He looked at me bleakly. I could tell from the sweat on his brow that he wasn’t feeling too good. Maybe his judgment was distorted. But an empire of twenty billion people spanning fifty levels is quite some juggernaut, and I could see why he might think that the idea of surrendering to a few thousand Tetrax wasn’t too appealing.
“Mr. Rousseau,” he said. “You had better decide whose side you are on. And you had better be prepared to show it. There will be no surrender.”
After he left, I looked across at Susarma Lear. She pulled herself up on to her elbow, and stared at me pensively. Behind her blue eyes, there was a lot of hard thinking going on.
“If we’re not careful,” I said, “we’ll be caught like a handful of corn between two millstones.”
“You have to play from where you stand,” she said. “We may have to look as if we’re on their side. But we’re on nobody’s side but our own.”
It was the only possible point of view. She would get no argument from me.
A little later, the nurse came back with another cup of water. I sat up to drink it—there didn’t seem to be any further point in play-acting. She stood patiently by the bedside, waiting. She had bluish skin and big eyes, with pointed ears and a cap of mousy fur where humans and invaders have hair. She seemed to me to have a friendly kind of face, and she also seemed to be the one person around from whom I had absolutely nothing to fear. I gave her a smile of gratitude and a respectful nod as I passed the cup back to her.
When she took it, she switched it for a folded flimsy. I blinked in surprise, but had sufficient presence of mind to clutch it in my fist and put my hand under the blanket. I unfolded it carefully and covertly, without having the least idea what to expect.
The message was simple enough. It said: Four suits and a homing device will be in airlock niney three periods after the lights go out. Someone will come for you. Two Tetrax will be with you. Do exactly as you are told, and all will be well.
It wasn’t signed.
That was hardly surprising.
What was surprising was that it was written in English.
22
You will, no doubt, remember my four criteria for maximising the success of an attempted jaibreak. You can imagine, I am sure, how confusing it was trying to weigh up our situation in the neo-Neanderthalers’ prison camp hospital in terms of those criteria.
I could see immediately that criteria one and two would be fairly readily met. The invaders, unlike the inhabitants of Goodfellow, were sufficiently slavish in their devotion to habit to maintain regular hours, and did not take the trouble to be overly vigilant in the hours of darkness. In addition, the epidemic which we’d brought with us was just beginning to break out among our genial hosts, and would presumably be causing a reasonable measure of chaos in the ranks. I had every faith in our ability to reach the relevant airlock easily and safely.
Criteria three and four, however, were the jokers in the pack. Did we have somewhere safe and cosy to go? Did we have anywhere to go? What sort of anywhere could there possibly be? It was all very well for our cryptic correspondent to assure me that a homing device would be provided along with suits to protect us from the alien atmosphere— but where was “home” supposed to be?
In addition to all these puzzles, I had also to worry about the identity of the man who had undertaken to assist us. As far as I knew, there was only one person outside of our sickroom who could write in English, and that was Aleksandr Sovorov. I could not think of any less likely person to mastermind a jailbreak. In the no-hoper stakes, Alex could give John Finn a hard race, and maybe beat him. At least Finn was devious; Alex had not even dishonesty to recommend him.
At the first opportunity, I slid out of bed and passed the note to Susarma Lear as covertly as it had been passed to me. I glanced in Finn’s direction, to indicate my suspicion that we needed to be discreet even among ourselves. Finn had not yet raised his ugly head to take notice of the rest of us, but I had observed when he took his food that he did not seem to be in any worse state than I was, which presumably meant that he was only pretending to be unconscious. Deceit came as naturally to him as breathing.
While the colonel read the note I moved into a position where I was between her and Finn, so that she could move her lips without being in his line of sight. That way, I figured, a whispered conversation could not be overheard.
She began with the obvious question: “Who sent this?”
“I don’t know,” I muttered. “Unless they’ve shipped more English-speaking prisoners down in the last couple of days, it can only have come from Aleksandr Sovorov. I can’t believe that he’s behind it, but he may be the middleman. If I had to guess, I’d say the Tetrax have arranged the break, and he’s relaying a message from them.”
“Why should the Tetrax want to spring us?” she asked.
“Who knows? Gratitude, maybe. They do have a strong sense of obligation, even to their slaves and other assorted catspaws.”
“You really believe that?”
“It’s not easy. I’ve met 822-Vela, and he didn’t seem to be a mastermind. But who can tell with the Tetrax? Anyhow—somebody sent it. Do we really have that much to lose?”
She pursed her lips. There was more than one possible answer to that.
If we jumped, we’d be leaping in the dark. We had to ask ourselves the usual questions: How bad was the frying pan we were in? And what sort of fire might we end up in?
“Do we go?” I asked. For once, I was looking for a second opinion. I guess being in the Star Force was beginning to pollute my soul. Instead of making up my own maverick mind, I was actually waiting for guidance from my superior officer. It can really take it out of you, being ill.
“Damn right we go,” she said. “How the hell else do we find out what’s going on? I’ll tell Serne.”
“What about . . . ?” I tossed my head slightly to indicate the guy behind me.
She favoured me with one of her best smouldering glares. “I don’t think we can trust the bastard,” she opined, in a fashion which suggested that Finn might be too ill to travel, whether he had recovered from his fever or not.
“It may be better to take him with us for precisely that reason,” I pointed out. “If he’s with us, we can keep an eye on him. If we leave him behind . . . who knows what he can get up to?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I guess he’s still in my command,” she said. “But I don’t know how long he was in their hands before they shipped him down here, and I don’t know how much he might have told them. We should never have brought him, in spite of his experience in the levels and his supposed knowledge of Tetron surveillance devices. We should have sent him to the penal battalion, where he belongs.”
I wasn’t about to quarrel with that. Had we but known why the Tetrax really wanted us. . . .
“What do you think is happening up above?” she asked.
“At a guess,” I said, “a pitched battle. The Tetrax in Skychain City—and anyone else they can trust—will be making the most of the epidemic. They’ve had months to figure out where to cut the invaders’ supply-routes. Starships will be landing to give support. For all we know, the Tetrax have plans to take control of ten or twenty of the levels below the city. Maybe they even know a way to get down here—and bring us out. I’m not prepared to underestimate their ability to wage effective war—not any more.”