Too late. One of the dying warriors pulled a grenade from his equipment belt and tossed it toward the hatch. I saw it wobbling on a lazy arc toward Emon and his crewmen. I fired at it, hit it, and it exploded in a shower of white-hot shrapnel. Howls of pain came from the ladderway. A body thudded down onto the main deck.
I crawled along the deck plates, firing into the crouching Skorpis who were using their own dead as shields for themselves. I rolled headfirst down into the ladder well, grabbed a rail and let myself slide down the rest of the way to the main deck.
Emon’s head and shoulders were covered with blood, his own and his crewmates’. One of the men sprawled dead on the deck, the other clutched a shredded arm with one hand.
“I’m okay,” Emon said. “I can still shoot.” But when he tried to stand he staggered into my arms.
I pulled him away from the ladderway and into the comparative safety of a compartment hatch. Then I went back and got the other wounded man. I saw laser beams zipping past the open ladder hatch, up above.
Sitting the wounded man against the bulkhead of the compartment, I told Emon, “The Skorpis will be pouring down that ladderway in a few moments.”
“I’ll hold ’em off,” he said, hefting his rifle in bloodied hands.
“Do the best you can,” I said. I left him there and sprinted down the passageway toward Frede and the rest of our crew.
“They blew the other hatches,” I told her.
“I heard it.”
“Get those people down here.” I pointed to the crew who were still firing from the top of the ladder. “We’ll make our stand in the cargo bay.”
“Right.”
They must know that we’re carrying Anya in this ship. For some reason they want her alive. They don’t want her to surrender to the Commonwealth, but they’d rather take her back to Hegemony territory, if they can.
I ran past the dead and smoking bridge, ducked down the ladderway to the lower deck and raced for the cargo hold where Anya’s cryosleep capsule lay. Her sarcophagus, I thought.
Four Skorpis warriors were already prying the cargo bay hatch open when I hit the lower deck. They were in space suits and did not hear me running up the passageway toward them. I gave them no chance. I fired my rifle from the hip as I ran toward them. The oxygen tanks on their life-support systems exploded, blowing them to sticky shreds.
Twelve more space-suited warriors came pounding up the passageway from the other end, where the air-lock hatch was. Too many for me to handle by myself, especially when they were firing laser rifles at me. I backpedaled, then turned and ran into the nearest protective hatch. I found myself in the transceiver station, a flat open bay with a small console standing to one side.
Using the passageway hatch to shelter me, I fired at the Skorpis who stood near the cargo bay hatch. I saw one sag and slide down the bulkhead, his helmet smoking where my rifle beam had caught him. The others turned toward me, in dreamlike slow motion, raising their rifles toward me. I fired twice, shattering a helmet visor and burning a hole through the arm of another Skorpis. They backed away, firing. I ducked back inside the transceiver bay hatch.
A standoff. They could not get into the cargo bay; neither could I.
I wondered if the ship was still hurtling toward Loris, and if the planet’s defensive systems would blast the Skorpis battle cruiser and us with it. Or had the cruiser’s captain maneuvered us away from our collision course with the planet?
Footsteps running up the passageway. I glanced out and saw Frede leading the rest of the crew. I counted only thirty.
“Look out!” I yelled. “They’re at the other end of the passageway, by the cargo bay hatch.”
Frede and her people flattened out against the bulkheads, firing and being fired upon as they, one by one, ducked into the transceiver bay with me.
“We caught the other boarding party coming through the after hatch,” she said. “Took some casualties.”
“So I see.” None of them were unwounded. Frede’s face was smeared with blood and sweat.
But she grinned. “We wiped them out. Killed every last one of those damned cats.”
That leaves only a couple of hundred, I thought. It was obvious that the Skorpis battle cruiser had attached itself to our air lock. We were not dealing with a shuttle load of warriors, not the way they were pouring reinforcements into our ship.
“They’re regrouping down the passageway,” I said. “Probably getting reinforcements before they charge us.”
“The first landing party, up by the main air lock-”
“They’ll be coming down here the same way you came. We’ll have our hands full.”
“Still thinking of taking their ship?”
I laughed bitterly.
Looking over the ragged remains of my crew, I saw that little Jerron was badly burned in the abdomen and left leg. He lay panting, wide-eyed with shock, with our medical officer bending over him.
“Magro,” I called to the comm officer. “Can you power up the transceiver?”
He was grimy and breathing hard, like all the others. But he gave me a nod and said, “I can try, sir.”
“What are you thinking?” Frede asked.
Peering down the dimly lit, smoky passageway, I could see no Skorpis. They were beyond the air-lock hatch, preparing their next attack on us.
“They want the cryo capsule in the cargo hold,” I told Frede. “Maybe we can beam it down to the planet.”
“We’d have to drag it in here,” Frede objected.
“We could cut through the bulkhead. Are there any flight packs stashed in that cargo bay? That would make it easier to move the capsule.”
Clearly, she did not think much of my idea. But she said, “I’ll get a couple of people to cut through the bulkhead.”
Nodding, I turned my attention back to the empty passageway. The Skorpis could cut through the ship’s outer hull and get into the cargo bay that way, I knew. Would they try that, or would they first try to wipe us out and walk into the cargo bay after we were done with?
Why not blow a hole in the hull right here, in the transceiver bay, and kill us all at one stroke? Blow out the hull, expose us to vacuum; none of us had space suits. Explosive decompression, we’d be dead in an instant. The thought startled me. But then I reasoned that if they had wanted to do that they would have done it by now. A blast big enough to puncture the hull would probably damage Anya’s cryosleep capsule, as well, and it seemed that they wanted Anya alive. If possible.
Waiting, wondering what would happen next, was harder than actually fighting. Behind me I heard the crackling sizzle of lasers cutting through the metal of the bulkhead separating us from the cargo bay. The passageway remained empty. Whatever the Skorpis were planning, they were taking their time about it.
I heard a crewman sing out, “Watch it, the section’s falling.”
Glancing over my shoulder I saw a whole section of the bulkhead, its edges glowing red, fall inward, scattering the crewmen who had burned it through. It thumped loudly, making me wonder if the Skorpis could hear it.
“Damn,” I heard Frede call, her voice echoing in the nearly empty cargo bay, “not a flight pack in the place. We’ll have to muscle it.”
I called Dyer and told her to watch the passageway. Then I stepped through the jagged hole in the bulkhead to join the team of sweating, grunting, cursing men and women who were tugging at the massive cryosleep capsule.
“Heavier than a sergeant’s ass,” one of the men muttered.
“Heavier than your ass, anyway.”
It was like dragging one of the stones for Khufu’s pyramid without the aid of rollers. The capsule screeched along the metal deck plates, moving grudgingly, a millimeter at a time. I called almost all the remaining members of the crew to help us, as I watched through sweat-stung eyes while Magro bent over the transceiver console, a puzzled frown on his face as he pecked tentatively at the keyboard.
At last we hauled the capsule onto the transceiver stage. I felt as if I had dragged the planet Jupiter through a light-year of mud.
Trudging slowly to Magro at the console, I asked, “You do have power, don’t you?”
“Yessir,” he said, still frowning at the readouts. “But I don’t know where we are in relation to the planet. I need a navigational fix.”
I turned to Frede, who was leaning against the side of the capsule, mopping her sweaty face. “How can we-”
“Here they come!” yelped Dyer. And a grenade went off at her feet, blowing her legs off.
Chapter 29
I grabbed for my rifle and raced to the hatch just as a Skorpis warrior stepped through, pistol in one hand, grenade in the other. My senses were so hyper that I could see the slits of his irises moving in his eyeballs as he raised his arm to throw the grenade into our midst.
I fired and the grenade exploded in his hand, hot shrapnel streaking through the transceiver bay. I was knocked off my feet by the blast, my arm and chest stung by searing bits of sharp metal. Most of my crew were already diving to the deck. Magro ducked behind the transceiver console as several shards of shrapnel peppered its plastic stand.
The bulkhead along the passageway began to glow a dull red and I realized that the Skorpis were doing what we had done: burning their way through the bulkhead.
“Get them away from the hatch!” I bellowed, scrambling to my feet. Automatically I closed down the pain receptors and tightened the blood vessels where I had been hit.
Almost a dozen rifle beams converged on the hatch, driving the Skorpis away from it. I raced to it, dived onto my belly and skidded partway out into the passage, firing point-blank at the armored warriors grouped around the hatch.
Someone yanked at my ankles and pulled me back into the relative safety of the bay. I kicked free and yelled, “We’ve got to clear the passageway of them! Otherwise they’ll burn through the bulkhead and pour in here!”
We made the hatchway our bastion. Kneeling, lying prone, standing along its curved metal rim, we fired into the passageway and drove the Skorpis back. They were on both sides of the hatch, coming at us from both ends of the passage. We cut down the warriors who were trying to burn through the bulkhead and drove their cohorts back out of range of our rifles.
But they came at us again, behind a barrage of rocket grenades. There were so many that I could pick off fewer than half of them before they exploded in showers of fragments that forced us away from the hatch. I saw my crew mates fall, chests ripped open, blood spewing, faces screaming in the sudden realization of death.
We backed away and the Skorpis resumed cutting open the bulkhead. I saw it all in slow motion, firing, shouting, men and women sinking to their knees, Skorpis warriors in their armored space suits falling as they shot at us, the bulkhead separating us from the passageway glowing cherry red under their laser torches. We retreated to the cryo capsule and hid behind it, hugging its massive flank for protection as the bulkhead finally crashed down in three separate places and scores of Skorpis warriors poured in upon us.
Their laser bolts splashed off the engraved flank of the cryo capsule, making its surface hot to touch. They were too close to us to use grenades without killing themselves, but they advanced, a centimeter at a time, past the bodies of their own dead, crawling along the deck plates to get at us.
I saw that they were trying to outflank us, get around to the sides of the chamber where we would not have the cryo capsule between ourselves and them. I fired at them until my rifle went dead, then started using my pistol.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” I shouted into Frede’s ear.
“Good thinking,” she snapped. “How?”
“Transceiver.”
“Not me!” She shook her head as she sprayed a quartet of Skorpis warriors with burning laser fire.
“We’re dead if we don’t.”
“We’re dead if we do. I don’t care if a copy of me lands on Loris.”
But I was thinking of Anya. She knew that coming to Loris would mean throwing herself on Aten’s mercy. She knew that surrendering to the Commonwealth could mean final, utter, irretrievable death for her. Yet she had come, she had insisted on this desperate gamble for peace, because she wanted to stop the war. I had thought that she-like the other Creators-cared only for their own safety. But now I realized that she also cared about the billions of humans who were enmeshed in this endless killing. She wanted to face Aten and stop the war, no matter what the cost to herself.
And I would do everything I could, anything I could, to help her.
I glanced at the control console. Magro lay at its foot in a pool of blood.
“You don’t even know where the planet is anymore,” Frede insisted. “You can’t jump blind!”
“It’s our only chance.”
“Orion, don’t!” Frede warned.
“We’re already dead,” I shouted into her ear, over the blasts of the guns and the screams of the fighting, half-crazed humans and Skorpis. “What difference does it make?”
“I’ll take down as many of these damned cats as I can,” Frede shouted back. “I won’t take the coward’s way out.”
That was her training, I knew. The programming the army pumped into her brain while she was in cryosleep. Fight as long as you can. Take as many of the enemy as possible. Never surrender.
“I’ve got to try,” I said.
She put the muzzle of her rifle under my chin. It was burning hot. “Stay and fight, Orion.”
“You’d shoot me?”
“I’d shoot any coward who tried to run away.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw that three Skorpis warriors were trying to edge across the bay and flank us again. They were dragging the bodies of fallen warriors to shield them.
“There!” I yelled, and fired at them. Frede’s heavier rifle beam burned through one of the corpses and hit the warrior behind it. I hit another on the top of his helmet. The third scampered backward, back toward the protection of his mates.
And I jumped out from behind the cryo capsule, crabbing sideways to Magro’s body and the slim protection of the console stand. As I raised my head high enough to look at the console instruments, I saw Frede aim her rifle at me.
Time froze. I did not blame her for wanting to kill me. As far as she was concerned, I was killing her. Matter transmission destroyed the thing being sent and assembled a copy of it elsewhere. Did it matter if the Skorpis killed us or the transceiver did? I punched the key that activated the transceiver as I stared at Frede, who locked her finger on the rifle’s trigger.
But did not fire.
Everything went black. I recognized the blast of deathly cold that enveloped me. And I realized for the first time that the translations through the continuum that I had undergone were forms of matter transmission; the transceivers being used in this era were actually primitive forerunners of the capabilities that Aten and the other Creators used at their whim.
I had used them, too. Without knowing how it was done, knowing only how to direct such energies, I had translated myself across the continuum more than once.
Now, in this moment of absolute nothingness, I realized that I had to control not only my own translation through space-time, but those of all the others, as well. And I realized something more: Every time I had died and been revived by the Golden One-it was no revival at all. He merely built new copies of me. When I died, that person died forever, as completely and finally as the lowliest earthworm dies. A new Orion was created by the Golden One to do his bidding, and given the memories that Aten thought he should have. I laughed in the soundless infinity of the void. I was not immortal at all; merely copied.
But that meant that Aten and the other Creators were no more immortal than I. They could die. They could be killed. Anya would die, unless I found a way to save her.
That way lay on the planet Loris, capital of the Commonwealth, where Aten directed the war.
I saw Loris in my mind, an Earthlike planet of blue oceans and white clouds. I reached out mentally and sensed Frede and the others of my crew. And Anya, frozen in sleep inside the cryonic capsule.
Distantly, I sensed others observing me. The Creators? Aten? No, I did not feel the snide derision of the Golden One or the haughty disdain of his fellow Creators. It was the Old Ones reaching to me. I felt the warmth of their approval, the strength of their help. This one time they were actually unbending from their aloofness to help me.
“Loris,” I said without words, without sound or the body to speak with. Into the blank emptiness of the void between space-times, I gathered Anya and my crew and willed us to the planet Loris.
Chapter 30
Voices struck at me.
“What is it?”
“How can it be?”
“They just-appeared! Pop! Just like that.”
I opened my eyes, glad that I had eyes and ears and an existence in the world again.
We were in a wide, sunny city plaza, what was left of us. Frede still leaned against the cryo capsule, pointing her rifle at me. The others of my crew were slumped against the capsule’s curved flank. The side that had faced the Skorpis’s guns was so hot that it steamed in the afternoon air.
The plaza was filled with people. Well-dressed men and women. The buildings that lined the spacious open square were all graceful towers of glass and gleaming metal. The square was paved with colorful tiles. A fountain sprayed water barely a dozen meters from where we had landed. The people gaped at us as if we were ghosts or some strange alien apparition. More people were gathering around us, talking, pointing, staring.
We were a grimy crew. Bloody, sweaty, aching and parched from our deadly battle. Eighteen of us still alive. Our uniforms were torn, our faces streaked with dirt.
“Who are they?” an elderly woman asked.
“How dare they show themselves here?”
“I think they’re soldiers!”
“Soldiers? You mean, from the army?”
“What are they doing here?”
“They must be soldiers of some sort. Look at the guns they’re carrying.”
“You’re not permitted to carry weapons in the capital,” a cross-faced man shouted at us. “I’ve summoned the police.”
“They smell terrible!”
“Yes, we smell terrible and we look terrible,” I shouted at them. “We’ve been fighting and dying to save you from being invaded.”
They gasped.
“He’s insane!”
“The whole group-look at them! Obvious lunatics.”
“Where are the police? I called for them more than a minute ago.”
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. “Don’t you realize there’s a battle going on in orbit above you? Don’t you know you’re at war?”
“It’s some sort of trick.”
“New theater. The younger generation always tries to shock their elders.”
One of the gray-haired women stepped up to me, barely as tall as my collarbone. “See here, young man, there’s no use trying to frighten us. The war is being fought a thousand light-years away from here.”
I shook my head in a combination of disbelief and disgust, then turned away from her and went over to what was left of my crew.
Frede and the rest of my crew were just as stunned as the civilians. She lowered her rifle, slumped against the sleep capsule and let herself slide down to a sitting position. The others sprawled, exhausted, on the brightly colored tile pavement.
“This is Loris?” Frede asked.
I nodded. “The capital of the Commonwealth.”