Free Asgard's Conquerors by Brian Stableford

because his scientific curiosity was sufficient to outweigh his
anxieties as a member of a politically ambitious species. I was willing to bet
that some of his compatriots couldn't contemplate the possibility with similar
serenity.
    When I left him I had already begun to toy with scenarios in which
Asgard could be made to play some crucial role in my hypothetical galactic
gardening business.
    Maybe Asgard was the gardener's shed. Maybe it was a seed-bank.
    Or maybe it was the combine harvester.
    It didn't take long for me to get round to looking at the question from
the dark and nasty underside.
    Suppose, I told myself, that the galaxy is a garden, and that deep in
the heart of Asgard are its gardeners. But just suppose, for a moment, that we
aren't the crop that's being raised. Suppose we're only the weeds! And even if
we aren't, what can we possibly expect to happen when we come a-calling on the
creatures we hope we might become?
    I asked myself what might happen if a legion of Neanderthal men
suddenly turned up on the Earth's surface, expecting to be invited to the
party.
    It seemed a slightly ominous question even then, though I couldn't
imagine at the time how soon it would assume a much more peculiar relevance,
and what an awful answer might be implied by the example with which I was to be
confronted.

9
    By the time
we reached Asgard I had just about readjusted to one-gee, and my muscles—not
without a little help from the medics—were ready to go into the levels and give
of their best. The men were all trained in the use of cold-suits, and had been
as fully briefed on the geography of Skychain City as I could manage. I
wouldn't in all honesty say that they were raring to go, but the idea of
another tour of dangerous duty was hardly new to them. The only ones not
combat-hardened were Kramin's little bunch of thieves.
    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