“That’s all right.” I felt almost embarrassed, for some reason.
“You could ask for a volunteer, you know. We have four unpaired women in the troop, because of the casualties.”
“I don’t need one.”
“It’s within regulations to ask for a male volunteer, even if they’re already paired with a female.”
“I know the regulations,” I said. But that was only partly true; I had not bothered to review all the army’s rules, especially those regarding sexual practices.
“You’re a celibate?” Frede asked.
I wished she would get off the subject. I temporized, “For the time being.”
“Ohhh,” she said. “You’ve got somebody waiting for you.”
“Yes,” I said, thinking of Anya.
But Frede had other ideas. “You know, of course, that the regulations on sexual assignments are equally binding on both members of the assigned pair.”
“Yes, I know.”
“That means that whatever your preferences, you are paired with me for the duration of this mission.”
“I told you that I know that.”
“You can call for volunteers while I’m on the sick list, but once I’m back to full duty, you are restricted to me.”
“Right.”
“Even if you have somebody waiting for you, back wherever it is that you come from.”
I finally realized what she was driving at. “Oh! I see.”
Frede laughed at my sudden discomfort, there in the darkness of the forested night. “Don’t fret, Captain. I’ll be good to you.”
She was teasing me!
I reached out and clamped the nape of her neck, gently. “I’m looking forward to it,” I whispered back to her.
Then I left her sitting there with her legs spraddled and a surprised expression on her face.
But the humor of the situation quickly faded from my mind as I stretched out on the mossy ground and closed my eyes. Anya. Where in all the space-times of the continuum was she? Why couldn’t I be with her? Why must I be here with the troop of cloned soldiers, stranded, abandoned on some godforsaken world?
Godforsaken indeed. Forsaken by the would-be god Aten. Abandoned by the Creators, all of them. Had Anya abandoned me, too? Or had the others forced her to stay far from me?
I could not sleep. I wanted to. I closed my eyes and willed my body to relax. But I could not force my mind to stop thinking. I saw past lives, past missions on which the Golden One had sent me. I was Osiris in Egypt long before the first pyramid was built. I was Prometheus in the cold and snow of the Ice Age. I crumbled the wall of Jericho and helped to remove the Neanderthals from this timestream of the continuum.
All at the service of Aten, the Golden One. And always with the help of Anya, the goddess whom I loved. The Golden One hated me for that. Aten hated me because Anya loved me. Time and again she took human form to be with me. Time and again he tried to keep us apart. I had crossed eons and light-years to be with her. But always he schemed to keep me from her.
I am Orion the Hunter, created by Aten to do his bidding, hopelessly in love with one of Aten’s fellow Creators. And here I was, stranded on some insignificant planet in the middle of an interstellar war, lost and abandoned with a troop of soldiers who were just as much slaves of their creators as I was of mine.
Why? Why had the Golden One placed me here and then abandoned me? To keep me away from Anya? Or for some other purpose, some part of one of his impetuous schemes for shaping the continuum to his own suiting? He had gone mad once, I knew. Perhaps he had become deranged again.
But no, I thought, what he’s done now has all the earmarks of a calculated, deliberate plan. He put me on this planet Lunga for a reason. He simply has not deigned to reveal his plan to me.
The first rays of sunlight began to filter through the trees. I pulled myself up to a sitting position and gave up all pretense of sleep.
All right, I said to myself. If the Golden One won’t tell me why he’s put me here, I’ll have to find out for myself.