We made rendezvous in the Asgard system with a small fleet of galactic ships—not all of them Tetron. There was a makeshift station providing an anchorage for the group, but it was a thing of thread and patches, not a custom-designed microworld. Months had now passed since the invasion, and the Tetrax had carefully picked up all the pieces, but they hadn’t begun to rebuild. Support ships were arriving from the Tetra system, and from a couple of closer ones, but as far as I could judge it would probably take a year or more to put together any convincing base by means of which the Tetrax could establish a respectable permanent habitation—whether to serve as an embassy in which the galactic community could re-establish friendly relations with Asgard’s inhabitants, or as a launching-point for an invasion, remained to be seen.
Meetings with our hosts, including the briefings, took place aboard one of their ships. We had to edge in very close to string an umbilical between the vessels, and ours wasn’t the only link they set up. I don’t know what we looked like from outside—probably like a lot of wind-blown debris caught in a tattered spiderweb.
The earliest meetings involved Valdavia and 673-Nisreen, but no Star Force personnel. I had the uneasy feeling that Valdavia was acting as a salesman, dickering with the Tetrax to fix a fair price for our services. I had an even uneasier suspicion that the Tetrax saw it that way as well; their whole social order seemed to be based on elaborate service contracts whereby individuals bought limited control of others. Humans tended to translate the word describing the system in pan-galactic parole as “slavery,” but that just made the Tetrax laugh at us for being horrified by the idea. From their viewpoint, selling themselves in whole or in part was quite routine, and there was a parallel system of quasi-feudal duties and obligations which meant that they all stood ready to act as civil servants—maybe even as military personnel too—at a moment’s notice. Thus, it was neither surprising nor upsetting to 673-Nisreen that he had been snatched away from his biological work to become a liaison man with the UN nabobs. I couldn’t help wondering what Dr. Ayub Khan’s attitude would have been had the UN sent him orders to forget Uranus and go to Asgard as a diplomat.
When the haggling was over (Valdavia carefully refrained from giving us the details) the colonel, Crucero, and I went over with him to the Tetron ship so that we could find out what it was that Earth and Tetra expected of us in the line of duty. The Tetrax, with their usual sharp eye for formality, confronted us with their own committee of four.
One of them, I already knew very slightly. His name was 74-Scarion, and he’d been an officer with immigration control. He’d been the one who’d contrived to get me involved with Myrlin in the first place. He was very much the junior member of the Tetron team, though, and had presumably been included because he and I had already met.
The other three announced themselves as 994-Tulyar, 871-Alpheus, and 1125-Camina. 673-Nisreen wasn’t present. Camina was a female, though it wouldn’t have been obvious if she hadn’t taken the trouble to tell us. All Tetrax have round faces, wizened features, and black skin with a highly-polished look to it. They do have hair, of a sort, but it’s black and very short, and doesn’t differ in length or style between individuals. Their dress is unisex and they don’t seem to make any attempt to adopt small tokens of individuation. You can tell one from another by the shapes of their noses and the patterns of the markings on their faces, but it isn’t easy. They profess a horror of excessive individuation, which is why they give themselves numbers as well as names. I never had figured out whether the names they had were more akin to our Christian or family names, or what kind of relationship was likely to exist between two Tetrax with the same name. I did know, though, that high numbers were in some loose way connected with high status. Four-figure numbers were rare, and it wasn’t surprising that 1125-Camina turned out to be the chief spokesman.
“We are most honoured and very grateful for your willingness to assist us in this tragic hour,” she assured us. “This is a time of trouble for all the galactic community, and I know of no homeworld which does not mourn for lost sons and daughters. The Asgard project was one that brought together all races in a common endeavour, and was therefore precious to us all as a symbol of harmony. These have been dreadful happenings.”
All of this tripped very smoothly from her tongue in pangalactic parole, which is a language perfectly suited to Tetron mouth-parts. Human tongues, which are flatter and wider, can’t quite get to grips with the full range of syllables, and the fact that we have to substitute a couple of nonstandard consonants means that we sound very awkward when we try to use the language. Alas, there’s no other way to get by in the community. One could hardly expect the Tetrax to learn English.
For this reason, Valdavia’s official reply to the greeting was more succinct than his natural inclination would have prompted him to be, and the words did not flow like verbal honey.
“We regret,” 1125-Camina explained, speaking directly to the colonel because Valdavia had presumably already heard the news, “that we have been unable to establish communication with the people who have seized Skychain City. There is, of course, a language barrier, but no attempt seems to have been made by the invaders to begin the work of overcoming it. Our transmissions are ignored. We have sent down unarmed emissaries, but none have returned, although we have no evidence that any of them has been harmed. There are still galactics beneath the surface who have not yet been captured—people who were working in bubble-domes established by the Co-ordinated Research Establishment. We have been able to communicate sporadically with these groups, though we are wary of attracting attention to them. We did manage to receive communications from our people in the city for some time after the invasion, but we have not picked up any transmissions for some time. With your permission, we will summarize briefly what we now know about the invaders.”
Valdavia inclined his head, gesturing that she should continue. The colonel simply raised a blonde eyebrow. She was well into her tough-guy routine. 1125-Camina promptly passed the buck to 994-Tulyar.
“The invaders came from beneath the city,” he said. “They emerged from at least five different points in levels two and three, using doorways of whose existence we had been quite ignorant. We infer that the invaders must have been grouping in levels three and four for some time before the attack; it is possible that they were there even before Mr. Rousseau first penetrated to the lower levels, and that the attack was in no way a response to that penetration.
“There is one remarkable coincidence, of whose significance we are uncertain. If you will look at these. . . .”
He took some flimsies from a bag beneath the table. They were photographs, presumably taken in the aftermath of the battle for Skychain City and transmitted before communication was closed down.
The invaders looked human.
Of all the starfaring races in the community, about half a dozen are near enough to human for at least some of their members to pass. Humans are pretty various, of course, so it only has to be the case that some members of a near- human race could be mistaken for some humans for us to be able to speak of there being a coincidence. The invaders in the photographs were all white-skinned—rather pasty- faced, in fact—and they all had light-coloured hair. Their features were a little on the Neanderthal side, with heavy brow-ridges and Eskimo-type noses, but they could have walked the streets of a dozen Earthly cities without attracting too much notice, and on a multiracial microworld anyone would have been happy to shake hands with them.