She glanced sideways, at me.
I managed a small sardonic smile, and murmured “Gung Ho!” I said it in English, of course. Pan-galactic parole has no need of any such expression. After all, the Tetrax invented parole, and they always let other people do their gung-hoing for them.
10
We were split into three groups, scheduled to go down in three different shuttles. Each one was to put down beyond Skychain City’s horizon, close to a trapdoor that would give easy access to level one. There were plenty of trapdoors like that, painstakingly identified and made functional by the C.R.E. teams which had spread out from Skychain City into the level one habitation at whose hub the city had been built.
Susarma Lear and I were in the same group. Crucero took command of the Star Force personnel in the second; Kramin was attached to his group and so was Finn, whose temper was dramatically improved by the news that the Tetrax remembered him, and considered his knowledge of bugging devices adequate to warrant giving him further training and extra responsibilities. His self-esteem, which must have taken a battering in recent weeks, was boosted back to the level of intolerable arrogance.
871-Alpheus was the Tetron in charge of Crucero’s team. Both 994-Tulyar and 74-Scarion were assigned to my crew, apparently confirming that the Tetrax considered us the lynch-pin of the mission, and the group most likely to succeed.
Each group of would-be spies had a couple of experienced scavengers allotted to it. My group had me and a Turkanian named—as nearly as I could pronounce it—Johaxan. I’d never met him before, but he was an old C.R.E. hand who’d worked the levels even longer than I had. He’d been on the satellite when the skychain was destroyed.
Turkanians must have been forest-dwellers for most of their pre-sentient phase, because they still have long arms and bent legs with clever toes. They wear very little in the way of clothing and their skins are lightly furred, the colour of the fur being an oddly mottled mixture of greens and browns. Very few humanoid species exhibit that kind of camouflage colouring, because humanoids are usually big enough not to be too worried about hiding from predators. Turkanians, though, exhibit “prey mentality”—they have a wide streak of natural paranoia, and are very shy of fighting, though it would be a mistake to put them down as non- aggressive. In their own way they can be very assertive indeed, and they have the reputation of breeding the best pickpockets in the galaxy.
In terms of equipment, we were reasonably well supplied. We had a cold-suit each, and a couple of spares, and life-support backpacks enough to keep us all going for several months; we were told that further supplies would be dropped when needed. We also had various kinds of cutting-tools, bubble-building equipment, and sleds. Given that we had to travel light, we had everything we needed.
By the time we went down, Susarma Lear had obviously managed to have a meaningful discussion with someone about weaponry, and we were issued with guns—but not killing guns. All the weapons training I’d done aboard Leopard Shark was for nothing; each and every one of us was issued a mud gun. Out in the levels, of course, they’d be no more useful than water pistols, but if and when we did get into Skychain City, we’d be able to defend ourselves without doing anyone any lasting damage. This was another little reminder of the fact that our goal was to bring peace and harmony to Asgard, the galactic community, and the entire universe.
Or so we were frequently told.
The colonel did once express the opinion—in private— that the Tetrax were not entirely to be trusted, and that she was not prepared to take anything at face value. This was professional paranoia at its finest, but I had to admit to her that the Tetrax were a cunning bunch, who would not shrink from being wickedly underhanded, if they thought the situation warranted deceit. I reserved my own judgment.
The drop was nerve-racking, especially the landing. Atmospheric pressure on the surface of Asgard is low, and there was no way that we could be dropped quietly out of the shuttle to parachute down. The shuttle had to come with us all the way, using its AM jets to soften up the landing. It wasn’t a very big craft, but anything zooming around close to a planet’s surface blasting away with AM jets can hardly be considered discreet. It’s all very well to have a horizon in between you and the enemy once you’re on the floor, but when you’re coming down from a long way up it’s not easy to hide. We were hoping that the invaders hadn’t got any spaceship-spotting equipment of their own; certainly they weren’t going to get any help from the Tetron satellites. Logic suggested that radar and the like wouldn’t be very useful to an army which did most of its fighting under a twenty-metre ceiling, but nerves are notoriously unready to listen to logic.
Once we were down, though, we had reason to be grateful to the efficiency of Tetron targeting; we were practically on top of a hatchway, and it took us less than ten “hours” (local metric) to go underground.
We abandoned the shuttle entirely; our first mission was to get to another hatchway, two days’ hike away in the direction of the city, to put up our communications aerial and establish some kind of semi-permanent base of operations. That way, we figured, it wouldn’t make too much difference if the invaders did find the shuttle.
Except, of course, that we’d have to hitchhike home if the time ever came to get the hell out.
The first trek was pretty easy. The hatchway let us down to an arterial highway on level one. We sent two troopers on ahead to act as scouts, and then began to haul our sleds right down the middle of the road, skimming over the thin coat of ices. Level one is fairly benign, of course—the temperature rarely drops below two-thirty K, and sometimes gets up almost to freezing point.
If we had been following the highway to its end we would have taken a straight-line course smack into the middle of Skychain City, but we didn’t intend to go quite that far. Once we were close to the city, our intention was to fade quietly into the forgotten back alleys.
We lit our way with torches mounted on the sleds, conserving our helmet-lights. Everybody took turns at hauling, including the colonel and the two Tetrax. There were no passengers on this trip. We’d already arranged a timetable for rest-periods; whenever we rested, a man would go on ahead to relieve one of the scouts. It all went like clockwork.
We had no trouble at all that first day; the invaders weren’t using the highway, and if they had any guards out on it, they were patrolling much closer to home.
On the second day, things didn’t go quite so smoothly.
About 37.50 (we were on Skychain City metric time, though there was no reason to take it for granted that Skychain City had retained its old schedule since the new tenants arrived) the scouts reported that they had run into some kind of light-sensitive device on the highway. They said that it was a relatively primitive device, but good enough to do its job. They had every reason to suppose that they had triggered it simply by spotting it, and that it had told Skychain City that we were on our way. It meant that we had to leave the highway immediately.
This was by no means a disaster, because we were so far out it would take hours for an invader patrol to get here even in a fast, wheeled vehicle, and by that time we’d be long gone. But it did seem as if the first point on the board had been clocked up to the opposition.
In the late afternoon we were close enough to go down to level two, where the temperature is mostly an unfriendly one- thirty K. It was as far down as I intended to go. There was no point in risking the men and the equipment in the really cold regions. I thought of level three as a place to retreat to if the going got rough. We had no idea, of course, how well the invaders might be able to operate in three and four. Maybe they were used to moving about in levels that were warm and brightly lit, and had no experience in really cold conditions. We couldn’t depend on that assumption, though—their army might have been lurking in three and four for some considerable time before the attack on the city. For all we knew, they might go to the cold layers for their summer holidays.