"What have you to offer that I would desire?"

 

"Your team of scientists."

 

Her lips pulled back slightly to show her teeth. "You captured them and now you return them?"

 

"I saved them from the Tsihn and now I offer them back to you."

 

Unconsciously she began grooming the fur of her face. "They must be of very little value to you if you offer them back to me."

 

I almost smiled, remembering the wonderfully fierce bargaining that would go on in the bazaars of cities the Mongols had taken or even in the boardrooms of interplanetary corporations.

 

"Their value to me is not so important as their value to you," I said.

 

"What value are they to me? They cannot fight. They cannot entertain. They cannot be used for food. They have not succeeded in their mission. Because of them I have lost nearly two whole battalions of warriors."

 

I jumped on that point. "Your orders were to protect these scientists. You fought honorably and well to protect them. Unfortunately, you must tell your superiors that you failed. The scientists were captured, despite your spending nearly two whole battalions to protect them. It is very sad."

 

If a cat could smile, she did it then. "I have not lost the scientists. They are on your ship."

 

"But not on yours."

 

"Meaning?"

 

"Meaning that I will blow up this ship, with the scientists in it, if you do not agree to my terms."

 

"You will kill yourself, then?"

 

"Yes, and no Skorpis will ever eat my flesh. I will blast this ship and all of us into an ionized gas cloud."

 

Her massive shoulders moved in a very human-looking shrug.

 

"Go ahead, then. It is no fur off my face."

 

"But what will your superiors say when you report to them that you failed to protect the scientists? What will they say when you report that you refused to take them back after they had been captured and returned? You will be meat for their larders, I'm afraid."

 

That brought out a snarl. "We can take your ship-"

 

"Not before I blow it to atoms."

 

She just stared at me. Even though it was only an image on the display screen I could feel the fury of that yellow-eyed stare. At that moment she would like nothing better than to sink her fangs into my throat.

 

"But I will happily return the scientists to you," I said, trying to sound carefree and cheerful.

 

"Under what terms?"

 

"That you return my troopers to me."

 

"They are prisoners. They surrendered with hardly a fight."

 

"So they are worth very little," I taunted. "How much courage can you ingest from soldiers such as they?"

 

"Then why do you want them?"

 

I had to think fast. "I want to revive them and train them to be true soldiers, worthy of their calling. So that the next time you meet them they will offer you a better meal than their miserable carcasses offer now."

 

Now it was her turn to do some thinking. She undoubtedly thought that I was lying, that there was something else going on. But actually, what I told her was as close to the truth as I could say. My troopers needed better training-and better leadership-if they were to survive their battles.

 

"I must consider this carefully," said the base commander. "The prisoners have been frozen. They belong to the larders of those who captured them. I must determine what payment those warriors should receive if they give up their food."

 

Nodding, I replied, "I'm inserting this vessel into a stationary orbit around the planet. In one hour I will set off the engines and blow up the ship."

 

"I will give you my response in less than one hour, Orion."

 

"Good." I cut the connection, and saw that my finger trembled slightly.

 

"You can't be serious."

 

Turning in the pilot's chair I saw that Randa was standing behind me. She had not gone back to the galley. She had heard my conversation with the base commander.

 

"I'm completely serious," I told her.

 

"You'd kill us all for the sake of a handful of soldiers? Soldiers? Why, they're little better than machines."

 

"They're quite human," I said, holding on to my temper.

 

"And you think that we'll just sit here quietly and allow you to murder us?"

 

There were no weapons among them, I knew. Even the tools that the ship carried were in cargo containers outside this crew habitat module.

 

I grinned up at her. "There are twenty-two of you and only one of me. But I doubt that more than three or four of you could squeeze into this cockpit area at one time. And I can handle three or four of you without raising much of a sweat."

 

"You're insane!" Randa snapped. "We're scientists, you big oaf! Each one of us is worth a hundred of your miserable soldiers."

 

I let that pass. I merely said, "If you keep your cool and don't do anything foolish, you'll be back at the Skorpis base within an hour or so. Or what's left of the base, anyway. If you try to stop me I'll blow this ship to hell right here and now."

 

She stared at me, horrified. "Don't you care about your own life?"

 

I found myself shaking my head. "No. I don't give a damn. Death doesn't frighten me in the slightest. In fact, it would be a relief."

 

Randa shuddered, turned, and fairly ran toward the galley and her fellow scientists.

 

The Skorpis commander called me when there was less than five minutes remaining in the hour. I could imagine what she had been going through: trying to determine if there was some way they could take this survey vessel or incapacitate me before I blew up the ship; weighing the worth of the forty-nine frozen prisoners against the worth of the twenty-two Hegemony scientists; deciding how much recompense to give the warriors who had captured my troopers. Idly I wondered if they ate any of the reptilian Tsihn they captured in battle.

 

She agreed to the trade, reluctantly. The forty-nine cryo units were carried to my orbiting vessel by a trio of Skorpis landing shuttles. I would not have my troopers destroyed by a matter transceiver. Once I was satisfied that all of the bulky sleeper units were properly attached to my vessel, I allowed the scientists to board the last of the Skorpis shuttles.

 

Delos stood beside me and watched his team file through the air lock that connected to the shuttle.

 

"Where will you go now?" he asked me.

 

"To find someplace that has the facilities to revive my troopers."

 

"And then?"

 

"I don't know," I admitted.

 

"Continue the war?"

 

"I suppose."

 

Randa was the last of the scientists in line. As she placed one hand on the rim of the air-lock hatch, she turned slightly to look at me.

 

"Would you really have killed us all for the sake of a gang of frozen corpses?"

 

I heard the words she did not speak: a gang of frozen corpses who are nothing but soldiers, not quite human, fit for nothing but to fight and eventually die on some ball of rock out among the stars.

 

"If I had to," I said.

 

The corners of her lips curled slightly in a malicious smile. "And how do you know that those pods actually hold your precious soldiers? Maybe the Skorpis commander put forty-nine of her own warriors in them, to take you by surprise."

 

I made myself smile back at her. "The Skorpis commander made an honorable agreement with me. She's a warrior. She'd kill me if she could but she wouldn't deliberately lie to me."

 

"You think not?"

 

"She doesn't have the same set of values that you do," I said.

 

Randa's eyes shifted from me to her husband. "Let's go," she said to Delos, "and leave this madman to his frozen soldiers." With that she ducked through the hatch.

 

Delos looked up at me with eyes that were almost sad. "Somehow I get the feeling, Orion, that I would learn a lot more about the universe by going with you."

 

"Be my guest," I said.

 

But he shook his head. "I wish I could. I'm not a soldier, but I have a duty to perform. And I know my place."

 

"Maybe you can help to end this war."

 

"How?"

 

"I wish I knew."

 

He put out his hand to me. "We're on opposite sides, I know. But-good luck, Orion. I wish there really was a way to end this war."

 

"Search for it," I said, taking his hand.

 

 

Chapter 18

 

Part of my agreement with the Skorpis commander was that she allow me to leave the Lunga system. Alone now in the survey vessel, I broke orbit and headed in the direction that the Tsihn fleet had taken. The Skorpis battle cruisers remained in orbit, but I knew that as soon as their commander decided to, they could overtake me and blast me into vapor.

 

The survey vessel was not capable of lightspeed. The only safety I could hope for was to find another Commonwealth ship in normal space. A forlorn hope, I realized. Space is vast, and most of the ships traveling through it go to superlight velocity as soon as they can, which puts them completely out of touch with turtle-boats such as mine.

 

But I had another means of communicating.

 

I put the ship on autopilot, with instructions to warn me if any Skorpis or Hegemony vessels appeared nearby. Then I leaned back in the pilot's chair, closed my eyes, and reached for contact with the Creators.

 

This time it was easy. The Golden One appeared immediately, decked in a magnificent glowing robe. He seemed to be hovering in the emptiness of interstellar space, a splendid god radiating power and glory.

 

"What a strange ape you are, Orion," he said. "Threatening to kill yourself if the enemy refused to return your troopers to you."

 

"I've died before," I said. "There's no great trick to it."

 

"But you expect me to revive you each time."

 

Vaguely I recalled a slight, soft-spoken Hindu with dark skin and large liquid eyes. "It would be a relief to be taken off the wheel of life," I said.

 

"You seek nothingness? Oblivion?"

 

"It would be an end to pain."

 

Aten smirked at me. "Your nirvana is not to be, Orion. Not yet. I have further chores for you."

 

"First revive my troopers," I said. "Awaken them and allow them to live normal human lives. They deserve that much, at least."

 

"They will be revived, I promise you. I haven't given up hope of enlisting the aid of the Old Ones and similar ancient races. Your troopers will help you to establish the next point of contact with them."

 

"End this war," I urged him. "Stop the killing. What's so important that it makes you send billions to their deaths?"

 

"What's so important about those billions that it matters when and how they die? They're creatures, Orion. Creatures. My creations. I can use them as I choose. I use them as I must."

 

"Why should we help you to carry on this war? What's the point of it? Why can't you stop it?"

 

Aten shook his head as if disappointed in me. "How little you understand, my creature. Don't you think I would end the war if I could? It isn't that easy, Orion."

 

"Why not?"

 

"If it takes two to make a fight, it also takes two to make peace. Anya and her ilk won't stop fighting. They want their way, and that way will lead us all to utter disaster."

 

"She must think differently."

 

"She is wrong!"

 

I thought, If only I could find Anya, speak with her, learn why she is fighting, what her goals are.

 

But the Golden One read my thoughts as easily as if I had spoken them aloud. "She would kill you out of hand, Orion. The goddess you love now seeks only blood and vengeance. Anyone serving me is her enemy and she will destroy them. She is my enemy, Orion. And therefore she is your enemy."

 

No, I thought. She could never be my enemy.

 

"Fool," spat Aten. And he disappeared from my awareness.

 

I was back in the cockpit of the survey vessel. Warning lights on the control board were blinking red, the contact alarm beeping annoyingly.

 

The screen showed a lone vessel, a sleek scout ship moving at nearly lightspeed toward me. Cranking up the sensors to maximum magnification, I saw that it bore the hexagonal symbol of the Commonwealth.

 

It was a Tsihn ship. Its captain appeared on my display screen, small and slight, scales rippling pink and pale yellow.

 

"You are the survey vessel from the Blood Hunter," it told me, rather than asking me. "The humanoid known as Orion."

 

"That is correct."

 

"Good. You will be attached to my ship and then we can haul our eggs out of this region before a Hegemony cruiser spots us."

 

I stayed aboard the survey ship while the Tsihn scout sent out an EVA team to grapple my vessel and attach it to theirs. Once we were safely linked to them, the scout ship accelerated to lightspeed and made the jump to superlight velocity.

 

The Tsihn captain did not invite me aboard its ship. It seemed to want to have as little to do with me as possible. Its orders had been to penetrate the area where I had jumped away from the Blood Hunter, find me and bring me back to the nearest Tsihn base. Its orders did not include hospitality or even civility.

 

The Tsihn base was not a planet, but a massive motile station nearly a hundred light-years from the Lunga region. It hung in the emptiness of interstellar space, outlined against a distant bright swirl of gas and dust glowing red and blue in fluorescence stimulated by a cluster of newborn hot, blue stars a few light-years away.

 

There was a human section to the station, and I was brought there by a Tsihn escort, not knowing whether I was going to receive a medal or a court-martial.

 

I got neither. The human chief of the section was a grizzled old brigadier named Uxley with prosthetic legs and a permanently bleary expression on his baggy, sagging face. I was brought to his office by my Tsihn guards, who wheeled about and left without a word or a salute. I stood before his desk at attention.

 

"You're being put in charge of a battalion, Orion," Brigadier Uxley told me, with no preliminaries. "Don't ask me why. Somebody higher up in the chain of command must either have enormous faith in you or wants to see you dead. Maybe both."

 

He was clearly unhappy over me. I had no rank, not even a record in his personnel files. As far as he was concerned I was the protégé of some high-ranking officer or politician, with no real military experience. He was, of course, more right than he could know.

 

"There's a little piece of rock called Bititu," he said, flashing an image of a black, pitted asteroid on his wall screen. "What its strategic value is, no one in the upper echelons has seen fit to tell me. But it's to be taken by you and your thousand. And damned quick, too."

 

"Sir," I said, still at ramrod attention, "I would like to have the survivors of the Lunga mission as part of my command."

 

He fixed me with a bloodshot eye. "Why?"

 

"I know them, sir, and they know me. We work well together."

 

"Do you?" He looked down at the display screen on his desk for several moments. I could not see the screen, but from the reflection of light on his face I could tell he was paging through a considerable amount of data very quickly.

 

Finally he looked up at me. "You pulled them out of a Skorpis depot? Single-handed?"

 

"I negotiated for them, sir."

 

His attitude softened appreciably. Leaning back in his padded chair, he pointed at me with a rock-steady finger. "You're not regular army, are you?"

 

"No, sir."

 

"Yet you went in there and got your troops away from the Skorpis."

 

I said nothing.

 

"All right, you can have them with you. I'll even add them to your command, since you're already slated for a full battalion. The sergeant outside will show you where your quarters are. Better start spending every waking second on studying Bititu and the Hegemony's defenses of it."

 

"Yessir." I saluted and left his office.

 

And went straight to the cryonics center where my troop was being revived. It was a big chamber very similar to the one where I had first awakened in this era. The medics had removed forty-nine of the chamber's regular cryosleep units and placed my troopers' capsules on their foundations. They were all plugged in to the chamber's environmental controls and computer system. Frede was in one of those pods. And Quint, Jerron and the others. Frozen inside dull metal canisters inscribed with Skorpis symbols. The capsules looked old, heavily used. But I saw no vapor leaking from them; battered they might be, but they still worked as they should.

 

"They won't be coming out of it for another six hours, at least," said the medic on duty at the control station. Her voice echoed off the metal walls.

 

"It takes that long?" I asked.

 

She waggled one hand in the air. "Slower is better, once the body cells have been defrosted. Pump nutrients into them, stimulate their brains to restart, let them dream and sort out whatever memories were locked in short-term storage when they went under."

 

Their short-term memories must be terrible, I thought. The last thing they would remember would be the Skorpis freezing them for their food larders. Did they struggle? Try to fight? Or go under resigned to their miserable fate, convinced that they had been abandoned by their leaders?

 

"And besides," the medic added, "we just got orders to feed some new training into them. So while we're letting them come back gradually we can program this new material into their neural systems."

 

I didn't bother to ask what the new training material was. I knew they were being programmed with everything the army thought they needed to know about Bititu. I decided to go back to the cubicle they called my quarters and start to study up on the asteroid, too. It wouldn't do for my troops to know more about the operation than I did.

 

But first I asked the medic, "Could you call me when they wake up?"

 

"I'll be off duty then," she said.

 

"Well, how long will it take? What time will they start to come out of it?"

 

"Another six hours. I already told you."

 

I thanked her and hustled back to my quarters. I spent the six hours studying Bititu, grateful that I did not need sleep. What I learned of the asteroid was not encouraging.

 

Bititu was an asteroid in the Jilbert system, a seven-mile-long chunk of barren rock, roughly kidney-shaped. Jilbert itself was a dim red dwarf star with only one true planet, a gas giant orbiting so close to the star that they were almost a binary system. The rest of the system was nothing but asteroids, an unusual state for the planetary system of a dwarf star.

 

The Hegemony had apparently fortified Bititu heavily. According to the reports I scanned, the asteroid was honeycombed with tunnels defended by a full regiment of spiderlike creatures that the reports referred to only as the Arachnoids. Very little was known about them; even their intelligence was in some doubt. Some scientists believed that individual Arachnoids were not intelligent, in the sense of being self-aware and motivated, but were instead part of a collective hive mind, as many species of insects have proven to be.

 

The most discouraging part of the reports was the admission that not much was known about the Arachnoids because none had ever been taken alive. They always fought to the last member. Not a happy prospect for those who had to do battle against them.

 

Then I saw that the Commonwealth's scientific community requested that we take as many of the Arachnoids prisoner as possible, for them to interrogate and study. The phrasing of their request made it clear that they thought we soldiers slaughtered all the Arachnoids deliberately.

 

"Despite their nonhumanoid appearance," the scientists' request read, "the Arachnoids are to be treated as fully sentient, intelligent beings. Indiscriminate killing of these creatures is punishable by military code."

 

I turned off the video reader with a feeling almost of disgust. Bititu would be a bloody mess, it seemed. There was no way to take the asteroid except by direct assault, and the enemy was well entrenched and willing to fight to the bitter end. I doubted that the Arachnoids would willingly allow themselves to become prisoners and objects of our scientists' eager investigations.

 

With my mind full of foreboding I went down the metal passageway of the station back to the cryonic center.

 

A different medic was on duty now, a gray-haired male whose face was also a grayish pallor, as if he had not seen the sun in years.

 

"They're coming around," he whispered as I looked out across the big room filled with the cryonic capsules. His attention was focused on the dozens of display screens set into the curving panel before his chair like the faceted eyes of a giant insect.

 

I felt the chill of cryonic cold seeping into my bones. "Shouldn't it be warmer in here?" I asked.

 

He shot me a disapproving glance. "I know what I'm doing, soldier."

 

"Yes," I said. "Of course."

 

"They're going to be disoriented for a bit. The briefings they've been getting while we're pulling them out will be mostly subconscious, until they're brought to the surface by trigger phrases."

 

The trigger phrase, I knew, was simply the name of the target asteroid: Bititu.

 

"The last real memories they'll have will be whatever they saw when they were put under."

 

Skorpis warriors forcing them into the cryo pods. Knowing that they were nothing more than food to their captors, that if they were ever awakened it would be for ritual execution.

 

"Isn't there some way we can tell them they're safe, that they're not prisoners of the Skorpis anymore?"

 

The medic glared at me. "Is that what happened to these soldiers? They were frozen by those damned cats?"

 

"Yes."

 

"Shit on a goddamned mother-loving sonofabitch sandwich," he snarled, his fingers suddenly playing across the control keys. "Nobody tells me any pissing thing. Same old army. If there's a way to screw things up..." His voice sank to a disgruntled mumble.

 

At last he looked up from the controls and displays. "It's too pissing late. There's nothing I can do. They're going to start waking up in a few minutes and they'll still be thinking that they're prisoners. If we don't have a couple of heart attacks among them it'll be a pissing miracle."

 

My mind raced. Was there anything I could do? Could I reach out to them mentally and assure them that they were safe, that they had nothing to fear?

 

Too late. A heard a click and a sighing sound. Looking across the chamber, I saw one of the capsules pop open, white vapor issuing from it like fog seeping across a graveyard at midnight. Another clicked and sighed. Then more.

 

Someone moaned. Someone began to sob like a motherless child. Which we all were, of course.

 

I rushed to the nearest capsule. I saw a trooper struggling to a sitting position, eyes wide with fright.

 

"It's all right," I shouted, my voice echoing off the chamber's metal walls. "You're safe. You're not a prisoner anymore."

 

One by one the pods opened up and my troopers awoke. Many of them were ashen-faced, trembling. Others sat up with fists clenched and teeth gritted, ready for a fight. I saw that most of them were bruised, lips split, eyes swollen, clotted blood matting their hair. They had not gone into those pods peacefully.

 

I searched through the capsules for Frede's pod. She was just opening her eyes when I found it.

 

"Orion?" she asked as I leaned through the vapor steaming out of her capsule. "They got you, too?"

 

A heavy blue-black bruise swelled her cheek. I saw slashes on her arms where her sleeves had been torn.

 

"No," I told her. "I got you back from them. You're safe. It's all right."

 

"Safe?"

 

"We're in a Tsihn station. I got you back from the Skorpis."

 

I helped her up to a sitting position. She seemed dazed, disoriented. "We're not prisoners? Not..."

 

"You're not prisoners anymore. You're safe."

 

She looked around, blinking her eyes. "Sheol, do I have a headache," she muttered. Then she threw her arms around my neck and kissed me so hard that the rest of the barely revived troopers whooped and whistled.

 

And then someone screamed, as if in agony or mortal terror. I pulled away from Frede's embrace and sprinted to the pod. It was Lieutenant Quint, screaming horribly, still lying on his back with his eyes squeezed shut, his hands raised defensively in front of him, his legs churning as if he were trying to run away.

 

"Quint, it's all right!" I yelled into his contorted face. "You're safe."

 

He kept on screaming as if he could not hear me. I reached into the capsule and grabbed the front of his shirt, yanked him halfway up and shook him violently. Still he screeched, eyes closed, gibbering incoherently.

 

I slapped his face. Even as I did, I noticed that he was unbruised. Shaking him again, I shouted, "Wake up! It's me, Orion. You're safe."

 

He was trembling uncontrollably, but he opened his eyes and stared at me.

 

"You're not among the Skorpis," I said, more gently. "It's all right. There's nothing to be afraid of."

 

A few of the other troopers had gotten shakily to their feet and gathered around Quint's capsule. I smelled something foul, and realized that Quint had emptied his bladder and his bowels, either when the Skorpis had shoved him into the pod or just now, as he awoke.

 

I waved the other troopers away before they smelled it. "Fall in," I said. "Give the lieutenant a minute to pull himself together."

 

I had them line up, leaving Quint in his capsule. They were bruised, cut, uniforms tattered and dirty, but alive and grinning at me.

 

"There must be a sorrier-looking bunch of mongrels somewhere in the army," I said to them, "but if there is, I hope I never have to look at them. Sergeants, get these mutts cleaned up, find their assigned quarters, and see that they're issued fresh uniforms and kits. Officers, come with me."

 

I knew that the remaining sergeants among my troop were experienced veterans who knew how to maneuver their squads through a camp, whether it was on some alien planet or an interstellar way station, such as this was. I wanted the troopers out of the chamber before I dealt with Quint.

 

He was a mess, both physically and mentally. Frede was the only other surviving lieutenant, and it took the two of us to coax Quint out of his pod and down to the medical rehab center. The gray-faced medic who had supervised the revival process came with us.

 

"I've seen this before," he told me as a pair of robot nurses took Quint gently in their metal grips. "He won't be fit for active duty until he's been completely deprogrammed and retrained. Maybe not even then."

 

"What will happen to him, then?" I asked.

 

The medic shifted his shoulders beneath his white jacket. "Oh, they'll assign him to some desk job, I suppose. He'll be perfectly adequate to send other troopers into battle; he just hasn't got the stuff in him to face battle himself, anymore."

 

I should have felt pity for Quint, I know. Instead I felt a smoldering resentment, almost anger.

 

Frede read my face. "He can't help it," she said. "He's not goldbricking."

 

"How do you know?"

 

She shrugged. "What difference would it make?"

 

I realized she was right. What difference would it make? Despite all the training, despite being gestated specifically to be a soldier, despite a lifetime of nothing but the military, Quint had taken all the fighting he was ever going to take. I should have seen it coming. I should have realized that while we were fighting for our lives on Lunga he was hiding in a hole somewhere, keeping his head down, unwilling or unable to face the death that the rest of us did not even think about in the heat of action.

 

 

"It's not a good thing for soldiers to think too much," Frede told me as we left Quint to the medics and went to find our quarters and the rest of the troop.

 

"Maybe not," I muttered, thinking of Randa, who did not really believe soldiers were capable of thinking at all.

 

"You're now my second-in-command," I told her as we walked along the metal passageways, guided by the computer displays on the bulkheads. Most of the others in the passageways in this section of the station were humans, although we passed several Tsihn and even a few other species.

 

She nodded. "Are we going to stay here on this station, or will they ship us to an R-and-R center?"

 

"No R-and-R," I said. "We've got a new assignment."

 

"Without a rest and refit from the last one?" She was immediately indignant.

 

I suddenly realized that it was my fault. "I asked for you," I said, "when I got the assignment."

 

"What assignment?"

 

"Bititu. It's an asteroid in the-"

 

I stopped. Frede's eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment. The trigger word. I could have kicked myself. All the data from the subconscious briefing came surging up into her awareness.

 

"Sheol," she murmured. "They don't give you the easy ones, do they?"

 

"I shouldn't have asked for you," I started to apologize. "Maybe I can get you released for R and R."

 

"Not now. Not once we've been briefed. They'll either ship us out or freeze us."

 

We started walking along the passageway again. I didn't know what to say. It had never occurred to me that the troopers deserved a spell of rest and recreation after their ordeal on Lunga. Bititu promised to be even worse.

 

"There's one glitch in the planning that I'll have to fix," Frede told me as we approached the section where we would be quartered.

 

"What's that?" I asked.

 

"The sleeping arrangements. They've paired each of us off with other people."

 

"That's standard procedure, isn't it? The army doesn't want us forming emotional attachments that are too close."

 

"Right. But you're battalion commander now and rank has its privileges."

 

"I don't know if I should-"

 

"Not you," Frede said, her eyes twinkling mischievously. "If I'm your second, then I can pull my rank to supersede the bitch they've assigned to you."

 

 

Chapter 19

 

So when we boarded a Tsihn troopship for the flight to Bititu, Lieutenant Frede was my second-in-command and my bunk-mate.

 

Our ship joined a sizable battle fleet of cruisers and dreadnoughts. The plan was to make the run to the Jilbert system at superlight velocity, so we could not be detected until the very last moment, when we slowed to relativistic speed. Navigation was going to be tricky, but the Tsihn admiral assured me that they could get us to within a few light-hours of Jilbert.

 

"In that way," it told me at one of our conferences in its quarters, "the Hegemony will have no warning time to reinforce the system."

 

Its conference room was hot and dry; like being in a sunbaked desert, except that we were seated around an uneven conference table. Half of the table was set at a height to make humans comfortable, the other half several centimeters higher for the comfort of the big senior officers among the reptilians. The admiral, of course, was the biggest of them all: nearly three meters tall when standing, the dun-colored scales of its chest almost completely covered with symbols of rank and distinction.

 

The walls of the conference room were filled with holograms of arid rocky country and a blazing bronze sky. I was tempted to shield my eyes from the sun, but the brightness actually was never high enough to cause real glare.

 

"The nearest Hegemony base to Bititu is in the Justice system," I pointed out. "That's only a dozen light-years away. The enemy could send a battle fleet to Bititu before we've secured the asteroid."

 

The admiral flicked its forked tongue in and out almost faster than the eyes could follow, its way of working off nervous energy.

 

"We will remain in the Jilbert system until you have secured the asteroid, never fear," said the admiral. "My fleet is powerful enough to take care of any Hegemony attempt to reinforce Bititu."

 

I remembered the way the Tsihn fleet had bolted from Lunga and stranded us.

 

"In point of fact," said the admiral, tongue flicking blurrily, "we are hoping that the Hegemony will attempt to interfere. It will give us an opportunity to destroy one of their fleets."

 

I was glad to hear that it was so confident. Glancing along our end of the conference table to Frede and my other officers, I saw that none of us humans shared its opinion.

 

My battalion spent most of the flight in training. We converted the troopship's passageways and compartments into mock-ups of the tunnels and caves we expected to find on Bititu and practiced storming through heavily defended positions, day after day. There was no room for subtlety in our tactics. It was just brute force and firepower. I knew the casualties would be high.

 

"Why doesn't the fleet just blow the goddamned asteroid out of existence?" Frede asked one night in our bunk. "Why do we have to take it?"

 

I had no answer, except, "Maybe the Commonwealth wants to use it as a base for themselves after we've driven out the Hegemony."

 

"You know what I think," she asked, then went on without waiting for my reply, "I think it's those double-domed scientists. They want Arachnoid specimens to study, so we get stuck with the job of trying to capture some of them."

 

"But according to our briefings, the Arachnoids fight to the last one," I said.

 

"Tell it to the scientists."

 

"Still," I said, thinking aloud, "the fleet could bombard the asteroid before we go in, pound it as hard as they can. It wouldn't hurt the Arachnoids deep inside the rock, but it could knock out any of them up by the surface."

 

"And make our landing easier," Frede said.

 

But when I took up the question with the admiral's chief aide, a reptilian about my own size with beautiful multicolored scales, the answer was: No preliminary bombardment. It would merely alert the Arachnoid defenders and delay our landing.

 

"But once we show ourselves in the Jilbert system, several light-hours away from the asteroid, won't that alert them?" I asked.

 

"No preliminary bombardment," the reptilian repeated. "The plan is set and will not be changed."

 

I demanded the right to ask the admiral about it. Permission denied. I got the impression that the strategists who had planned this operation wanted to capture Bititu as intact as possible. They were perfectly willing to spend our lives in exchange for killing off the defenders without wrecking the asteroid itself.

 

I had other ideas.

 

I assigned Frede and my other officers to studying the pictures of Bititu as minutely as possible. I myself spent most of my nights going over those images, pinpointing each spot on that pitted bare rock that looked like an air-lock hatch or a gun emplacement. Then, one by one, I assigned each of those targets to one of our heavy-weapons platoons.

 

My plan was to knock out those surface defenses as we rode toward the asteroid in our landing vehicles. Instead of sitting inside and waiting passively until we touched down on the surface, I ordered my weapons platoons to zero in on specific targets and destroy them while we were in transit from the troopship to the asteroid.

 

Otherwise, I feared, the Arachnoid defenders would blast our ships out of the sky before we reached the rock.

 

As we neared the Jilbert system I worked the troopers harder and harder. Little sleep and less rest. We raced through the ship's passageways every day and almost every night. When we were not physically assaulting our mock targets we were studying the imagery of Bititu, familiarizing ourselves with every crevice and hollow of its surface, picking out the precise spots where each landing vehicle would touch down on its surface.

 

Some of the troopers began to complain that by the time we reached our target they would be too tired to fight. I drove them harder.

 

"We go relativistic in six hours," the Tsihn liaison officer told me at last. "Then two or three hours to the point where you embark for the asteroid."

 

I got my troops ready. We marched to the loading docks where our landing vehicles waited, singing ancient songs of battle and blood. We got into our armored space suits, using the buddy system to check each other carefully. The suits had been anodized white at my insistence; in the dimly lit tunnels of Bititu we had to be able to see each other. No one knew what the visual range of the Arachnoids was, whether white stood out as clearly to them as it did to us, but I was determined to avoid killing ourselves with friendly fire.

 

I put the heavy-weapons platoons in the first of our forty landers, with the other platoons' landers coming in behind them. I put myself in the first of the weapons platoons.

 

As the troops clambered aboard the landers, awkward in their heavily armored suits, Frede came up beside me, her helmet visor raised, an odd, expectant smile on her face.

 

"Well, we're as ready as we can be," she said, her voice trembling ever so slightly.

 

"Make certain your weapons team hits every assigned target," I said. "Especially the air locks. Maybe those spiders can breathe vacuum, but I doubt it."

 

"I never liked spiders," she said.

 

"Now's your chance to kill a few thousand of them."

 

She nodded inside the space helmet, then slid the visor down and lumbered off to her landing vehicle. I clamped my visor and sealed it. I had done everything I could think of. Now it was us against them, with no mercy expected either way.

 

The landing vehicles were little more than armored shields with handgrips for the troops and propulsion units hung off their sterns. We pushed off the troopship, forty landers, and slid out into the darkness of space.

 

"Here we go," said one of the troopers. I heard his tense, shaky voice through my helmet earphones.

 

"Another free ride, courtesy of the army."

 

"Enjoy your trip."

 

"Yeah. You gotta be born to it."

 

No one laughed.

 

The sullen red star off in the distance gave very little light. The dark, pitted rock of Bititu seemed to float out there among the stars, a long way off. And we seemed to be hanging in the middle of the emptiness, barely moving. As I clung to the handgrips behind the forward armored shield, in the midst of the heavy-weapons platoon, I had to turn my entire body around to see the troopship we had just left. Farther in the distance hovered hundreds of battle cruisers and dreadnoughts, sleek and deadly, with enough firepower to atomize Bititu and its fanatical defenders.

 

We slowly, agonizingly drifted toward the asteroid. I felt naked and alone despite my armored space suit and the soldiers surrounding me. Not a sign of life from the asteroid. Not a glimmer of light. It merely hung there, growing slightly larger as we slowly approached it, a massive elongated chunk of rock, pockmarked with craters and scored with strange grooves, dark and solid and ominous.

 

I checked the watch set into the wrist of my suit. I had set it to count down to the instant when we would begin firing at the surface facilities. A hundred and nine seconds to go. A hundred and nine eternities.

 

At last I saw something glint on the asteroid's surface. The reflection of sunlight? No, Jilbert was too faint and red to make that kind of glitter. Then another, and the front shield of one of our landers flared with the impact of a laser blast. Missiles were leaping from hidden fissures in the asteroid, blazing toward us. Our bombardment plan was instantly forgotten as we began to shoot at the missiles. They exploded in silent fireballs, each one closer to us as we drove onward toward the asteroid.

 

A lander was hit, bodies and fragments scattering, tumbling, flailing through the dark emptiness. Another, and then another. Dying voices screamed in my earphones.

 

"Fire at the surface targets!" I bellowed into my helmet microphone. "Heavy weapons, fire at the surface. All other platoons, antimissile fire."

 

My well-trained troops began shooting at the targets we had picked out. But the enemy was firing missiles from spots that had looked like nothing but bare rock until a few moments earlier. A missile exploded scant meters from my lander, I could feel the heat of its flare even through the armor of my space suit. Fragments ripped into us, clunking against our armored suits. A trooper's oxygen tank exploded in a brief deadly flare of flame, killing him instantly.

 

We were hitting the ground targets, I could see. Explosions peppered Bititu's surface. Missiles were still blazing toward us, several more landers were blown away, but we were hurtling toward the surface now. We would be there in a few seconds. Smaller weapons were blasting at us now; I could feel the lander shuddering as small solid slugs racked us. A trooper was hit just next to me, space suit erupting into fountains of gushing blood that froze in the vacuum into solid red pellets.

 

We huddled behind the lander's forward shield as lasers and projectiles racked the vehicle from one end to the other. Half the troops on the lander had already been killed by the time we thudded onto the asteroid's rocky surface.

 

I jumped in the negligible gravity, rifle in hand, and blasted a partially open hatch set into the rock. It snapped shut. It took an effort to keep from soaring into space; I adjusted the flight pack on my back to negative and felt some semblance of weight that helped me to flatten onto my belly while laser beams and volleys of slugs zipped over my head.

 

My earphones were ablaze with frantic voices:

 

"They're all around us!"

 

"I've got seventy-percent casualties! We've got to get off this rock!"

 

"Where's the weapons platoon? I need backup. Now!"

 

I slapped a magnetic grenade on the hatch and backed away. It blew noiselessly in the vacuum, smoke dissipating almost before my eyes registered its presence.

 

"Get into the tunnels!" I yelled into my helmet mike. "The only troops left on the surface are going to be the dead. Get inside! Move!"

 

I rolled another grenade into the opening of the blasted hatch, then slid into the tunnel headfirst, spraying rifle fire into the murky shadows to clear out any defenders who might have survived the grenade.

 

The tunnel was barely wide enough for me to crawl through and so dark that I had to turn on my helmet light, despite the infrared sensors in my visor. I heard something slithering behind me and rolled onto my back, aiming my rifle down the length of my torso.

 

"It's just me, sir!" came a trooper's voice, and I saw a space-suited figure, as anonymous as a faceless sculpture, crawling down the tunnel behind me.

 

Rolling onto my stomach again, I came face-to-face with my first Arachnoid. It was black, fully a meter wide, with eight spindly legs covered with what seemed like barbs. It held an oblong object in its front two claws, something with fins and a glasslike lens pointing at me. Behind that weapon I saw a face with horizontal mandibles clicking rapidly and eight glittering eyes, no two the same size.

 

I ducked my head, digging my visor into the bare rock of the tunnel, and pulled the trigger of my rifle at the same time. I felt a blast of heat against the armored top of my helmet, heard a high-pitched wail and the scuttling sound of claws on rock.

 

When I looked up the spider was gone, but there was a patch of sticky pus-yellow goo on the tunnel floor where it had stood. I saw a side tunnel veering off from this one. Pulling a rocket grenade loose from my belt, I set it for impact and fired it down the side tunnel. It exploded almost immediately, showering me with a hail of pebbles and dust and smoke.

 

I crawled past the side tunnel, ordering the trooper behind me to take his buddies along it. My earphones blazed with frantic voices:

 

"There's millions of 'em!"

 

"They're behind us! They're all around us!"

 

"We've gotta get out of here! There's too many of 'em!"

 

There was no way out of here. We could not get back aboard the landers even if we wanted to; they had lifted off the asteroid as soon as we had disembarked.

 

Slithering forward on my belly, I peered deeper into the tunnel. For a few moments I saw nothing, but I realized I could hear scraping noises and eerie, whistling screeches. Somehow there was enough air in the tunnel to carry sound, or maybe the rock itself was conducting sound waves. Farther off, I could hear the crack, crack sound of lasers firing so rapidly that it became an almost continuous clatter of noise. And explosions, some of them big enough to shake the tunnel. Dust and screams and voices shouting.

 

"There's more of 'em!"

 

"It's like a trapdoor. Look out!"

 

The tunnel was widening. The light on my helmet was deep red, not much help in seeing, but Intelligence hoped that the Arachnoids' eyes could not see that end of the visible spectrum. It occurred to me that if we could produce sensors that detected wavelengths our eyes could not see, the Arachnoids might similarly have developed technology to aid their natural senses. So I switched off the lamp and inched along the black tunnel, depending on my visor's infrared sensors to warn me.

 

Something exploded somewhere behind me, too big an explosion to be one of our grenades. A cloud of dust roiled along the tunnel. Then I heard that scraping, skittering noise again and a spider popped out of another side tunnel. I blasted it in half with a bolt from my rifle. Edging to the lip of the tunnel entrance, I peered into the darkness. My visor showed the faint outline of something in there, inching slowly toward me. I waited until it became clear. Another spider. I killed it with a shot in the middle of its eye cluster.

 

I worked my way past the sticky remains of the Arachnoid. The tunnel was almost high enough for me to get to my hands and knees, and getting wider all the time. The Arachnoids, I realized, needed more width than height to accommodate the shape of their bodies.

 

"My squad's down to six effectives. We've got to get out of here!"

 

"Keep moving toward the center of this rock," I bellowed into my helmet mike. "Nobody's getting off until the last spider's killed."

 

"Look out, sir!"

 

I rolled over and saw half a dozen Arachnoids dropping out of a hatch in the top of the tunnel, behind me. The trooper who had shouted the warning fired at them. Two of the spiders rushed at me. I shot the first one in the belly, it was that close. The second was on top of me, jamming its pistol against my chest and firing point-blank. I knocked the gun away with the butt of my rifle as the beam cracked my suit armor and burned my flesh. With a roar of pain I pressed the muzzle of my rifle against the spider's underside and fired. The Arachnoid exploded, spattering the tunnel and me with sticky yellowish pieces.

 

The trooper behind me was dead, his head blown off, but there were two dead spiders beside him, and another of them twitching its legs helplessly. I finished it with a quick blast from my rifle. My suit was sealing the hole the laser beam had made, fluid edges of the perforation flowing together and quickly hardening. I could feel the medical systems inside the suit spraying a disinfecting analgesic on my burn.

 

But my thoughts were on the sixth of those Arachnoids. The one that was not accounted for. It must have scuttled down one of the trapdoors that lined these tunnels. Was it lurking just behind one of the hatches, waiting for me or some other unsuspecting trooper to pass it so that it could pop out again and kill more of us?

 

In the distance ahead of me I saw a dim light and made my way toward it. Several tunnels came together in a hollowed-out area; the walls were smeared with something fluorescent that gave off a faint, sickly greenish yellow light.

 

I hesitated. I could hear sounds of lasers firing and the dull thumping explosions of grenades echoing down the tunnels. This little cavern seemed to be a nexus of some sort, yet it was apparently deserted, undefended. I heard screams of pain and shouting from one of the tunnels, and then a trio of Arachnoids came scuttling backward toward the cavern. They turned around as they came into the wider area. One of them slid a claw into a crack in the tunnel floor, and a hatch-cleverly concealed to look like a natural piece of the rocky floor-slid open.

 

Just as the spider did that, its companions spotted me. I fired at the two of them as the third popped down the open hatch. My rifle blast blew the first Arachnoid to pieces and chopped a leg off the second. It fired back, charring the shoulder of my suit. My second shot killed it.

 

I realized that the spiders did not seem to be wearing any protective clothing. Maybe they could breathe vacuum, I thought, although there was definitely air of some kind in these tunnels. I had no time for investigation. The third one lobbed a grenade at me. My senses shifted into overdrive and I saw it soar slowly up from the open hatch, hit the ground once and bump along in my direction. I pushed myself backward, down the tunnel along which I had come, as the grenade went off in a shower of rocks and dust. The blast tore the rifle from my hands; flying debris peppered my armor, denting and cracking it along the shoulders and helmet. But it held. I was unhurt, though momentarily stunned.

 

The spider edged above the lip of the hatch to fire its laser weapon at me. But I was faster, grabbing my rifle and squeezing its trigger even as I dragged it along the ground toward me. The blast caught the Arachnoid in its eyes. It screeched and dropped out of sight.

 

I crawled to the edge of the hatch and saw a squirming mass of Arachnoids below, dozens of them, with their wounded companion wriggling its barbed legs in their midst. Before they could react I dropped a grenade on them and slammed the hatch shut. The explosion forced it open again.

 

Several troopers came crawling down tunnels into the cavern. Their armor was stained, scuffed, bloodied. One of them was missing an arm. They collapsed, exhausted, on the rocky floor.

 

"Officers report," I said into my helmet mike.

 

One by one they called in. In several platoons the sergeants or even ordinary troopers were the ones to speak; their officers had been killed or wounded. I heard nothing from Frede until almost the end.

 

"Frede here. We're down to five effectives, all of them wounded. I'm the only one still in one piece."

 

Studying the locator map on my visor and the red dots that represented the positions of the reporting soldiers, I saw that we had more or less cleared out two levels of the tunnels that honeycombed the asteroid. There were at least four more levels to go. Maybe more. And I was down to about thirty percent of my original landing force.

 

 

Chapter 20

 

It grew eerily quiet. In the dim underground shadows, dust sifting through, the fighting had stopped for the moment. The Arachnoids seemed content to wait for us to push deeper, into the next level of tunnels.

 

I had the medical officer set up his aid station and told the troopers to take a quick squirt of nutrients from the nipples in their helmets. The nutrients included neural stimulators designed to counteract the effects of physical exhaustion and mental fatigue. The troopers called it "joy juice," or "mother's milk," or worse.

 

I sent a team back to the surface to bring down all the grenades and explosives from the magazines that the landers had left. They caught a few Arachnoids out there, hiding in the wreckage of some of the crashed landers, waiting to snipe at unsuspecting humans.

 

"We got 'em all," reported the sergeant who led the ammunition detail. Then he added, "I think."

 

"Were they wearing any kind of protective suits?" I asked through my helmet radio.

 

"No, sir," said the sergeant. "None that I could see."

 

The scientists would be interested in that, I thought. I had the grenades and heavier explosives distributed among the surviving soldiers and gave them orders to blanket the tunnels with explosives before moving into them.

 

"Blast every hatch you see," I told them, "and then blast whatever's on the other side of the hatch. Check every crevice, every crack in the rock. Go slowly, make certain you've cleared the area around you before advancing. Now let's move."

 

It was slow, painful going. Hours dragged into days. We inched along the tunnels, probing for trapdoors and hidden nests of spiders waiting to pounce on us. I called up to the fleet and requested more explosives.

 

"Do you have anything that can produce a high-temperature flame?" I asked.

 

The Tsihn weaponry officers conferred among themselves, then called back to me that they could send down drums of chemicals which, when mixed together, burst spontaneously into flame.

 

"Good!" I said. "Send down all you can."

 

The Tsihn hesitated. In the image on my visor I could see its tongue flicking nervously.

 

"These are very volatile liquids," it said. "Very dangerous to handle."

 

I laughed at it. "What do you think we're doing down here, having a picnic?"

 

It did not understand my words, but my tone was clear. Within a few hours a shuttle craft took up a parking orbit a scant hundred meters off the asteroid and off-loaded dozens of large, bulky drums. A Tsihn officer came down to the second-level cavern that I had turned into my command post. It was clad in an armored space suit just like the rest of us; the only way we could tell it was not one of us was from the fact that its suit was clean and undamaged.

 

It explained that the liquids in the drums were hypergolic: mix them and they burst into flame hot enough to melt aluminum.

 

"Fine," I said. "That's just what we need."

 

The drums were identified by Tsihn symbols. They looked like abstract pictures to me, little black blots spattered on the curved sides of the big gray drums.

 

"You must be very careful with these chemicals," the Tsihn officer kept repeating. "They are very dangerous."

 

"That's just what we want," I assured it.

 

The Tsihn left as quickly as it could.

 

We went to work on the tunnels, pouring a whole drumful of one chemical down one hatch and then tipping over its hypergolic counterpart and moving out of the way-fast!-as a river of flame burst down on the shrieking, skittering Arachnoids. One by one we cleaned out the tunnels, advancing as soon as the flames had died away, crawling through smoke so thick and oily and choking that we sealed our visors and went back onto the life-support systems in our suits.

 

Down level after level we crawled, through the sooty smoke, through the charred heaps of hundreds of spiders. Their flesh crackled and broke apart in brittle chunks as we crawled past them. Even sealed inside our suits we found the smell nauseating. This was no longer a battle, it was extermination, I thought. The Arachnoids don't have a chance against the liquid fire. I could see, even in the dim light through my helmet visor, that the fire was so intense it had fused the tunnel walls into a slick, glassy surface.

 

But they were not finished yet. Not quite.

 

We had made our way down to the core of the tunnel complex, a large cavern near the heart of the asteroid, big enough for us to stand in. Five major tunnels converged here, and five rivers of flame had poured down into this cavern to turn it into a pit of hell. The floor, the walls, the domelike ceiling were blackened. There had been equipment down here; I could see the charred remains of boxes and consoles, plastic melted and dripping.

 

But no bodies.

 

I walked upright, boots crunching on the burned litter, rifle cradled in my arms. Frede and a dozen other troopers were behind me, visors down, gloved fingers on the triggers of their rifles.

 

"You'd think they'd make their last stand down here," Frede said.

 

I shook my head inside my helmet. "Not if they're smart. They would have figured out that the fire rivers would all converge here and-"

 

Four camouflaged doors in the ceiling dropped open and dozens of spiders jumped down on us, firing, screeching weird high-pitched cries. One of them landed on my shoulders, heavy enough to buckle my knees and knock the rifle out of my hands. I saw a horrific set of mandibles snapping at my visor and felt a laser burn my arm. Grabbing at the spider, I yanked it away from me and smashed it against the cavern wall. Its hard shell took the shock, several of its arms sinking their barbs into the armored sleeve of my suit, another two firing pistols into my torso.

 

I staggered back, still clutching the thing by one of its barbed arms, and reached for the pistol at my hip. My right arm was badly burned, but I shut off the pain signals and yanked the pistol out of its holster. The Arachnoid tried to block me with one of its arms but I clubbed the arm away and fired into its clacking, snapping mouth. The beam sawed through the creature's head and came out the other side, splashing against the wall.

 

Turning as it dropped away from me, I saw another spider clinging to a trooper with several arms and flicking the detonator of a grenade with one free claw. The explosion killed both of them and knocked the rest of us to the floor of the cavern.

 

With my senses in overdrive I fired at two more of the Arachnoids, pulled a third off Frede's back and blew its head off, then swept half the cavern with the beam of my pistol.

 

The attack ended as suddenly as it had begun. Four of my troopers were on the ground, dead or dying. None of the spiders was left alive.

 

Through the suit radio I could hear Frede gulping for air.

 

"Thanks," she gasped. "It was going to set off a grenade, I think."

 

"Suicide fighters," I said. "We won't have any prisoners for the scientists to study."

 

Frede laughed bitterly. "Tough shit," she said.

 

 

 

I was able at last to tell the Tsihn admiral that Bititu was secure, after four days of intense battle. My casualties were nearly eighty percent. I myself was burned in the chest and right arm.

 

The admiral congratulated me, although its image in my visor showed no sign of pleasure or even of approval.

 

"The Hegemony has not seen fit to attempt to reinforce Bititu," it complained. "My fleet has waited here for nothing."

 

As we were being ferried back to the troopship I wondered why the Commonwealth thought this barren chunk of rock was important enough to kill hundreds of troopers. Apparently the Hegemony did not want to hold on to Bititu badly enough to send help to its Arachnoid garrison.

 

I shook my head wearily. Was there some real strategic meaning to this fighting, or was it all a game that the Creators were playing among themselves, using us and the other alien races we had encountered as pawns for their entertainment?

 

What difference did it make? Sitting there in the shuttle craft on the way back to the troopship, grimy and bloody and utterly exhausted, I did what all the other troopers were doing. I leaned my head back against the bulkhead and dozed off.

 

"It is not a game, Orion."

 

The Golden One appeared before me, radiating light so blindingly bright that I had to shield my eyes with my aching, weary hands.

 

He seemed deadly serious, none of his usual mocking tone in his voice, his face somber, almost grim.

 

"The balance of forces in this war is tilting the wrong way," Aten told me. "Anya and her ilk are slowly overcoming my Commonwealth."

 

"But we took Bititu," I protested, like a child seeking its father's approval. "Isn't that something?"

 

"Not enough," he said. "The Hegemony did not go for my feint. The fleet waited, but the enemy did not step into the trap we had prepared for them."

 

"Feint? All that killing was nothing more than a feint?"

 

"Not quite, Orion. A good strategist always has more than one objective in sight." Some of Aten's old haughty self-importance crept back into his expression. "The military aspect of your exertions did not pay the dividends I expected, but the political consequences may yet bear fruit."

 

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

 

He folded his arms across his chest. "You will see, in due time."

 

I blinked and was back on the shuttle, amid my wounded, bone-tired, snoring troopers. The shuttle shuddered and thumped as it docked with the troopship, waking all but the most determined dozers.

 

"Home sweet home," somebody cracked.

 

"You know," said someone else, "that cryosleeper's gonna look damned good to me."

 

I frowned. Cryosleep? Is that what was in store for these troopers?

 

They let us rest for two whole days. The severely wounded were sent to sickbay while the rest of us were examined by medics, patched here and there, and allowed to return to our quarters. We slept, we ate and we slept some more.

 

On the third day we were handed dress uniforms and ordered to assemble in the ship's biggest cargo bay. It had carried supplies and ammunition on the trip to Bititu; now it was empty. Human officers I had never seen before-all of them in magnificent spotless uniforms heavy with braid and decorations-put us through a marching drill and then paraded us around the big cargo bay to the tune of martial music piped in through the ship's intercom.

 

They stood us at attention in front of a makeshift dais, and the human officers, together with a handful of Tsihn, made a series of speeches at us, praising our courage and loyalty. Even Brigadier Uxley was there, obviously reading his prepared speech from a screen built into the rostrum that he leaned upon. He had flown out from the sector base to rendezvous with us at one of our navigation points, where we slowed from superlight velocity for a few hours.

 

"They're piping this ceremony back to Loris," Frede whispered to me as we stood at attention through the long, boring speeches.

 

Loris. The Commonwealth's capital planet, my memory told me. The only Earthlike planet of the Giotto system, 270 light-years from old Earth itself.

 

Then the Tsihn admiral read off a unit citation and handed out medals. It seemed like a miserably poor reward for such hard fighting, but the troopers were pitifully grateful for the recognition.

 

At the end of the ceremony Uxley smiled beamingly at us and announced, "You are relieved of all duties for the remainder of this trip back to sector base six. There you will be reassigned. Dismissed."

 

Frede came up to me as the troop broke up into chatting, laughing little groups.

 

"Ready for some R and R?" she asked.

 

"Not much to do aboard this bucket," I complained.

 

"We can grab some sack time."

 

I caught the gleam in her eye. "For the whole trip back?"

 

Frede laughed. "That would be fun, Orion, but we've only got another twelve hours."

 

Puzzled, I asked, "What do you mean? The commander said we're relieved of all duties-"

 

"That means we're going back into cryosleep," Frede said, her tone sobering. "You don't think they're going to feed us the whole trip back, do you? A few watts of electricity to keep the nitrogen liquefied is a lot cheaper than having us underfoot."

 

"But I thought-"

 

She gripped my arm, making me wince slightly.

 

"Oh, I'm sorry! I forgot your arm is still healing."

 

"You mean that after all the fighting we've done they're going to pop us back into the freezers?"

 

Frede gave me a sad smile. "We got a unit citation and individual medals and congratulations from the admiral. They beamed the ceremony back to the capital for all the civilians to see. We're official heroes. What more can a trooper ask for?"

 

I shook my head. "I guess you've got to be born to it."

 

"Yeah," she said. "Come on, let's make out while we're still warm."

 

 

Chapter 21

 

I was an officer, and not a regular army officer at that. I received special treatment. I was allowed to remain awake for the trip back to sector base six.

 

There was a handful of other human officers on the ship, but they seemed to deliberately avoid me. They were staff officers, not line. I got the feeling that they regarded fighting soldiers as beneath their dignity. Or perhaps they were inwardly ashamed of their soft jobs and did not wish to be reminded that the memos and charts and requisitions they dealt with represented real, living, bleeding men and women who were sent into battle at the touch of a keystroke.

 

Brigadier Uxley remained on board, riding with us back to the sector base. Uxley was cut from a different cloth than the staff officers. He had been a frontline soldier; lost both his legs in battle. He was a gruff old buzzard who drank too much and liked to talk far into the night. We became friends, of a sort. I could drink with him because my metabolism neutralized the effects of alcohol almost as quickly as I digested it. And I needed very little sleep, after resting several days from Bititu.

 

We spent the long nights of the flight back to sector base six in the brigadier's quarters, drinking his favorite liquor. The Tsihn quartermaster complained about using the ship's limited supplies of energy to make unauthorized refreshments with the matter-transceiving equipment. Uxley overrode the reptilian's objections.

 

"Damned lizards think they own this sector just because their fleet is operating here," he grumbled to me as we drank the night away.

 

He liked to tell war stories, and his memory for them became better with each glass of whisky he downed. Unfortunately, he seemed to forget that he had told me several of his favorite stories more than once. He repeated them, night after night, although each retelling was slightly different.

 

"You're lucky," he said one evening, slurring his words as he poured himself another drink and refilled my glass.

 

"Lucky?" I asked.

 

Bobbing his reddened face up and down, Uxley said, "You fought those damned spiders. And the Skorpis before that."

 

"I wouldn't call that lucky," I said.

 

Waving a finger in the air, he explained, "You don't understand. You haven't had to fight humans. It's easier to kill aliens. Humans-even those bastards of the Hegemony-that's a little tougher, believe me."

 

I grimaced inwardly. I had fought humans, killed them face-to-face with swords and knives, fought for the Greeks at Troy, for the Israelites at Jericho, fought in a thousand different times back on distant Earth.

 

"I fought humans," Uxley said, leaning close enough for me to smell his alcoholic breath. "That's where I lost these." He thumped on his prosthetic legs.

 

"It must have been very painful," I said.

 

"You don't feel the pain. Not at first. Shock. I had both m'legs burned out from under me and I never knew it. Just flopped down on my belly and kept on firing at those Hegemony bastards. Bastards took my legs. I wanted to kill 'em all, every one of them. I got a bunch of 'em, don't think I didn't. When the battle was over I was surrounded by piles of enemy dead. I held my position and killed 'em by droves."

 

I sipped at my whisky.

 

"I can still hear 'em," he said, his voice sinking to a whisper. "At night, when I go to sleep. I can still hear the wounded moaning and screaming. Every night."

 

One evening he asked me if I would like to see the recording of our ceremony, as it was shown to the populace of Loris and all the other Commonwealth worlds. When I hesitated, he laughed.

 

"Don't worry, you won't have to sit through all the speeches. The news media trimmed our ceremony quite a bit."

 

I really had no choice. I pulled up a chair next to his as he ordered the voice-activated screen to show the news recording from Loris.

 

I saw my troop, looking clean and fresh in the dress uniforms they had issued us. Instead of being in the cargo hold of a troopship, we appeared to be out on the surface of an Earthlike planet, beneath a bright blue sky, flags and pennants snapping in a brisk breeze. And we were only one tiny unit on a parade ground that held massed ranks by the tens of thousands. The ground was black with Commonwealth soldiery that had been added to the scene by computer.

 

I glanced at the colonel. "They make it look good, don't they," he muttered.

 

The computer-created band played stirring martial music while a commentator identified my unit as the group that "annihilated the defenders of a key planet in a conquest that took only four days."

 

Only four days, I thought. Four days in hell.

 

The entire show was over in less than ninety seconds.

 

"What do you think?" Uxley asked me as the screen went dark.

 

I felt anger simmering inside me. "A kernel of fact wrapped in a big phony sugar coating," I said.

 

He nodded and began to pour his first drink of the evening. "Got to keep the civilians happy, Orion. Got to keep up their morale."

 

"Really?"

 

He looked at me through bloodshot eyes. "Hell, man, most of 'em don't even realize there's a war going on unless we show them stuff like this."

 

"Then why don't they show them combat scenes? Why don't they show some of the tapes our helmet recorders took on Bititu? Then they'd see there's a war being fought!"

 

Uxley shook his head. "Don't want to scare them, Orion. The deep thinkers upstairs, the psychotechs and politicians, they don't want to upset the civilians with blood and pain. Just tell 'em that we're winning, but there's a long haul ahead. Light at the end of the tunnel. That's what they feed the civilians."

 

"Crap," I said.

 

"I suppose it is," Uxley agreed calmly. Then he took a big swallow of whisky. "I believed in this war, Orion. I really believed it was important to fight for the Commonwealth. That's why I joined up. Volunteered. No one forced me. I left my family as soon as I graduated university and joined the army."

 

"What did your family think of that?"

 

He shrugged, his sorrowful eyes looking into the past. "Father was proud. Mother cried. My sisters thought I was crazy."

 

"And now?" I avoided looking at his legs.

 

"Who knows? Haven't seen any of them in years. We would hardly recognize each other, I suppose. Too much has happened, we've moved too far apart."

 

"Wouldn't you like to go home?"

 

He gulped at his whisky. "The army's my home, Orion. I have no other home now. Just the army."

 

Another night we got onto the subject of his legs.

 

"They tried regeneration, but something in my metabolism fouled up the process. These plastic jobs are all right, though. I can get around just fine and they only hurt if I have to be on my feet for more than an hour or so."

 

Then he started once again on the story of how he lost his legs.

 

"Training, Orion," he told me. "That's the important thing. Training. It's not rational to expect a man to stand and fight when he's being shot at. A sane man would turn and run for safety. Takes training to make him fight."

 

"Even our cloned troopers?" I asked.

 

"Yes, of course. They're humans. They want to live, cloned or not. Got to train them to stand up to battle, not to run when all hell's breaking loose on them."

 

"And train them to kill," I said.

 

"Oh, yes, killing's an important part of it. No one's figured out how to win a battle without killing, despite all the scientists and computers."

 

"Brigadier, what's going to happen to my troop?"

 

"Happen?" He blinked his bleary eyes. "They'll be reassigned, what else?"

 

"Don't they get any time for R and R? Furloughs?"

 

Uxley sat up straighter in his chair. "You're talking about troopers, Orion. They were made to fight. That's what they're for. They're not real people, like you and me. We've got families and friends and a life back home. They don't. They're nothing but soldiers. What would they do with a furlough? They've got no place to go, no families, no home except the army."

 

"But you said you've drifted apart from your family, your home," I pointed out.

 

"So what? I've still got 'em. They're still there if I decide to go back to them. You've got a family and home, don't you?"

 

I wondered what to say, finally decided on, "No, I don't. I'm-an orphan."

 

"Too bad. But the troopers, they're just clones. We made 'em to fight, not to mix with society."

 

"There's nothing in their lives except battle and training for battle."

 

"We let 'em have sex, don't we?" he countered with a broad wink.

 

"Because some psychotechs decided they'd fight better if their aggressive/protective instincts were reinforced by sexual relationships. Is that all they mean to you? A bunch of instincts to be trained and used like weapons?"

 

Uxley began to look uncomfortable, his face flushing slightly. "Listen to an old veteran, Orion. Being a soldier consists of long months of boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. We've eliminated the boredom for them. They ought to be grateful."

 

"And left them nothing but the terror. Is that fair to them?"

 

"Fair?" His face reddened even more. I didn't know whether he was going to burst out laughing or roar with anger. "Fair? We're fighting a war, man! We need the biggest number of troops we can generate. And the cheapest. We can't go around worrying about their feelings. It'd make them soft, lower their fighting morale."

 

I tried to make him see the troopers as human beings, fully as human as he himself was, or as he thought I was. But it was useless. Night after night we talked about it, and he always came down to the same statement. "They were made to fight. Otherwise they would never have been made at all. They ought to be grateful that they're alive and able to serve the Commonwealth."

 

Yes, I thought. Just as I should be grateful that I have been given life after life, all for the privilege of serving Aten and the other Creators.

 

"What will their next assignment be?" I asked one night.

 

Uxley shrugged. "Headquarters hasn't decided yet. Or at least, I haven't been informed."

 

"Aren't they being retrained while they're in cryosleep?"

 

"Not yet," he told me. "Not as far as I know."

 

I began to wonder. And to think. As I lay awake in my bunk after bidding the colonel good night, I began to consider what the Golden One had told me and what I had seen with my own eyes of this era, this time of interstellar war, this battle among the Creators themselves.

 

The Golden One had told me that Anya had rejected me, rejected human form, that she was leading the fight against him. I was programmed to believe him, but deep within me there was a shadow of doubt. Anya and I had loved one another through the eons, in every era to which I had been sent. Why would she change now?

 

The Golden One said that if I found Anya she would kill me as quickly and casually as a man swats an insect. And he would not revive me; perhaps he would be unable to do so, more likely he would be unwilling.

 

Very well, then, I thought. If I seek out Anya, wherever she is among the stars, and find that what Aten has told me is the truth, then I will be killed and that will be the end of it. The end of all suffering. The end of all my hopes and pains. The end of love.

 

But if he has been lying to me, if Anya still loves me and wants me with her, then it is lunacy for me to remain locked into this servitude. I should go out and find her.

 

Love or death. The ultimate stakes of life.

 

I began to plan.

 

 

 

The Golden One had his own plans for me, I discovered.

 

Once we reached sector base six I supervised the offloading of my troop's cryosleep capsules. I wanted to begin retraining them for the mission I had in mind, and began to look into how I might tap into the computers that programmed the sleep training systems for the base.

 

But as I started cautiously playing with the computer terminal in my cramped quarters, Aten appeared to me once more. One instant I was sitting at the desk in my quarters, hunched over the keyboard and display screen.

 

The next I was on that grassy hillside above the Creators' mausoleum of a city. The sun shone warmly, the wildflowers nodded in the breeze from the nearby sea. Waves washed up on the beach. I knew there were dolphins out there who regarded me as their friend.

 

A golden sphere appeared in the air before me, blazing radiance, forcing me to throw my arms up over my face and sink to my knees.

 

"That's better, Orion," I heard Aten's arrogant voice say. "A properly worshipful position."

 

When I dared to look up, the Golden One had assumed human form, standing before me in his immaculate military uniform.

 

"You did well on Bititu," he said, almost grudgingly.

 

"It was a slaughter."

 

"Yes, but necessary."

 

"Why?"

 

"You mean you haven't puzzled that out for yourself, Orion? You who claim to be almost as good as your Creators? You who scheme to find the goddess you're so infatuated with? Why would the Commonwealth want Bititu?"

 

Not for itself, certainly, I reasoned swiftly. Then it must be valuable for its location. But there was nothing else in the Jilbert system except the fading red dwarf star itself, a single gas giant planet orbiting close to it, and the scattered debris of other asteroids, dead chunks of rock and metal....

 

I looked into Aten's gold-flecked eyes. "There was once another planet in the system. You destroyed it."

 

"Two others, Orion," he answered. "We destroyed them both."

 

"How many were killed?"

 

He shrugged carelessly. "The Hegemony had planted colonies on those worlds. They were turning them into powerful military bases."

 

"But what did that threaten?" I asked. "There's no Commonwealth world for a hundred light-years or more."

 

"So?" he taunted. "Think, Orion. Think."

 

The only other planet in the Jilbert system was the gas giant, a huge blue world covered in clouds. Beneath those clouds the planet's gases would be condensed by its massive gravity field into liquids. A planetwide ocean. Of water, perhaps.

 

It hit me. "The Old Ones."

 

Aten actually clapped his hands. "Very good, Orion. The Jilbert gas giant is a world on which the Old Ones have lived since time immemorial. Perhaps it is their original home world."

 

"The Hegemony established their bases in the system in an attempt to establish contact with the Old Ones."

 

"And to prevent us from making such contact," the Golden One added.

 

"Now that we've driven the Hegemony out of the system," I reasoned, "you want to try to reach the Old Ones."

 

Like a patient schoolteacher, Aten prompted, "And since you are the only person the Old Ones have seen fit to talk to..."

 

"You want me," I finished his thought, "to attempt to contact them again."

 

"Exactly."

 

My mind was churning, trying to set this new factor into my plans without letting Aten realize what my true objective was.

 

"In that case," I said, "I will need a ship and a crew."

 

"I can send you there without such paraphernalia," he said.

 

"And have me tread water in that planetwide ocean until the Old Ones deign to speak to me?" I retorted. "Can I breathe that planet's atmosphere? Can I eat the fish that swim in that sea?"

 

He nodded. "I see what you're after, Orion. You want the survivors of your assault team to be retrained as crew for your vessel. Touchingly virtuous of you, to be so loyal to such creatures."

 

"They are human beings," I said.

 

"Manufactured to be soldiers. Weapons, Orion, nothing more."

 

"Your ancestors," I reminded him.

 

Aten laughed derisively. "So are tree shrews, Orion. Do you feel pangs of conscience for them?"

 

Before I could answer, the entire scene disappeared as suddenly as a snap of the fingers and I was hunched over my computer screen again in my quarters at sector base six.

 

The computer beeped and my orders appeared on the display screen: I was to command a scout ship and return to the Jilbert system where I would contact the Old Ones and invite them to join the Commonwealth.

 

I saw to it that my cryosleeping troopers received the training they needed to run a scout vessel. I myself spent almost all my time in the training center with a crown of electrodes clamped to my head as the training computer poured information into my brain. I wondered if this was the way Aten trained me for my various missions throughout space-time, while I was unconscious.

 

In a week my troopers were revived and our ship arrived, a sleek disk-shaped scout named Apollo . I frowned when I first learned the name; the Golden One had styled himself Apollo to the awestruck ancient Greeks and Trojans. Aside from the name, though, I found the vessel trim and fit, and my troopers transformed by their cryosleep training into a crew that at least appeared to know what it was doing.

 

Frede was still my second-in-command, and Apollo's navigation officer. Little Jerron was now chief engineer. Ordinary mutts who had been little more than cannon fodder on Lunga and Bititu now found themselves classified as ship's officers, in charge of weapons, logistics, damage control, communications, medical services. They grinned at their newfound stature, but they took their new duties quite seriously.

 

And, one by one, each of them thanked me for getting them better duty. Emon, our weapons officer, put it best:

 

"The longer we stay with you, sir, the better off we'll be. If we live through it."

 

I believe he was entirely serious.

 

We spent two days directing the robots that outfitted and stocked Apollo with supplies; then we left sector base six and started our run back to the Jilbert system.

 

Except that we never got there.

 

 

Chapter 22

 

Frede and the others were happy to be awake, alive, and running a starship rather than fighting as expendable infantry.

 

"This makes us more important to the Commonwealth," Frede told me. "More valuable."

 

"And it's easier duty," said weapons officer Emon. As a sergeant, he had been wounded twice during the assault on Bititu. Frede's official title was now "first mate," which set off a lot of jokes because she once again had jiggered the sleeping assignments so that she shared my bunk.

 

The bridge was compact, built more for efficiency than comfort, with only five duty stations jammed in cheek by jowl. Tactical command and all the ship's information systems were tied together in the consoles and data screens that surrounded us. From my command chair I could see anything in the ship I needed to see, call up all of the computer files, activate any system aboard the vessel.

 

We made the transition to superlight velocity as smoothly as if the crew had spent years aboard the ship. As far as their memories and reflexes were concerned, they had. Neural training, whether awake or in cryosleep, leaves virtually the same imprint on the brain and nervous system as actual experience would.

 

"What if we could just fly this ship forever," Frede whispered to me one night in our bunk. "Just forget the war and everything and go out among the stars for the rest of our lives."

 

"Would you like that?" I asked.

 

"Yes!" She clutched at my bare shoulders. "Never to be frozen again. To be free. It'd be wonderful."

 

"To be free," I murmured, knowing that in all the eras of space-time in which I had existed, I had never been free.

 

"There are others," she whispered. "You hear stories about them."

 

"About who?" I asked.

 

"Renegades. Units that disappeared, just walked off into the jungle and never were heard from again. Ships that took off on their own, split from the fleet and ran away forever."

 

I knew all about renegades. Lukka and his squad of mercenaries, fighting for their lives in the shambles of the Hittite empire's collapse; Harkan and his band of thieves roaming the mountains of Anatolia, searching for his enslaved children; guerrillas from a thousand wars in a thousand different eras.

 

"And the war," I asked her gently. "Our duty to the Commonwealth?"

 

She hesitated for a moment, realizing that she was speaking to her superior officer even though we happened to be lying nude in bed together.

 

"How long have you been serving the Commonwealth, Orion?"

 

I evaded a direct answer. "Time loses its meaning."

 

"I've been serving all my life," Frede said. "So have we all. It's all we know, the army. It's all we have to look forward to, until the day we're killed."

 

There was a trigger phrase, of course, that came with my orders. Whenever the crew began to show signs of humanity, indications that they were thinking of themselves instead of their duty to the Commonwealth, all I had to say was "Remember Yellowflower."

 

The planet Yellowflower, according to the Commonwealth's history of the war, had been suddenly and ruthlessly attacked, destroyed by Hegemony forces without a declaration of war, scoured down to bedrock. Four billion human beings had been killed, the planet's entire biosphere totally obliterated. Yellowflower had been the start of the war, three generations earlier.

 

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."

 

"Eliminated?"

 

"The human race, the Skorpis, the Tsihn, all the warring species will be extinguished."

 

"How? What do you intend to do?"

 

"The older species have maintained neutrality throughout your squabbles. But we cannot allow you to destroy the very stars on which the continuum hinges. Attempt to attack a single star, and we will eliminate you-all of you-completely."

 

They spoke with one voice, an implacable finality in their tone.

 

"Go back to your Creators and tell them what we have said, Orion. The fate of many species depends on their reaction to our warning."

 

I sat bolt upright on my bunk. Frede lay sleeping peacefully beside me, a little girl's smile on her relaxed face.

 

The Old Ones were using me as a messenger again. It's not enough that Aten manipulates me, the Old Ones use me to manipulate him and the other Creators.

 

But then I smiled. Did the Old Ones know my inner thoughts, my plans? I had hoped to use this scout ship to find Anya, somewhere deep in Hegemony territory. Now the Old Ones had given me a reason for seeking her. I had to warn her about the Commonwealth's star-wrecker.

 

The third watch still had an hour to go when I came onto the bridge and relieved Dyer, my logistics/damage-control officer, who had the command. The watch was almost entirely perfunctory; as long as we were in superlight velocity there was nothing to worry about except a possible internal malfunction.

 

Taking the command chair, I ransacked the ship's computer records for information about the Hegemony. Where was their capital planet? What kind of defenses guarded it? Would they honor a flag of truce on a Commonwealth ship?

 

The computer could not tell me, of course, if Anya was in the Hegemony's capital. The data screens showed their capital planet, Prime, in the Zeta system. I viewed their cities and learned their population, history, economy, social customs, politics, military capabilities-much data, little understanding.

 

The screens showed Prime itself to be a gray, forbidding city of massive stone buildings rising out of dark cliffs into a heavy cloudy sky. Its streets were almost empty, swept by gusts of rain and sleet. Giant Skorpis warriors seemed to be at every intersection, serving as police or militia guards. The people of Prime looked grim, dour, humorless.

 

"Why the interest in Prime?"

 

I looked up from the screens surrounding my chair and saw Frede standing beside me, looking curious. At the touch of a keypad I blanked the screens.

 

"That's where we're going," I said.

 

"Prime?" she squeaked. "But that's the Hegemony's capital!"

 

The four others on duty in the bridge turned and stared at us.

 

"I have secret orders," I told her. But I didn't say who the orders had come from. "We're on a mission of diplomacy to Prime."

 

"They'll blow us out of the galaxy the instant we drop out of superlight," Frede said.

 

"Let's hope not."

 

Reluctantly she followed my command to set course for the Hegemony capital. I planned to send out message capsules ahead of us once we neared the Zeta system, so the Hegemony defenders would be warned that we were coming and that our mission was a peaceful one. Frede and the rest of the crew thought the Hegemony ships would shoot first and check on our story after we were safely dead. The almost happy air about the ship dissolved into soldierly griping and dread.

 

There was something more that I could do, of course. That night, while Frede slept, I tried with all my energies to reach across the span of space-time and contact Anya. Nothing. It was like facing a blank wall too high to climb, too wide to go around.

 

So I reached out to Aten, instead. Concentrating on my memory of the Creators' city, I translated myself to its timeless stasis in the continuum. I found myself standing atop a Mayan pyramid in the heart of the city, high enough to look out across its broad empty avenues toward the eternal sea. The sun's warmth Was tempered slightly by the shimmering golden dome of energy that encased the city.

 

Aten looked surprised when I appeared. He and several other of the Creators were apparently locked deep in conference, there at the top of the steep stone pyramid. They were all standing together before the sacrificial altar: Aten in a white and gold military uniform; the dark-bearded one I thought of as Zeus in a comfortable tunic and slacks; rust-haired Ares; slim, sharp-eyed Hermes; and the beautiful redheaded woman who had styled herself Hera in an earlier age.

 

It was Hermes who spied me first; the others had their backs to me as they talked earnestly among themselves.

 

"Look who's here," Hermes said, touching Aten on the shoulder.

 

They all turned toward me, wide-eyed with surprise.

 

Hera smiled maliciously at me. "Who invited you, Orion?"

 

"The Old Ones," I answered.

 

That stifled any complaints or gibes they intended to make. "What do you mean?" Aten snapped.

 

"They have given me a message for you. A warning," I said. "If you try to use the star-destroying weapon the Commonwealth has developed, the Old Ones will destroy you."

 

Ares glared at me. "How could they know about the star-wrecker? You told them, Orion! You're a traitor!"

 

"I didn't know about the weapon until they told me of it," I retorted.

 

"That's true," Aten said. "Orion knew nothing of the weapon."

 

"Then how could the Old Ones know?"

 

"They know," I said. "And they will eliminate all of us if you try to use it."

 

"How credible is this threat by the Old Ones?" Zeus asked.

 

"What threat?" Aten sneered. "How could they destroy us? We can avoid them by traveling through time whenever we wish. If necessary I can go back to their time of origins and eliminate them."

 

"I wonder," Zeus muttered.

 

"Your meddling with space-time has caused us enough trouble," Hera complained.

 

"My meddling," Aten retorted, "is what created us. Without me, we would never have come into existence."

 

Zeus said to me, "Orion, you must give this warning to Anya and her cohorts, too."

 

"The Hegemony-"

 

"Is developing a similar weapon," Hera told me. "What did you expect?"

 

"I am trying to reach Anya now," I said to them.

 

Aten fixed me with an angry look. "I never told you to do so."

 

"But I told you that I would find her," I said. "That's what I'm doing."

 

"In the era of the war?" Zeus asked.

 

"Yes. I am flying my ship to the Hegemony capital to tell her that you have the star-weapon."

 

"I told you he was a traitor," Ares snapped hotly.

 

I ignored him. "Now I must carry the Old Ones' warning to her."

 

"No," Aten snapped. "You mustn't do that."

 

"I am already doing it."

 

"I'll put a stop to that! And to you, too, Orion."

 

"Wait," said Zeus. "Perhaps your creature can accomplish what we cannot."

 

"Nonsense!"

 

"Anya has been close to this one in the past," Hera said, sneering. "Maybe she will listen to him where she refuses to speak with us."

 

"It's worth a try," said Hermes.

 

Ares glowered at me and rubbed his chin. "Aten, if this creature is yours, you ought to control him better than this."

 

"I can control him!"

 

"No, you can't," I said. "Not entirely. I came here on my own power, not because you summoned me. I decided to find Anya even when you told me it was impossible."

 

He smirked at me. "So you think you have free will? That you are not under my command every instant of your existence?"

 

"I've gone against your commands in the past," I countered.

 

"Pah!" spat Zeus. "Stop this posturing, both of you. Aten, I suggest you use your creature to make contact with Anya. This threat from the Old Ones must be taken seriously."

 

His eyes never leaving mine, Aten replied, "Perhaps you're right. Perhaps this pitifully flawed wretch can be useful to us in spite of himself."

 

I seemed to fall asleep then, as deep and restful a sleep as I have ever known. When I awoke, I was back in my bunk aboard the Apollo , with Frede drowsing peacefully beside me. A wonderful warm feeling of joy filled me. I was going to find Anya, I was going to see her again! And I knew that she loved me as much as I loved her. Nothing else mattered.

 

 

Chapter 23

 

Frede computed our course to the Zeta system with conspicuous reluctance. When on duty in the bridge she was crisp, efficient, and knowledgeable. She checked her navigation constantly by having us drop out of superlight velocity at random times so that she could take an observation of the stars. It took only a few seconds; then we accelerated back into superlight again.

 

At night, in bed, she tried to talk me out of entering the Zeta system.

 

"It's suicide, Orion! They'll blast us before we have a chance to blink our eyes. The system must have automated defense bases all around it, belts of them orbiting the star. They'll be programmed to shoot the instant any unauthorized vessel pops out of superlight within range of their weapons."

 

"We'll send message capsules ahead," I repeated each time she brought up the argument. "We'll tell them exactly when and where we'll appear."

 

"Great! Then they'll know exactly where and when to shoot!"

 

"Our mission is a peaceful one," I said. "Surely the Hegemony can understand that one scout won't be a threat to their capital."

 

Frede huffed at me. "No, they'll see it as an opportunity for target practice."

 

Every night we came to the same deadlock. And every night I would end the matter by saying, "Lieutenant, the time for argument is finished. As your commanding officer, I order this discussion closed."

 

Frede would grumble and give it up. Until the next night. We made love infrequently during that flight to Prime; it was difficult to work up any ardor when each of us was convinced that the other was being pigheaded.

 

And then, the night before we were scheduled to start sending out the message capsules, Frede told me what was really bothering her.

 

"You call out to Anya in your sleep, you know."

 

She was undressing. I did not feel at all sleepy. I did not answer her.

 

"That's the reason you want to go to Prime, isn't it?" Frede asked me. "She's there."

 

"Yes," I admitted.

 

"You're willing to get us all killed, for her?"

 

"She can stop the war," I said.

 

"Dogshit she can. Nobody can stop this war. It's going to go on forever."

 

"Is that what you want?"

 

"It's the reason I'm alive, Orion. All of us mutts. Stop the war and they freeze us."

 

"Continue the war and you'll be killed, sooner or later."

 

She ran a hand through her short-cropped hair. "Some choice, huh?"

 

"Maybe I can change things," I said, not really believing it myself, but wanting to give her some glimmer of hope.

 

She smiled weakly at me. "You asked me what I wanted. I want you, Orion. I want to get off this damned dogshit of a life and run away and find some happy little world that the Commonwealth and the Hegemony have never even heard of and live a normal life there. With you."

 

The look on her face. As if she expected to be hit. Cringing, almost. She had revealed herself to me knowing that there was nothing she could expect except to be hurt.

 

As gently as I could I took her in my arms and held her for a long, long silent time.

 

At last she disengaged a little and smiled up at me again. There were tears in her eyes. "Some soldier, huh? I ought to be popped back into a freezer and given a long course in discipline and loyalty, right?"

 

"You ought to be allowed to live a normal life," I murmured.

 

"Yeah. Right." She pushed entirely away from me and began to strip off her army brown undershirt. "Well, a normal life for us mutts is to follow orders, fight the enemy when we're awake, train for the next fight when we're in the freezer. Right?"

 

There was nothing that I could think of to say. As I watched, Frede stripped naked, stamped barefoot to the bunk and pulled down the top sheet.

 

"Well, I know my rights. I may be just a mutt, but I know my rights as a soldier. Get your gorgeous ass into bed, sir. It's time for you to do your fucking duty."

 

I made myself smile and say, "Aye, aye, sir."

 

 

 

Next day the tension on the bridge was thick enough to chew on. We slowed out of superlight one last time, and Frede used the few seconds to snap panoramic views of the star fields around us. Once we were safely back in superlight, she checked our position, made a slight course correction and announced in a loud, brittle voice:

 

"Next stop, Zeta system."

 

The others on the bridge said nothing, but I could see their bodies stiffen and they avoided looking me in the eye.

 

I ordered the message capsules sent out, one every four hours for the next twenty-four. Thirty hours from now we would slow to relativistic speed at the edge of the Zeta system. We would either be greeted warily as ambassadors under a flag of truce or blown out of existence in a few nanoseconds.

 

It was a tense thirty hours. The Hegemony could deduce the direction from which we were approaching Zeta by backtracking the message capsules as they appeared in normal space. Thus they could focus their defenses on the area where we would appear. What they could not do was to send us a message in return. I would have given a lot to hear either that they were willing to accept us as ambassadors or that they were waiting to destroy us if we should enter the Zeta system. It would have saved thirty hours' sweat.

 

"Lightspeed in one minute," the navigation computer announced.

 

"Still plenty of time to turn around, sir," said Emon, the weapons officer. I glared at him, then saw he was trying to grin at me. It was supposed to be a joke.

 

"Forty-five seconds."

 

"I wonder what it's like to be a plasma cloud," Magro, the comm officer, muttered, loud enough for everyone on the bridge to hear.

 

"Peaceful," Frede said.

 

"Mind-expanding."

 

"Just plain expanding."

 

"Thirty seconds."

 

I said, "Just in case you didn't know, I've enjoyed serving with you."

 

"We know, sir!"

 

"A mutt gets to sense when his commander's having a good time."

 

"You've got to be born to it. Sir."

 

"Ten seconds."

 

I glanced at Frede at the instant she happened to look at me. No words. Not even a smile. But we understood one another.

 

"Lightspeed," said the computer.

 

All the screens on the bridge lit up to show a sky full of dazzling stars. And Hegemony dreadnoughts.

 

"COMMONWEALTH SHIP, YOU WILL ESTABLISH CIRCULAR ORBIT AT FIFTY ASTRONOMICAL UNITS FROM STAR ZETA AND STAND BY FOR BOARDING AND INSPECTION."

 

They were not going to shoot first.

 

I punched the communications keyboard and answered, "We will comply with your instructions."

 

They sent Skorpis warriors aboard to inspect us and disarm our ship's weapon systems. Then they confiscated all our sidearms and assault rifles. I accompanied the boarding team as they went through the Apollo. They were very thorough in their search for weapons, but equally careful not to tear up the ship.

 

"You will wait aboard your ship until further orders," the chief of the Skorpis boarding party told me, after his team had finished.

 

We were standing at the main air-lock hatch. He towered over me by a full head, his shoulders so wide he would have to go through the hatch sideways. I hoped he would remember to duck his head. As it was, his furry skull was bare millimeters from the metal ribbing of our overhead.

 

"We are Commonwealth military personnel on a diplomatic mission," I replied to him. "We will accept instructions from your superiors, not orders."

 

His lip curled in what might have been the Skorpis equivalent of a smile. "Instructions, then."

 

With that, he turned, ducked low, and went sideways through the air-lock hatch to return to his own ship.

 

I let out a breath of relief.

 

"I thought they were going to take our butter knives," Jerron piped when I returned to the bridge.

 

"Makes you feel kind of naked," said Emon, "without even a pistol."

 

"We're here to talk, not fight," I reminded them.

 

"Yessir, I know. But I still feel naked."

 

 

 

For two days we waited inside our ship as it swung in orbit out at the far end of the Zeta system. Prime, the capital planet, was far closer to the star Zeta. We were out in the cold and dark, the closest planet a gas giant almost as large as the one at Jilbert.

 

I wondered if the Old Ones inhabited that huge world, as they did Jilbert's gas giant. But when I tried to probe for them with my mind I received only silence.

 

With little else to do, I called up the ship's information system for data about the gas-giant worlds of the Zeta system. There were three of them. No native forms of life had been found on any of them, as far as the ship's computer knew. Only the largest, the one closest to the star, bore an ocean of liquid water. The others were too cold for water to remain liquid, even under the pressure of their heavy gravity fields. I studied the information about Prime, instead, looking for all the details I could find about that gray, grim, rainswept world.

 

Then we received a message that we would be boarded again. I told the crew to spruce up and look snappy for the Skorpis. They complained loudly, their fears of instant annihilation long since forgotten, and grudgingly put on their best uniforms.

 

"Trying to impress the Skorpis is like trying to train a cat to fetch a stick," one of the troopers grumbled.

 

This time, however, it was a human team that came through our air lock. Two male soldiers carrying sidearms and a young woman bearing a red sash across her tunic.

 

"I am Nella, of the Hegemony diplomatic corps. I am instructed by my superiors to bring your representative to Prime."

 

I introduced myself and told her that I was the representative. She looked me over and I did the same to her. Nella was small, almost tiny, and seemed very young. I thought she must have been a very junior member of the diplomatic corps, an expendable, sent to fetch me by superiors who were still worried that I might be some sort of Commonwealth trick.

 

I noticed that Frede was studying her even more intently than I. Only then did I realize that Nella was rather pretty, youthfully charming.

 

"It will be my pleasure to escort you to the capital," Nella said, with a sparkling smile.

 

Turning to Frede, I said, "Lieutenant, you're in command while I'm gone."

 

"Yessir," she said, snapping a salute.

 

Startled by her formality, I returned Frede's salute, then told her, "Take care of the ship. And yourself."

 

Her face a frozen mask, Frede only repeated, "Yessir."

 

The capital city on Prime was a stunning surprise to me. True, most of its buildings were made of heavy gray stone quarried from the nearby cliffs, but everything else the ship's computer had shown me seemed to be a carefully edited pack of lies-or at least, a terribly slanted view of Prime.

 

The sky was thick with clouds, but they scudded past on a warm wind from the sea with plenty of blue sky showing between them and sunshine beaming down on the gray old stones of the city. The avenues were thronged with people, vehicles skimming lightly over the guideways, pedestrians strolling past shop fronts displaying brightly colored fashions and all sorts of wares from hundreds of worlds.

 

There were Skorpis warriors in sight, but not in battle dress. They were easy to spot, their heads bobbing along well above the rest of the crowd. They seemed to be on leave, not on duty. Plenty of other aliens, too, some of them fully encased in space suits to protect themselves from an environment that was hostile to them.

 

The city seemed happy, busy, engrossed in the everyday matters of shopping, dining, meeting people, finding romance, earning a living, enjoying life. Not at all the grimly forbidding view painted by the Commonwealth's computer. I was shocked by the contrast. And then I realized that the city did not seem concerned at all about the war. If these people knew that their soldiers and allies were fighting and bleeding and dying for them, they certainly did not show it. Just a few hundred kilometers above their heads orbited dreadnoughts and battle stations ready to blast an invader into subatomic particles. But down here on the busy avenues life went along in sunny unconcern.

 

I saw all this from inside a luxurious limousine. Nella had brought me straight to the capital's spaceport, and then we had ridden in this spacious, well-appointed skimmer into the heart of the city. I got the impression that she was enjoying the ride tremendously; she did not often get to ride in such elegance.

 

We drove through the crowded shopping district, then past long rows of buildings that looked almost like ancient temples. The traffic here was lighter.

 

"Government offices," Nella replied when I asked her what they were. She pointed to one as we swept past. "I usually work in there, back in the rear, you can't see it from here. I don't have a window, anyway."

 

The street climbed up a steep hill.

 

"That's the capitol, up in the old castle," Nella told me. "That's where we're going."

 

A full honor guard of Skorpis warriors lined the steps as we disembarked from the skimmer and entered the capitol building. I saw that they were fully armed. They fell in step behind us as Nella led me through a large and beautifully furnished entry hall toward a narrower corridor that ended in a metal door.

 

It was an elevator. The doors slid open to reveal two human soldiers, wearing sidearms only. Nella ushered me in, then came in behind me. The doors shut, leaving the Skorpis detachment outside.

 

We rode down, not up. "Medical exams," Nella murmured when the elevator stopped. "We must make certain that you're not carrying any disease organisms."

 

Or bombs, I added silently. The examination was swift and almost completely automated. I was walked through four different scanning archways; then a white-coated human doctor watched as still another automated archway recorded my full-body scan.

 

"Completely normal," the physician pronounced, running a finger across the readout display screen. "And extremely healthy."

 

Satisfied that I was not a walking bomb, Nella and the two human soldiers led me back to the elevator. Again, we rode down, deeper into the bedrock upon which the city was built.

 

At last I was led to a massive blastproof parasteel door.

 

"I'll have to leave you here," Nella said, almost apologetic. "When the doors open, step right through. The Director is waiting for you on the other side."

 

She hurried away, back to the elevator. I stood in front of the heavy doors, feeling a little silly to be standing there all alone.

 

Then the doors swung open as silently as the lid of a jewel box. I walked into a dimly lit room. I saw a long highly polished table that seemed to be made of granite or perhaps onyx. High-backed padded chairs lined both sides of the table. All of them empty.

 

The doors swung shut behind me, casting the room into even gloomier shadows.

 

There was someone sitting at the far end of the table, at its head. Alone, barely discernible in the dim lighting. I realized that I was bathed in light from a lamp in the ceiling high above, bathed in a cone of light while whoever it was at the head of the table hid in the shadows.

 

I stepped forward and the cone of light moved with me. Very well, I thought, I'll go to the head of the table and see who's there.

 

But I stopped before I had taken two steps. My eyes adjusted to the dimness and I recognized the figure watching me from the head of the table.

 

My knees sagged beneath me.

 

Anya!

 

 

Chapter 24

 

She did not smile at me. She did not give the slightest inkling that she knew who I was. She watched me with those incredibly beautiful gray eyes as I slowly, hesitantly, came toward her. Anya was wearing a simple cream-colored sleeveless dress; her hair was pulled back tightly, highlighting the sculptured plane of her cheekbones, the delicate yet strong curve of her jaw.

 

As I approached her, slowly, like a penitent making his awestruck way to a shrine, her face began to change. Her skin wrinkled, lost its youthful luster, began to look like faded parchment. Her hair turned gray, then white and lifeless, her hands became knobby claws, spotted with age.

 

"I am dying, Orion." Her voice was the croak of a feeble old crone.

 

I rushed to her side. She barely had the strength to hold up her head. I reached out to take her in my arms, but found myself frozen in place, immobile, helpless.

 

"Aten and the others have sent you," she said, her voice a weak, rasping wheeze. "They want to finish the work they began long ages ago."

 

I could not even speak. I strained to break free, to reach her.

 

"Don't struggle, Orion. You are in a stasis field and you will remain there until I determine what to do with you."

 

But I'm not your enemy! I wanted to tell her.

 

Her withered face cracked into a sad smile. "My poor Orion. Of course you're not my enemy. Not consciously. Not willingly. But you are Aten's creature and you will do his bidding whether you want to or not. You have no choice. And I have no choice except to protect myself as best as I can and fight against the others with the last atom of my fading strength."

 

You can't be dying, I said silently.

 

"I am dying, Orion. It takes a long time, but the strength ebbs away a little more each day, each hour. It took an enormous effort for me to appear young, the way you once knew me, when you first entered this chamber. Now you see me as I am, with very little time left."

 

No, I thundered silently. No!

 

Anya shook her head painfully. "I don't want it to end this way, my beloved. I don't want it to end at all. But I am trapped. Aten has won."

 

"Never!" I roared. And with all the willpower in me, with all my anger against the smug self-styled Creators, with all the rage against my being used as a witless pawn in this battle across the millennia, with all the blood lust that had been built into me so that I would be a useful hunter, assassin, murderer-I broke free.

 

I tapped the energy of the stars, the energy of the continuum. Just as Aten and the others had sent me across space-time I reached out for Anya and leaped through the continuum, through the endless cold of absolute nothingness, across eons of time and parsecs of space.

 

And found the two of us standing in a forest. Tall trees dappling the warm high sun, colorful birds flitting through the foliage, squirrels scampering, insects buzzing.

 

"Orion!" Anya gasped. "How could you..."

 

Then she looked down at her hands and saw that she was young and strong again. I pulled her to me and kissed her tenderly.

 

"Do you know where we are?" I asked her.

 

She took in the entire world in a single glance. "On Earth," she said. "In the forest of Paradise."

 

The wide woodland that someday would become the Sahara Desert. We had lived here with a Neolithic band, happy and content once we had escaped Set and his reptilian invaders.

 

"You remember that we thought about staying here forever," I said.

 

"Yes," Anya replied. But she pulled slightly away from my arms. "Yet we decided that we could not enjoy Paradise when there were so many conflicts in the continuum that had to be resolved."

 

"Perhaps we were wrong," I said. "Why can't we stay here and let the continuum solve its problems without us?"

 

She fixed me with those lustrous eyes of hers. "Because then Aten would solve the continuum's problems. And he would take all this away from us. He hates you, Orion. He fears you. And he hates me for loving you."

 

Aten fears me? That was a new concept for me to consider. "My powers are still growing," I said. "Perhaps I could protect us, protect this whole segment of the continuum. We could be safe here."

 

"Not from Aten. He's robbed me of my power. He is deliberately killing me, and all the other Creators who sided with me."

 

"But here you're strong and young."

 

"Yes," she admitted, smiling sadly, "but that's your doing, Orion, not mine. I can't change form anymore; I've lost the power. Aten has stolen it from me. He wants me dead. Me, and all the other Creators who oppose him."

 

"Why? What's the reason for all this hatred and killing? Why the war? What's this ultimate crisis?"

 

She almost laughed. "Orion, you're like a little boy, asking so many questions. They're not easily answered."

 

I gestured toward a sunny glade where a swift stream burbled over rocks, hardly a few meters from where we stood. "Very well. Let's go sit in the warmth of the sun and watch the deer come down to the stream and drink. And you can begin to explain it all to me."

 

"I'm not sure that I can," Anya said, but she walked along with me toward the grassy glade.

 

"Then tell me as much as my limited mind can understand," I coaxed her.

 

"Your mind is not as limited as Aten thinks," she told me. "He would be shocked to know that you can translate yourself across the continuum, and carry me along with you. And rejuvenate me, too."

 

"If we go back to Prime and the era of the war, will you remain as youthful as you are now?"

 

"No," she said ruefully. "I will be a dying old hag there, unless I exert almost all my failing strength to appear young for a few moments."

 

"How did Aten do this to you?"

 

We had stepped out of the shade of the trees, into the welcoming sunlight. Walking to the edge of the stream, we sat oh the soft grass, our backs against a big sun-warmed boulder.

 

"This war between the Commonwealth and the Hegemony," Anya said, "is really a continuation of the conflict we had over Troy."

 

"But why-"

 

She hushed me with a finger on my lips. And began to explain as much as she could.

 

The human race had expanded through the solar system and out to the stars, not as a single unified species, but as a pack of squabbling, contending tribes. Humankind had not overcome its tribal animosities merely because we had achieved interstellar flight. The Creators had built that aggressive nature into us, and no amount of technology could remove it. Indeed, the more sophisticated our technology became, the more dangerous our weaponry. We could blast whole planets clean of all life. Now we were ready to shatter stars.

 

We had found other intelligent species among the stars. Some were far below us in technological and cultural development: cave dwellers or simple herders and pastoralists. By and large these were left alone by the expanding human species; they had nothing to offer us, neither trade nor knowledge nor competition. Scientists studied them, although now and again unscrupulous humans colonized their worlds and despoiled them.

 

We also found other species that were far beyond us and, like the Old Ones, wished to have nothing to do with humankind or its ilk. But there were several intelligent species among the stars, such as the Tsihn and the Skorpis, who were close to our own level of knowledge and power. With these we could trade. And fight.

 

Inevitably, the humans who colonized the stars polarized themselves into two competing groups: the Hegemony and the Commonwealth. Inevitably, they sought allies among the aliens of our own level. Inevitably, they went to war.

 

"Inevitably?" I asked Anya. "Aten told me that this war is actually a struggle to decide how the Creators will deal with the ultimate crisis."

 

She bowed her head in acknowledgment. "I hadn't realized he had revealed that much to you."

 

"Have all of humankind's wars been caused by the Creators?" I asked.

 

"No, not all of them. The human species is ferocious enough to start its own wars, without our instigation."

 

"But what is this ultimate crisis?" I wanted to know. "Why do we have to kill billions of people and destroy whole planets? Why is the Commonwealth preparing to use a weapon that can blow away a star?"

 

Her eyes blazed. "They're ready to use it? How do you know...?"

 

"The Old Ones."

 

"Aten has made contact with the Old Ones?" Anya looked frightened.

 

"No, they refuse to speak with either the Commonwealth or the Hegemony."

 

"Then how-"

 

"They spoke with me. They told me to warn both the Commonwealth and the Hegemony that they will not allow a star-destroying weapon to be used. They said they would eliminate all of us-all of humankind and all our allies-if we tried to destroy a star."

 

Anya leaned back against the boulder. "They spoke to you?" She seemed unable to believe it.

 

I assured her that they did and gave her every detail of my contacts with the Old Ones. She probed into my mind and confirmed that it was all true.

 

"Then the Hegemony is lost," she said at last. "And me with it. Aten will win. We were hoping to develop the star-destroyer ourselves. It was our last chance, a desperation weapon that we hoped would be so terrible it would force the Commonwealth to accept a truce."

 

With a shake of my head, I repeated, "The Old Ones won't permit it. They'll wipe out all of us instead."

 

Anya's eyes looked old again, weary and defeated. "Then you'd better bring me back to Prime. I must tell the other Creators before they decide to go ahead with the weapon."

 

"Tell me first how Aten is killing you. How is it possible?"

 

She shook her head again, utterly weary. "It's a disease, Orion, a biological weapon that feeds on my metabolism. Aten developed it and planted it in all the Creators."

 

"All of them?"

 

"Every one of us, long eons ago. The microbe lies dormant for ages, then slowly awakes and becomes active. Little by little, it saps your strength, slows your powers. Gradually its effects accelerate, until at last you wither and age and finally succumb."

 

 

"But Zeus and Hera and the others-they didn't show any signs of aging."

 

A wan smile. "That's because Aten is keeping them alive. As long as they stay with him, support his side of this war, he keeps them healthy."

 

"And there's nothing you can do? No cure? No way to restore yourself?"

 

"Don't you think we've tried to find a cure? The organism mutates even as we study it; its basic genetic structure changes randomly. Aten spent millennia developing this disease. He experimented with hundreds of generations of humans to perfect it. Half the plagues in human history were his experiments."

 

"Yet he can protect the Creators who accept his domination."

 

"Apparently, although I wonder if he doesn't plan to kill them, too, when he no longer needs them."

 

"He always wanted to be the only god," I muttered.

 

Anya seemed to grow weaker with the exertion of admitting her helplessness. Yet I could not believe that she and the other Creators could not overcome Aten's treachery.

 

"If he can protect some of the Creators," I wondered aloud, "why can't you and the others find the protective agent for yourselves?"

 

"Because it is keyed to Aten himself," she answered. "He reaches through space-time to alter the microbe whenever we attempt to counteract it. We develop a vaccine and he changes the microbe to be immune to it. We move through space-time to annihilate the microbe, and he moves through space-time to revive it. The game is endless and deadly."

 

"And each time any of you translates across space-time it unravels the fabric of the continuum a little more," I said, remembering what the Old Ones had told me.

 

"Yes," Anya agreed grimly. "Already the continuum is so disturbed that we can no longer accurately trace the various space-time tracks. We can't probe the cosmos anymore, Orion! We're losing our ability to foresee the results of our actions. Chaos is crashing down upon us all. Absolute chaos!"

 

She was trembling with fear. I took her in my arms and held her while the warm sun of Paradise swung westward and began to set, turning the sky aflame with red and violet clouds. I watched the deer and smaller animals come to the stream for their evening drink while Anya remained huddled in my arms, as if asleep.

 

As the world grew dark, though, she lifted up her head and looked into my eyes.

 

"We must go back, Orion," she said, tearfully. "I must tell the others that we cannot develop the star-killer. I must get them to see that we have lost the war."

 

"And Aten has won?"

 

"Yes."

 

I shook my head. "Not while I live."

 

 

Chapter 25

 

"There is one way to save you," I told Anya.

 

"I know what you're thinking, Orion, but it can't be done. You can't kill Aten."

 

"He's killing you."

 

She touched my cheek with her fingertips, there in the gathering darkness of twilight, then kissed me lightly on the lips. "It can't be done. He's too powerful."

 

I replied, "He's constantly moving through space-time to adapt his bioweapon microbe against your attempts to destroy it. He's turning the entire continuum into a shambles in his mad lust for dominance. He's got to be stopped."

 

"But if we other Creators, with all our powers, can't stop him, how could you?"

 

"I almost killed him once, back in the time of Troy. Remember?"