-rate meat, but for once I wasn't too bothered about the taste.
Afterwards, I stayed sitting up, wondering whether it would be possible to have a harmless conversation. Serne got out of bed, looking ridiculous in a nightshirt that barely came down to his thighs. I wondered what our chances were of getting hold of some decent clothes before we made our break.
I checked under my bed, and was pleased to see that my comfortable Tetron-issue boots were there, but my one-piece was nowhere to be found. It was probably in the laundry. The idea of having to make our great escape clad in nightshirts, boots, and spacesuits was sufficiently incongruous to be funny, but not too attractive. I hoped that the someone who came for us would bring the proper accoutrements.
Serne went over to talk to Susarma Lear. Finn got out of bed too, and wandered over to join in. Then the door opened, and he started guiltily. Serne just looked round, his face impassive, as a couple of orderlies wheeled in a fifth bed. Following behind it, looking ready to collapse at every step, was Aleksandr Sovorov.
He gave me a poisonous look of pure resentment as the rubber-gloved attendants helped him off with his trousers and on with the nightshirt. Unintimidated, I waited calmly until the coast was clear, and then hopped out to visit him.
"Sorry Alex," I said. "How was I to know?"
"There's a rumour going around that this is an act of war by the Tetrax," he croaked. "Are you responsible for that?"
"Not exactly," I told him. "They worked it out for themselves."
"It's not true," he said defensively.
"Oh sure," I told him. "Finn and I probably picked up the virus on Goodfellow. It's probably been lurking in the Uranian rings for four billion years, waiting for someone to come along and be infected. And now it's free at last— saved from the ignominy of having to stay deep-frozen until the sun goes nova."
As I said this, I looked around at Finn, but he was studiously looking the other way. I took the opportunity to mutter under my breath: "Who told you to send the note?"
He was in too much discomfort to conjure up much of a look of blank incomprehension, but he did his best.
"What note?" he asked. Luckily his voice was too hoarse and his breath too feeble for the question to be loud.
"Nothing," I said, quickly. "Forget it." I turned round to face Susarma Lear. She was watching me like a hawk, and though she couldn't hear what had been said, her powers of deduction were easily equal to the task of figuring it out. "By the way," I added, "have any more humans arrived in the camp—more of the Star Force people, perhaps?"
"I've seen no one," Sovorov assured me. "And I really don't care."
"Do me a favour, Alex," I said. "Go to sleep—just go to sleep, and ignore everything that happens."
"I intend to do just that," he informed me miserably.
The way he looked, there was little doubt that we could trust him to do it.
I waited for another opportunity to talk to Susarma Lear while Finn was lying in his bed and taking no notice. He had probably guessed by now that something was up, but he didn't know what. It didn't seem to be a good idea to tell him.
"Alex didn't write the note," I told her—confirming what she'd already guessed.
"It doesn't change anything," she said. "We still have to go. There may be other humans here—ones that neither you nor he knew about. Hell, it might be one of our boys— we don't know how many were picked up, where, or when. Serne and I were ambushed along with Joxahan when we went to a meeting-place we'd named on one of those stupid handouts Tulyar prepared. I knew that was a ridiculous idea."
She was right, of course. There could be other humans here. There certainly seemed to be humans collaborating— or pretending to collaborate—with the invaders. Maybe Sigor Dyan had other informants here, who were trying to play a double role just as I had. There must have been two hundred humans in Skychain City when the melodrama got under way, and there was just a chance that one of them had enough up top to be the Scarlet Pimpernel. If so, I couldn't wait to meet him.
No doubt we would find out the truth, when the time came.
In the meantime, though, there was nothing to do but twiddle our thumbs and try to build up our strength for the coming ordeal.
23
Everything was dark and silent for hours on end while we waited, pretending to be asleep. Sometimes, I actually dozed off, but every time I caught myself relaxing too much I snapped myself out of it. The least noise was enough to wake me. Once or twice I was sure that the door had opened, but it was just nerves. Long before the appointed hour actually arrived, I had become impatient with the suspense.
When the door finally did open, the only light that came on was a tiny torch in the hand of a person who remained virtually invisible. The person handed me some clothes, and directed the light at them to show me what they were. My hand brushed the proffering fingers slightly as I took them. The fingers were hairy, with nails like claws. Not human, nor invader.
"Put them on," said an unfamiliar voice, in a purring whisper. The words were spoken in badly-accented parole. A barbarian, then—certainly not a Tetron.
I could see other bobbing pinpoints of light, and deduced that there were more of the visitors. I couldn't count properly, though, because the pinpoints were continually eclipsed by the bodies of the people who held them. I shoved my legs into the trousers I'd been handed, and swapped my nightshirt for a lighter garment. Then I dropped lightly from the bed and groped underneath it for my boots.
When I was ready, the hairy hand took me by the arm, and guided me toward the door. The others seemed to be ready too. They were bringing Susarma Lear, Serne, and Finn. I heard Serne suggest to Finn that if he made a sound, or slowed us down, or did anything other than what he was told, he would end up dead. Serne could be fearsome when he was in that sort of mood, and I didn't doubt that Finn would obey. In any case, he might be just as keen as the rest of us to get out of here.
"I lead," said one of the furry humanoids. "Follow quickly. Make no sound."
Outside, the corridor was dark, but the firefly torches gave us something to follow. There were no lights on at all in this part of the camp, but we came quickly enough to a curving corridor that led past several of the observation windows, through which faint streams o
f coloured light were filtering.
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.
There were fewer Hying creatures here, too. The smaller firefly-like things were very scarce, and the greater part of the "animal" population consisted of gliders as big as an outstretched human hand, like butterflies and dragonflies made out of crisp crepe paper.
There were fewer shots now—our pursuers rarely got a clear view of us, and now that the first recklessness of their excitement had cooled they were beginning to conserve ammunition. Serne, who had obviously been paying them closer attention than I, signaled to me that there were only half a dozen of them, but Susarma Lear extended the fingers of her left hand several times in rapid succession to remind
him that there would soon be more. We could have shouted to one another even through the plastic of our helmets, but it would have been very difficult to make ourselves heard, so we settled for the kind of sign language that people use in vacuum. I could tell that the colonel was distressed by the stickiness of the going underfoot, and it wasn't hard to see why. If our pursuers could bring vehicles into the hunt, they could cover this kind of territory much more easily than we.
Our problems were compounded by the fact that Tulyar and the other Tetron were already struggling to keep up. Even Finn was fit enough and fast enough to keep pace with the colonel, but the Tetrax are not overly devoted to physical culture, and Tulyar was a civilian used to all the comforts of advanced civilization. I saw Susarma Lear look back at them twice, speculatively, and I could imagine what was in her mind.
To what extent ought we to take risks ourselves in order to allow them to stay with us? Did we care if they became separated from the rest of us—and hence lost, given that we had the only direction-finder?
She didn't look to me for any advice. I didn't have any confidence at all in her eagerness to help them out, but I wasn't sure that I was eager myself. No one could have argued that I owed any favours to the Tetrax in general, or 994-Tulyar in particular
Things didn't get much better in the course of the first hour. The shooting had stopped, but we had no reason to think that we had given our pursuers the slip. We were no longer sprinting and crashing carelessly through anything that got in our way, but we were still leaving a visible trail. Sometimes the grey mud was liquid enough to cover up our footmarks as soon as we'd passed on, sometimes it was set as hard as polystyrene, so that we didn't leave any noticeable imprints, but mostly it was somewhere in between. The invaders probably had no experience in tracking, but they certainly wouldn't have needed Cochise to read the signs and tell which way we had gone.
By the time the first hour was up we were moving at a purposeful walk. Tulyar and the other Tetron were still with us, though they were showing signs of distress. We were surrounded by bulbous white growths, many of which were intricately patterned in dark grey and black. It wasn't easy to decide whether the dark tracery was specialised tissue belonging to the same organism or a kind of parasitic growth.
Asgard's Conquerors Page 17