“Yes,” Zeus admitted to me reluctantly, “that is our final option.”
“You’ll let her die?” I knew that my life counted little to them. But Anya was one of them. Had they no loyalty? No courage?
“You think in human terms, Orion. Survival is our goal, sacrifice is your lot. Anya is clever, perhaps she will surprise you and Set both.”
I sensed the blind link between us fading. His voice grew fainter.
“If there were something I could do to help you, Orion, truly I would do it.”
“But not at the risk of your own survival,” I snapped.
The thought surprised him, I could sense it. Risk the survival of a Creator over one of their creatures? Risk the survival of all the remaining Creators over the plight of one of their number? Never.
They were not cowards. Godlike beings that they were, they were beyond cowardice. They were supreme realists. If they could not defeat Set, they would run from his wrath. What did it matter to them that the entire human race would be expunged from the continuum forever?
“Orion,” called Zeus’s voice, even fainter. “We deal with forces beyond your understanding. Universes upon universes. We must face the ultimate crisis out there among the stars and whirling plasma clouds that pinwheel through the galaxy. Perhaps the human race has played its part in evolving us, and now has no further role to play.”
I snarled mentally, “Perhaps Set will seize such firm control of the continuum that he will track you down, each and every last one of you, no matter where you flee, no matter where you hide. Abandon the human race and you give Set the power to seek you through all of spacetime and destroy you utterly.”
“No,” came Zeus’s reply, so weak it was nothing more than a ghostly whisper. “That cannot be. It cannot….”
But there was doubt in his voice as it trailed off into nothingness. Doubt and fear.
My eyes opened. I was in a bare little cell, hardly bigger than a coffin stood on end, huddled into it like a folded, crumpled sack of grain. My head was resting on my knees, my arms hung limply at my sides, pressing against the cool smooth back wall of the cell on one side and the cool smooth door on the other.
The only light was from a dim dull red fluorescence emanating from the cell walls. The only sound was my own breathing.
Abandoned. The Creators were going to abandon Anya and me to final destruction. They were going to abandon the entire human race and flee to the depths of interstellar space.
And there was nothing I could do about it.
I almost wept, hunched over in that cramped claustrophobic cubicle. Orion the mighty hunter, created by the gods to track down their enemies and destroy them, defender of the continuum. How laughable! Instead of crying, I howled with maniacal glee. Orion, tool of the Creators, locked helpless and alone in a dungeon deep within the ultimate enemy’s castle while the goddess I love is probably being tortured to death for the amusement of that fiend.
I could hardly move, the cell was so narrow. Somehow I slithered to my feet. Almost. The cubicle was too low for me to stand erect. My head bowed, my shoulders, arms, back, and legs pressed against the cool smooth flat surfaces of the cell. It made my blood run cold. The walls and door felt, not slimy, but slick, like rubbery plastic. It made me shudder.
I pushed as hard as I could against the door. It did not even creak. I strained every gram of strength in me, yet the door did not budge at all.
Defeated, exhausted, I let myself slide back down to the floor, knees in my face, muscles aching from frustrated exertion.
A mocking voice surged up from my memory. “You were created to act, Orion, not think. I will do the thinking. You carry out my orders.”
The voice of the Golden One, the self-styled god who claimed to have created me.
“The intelligence I built into you is adequate for hunting and killing,” I heard him saying to me, in his mocking deprecating way. “Never delude yourself into thinking that you have the brains to do more than that.”