The Golden One said that if I found Anya she would kill me as quickly and casually as a man swats an insect. And he would not revive me; perhaps he would be unable to do so, more likely he would be unwilling.
Very well, then, I thought. If I seek out Anya, wherever she is among the stars, and find that what Aten has told me is the truth, then I will be killed and that will be the end of it. The end of all suffering. The end of all my hopes and pains. The end of love.
But if he has been lying to me, if Anya still loves me and wants me with her, then it is lunacy for me to remain locked into this servitude. I should go out and find her.
Love or death. The ultimate stakes of life.
I began to plan.
The Golden One had his own plans for me, I discovered.
Once we reached sector base six I supervised the offloading of my troop’s cryosleep capsules. I wanted to begin retraining them for the mission I had in mind, and began to look into how I might tap into the computers that programmed the sleep training systems for the base.
But as I started cautiously playing with the computer terminal in my cramped quarters, Aten appeared to me once more. One instant I was sitting at the desk in my quarters, hunched over the keyboard and display screen.
The next I was on that grassy hillside above the Creators’ mausoleum of a city. The sun shone warmly, the wildflowers nodded in the breeze from the nearby sea. Waves washed up on the beach. I knew there were dolphins out there who regarded me as their friend.
A golden sphere appeared in the air before me, blazing radiance, forcing me to throw my arms up over my face and sink to my knees.
“That’s better, Orion,” I heard Aten’s arrogant voice say. “A properly worshipful position.”
When I dared to look up, the Golden One had assumed human form, standing before me in his immaculate military uniform.
“You did well on Bititu,” he said, almost grudgingly.
“It was a slaughter.”
“Yes, but necessary.”
“Why?”
“You mean you haven’t puzzled that out for yourself, Orion? You who claim to be almost as good as your Creators? You who scheme to find the goddess you’re so infatuated with? Why would the Commonwealth want Bititu?”
Not for itself, certainly, I reasoned swiftly. Then it must be valuable for its location. But there was nothing else in the Jilbert system except the fading red dwarf star itself, a single gas giant planet orbiting close to it, and the scattered debris of other asteroids, dead chunks of rock and metal….
I looked into Aten’s gold-flecked eyes. “There was once another planet in the system. You destroyed it.”
“Two others, Orion,” he answered. “We destroyed them both.”
“How many were killed?”
He shrugged carelessly. “The Hegemony had planted colonies on those worlds. They were turning them into powerful military bases.”
“But what did that threaten?” I asked. “There’s no Commonwealth world for a hundred light-years or more.”
“So?” he taunted. “Think, Orion. Think.”
The only other planet in the Jilbert system was the gas giant, a huge blue world covered in clouds. Beneath those clouds the planet’s gases would be condensed by its massive gravity field into liquids. A planetwide ocean. Of water, perhaps.
It hit me. “The Old Ones.”
Aten actually clapped his hands. “Very good, Orion. The Jilbert gas giant is a world on which the Old Ones have lived since time immemorial. Perhaps it is their original home world.”
“The Hegemony established their bases in the system in an attempt to establish contact with the Old Ones.”
“And to prevent us from making such contact,” the Golden One added.
“Now that we’ve driven the Hegemony out of the system,” I reasoned, “you want to try to reach the Old Ones.”
Like a patient schoolteacher, Aten prompted, “And since you are the only person the Old Ones have seen fit to talk to…”
“You want me,” I finished his thought, “to attempt to contact them again.”
“Exactly.”
My mind was churning, trying to set this new factor into my plans without letting Aten realize what my true objective was.
“In that case,” I said, “I will need a ship and a crew.”
“I can send you there without such paraphernalia,” he said.
“And have me tread water in that planetwide ocean until the Old Ones deign to speak to me?” I retorted. “Can I breathe that planet’s atmosphere? Can I eat the fish that swim in that sea?”
He nodded. “I see what you’re after, Orion. You want the survivors of your assault team to be retrained as crew for your vessel. Touchingly virtuous of you, to be so loyal to such creatures.”
“They are human beings,” I said.
“Manufactured to be soldiers. Weapons, Orion, nothing more.”
“Your ancestors,” I reminded him.
Aten laughed derisively. “So are tree shrews, Orion. Do you feel pangs of conscience for them?”
Before I could answer, the entire scene disappeared as suddenly as a snap of the fingers and I was hunched over my computer screen again in my quarters at sector base six.
The computer beeped and my orders appeared on the display screen: I was to command a scout ship and return to the Jilbert system where I would contact the Old Ones and invite them to join the Commonwealth.
I saw to it that my cryosleeping troopers received the training they needed to run a scout vessel. I myself spent almost all my time in the training center with a crown of electrodes clamped to my head as the training computer poured information into my brain. I wondered if this was the way Aten trained me for my various missions throughout space-time, while I was unconscious.
In a week my troopers were revived and our ship arrived, a sleek disk-shaped scout named Apollo . I frowned when I first learned the name; the Golden One had styled himself Apollo to the awestruck ancient Greeks and Trojans. Aside from the name, though, I found the vessel trim and fit, and my troopers transformed by their cryosleep training into a crew that at least appeared to know what it was doing.
Frede was still my second-in-command, and Apollo’s navigation officer. Little Jerron was now chief engineer. Ordinary mutts who had been little more than cannon fodder on Lunga and Bititu now found themselves classified as ship’s officers, in charge of weapons, logistics, damage control, communications, medical services. They grinned at their newfound stature, but they took their new duties quite seriously.
And, one by one, each of them thanked me for getting them better duty. Emon, our weapons officer, put it best:
“The longer we stay with you, sir, the better off we’ll be. If we live through it.”
I believe he was entirely serious.
We spent two days directing the robots that outfitted and stocked Apollo with supplies; then we left sector base six and started our run back to the Jilbert system.
Except that we never got there.
Chapter 22
Frede and the others were happy to be awake, alive, and running a starship rather than fighting as expendable infantry.
“This makes us more important to the Commonwealth,” Frede told me. “More valuable.”
“And it’s easier duty,” said weapons officer Emon. As a sergeant, he had been wounded twice during the assault on Bititu. Frede’s official title was now “first mate,” which set off a lot of jokes because she once again had jiggered the sleeping assignments so that she shared my bunk.
The bridge was compact, built more for efficiency than comfort, with only five duty stations jammed in cheek by jowl. Tactical command and all the ship’s information systems were tied together in the consoles and data screens that surrounded us. From my command chair I could see anything in the ship I needed to see, call up all of the computer files, activate any system aboard the vessel.
We made the transition to superlight velocity as smoothly as if the crew had spent years aboard the ship. As far as their memories and reflexes were concerned, they had. Neural training, whether awake or in cryosleep, leaves virtually the same imprint on the brain and nervous system as actual experience would.
“What if we could just fly this ship forever,” Frede whispered to me one night in our bunk. “Just forget the war and everything and go out among the stars for the rest of our lives.”
“Would you like that?” I asked.
“Yes!” She clutched at my bare shoulders. “Never to be frozen again. To be free. It’d be wonderful.”
“To be free,” I murmured, knowing that in all the eras of space-time in which I had existed, I had never been free.
“There are others,” she whispered. “You hear stories about them.”
“About who?” I asked.
“Renegades. Units that disappeared, just walked off into the jungle and never were heard from again. Ships that took off on their own, split from the fleet and ran away forever.”
I knew all about renegades. Lukka and his squad of mercenaries, fighting for their lives in the shambles of the Hittite empire’s collapse; Harkan and his band of thieves roaming the mountains of Anatolia, searching for his enslaved children; guerrillas from a thousand wars in a thousand different eras.
“And the war,” I asked her gently. “Our duty to the Commonwealth?”
She hesitated for a moment, realizing that she was speaking to her superior officer even though we happened to be lying nude in bed together.
“How long have you been serving the Commonwealth, Orion?”
I evaded a direct answer. “Time loses its meaning.”
“I’ve been serving all my life,” Frede said. “So have we all. It’s all we know, the army. It’s all we have to look forward to, until the day we’re killed.”
There was a trigger phrase, of course, that came with my orders. Whenever the crew began to show signs of humanity, indications that they were thinking of themselves instead of their duty to the Commonwealth, all I had to say was “Remember Yellowflower.”
The planet Yellowflower, according to the Commonwealth’s history of the war, had been suddenly and ruthlessly attacked, destroyed by Hegemony forces without a declaration of war, scoured down to bedrock. Four billion human beings had been killed, the planet’s entire biosphere totally obliterated. Yellowflower had been the start of the war, three generations earlier.
According to the Commonwealth’s history. I recalled the human scientists on Lunga telling me that it had been Tsihn attacks on Hegemony worlds that had started the war.
I stroked Frede’s short-cropped hair. “It’s not so bad now. We’ve got this fine ship. As long as we stay in superlight no one can touch us.”
“But sooner or later we’ll drop back to relativistic speed and reenter the war.”
“Maybe,” I murmured, not yet ready to tell her what I was hoping to do.
She fell asleep and I lay on the bunk beside her. As captain of this vessel, my quarters were small but comfortable. Frede was right: the galaxy is huge; one ship could lose itself among the stars. But what of all the other ships, all the other assault teams and regiments and armies and battle fleets? What right did we have to run away and hide while others were fighting to their deaths, humans and aliens, Commonwealth and Hegemony?
There has to be a way to stop this killing, I told myself. There has to be.
A warning, Orion.
It was a voice from the Old Ones, in my mind. I recognized it instantly. Closing my eyes, I felt a moment of utter cold, the wild plunging sensation of nothingness, and then I was swimming in the warm sea of their ocean once again. A dozen or more of the Old Ones glided through the deep, dark water with me, pulsating colors, tentacles waving as if in greeting.
“Is this the planet in the Jilbert system or am I back on Lunga?” I asked.
“What difference?” came their reply. “In a sense, we are on both worlds-and many others, as well.”
I thought I understood. Each of the Old Ones swimming around me came from a different planet. They had all come together to meet with me; each of us was light-years from all the others, yet we swam together in this fathomless ocean.
“You said you wanted to warn me of something?”
Their response seemed to come from all of them, even though I heard it as only one voice.
“Orion, your war grows deeper and more violent. It troubles us.”
“I have been asked by one of my Creators to encourage you to join the Commonwealth,” I said. “Their reasoning is that, with you on their side, they will quickly end the war.”
“In victory for the Commonwealth, at the expense of the Hegemony.”
“Yes.”
“Since this slaughter began,” they said, “we and others of our maturity have remained totally neutral.”
“Others?” I asked.
“There are many, many races among the galaxies, Orion. And even between them. You humans have met and interacted with species of your own youthful stage of development. You interact with your own intellectual peers. You trade with them. You fight with them.”
“While you older species remain aloof from us.”
“From you, and from the Skorpis, the Tsihn, the race you call the Arachnoids, and all the others who have not yet achieved the wisdom to avoid slaughtering one another.”
I got the impression of a group of gray-haired elders watching a gaggle of noisy brats fighting in a sandbox.
“But your war grows more violent,” they repeated.
I agreed. “There seems to be no end to it.”
“From the outset you slaughtered billions of your own kind, eradicated all life-forms from entire planets, blasting them down to their rocky mantles.
“Then you escalated the violence. Whole planets were blown up, as were the two outer worlds in the Jilbert system, blasted into fragments.”
“I know,” I said.
The voice became grave. “Now the violence is about to escalate again. The Commonwealth has perfected a weapon that can destroy a star. The weapon creates a core collapse of the star; a supernova explosion is the result.”
I felt a hollow sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.
“This must not be allowed.”
“If the Commonwealth unleashes this weapon,” I told them, “then the Hegemony won’t rest until it develops something similar.”
“We will not permit stars to be destroyed.”
“Not permit…?”
“Give this message to your Creators, to the leaders of both warring factions: Tell them that if they attempt to destroy a star they themselves will be eliminated from the continuum.”
“Eliminated?”
“The human race, the Skorpis, the Tsihn, all the warring species will be extinguished.”
“How? What do you intend to do?”
“The older species have maintained neutrality throughout your squabbles. But we cannot allow you to destroy the very stars on which the continuum hinges. Attempt to attack a single star, and we will eliminate you-all of you-completely.”
They spoke with one voice, an implacable finality in their tone.
“Go back to your Creators and tell them what we have said, Orion. The fate of many species depends on their reaction to our warning.”
I sat bolt upright on my bunk. Frede lay sleeping peacefully beside me, a little girl’s smile on her relaxed face.
The Old Ones were using me as a messenger again. It’s not enough that Aten manipulates me, the Old Ones use me to manipulate him and the other Creators.
But then I smiled. Did the Old Ones know my inner thoughts, my plans? I had hoped to use this scout ship to find Anya, somewhere deep in Hegemony territory. Now the Old Ones had given me a reason for seeking her. I had to warn her about the Commonwealth’s star-wrecker.
The third watch still had an hour to go when I came onto the bridge and relieved Dyer, my logistics/damage-control officer, who had the command. The watch was almost entirely perfunctory; as long as we were in superlight velocity there was nothing to worry about except a possible internal malfunction.
Taking the command chair, I ransacked the ship’s computer records for information about the Hegemony. Where was their capital planet? What kind of defenses guarded it? Would they honor a flag of truce on a Commonwealth ship?
The computer could not tell me, of course, if Anya was in the Hegemony’s capital. The data screens showed their capital planet, Prime, in the Zeta system. I viewed their cities and learned their population, history, economy, social customs, politics, military capabilities-much data, little understanding.
The screens showed Prime itself to be a gray, forbidding city of massive stone buildings rising out of dark cliffs into a heavy cloudy sky. Its streets were almost empty, swept by gusts of rain and sleet. Giant Skorpis warriors seemed to be at every intersection, serving as police or militia guards. The people of Prime looked grim, dour, humorless.
“Why the interest in Prime?”
I looked up from the screens surrounding my chair and saw Frede standing beside me, looking curious. At the touch of a keypad I blanked the screens.
“That’s where we’re going,” I said.
“Prime?” she squeaked. “But that’s the Hegemony’s capital!”
The four others on duty in the bridge turned and stared at us.
“I have secret orders,” I told her. But I didn’t say who the orders had come from. “We’re on a mission of diplomacy to Prime.”
“They’ll blow us out of the galaxy the instant we drop out of superlight,” Frede said.
“Let’s hope not.”
Reluctantly she followed my command to set course for the Hegemony capital. I planned to send out message capsules ahead of us once we neared the Zeta system, so the Hegemony defenders would be warned that we were coming and that our mission was a peaceful one. Frede and the rest of the crew thought the Hegemony ships would shoot first and check on our story after we were safely dead. The almost happy air about the ship dissolved into soldierly griping and dread.
There was something more that I could do, of course. That night, while Frede slept, I tried with all my energies to reach across the span of space-time and contact Anya. Nothing. It was like facing a blank wall too high to climb, too wide to go around.
So I reached out to Aten, instead. Concentrating on my memory of the Creators’ city, I translated myself to its timeless stasis in the continuum. I found myself standing atop a Mayan pyramid in the heart of the city, high enough to look out across its broad empty avenues toward the eternal sea. The sun’s warmth Was tempered slightly by the shimmering golden dome of energy that encased the city.
Aten looked surprised when I appeared. He and several other of the Creators were apparently locked deep in conference, there at the top of the steep stone pyramid. They were all standing together before the sacrificial altar: Aten in a white and gold military uniform; the dark-bearded one I thought of as Zeus in a comfortable tunic and slacks; rust-haired Ares; slim, sharp-eyed Hermes; and the beautiful redheaded woman who had styled herself Hera in an earlier age.
It was Hermes who spied me first; the others had their backs to me as they talked earnestly among themselves.
“Look who’s here,” Hermes said, touching Aten on the shoulder.
They all turned toward me, wide-eyed with surprise.
Hera smiled maliciously at me. “Who invited you, Orion?”
“The Old Ones,” I answered.
That stifled any complaints or gibes they intended to make. “What do you mean?” Aten snapped.
“They have given me a message for you. A warning,” I said. “If you try to use the star-destroying weapon the Commonwealth has developed, the Old Ones will destroy you.”
Ares glared at me. “How could they know about the star-wrecker? You told them, Orion! You’re a traitor!”
“I didn’t know about the weapon until they told me of it,” I retorted.