I wept.
Frede shook me awake. “Orion, what is it? Wake up!”
I sat bolt upright. We were in camp, under the trees, the first streaks of dawn breaking through low gray clouds overhead. The other troopers were still sleeping, sprawled alone or coupled, except for the sentries I could see down by the river-bank.
Frede wrapped her arms around my bare shoulders. “You were moaning in your sleep.”
“I had a dream.”
“And calling to someone. Anna.”
“Anya,” I corrected.
She pulled her shirt on. “Is she the one you’re promised to?”
I almost smiled. “She’s the woman I love.”
Frede nodded matter-of-factly. “If we get out of this alive—you’ll be going back to her?”
“I don’t know. I want to, but I don’t know if I can.”
“The army won’t pop you back into a cryo freezer until the next time they need you?”
I had to shake my head and admit, “I just don’t know.”
“That’s what we’ve got to look forward to,” Frede said. “Cryosleep or battle. With some training in between. It’s a great life, Orion, being a soldier. You’ve got to be born to it.”
So that was the meaning of the tag line. You’ve got to be born to it. A bitter joke, but it was just as applicable to me as to any of these cloned involuntary soldiers. You’ve got to be born to it. Or created for it. As all of us were.
“Come on,” I said, getting to my feet. “Time to start moving.”
She got up, but locked her gaze on me and asked, “Why?”
I stared back at her. “What do you mean?”
“Why do we have to start moving?”
“You know as well as I—”
“To attack the Skorpis base? Why should we? What difference would it make? Except to get the rest of us killed.”
I knew that the troops had been conditioned to obey, to fight, to follow orders. That conditioning had weakened terribly during this mission, but it could be reinforced by a set of key words that every officer above the rank of lieutenant had memorized. I supposed, now that I thought about it, that higher ranks had other sets of memorized trigger phrases to use on the ranks below them. Aten had put those key words into my memory, and they sprang to my conscious mind now, just as if he were standing at my elbow, prompting me.
You are the tip of the spear, the point of the arrow. Those few words would drown Frede’s dawning independence under a flood of mental conditioning, turn her from a frightened, doubting woman into an obedient soldier once more. A grumbling, complaining soldier, perhaps, but one who would no longer question the mission she had been assigned to, or waver at the thought of its impossibility.
I could not speak those words. Not then. Not to Frede. Condemned to a life she never had asked for, never had any choice in, she was beginning to show the first signs of independent humanity: she was afraid that she—and all of us—were not only going to die, but throw away our lives needlessly.
She misunderstood my openmouthed silence. “All right, you can break me down to private and put somebody else in my place. But I still don’t see what good we’re going to do, throwing fifty-two of us at an entrenched Skorpis base.”
“What alternatives do you see?”
She took a deep, shuddering breath, as if afraid to say what was in her thoughts. But she squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, gathering her courage, and then said, “We can stay here. Live here. Forget the war, forget whatever the hell it’s all about and just live the rest of our lives right here.”
“Forget our orders?”
“They abandoned us, Orion! We didn’t leave them, they left us!”
“Do you think the enemy will leave us alone?”
“We’re no threat to them if we stay here. And they know we can maul them pretty good if they attack us. So why would they bother us as long as we can’t hurt them?”
I thought about it for a moment. She was probably right. But if we remained here I would never find Anya. And as much as I hated the Golden One and all the other Creators, except Anya, I had to admit that there must be some purpose to his sending me here, to this place and time. Some reason.