Asgard's Conquerors. Brian Stableford

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 1990, 2012 by Brian Stableford

      Published by Wildside Press LLC

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      For my father, William Ernest Stableford, from whose example I have learned more than he probably imagines

      CHAPTER ONE

      I sometimes have the disturbing impression that the universe is determined to force my life into the mold of an exemplary tale. I have done my best to resist, but I am beginning to believe that resistance is useless. I fear that fate has it in for me, and that destiny has me marked down for something big.

      I will explain to you, if I may, how I arrived at this awful conclusion.

      There is supposed to be an ancient Chinese curse suggesting that the worst fate that could possibly befall a man is to live in interesting times. I had always been aware of this saying, but had never considered its logical corollaries, the first of which must surely be that one is similarly cursed if one is drawn, moth-to-flame fashion, to interesting places. So I, as a young man, was lured by my good friend Mickey Finn to cross half the known universe to the artificial macroworld that Earthmen had learned to call Asgard: the home of the technocratic ‘gods’.

      Various members of the galactic community, representing as many as three hundred different humanoid species, had been digging around for technological artifacts in the topmost levels of Asgard for many years. The Coordinated Research Establishment organized the efforts of most of these good people—guided and supervised by the Tetrax, who are very much the top dogs in the galactic community—but I never joined it, preferring to be my own master and go wherever the mood took me into those cold and desolate spaces.

      It wasn’t me who made the breakthrough discovery that opened up the warmer and more interesting levels beneath the ones that had caught a dreadful chill in some unlucky cosmic accident. It was my fellow human Saul Lyndrach, who was quickly murdered by evil persons desirous of prizing the secret out of him. It was then that I fell foul of the second corollary of that ancient Chinese curse, which is that one can get into very deep trouble if one happens to become an interesting person. Through no fault of my own, I was suddenly very interesting indeed.

      I was interesting to the gangsters who had murdered Saul because I happened to be the only person on Asgard who could read French, the language in which Saul had recorded his notes. I was also interesting to several members of Earth’s Star Force, who had come to Asgard fresh from concluding a genocidal war against Salamandra. Their commanding officer, Star-Captain Susarma Lear, was convinced that a large man, to whom Saul had generously given shelter, was actually a Salamandran android mysteriously equipped to take revenge on humankind; she also became convinced that I was the one man who could help her catch and kill this person.

To cut a long story short (you can read about it, if you wish, in the first volume of my memoirs),1 the android disappeared into the bowels of Asgard, with myself and the starship troopers in hot pursuit. We were tracked in our turn by an assorted rabble of vormyr and Spirellans, bent of mayhem.

      And mayhem was what ensued.

      When everything was finally sorted out, the star-captain and her merry men set off back to Earth, feeling smug about having completed their nasty mission, and I was left to sell the secret of the gateway into inner Asgard to the highest bidder.

      I wasn’t used to being rich. All my life I’d lived on the margin, never having to worry about long-term ambitions because it was quite hard enough figuring out where next week’s food was going to come from. My lucky strike changed that, and suddenly I was precipitated into a premature mid-life crisis, faced with the awful prospect of making plans.

      Asgard began to seem like a pricked balloon. Its mysteries were far from being solved, but the process had begun, and with hundreds of levels now open for exploration, the contribution which might be made by any one man seemed pretty small. Even though I hadn’t really got near the enigmatic center of the world, I felt that my hour of glory had come and gone. I began to wonder what there was in the rest of the galaxy to attract the attentions of a nouveau riche recluse like myself. Inevitably, I began to think of home: the solar system, the asteroid belt, the microworlds, Mother Earth.

      I’d never actually been to Earth. Asgard, which was more than a thousand light years away from my birthplace in the belt, was the only planet-sized mass I’d ever been on. It began to seem a little odd that I’d come so far from home without ever bothering to visit the homeworld of my species, which was only a lousy couple of hundred million miles away from where I’d started from. The more I thought about it, the more peculiar it seemed.

      So I decided to make a pilgrimage to Earth.

      Mistral, the ship in which I’d come to Asgard, in the company of Mickey Finn, Helmut Belinski, and Jean Averaud, was still strung up to an umbilical, quietly trailing the Tetron satellite at the top of the skychain. She was evacuated and sealed. No dust, no decay, no wear and tear. She’d been Finn’s ship, really, though it had taken our combined fortunes to get her fitted out for the long trip to Asgard. Finn, Belinski, and Averaud had all been killed in an accident downstairs, on one of the trips when it was my turn to stay at home. Under our agreement, I inherited the ship. It was all I did inherit, along with a bill for Mickey’s back taxes which the Tetrax kindly forwarded to me.

      That had been a bad time for me—to be one of a group of four on a world mostly populated by aliens is one thing; to be a man alone is another. I’d got used to it; in a way, I’d got to like it. In the course of adjusting, I’d pushed Mistral into some quiet corner of my consciousness, where she didn’t intrude upon my thoughts. But she’d always been there, waiting.

      I used part of my small fortune to have her fitted out all over again. I had the fusion reactor overhauled and the space-stresser checked. I don’t know the first thing about the tortuous physics of the frame force, which lets us play origami with raw space in order to wormhole ourselves around the universe, and I wanted to make quite sure that the ship would end up back in Sol-space when I pressed the right buttons. I bought new navigational software, and the best troubleshooting programs I could find, just to make sure. Then, relishing the thought that I could splash out without pauperizing myself, I installed some brand new Tetron organics—an integrated thermosynthetic system that would do food, waste-disposal, atmosphere regulation, bioluminescence, and minor electrics with pure organic technology; not an adapted organism in it. When we’d flown out, we’d had to make do with bacterial soup and adapted fungi. The food had been unbearable, the stink disgusting.

      When it was all done, and my ship was rigged up for first-class service, I trundled up the Skychain, and I said au revoir to dear old Asgard. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever be back.

      I wasn’t sure of anything, much.

      Starships are very fast. They make light seem like viscous treacle oozing across a flat tabletop. But galactic distances are not small; in fact, they’re unimaginably huge. So the ship’s flight back to Earth was no mere ferry-crossing. It took months, and it became very boring.

      I had text-discs and I had sound-discs. I had a centrifuge to put weight on me, and various gadgets for keeping various bits of me fighting fit. They kept me occupied for a while, but in the end I was forced to seek some new distraction, some pleasure whose delights I had never tasted before.

      That was when I conceived the plan of writing the memoirs to which I referred, and immediately reached for my tape recorder. I won’t say that it was an entirely joyful experience inscribing it all, because I am not a literary man, and sometimes found composition hard work. On the other hand, I’m sure that my reconstructed dialogue sounds a good deal slicker than what was actually said at the time; poetic license can be fun! I had no intention of publishing what I’d recorded—not immediately, anyhow—because there was some very sensitive information in there regarding the real fate of the android which Susarma Lear