Asgard's Conquerors by Brian Stableford

said.
"They think we're fortunate to get the job. I suppose there aren't many
men with your experience who weren't on Asgard at the time of the attack. Lucky
you left Asgard when you did."
    I wasn't so sure that "lucky" was the right word. In any
case, I may have left, but I certainly hadn't got away.
    "I don't like it," I said. "I don't like it at
all."
    "They guessed that you wouldn't," she pointed out.
"That's why they put the word out that you were to be arrested as soon as
you made any kind of landfall. They knew you were already rich. They felt they
had to make you an offer you couldn't refuse."
    She had the grace not to look too pleased about it. She wasn't about to
issue an official apology on behalf of the Star Force, but she'd made it pretty
clear that she didn't agree with her superiors. I wondered whether that was
just a bit of diplomatic chicanery—Sorry, Rousseau, the big men have it in for
you but I'm your pal!—but her expression and her manner implied that she meant
what she said.
    "Suppose," I said, speculatively, "that I say no."
    "Do you have any idea what the penalty is for disobeying orders—given
that the state of emergency is still in force?"
    I hazarded a guess that I might get shot.
    She passed a hardened hand through her stiff, pale hair, and opined
that indeed I might.
    She pursed her lips, and stared me full in the face with her big blue
eyes. I could imagine any number of ways she could have used that stare while
building her career—she had a very powerful personality.
    "We're in this together," she told me.
    A more impressionable man than me might have been quite won over by a
remark like that. Some men go for domineering women, and even those who don't
can get a certain satisfaction out of having to be around someone as strikingly
handsome as Susarma Lear. Personally, I'd been on my own far too long to be
suckered by that kind of attraction. I thought.
    "In that case," I said, "when I get out of it, I'll
think about helping you out, too."
    I can make false promises just as easily as the next man.

7
    So there it
was. Fate wanted me back on Asgard and it was prepared to do whatever it had to
do in order to get me there.
    As soon as our little formal gathering was over we were hustled aboard Leopard
Shark , and Leopard Shark was hurled into the
slickest wormhole she could make, scheduled to make her rendezvous in the
inner reaches of the Asgard system in forty days.
    I had always thought of space travel as one of the most boring
activities ever devised by man. A starship pilot doesn't have to do anything,
except tell the machines what needs to be done; artificial intelligences in the
software take care of the rest. But the Star Force was a whole new way of life,
and the business of learning to be a starship soldier left little time for
boredom.
    I had to learn how to handle dozens of different bits of equipment,
including weapons of every shape and size. I had to learn combat techniques,
survival strategies, and how to defend myself against all kinds of dangers that
my vivid imagination could never have conjured up on its own.
    During the remaining hours of each day I had to tell the men who'd be
going with us everything I knew about the levels, and I had to train them in
the use of cold-suits and all the other items of equipment that scavengers find
handy. There was a certain overlap, it's true, between Star Force equipment and
the kind of stuff the Tetrax and others had devised for getting by in the upper
levels, but the one kind of environment which had never cropped up in all the
skirmishes of the war against the Salamandrans was the one we were going into
now.
    All of the practice, needless to say, had to be undertaken in one gee,
and Leopard Shark was spun to produce it. I'd been in low-gee, save
for very brief periods, for several months, and at the end of every day on the
Star Force cruiser I ached.
    Men of the branch of the Star Force to which I now belonged were only
passengers