“End this war,” I urged him. “Stop the killing. What’s so important that it makes you send billions to their deaths?”
“What’s so important about those billions that it matters when and how they die? They’re creatures, Orion. Creatures. My creations. I can use them as I choose. I use them as I must.”
“Why should we help you to carry on this war? What’s the point of it? Why can’t you stop it?”
Aten shook his head as if disappointed in me. “How little you understand, my creature. Don’t you think I would end the war if I could? It isn’t that easy, Orion.”
“Why not?”
“If it takes two to make a fight, it also takes two to make peace. Anya and her ilk won’t stop fighting. They want their way, and that way will lead us all to utter disaster.”
“She must think differently.”
“She is wrong!”
I thought, If only I could find Anya, speak with her, learn why she is fighting, what her goals are.
But the Golden One read my thoughts as easily as if I had spoken them aloud. “She would kill you out of hand, Orion. The goddess you love now seeks only blood and vengeance. Anyone serving me is her enemy and she will destroy them. She is my enemy, Orion. And therefore she is your enemy.”
No, I thought. She could never be my enemy.
“Fool,” spat Aten. And he disappeared from my awareness.
I was back in the cockpit of the survey vessel. Warning lights on the control board were blinking red, the contact alarm beeping annoyingly.
The screen showed a lone vessel, a sleek scout ship moving at nearly lightspeed toward me. Cranking up the sensors to maximum magnification, I saw that it bore the hexagonal symbol of the Commonwealth.
It was a Tsihn ship. Its captain appeared on my display screen, small and slight, scales rippling pink and pale yellow.
“You are the survey vessel from the Blood Hunter,” it told me, rather than asking me. “The humanoid known as Orion.”
“That is correct.”
“Good. You will be attached to my ship and then we can haul our eggs out of this region before a Hegemony cruiser spots us.”
I stayed aboard the survey ship while the Tsihn scout sent out an EVA team to grapple my vessel and attach it to theirs. Once we were safely linked to them, the scout ship accelerated to lightspeed and made the jump to superlight velocity.
The Tsihn captain did not invite me aboard its ship. It seemed to want to have as little to do with me as possible. Its orders had been to penetrate the area where I had jumped away from the Blood Hunter, find me and bring me back to the nearest Tsihn base. Its orders did not include hospitality or even civility.
The Tsihn base was not a planet, but a massive motile station nearly a hundred light-years from the Lunga region. It hung in the emptiness of interstellar space, outlined against a distant bright swirl of gas and dust glowing red and blue in fluorescence stimulated by a cluster of newborn hot, blue stars a few light-years away.
There was a human section to the station, and I was brought there by a Tsihn escort, not knowing whether I was going to receive a medal or a court-martial.
I got neither. The human chief of the section was a grizzled old brigadier named Uxley with prosthetic legs and a permanently bleary expression on his baggy, sagging face. I was brought to his office by my Tsihn guards, who wheeled about and left without a word or a salute. I stood before his desk at attention.
“You’re being put in charge of a battalion, Orion,” Brigadier Uxley told me, with no preliminaries. “Don’t ask me why. Somebody higher up in the chain of command must either have enormous faith in you or wants to see you dead. Maybe both.”
He was clearly unhappy over me. I had no rank, not even a record in his personnel files. As far as he was concerned I was the protégé of some high-ranking officer or politician, with no real military experience. He was, of course, more right than he could know.