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.”