He nodded, abstractedly, and sipped more of his drink. “You should try to take some,” he said. “While you have a fever, you should drink plenty of liquid. Shall I ask the doctor to look at you? He may be able to help.”
“It’s okay,” I muttered. “Only a cold in the head.”
“Are you well enough to answer a few more questions?”
“I think so,” I said—then wished that I had said no.
“I’ll try to keep to essentials. I’m grateful that you have decided to tell me all this, but there are other matters with which you might be able to help us, and about which I must question you. I’d like you to record for us, if you will, all the details of the plans which you and your employers made before you returned to Asgard. We’d like confirmation of what we already know about the groups of spies which were dropped from orbit—their personnel, their objectives, the bases they intended to use, and the places at which they planned to enter the city. Can you do that?”
If I hadn’t been feeling so awful anyhow, that might have been one to set me aback. As things were, I cared somewhat less than I might have.
“So Jacinthe Siani did know I’d left Asgard,” I said, resignedly.
“No. But you were only the first member of your group to be apprehended. We have captured others, some of whom have been co-operative. Information about your mission reached me this morning. Some of your companions will be joining you tomorrow. I think that our people have enough information to round up all the invaders, but just by way of checking, I’d be obliged if you could tell us all you know.”
I looked at him sulkily, wishing that I felt in better shape to make a decision.
“As an officer in the Star Force,” I said, finally, “I’m not able to tell you anything that might imperil my companions. It’s a matter of military honour.” I was only being slightly sarcastic. Susarma Lear might not be my favourite person in all the world, but I was hesitant about betraying her.
“As you wish,” he said, in an easy tone which suggested that he did indeed have the information already. “In fact, you do not seem to me to be well enough to undertake such a laborious task. I think that I will ask the doctor to see you again. After all, we do not want you to. ...”
Suddenly, the easy manner evaporated, and he was looking at me with a very different expression. I thought I could read him exactly as I would another human, and he had the appearance of a man who had been struck by a distinctly unpleasant idea.
I swallowed. My throat was sore, and I was becoming dizzy. The sweat was trickling from my forehead into my eyebrows, and running into the corners of my eyes to gather like bitter tears. I had to lie back, lolling against the leathery material of the sofa.
“Is it possible, Mr. Rousseau,” he said, in a deadly voice, “that your Tetron masters intended that you should all be captured?”
I opened my mouth to say no, but the denial wouldn’t pass my lips. It wasn’t just the sore throat—it was the awful possibility dawning in my own mind.
I had asked myself more than once how the Tetrax might plan to go to war against the invaders of Skychain City. I had tried to weigh up the possibilities in my mind. But I hadn’t really kept it in mind that the Tetrax aren’t like humans. They aren’t heavy-metal-minded. They’re biotech- minded. They would always think first in terms of biological weaponry and biological warfare.
Now—very belatedly indeed—it occurred to me that the best way, and maybe the only way, to get a virus weapon into a domed city would be to use live carriers. And if the virus in question had to be carefully tailored to a particular biological pattern, so that it would hurt the enemy far more than the Tetrax themselves, then the carriers would have to be as similar as possible to the targets.
Suddenly, lots of little pieces of the puzzle seemed to fall into place. The Tetrax had received messages from the surface for some days after the attack. They had photographs of the invaders. Maybe they even had the results of gene-analysis of invader tissue. Maybe they had all that they needed to plan a swift and efficient counter-attack—everything except a group of clever carriers, to take the disease into the city for them.
They knew how primitive the invaders were—how unprepared they were to fight off a virus epidemic. They knew how easy it would be for their own people to seize control of the city again, if only the occupying forces could be comprehensively weakened.
And so they had used us. They had hired the Star Force, and they had hired me, feeding us that half-way plausible story about needing us to open lines of communication, to gather intelligence . . . when all they really wanted to do was use us as a bunch of Typhoid Marys.
“Oh merde!” I said, with a great deal of feeling. “The bastards!”
But I could see in Sigor Dyan’s face that he didn’t believe that I was innocent.
It seemed the perfect time to give up the unequal struggle and let go, so I let the dizziness and the fever take control, and I fell into insensibility.
21
My memory of subsequent events is understandably a little hazy. The fever didn’t make me delirious in the sense that I was afflicted by crazy dreams, but it did put such pressure on my brain that I suffered continual lapses into semicoma.
They tried to ask me more questions, and I tried to answer them, but I wasn’t terribly articulate and I don’t suppose they got much joy out of it. I wasn’t taken back to my cell, but was instead removed to some kind of isolation unit. All of a sudden, everybody that touched me was wearing rubber gloves and surgical masks. Even in my dilapidated state I knew that they were locking the stable door with the horse long gone. Since I slugged my first invader I’d been manhandled by an awful lot of soldier boys. The disease would be peacefully incubating away in a great many bodies by now. If the Tetrax really had planted a biological time-bomb inside me—and I didn’t doubt it—they’d made sure it had a nice long fuse, so it wouldn’t show up too early. I was still cursing myself for not having realised how perfidious they were.
Tetron biotech makes for very good medicine, and a weapon like this one would have been useless even against the likes of human beings. The invaders, by contrast, could do very little even to treat the symptoms. And I, poor hapless weapon, had to suffer alongside them.
I must have lain in my new bed suffering the ravages of the fever for several days. At first, I didn’t even notice when they wheeled in the other patients, and the realisation dawned on me only by degrees that there was only one person I knew who possessed a shock of bright blonde hair like that adorning the head which was tossing and turning on the pillow five metres away.
There had been no need to worry about betraying Susarma Lear to the invaders. She’d already been betrayed—probably by order of the Tetrax, so that she could start the serious business of spreading her germs far and wide.
I remember thinking to myself, not altogether coherently, that it was a great pity, because now there was no U.S. Cavalry out there to ride to my rescue.
At some stage I must have been able to take a good look at the other two people who’d also been moved in, because by the time I became compos mentis again I knew who they were.
They were Sergeant Serne and Trooper John Finn.
I would like to report that I was tough enough to recover before anyone else did from the ravages of the sickness, but I wasn’t. Truth to tell, I was still very much under the weather when the others were beginning to recover, and it took a lot of effort on the colonel’s part to get me to pay proper attention when she woke me up in the middle of the night.