“Then we’ve got to get out of here pretty quickly.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “But how?”
That was a problem without a solution that I could find. There were forty-nine of us, unarmed, under constant watch, in the middle of a camp of at least a thousand Skorpis. I racked my brain for days on end trying to come up with a plan that might have some faint chance of working. Nothing.
Until one night it hit me. We don’t need to escape. We need to be rescued.
I lay on the plastic floor of our prison, Frede next to me, staring up at the blank ceiling. I still had no clothes except the shorts I had been wearing for weeks. I closed my eyes and called silently to Aten.
There was no answer. Nor had I expected one, at first. Summoning up my will and my memory, I translated myself to the empty city of the Creators and stood once again beneath the warm sun on the hillside overlooking the city and the sea.
To those who can manipulate space-time, it matters little if you are in a certain place for a moment or a millennium. You can always return to the place and the time where you started.
“I can wait,” I called the cloud-flecked blue sky. “I can wait as long as you can.”
I did not have to wait long. Almost immediately a silver glowing sphere appeared before me, so bright I could not look at it, yet I felt no heat from its brilliance. It coalesced, took the form of a man. The Creator whom I thought of as Hermes: dark-haired, lean, the hint of mischief in his ebony eyes.
“Orion, the disturbance you make in the continuum is like a toothache.”
“When did you ever experience a toothache?” I countered.
He grinned at me. “What is it? What brings you here all hot and impatient?”
“Are you part of this interstellar war?” I asked.
“Of course. We all are.”
“And whose side are you on?”
His trickster’s face took on a sly, cunning look. “Does it make a difference to you?”
“Can you take me to Anya?”
He thought a moment, then shook his head. “Better not to, Orion. She bears the weight of our future on her shoulders. She would not be glad to see either one of us.”
“You serve the Golden One, then.”
“I serve no one!” he blazed. “I have put in my lot on Aten’s side, though, that is true.”
“Then tell him that he must rescue my troop from the Skorpis base on Lunga.”
“Tell him that he must? By your word?”
“If he expects me to serve him further,” I said.
Hermes actually blinked at me. “You bargain with your Creator?”
I smiled back at him. “No, you bargain with him. I must return to my troopers.”
And I opened my eyes in the prison shack at the Skorpis base, with Frede sleeping soundly beside me.
The rescue attempt, when it came, was just as fouled up as every other aspect of our mission to Lunga.
It was early afternoon. I was out in the submersible with nine of the other human scientists, including Delos—who went on every cruise—and Randa, who still seemed hostile and distant most of the time, although she could thaw slightly, especially when there was some interesting science to talk about.
The Skorpis warrior who accompanied us, so big that he could barely squeeze through the sub’s hatches, filled the tiny comm compartment with his bulk. If humans felt uncomfortably dwarfed in Skorpis furniture, this warrior seemed ridiculous with a comm set clamped to his furry head. It was designed for human ears and human dimensions, but the warrior had managed to get the earphone to stay in his cuplike ear by slapping a strip of gummy tape across his head. It must have hurt when he pulled it off. I could see the pale scars of earlier tapes etched into his greenish fur.
“Return to base,” he rumbled.
Delos, in the next compartment bent over the sensor displays, jerked his head up so suddenly he banged it on the metal overhead.
He yelped with pain, then said, “Return? Why?”