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.