Orion

CHAPTER 33

From the searing heat of hell I plunged into a cold so bitter that it felt like burning. I opened my eyes to find myself crouched against a raging wind, snow flying in my face, the ground covered with ice and heavy banks of snow.

The wind howled and roared. I could feel my face freezing as I closed my eyes to slits against the snow that pelted me like stinging darts.

Stumbling, sliding, stooping low against the biting wind, I groped toward the only protection I could find — a looming snow bank that reared up massively in this bewildering blizzard of white.

I sank down on my haunches and leaned my back against its protection. The cold was inescapable, but at least I was protected from the slashing force of the wind. Looking down through lashes already thick with ice, I saw that I was dressed in what looked like white armor, from throat to foot, although the material seemed to be plastic rather than metal. I realized that, except for my freezing head, I was protected and comfortably warm. The suit was heated. My hands were sheathed in gloves so thin and flexible that they might have been another layer of skin, but they kept my hands warm, nonetheless. Somewhere there must have been a helmet that went with this outfit, but now it was lost in the howling blizzard that was covering the world with featureless white.

I sat there, puzzled and slowly freezing, for what seemed like hours. I shifted the blood flow in my capillaries to keep my head as warm as possible, but that merely postponed the inevitable. In this sub-zero blizzard I was merely using up my body’s internal store of energy to delay frostbite and eventual death. I had to find shelter.

But where? The snow blanketed everything. I could not even tell where the horizon might be; all was blurred in endless snow and ice.

And what era was this? Everything that had happened to me so far told me that I was moving backward in time toward The War. If so, I should be in an era that preceded the Neolithic. The blinding storm raging around me made me suspect that I had been sent back into the Ice Age. But my clothing told me differently. I was wearing the products of a highly sophisticated technology — minus the helmet, of course. The midsection of my armored suit was studded with plastic pouches that contained elaborate electronic equipment that I could not even begin to understand. Always before, I had been dressed in a manner appropriate to the era in which I had been placed, but this was no Ice Age hunter’s furs.

Where was I? And when?

Those questions were secondary, though, to the problem of survival. One by one, I tried the various pieces of equipment from the pouches around my waist. Most of them made no sense to me at all. One looked vaguely like a telephone or communicator of some sort; it was palm-sized, with a small grill at its base and a tiny plastic oval at the top that looked suspiciously like a miniature video screen. I tapped the three pressure pads that ran across its middle, one by one. They were color-coded red, yellow, and blue. Nothing happened.

In my haste to examine the equipment I put the communicator down on the snow beside me, alongside the other gear I had pulled out of the pouches. I went on yanking them out, trying to determine what they were for, how they worked — to no avail.

Except for the last one. That one was obvious. It was shaped like a pistol and holstered at my right side. Its barrel was a crystal rod circled by metallic cooling fins. Its grip bulged slightly in my hand and felt warm to the touch; no doubt a power pack of some sort was built into it. I curled my finger around its trigger, pointed the gun straight up, and squeezed slowly. It hummed softly for a moment and then fired out a blood-red beam so bright that I had to turn my eyes away from it. For several moments the afterimage burned in my vision. I almost welcomed it, a relief from the deathly white that covered the world around me.

I tried it again, this time averting my eyes from looking directly at the beam as it lanced through the snow-filled air. The beam disappeared in the gray clouds. I got the impression that it could bore a hole through the armor I wore, or through a mountainside, for that matter.

As I slid the gun back into its holster I heard a chirping sound which quickly turned into a steady little whistle. I pulled out the gun again and checked it over; it was neither vibrating nor making the noise. For a moment or two I thought it might have been my ears, perhaps the aftereffect of firing the pistol. But then I glanced down at the various bits of equipment scattered in the snow around me. Already the freshly falling snow was covering them with white — all except the communicator, I saw.

I snatched it and brought it to my ear. Not only was it slightly warm, but the tiny electronic wail was coming from it. The red pressure pad was glowing! Someone was trying to make contact with me!

I punched those buttons and jabbered into the little device for what seemed like hours. No use. All I could get out of it was that steady shrill whistle. I got to my feet, thinking that perhaps voice or picture transmission was being blocked by the snow bank I had huddled against. No difference, except that when I turned around, the whistle changed its pitch.

Squinting against the howling wind, I slowly turned a full circle. The whistle whined up and down the scale, strongest in the direction I had been originally facing, weakest and almost inaudible when I was turned exactly away from that direction.

A directional beam, I told myself. Or, with a thrill of hope bubbling inside me, a direction finder. I knelt down to scoop up the rest of the equipment from the snow, stuffed it into the various pouches at my waist, and then headed off in the direction that the electronic signal indicated, bent almost double against the raging, icy wind.

I trudged through drifts that almost reached my armpits. Fortunately the suit I wore kept me warm and dry. The hair on my head was a brittle mass of ice and I could barely see through the icicles that closed my eyes to slits. All feeling had left my cheeks, my ears and nose. But I could still breathe, and I pushed on, hour after hour, growing hungrier and weaker with each painful, plodding step.

The storm did not let up in the slightest. If anything, it seemed to be growing in strength. But through the swirling snow I began to make out the dim gray form of a massive bulk of rock. The directional beam was leading me toward it, and as I struggled through the blinding snow, I could see that it was a looming cliff of granite, scoured clean of snow by the furious wind, jutting stubbornly up from the snow-blanketed landscape, standing jagged, raw, and dark against the gray, snowy sky.

I floundered through deep drifts, stopping only to check my communicator every few minutes, to make certain I was still following its electronic guidance. My strength was ebbing fast. The cold was seeping into me, leaching the energy of my muscles, numbing my will to press on. Each step became more difficult. My booted feet felt as if they were shod with lead and weighed a ton apiece. All I really wanted to do was to lie down and rest in the soft, comforting snow.

I remembered seeing pictures from some distant era of Eskimo sled dogs curled up happily in little holes they had dug for themselves in the snow, their bushy tails wrapped around their noses, their dark eyes peeping out from a world of white and cold. I stopped for breath and turned to look back at the trail I had broken through the deep snow. Already my tracks were being filled in, obliterated, by the howling storm. The stern gray bulk of the mountain frowned silently down at me as I stood lost in a world of white, totally alone in the universe, as far as I knew. It was time to rest, time to lie down and sleep.

Even my fingers were growing numb, despite the gloves and the suit’s overburdened heating system. I let the tiny communicator slip from my fingers. It landed in the snow, its one red square glowering at me accusingly.

“You can glare all you want to,” I said to it, in a voice raw with pain. Each breath I took was agony now; the air was so cold that it was burning my lungs.

“I’ve got to rest,” I said to that red light.

It stared back at me, unblinking. The tiny electronic wail cut through the blizzard’s howling.

“All right,” I rasped. “I’ll take ten more steps. Then, if there’s no shelter in sight, I’m going to dig a hole for myself and get some sleep.”

I forced myself through ten more steps. Then ten more. Then five. The granite cliff seemed as far away as ever. The storm grew in fury.

“There’s no point to it,” I said to the inanimate little box in my hand. “There’s no point…”

A blinding red pencil-beam of light lanced past my head. I plunged down into the snow instinctively and fumbled for the gun at my hip.

The beam streaked out again, and I could hear the air around me crackle.

Friend or enemy? I asked myself, and then almost laughed at the ridiculousness of the question. The enemy was this storm, the cold, the bitter agony of the ice that surrounded me. Anyone who could fire a gun must have heat, and food.

I raised my pistol and fired it straight overhead. That eye-hurting brilliance ought to be visible for miles, even through the storm.

Peering toward the granite cliff, I saw an answering beam angling up into the clouds. I headed for it, adrenaline pumping through my aching body and my limbs flailing through the snow with every last ounce of energy in me.

I saw, up ahead, a dark cleft in the rock, the mouth of a cave. Several people were standing there, clad in the same kind of white armor that I wore. They saw me, too, and began waving frantically, encouragingly. But they did not leave the safety of their shelter.

I plunged ahead, waving my own arms foolishly over my head, yelling hoarsely to them.

“Come on, you can make it!” one of them called.

“Only a few more yards,” yelled another.

I staggered toward them, wondering far in the back of my mind why they would not come out of their cave to help me through those last few yards. But that question was swamped by the joy I felt at finding others like myself in this endless desert of ice and snow.

The storm winds had sculpted the snow banks around the base of the cliff into smooth ramps of white. I slithered down one of them, sliding and slipping on the ice until I staggered into their welcoming arms.

They grabbed me, held me up, grinning and laughing happily at me. Beyond them, deeper in the cave, I saw crates of equipment and a big electric radiant-heater glowing red and warm.

“Hey!” one of them said. “He’s not from our unit!” Their laughter froze and their grins disappeared as they held me in their arms.

“Just who the hell are you, anyway?”

“What unit are you with?”

“I didn’t know there were any other units operating in this sector.”

“Come on, buddy — who are you and what are you doing here?”

I had no real answers for them. My body sagged in their arms, every last bit of energy totally spent. My eyes closed and the world went dark.

CHAPTER 34

When I opened my eyes, I saw the ceiling of the cave, rugged slabs of granite, far above me. I flexed my fingers and toes, then turned my head slightly. I saw that I had been stripped to the waist; my armor suit was gone and I wore nothing but a pair of briefs.

But I felt warm. The sensation was delightful. I reveled in it for a few moments, then propped myself up on my elbows to take a better look around.

They had placed me on a cot that seemed to be suspended in midair. It felt like a hammock; it swayed with every move I made. But I could see no supports holding it up. The others were grouped together deeper inside the cave, gathered around what looked like a desk. I could only see their backs. Most of them had removed their suits of armor, and I could see seven men and five women dressed in gray coveralls. Someone was seated at the desk, but I could not tell whether it was a man or a woman, because the others were clustered around so tightly.

“How are you feeling?”

I turned at the sound of a woman’s voice, so quickly that the hammock’s swaying nearly dumped me to the floor of the cave.

“I’m all right… I think.”

She was a good-looking woman with blonde hair and a pert little nose. She grinned at me. “I thought you’d be in for a fierce case of frostbite when you staggered in here, but the computer checked you out fine.”

“I feel fine,” I said, realizing that it was true. I felt warm and safe. I was not even hungry.

As if she could read my thoughts, the woman said, “I pumped a couple of vials of nutrients into you while you were sleeping. Whatever happened to your helmet? Good thing you had the emergency communicator. And using your pistol as a distress signal! What put that idea into your head? What unit are you from, anyway?”

I stopped her staccato questions by raising one hand and saying, “I think I can get up, if you’ll hold this thing steady for a second.”

She laughed and grabbed one end of the floating cot. “It looks great back at headquarters; all you need is a grav disc and a length of fabric. Travels light. But none of the desk jockeys ever tried to sleep on one of these monstrosities!”

I got to my feet, glad to be off the cot. I saw that a tiny metal disc lay on the floor beneath it. Somehow it canceled gravity and allowed the cot to float in midair.

“My name’s Rena,” said the woman, proffering her hand. “Technician and biowarfare specialist. Naturally, they made me the squad’s medic.”

I shook hands with her. She was barely as tall as my shoulder and as slim as an elf. She looked at me expectantly with eyes as blue as a distant snowclad mountain.

“Orion,” I said. “My name is Orion.”

“Unit? Specialty?”

I shook my head. “None that I know of.”

Her smile faded into a look of concern. “Maybe I ought to run the diagnostic computer over you again. It has a neuropsych program…”

“Rena, put some clothes on him, for god’s sake!”

A man strode up to us. His coveralls bore silver emblems on the collar and a nameplate sewn above the heart: Kedar. On the shoulder of his left sleeve was the symbol of a bolt of lightning. His face was grim. He had the strong, lean build of an athlete, but I noticed that he limped slightly.

“Yes, sir,” Rena said, snapping her hand to her brow in a military salute I thought there was just enough emphasis on the sir to make it slightly mocking.

She pointed me farther back in the cave, where stacks of plastic cartons stood lined in neat rows. “Clothes in here.” She yanked open the side of one carton and I saw a pile of gray coveralls. “Helmets and equipment in those rows back there. Help yourself. One size fits all.”

I took a pair of the coveralls from the bin. They looked much too small for me as I held them in my outstretched hands. But I shrugged and tried them on. They seemed to mold themselves to my body, stretching as necessary to fit comfortably without being too snug.

Rena peeled the blank nameplate from the chest of my uniform and took a light pen from her pocket.

“Orion,” she said, tracing my name onto the fabric. As she handed it back to me, she whispered, “Be careful of Kedar. Just because he’s a power tech he thinks he’s above the rest of us.”

I nodded my thanks and slapped the nameplate back where it belonged, just above my uniform’s breast pocket. Then we went shopping for a new suit of the white plastic armor that Rena said they all wore outside the cave. And a helmet.

I felt a little like the squire to a medieval knight, carrying a double armload of armor and equipment as I followed Rena back toward the front of the cave.

Kedar intercepted us. “Well, at least you’re properly outfitted,” he said, eying me up and down. “Come on, Adena wants to ask you a few questions.”

For an awkward moment I stood there, my arms full, not quite knowing what to do. Rena solved my problem by taking the stuff I was carrying. She could barely peep over the top of it once I had loaded it all on her. But she gave me a friendly wink as she staggered off toward the area where the cots were.

Kedar led me to the desk where the others had been clustered before. A woman stood at it, her back to me, bent slightly over the desk as she studied a map displayed on her video screen.

“Here he is, Adena,” said Kedar.

She turned, and the breath caught in my throat. It was she. As young and vibrantly beautiful as I had first seen her, so many long ages ago. Her hair was cropped short now, shorter even than mine. But it was thick and shining black, curling around her ears and across her brow. Her eyes were the same profound gray, warm and deep and knowing.

She flicked a glance at the name stenciled on my breast.

“Orion?” Even her voice was the same rich resonance.

I nodded. “And you are Adena.” The insignia on her shoulder was a clenched fist.

“What are you doing in this sector? What unit are you with?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I found myself lost in the blizzard out there. I can’t remember anything further back than a few hours ago.” Unless you want to count other ages, other lifetimes, I added silently.

She frowned at me.

Kedar said, “Obviously he’s not from the transport team.”

“Obviously not,” Adena replied. Looking back at me, she asked, “What’s your specialty?”

I had no answer.

“Biowar? Chemicals? Energy weapons? Power? Communications?” Her voice rose slightly as I stood there mute and befuddled.

“You’ve got to have some specialty, soldier,” Kedar snapped.

“I’m on a special assignment,” I heard myself reply. “I’m an assassin.”

“A what?” Kedar glanced at Adena, his brows arching almost up into his scalp line.

“My assignment is to find Ahriman and kill him,” I said.

“Ahriman? Who in the name of the twenty devils of the night is Ahriman?”

Adena’s voice was softer. “There’s no one in this unit by that name.”

“Ahriman’s not one of us,” I said. “He’s a different kind of creature, intelligent but not truly human, dark and powerful…” I described the Dark One as closely as I could.

Their faces grew more surprised and nonplussed with each word I spoke.

When I stopped, Adena said, “And your special assignment is to find this person and kill him?”

“Yes. That’s why I was sent here.”

“By whom?”

“Ormazd,” I said.

They looked at each other. The name obviously meant nothing to them.

“Do you know of Ahriman, the Dark One?” I asked. “Do you know where I can find him?”

Kedar’s expression turned into a bitter smirk. “Just stay here for another day, Orion. As soon as this blizzard ends, you’ll see more men like the one you described than you’ll ever want to see in your entire life.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you know that we’re at war with them?” Adena asked.

“War? With… with whom?”

“The man you described,” she said. “This whole planet was covered with people such as he. We’re here to eliminate them.”

“But we’re cut off from our other units,” Kedar added before I could draw a breath. “They’re gathering out there in the snow — hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. They’re going to attack as soon as the storm stops. They’re going to eliminate us.”

But his despairing words barely registered on my attention. Within me, my mind was racing. The War! This must be The War!

CHAPTER 35

Adena and Kedar soon turned me loose. There was not much they could do with a man who was obviously either insane from battle or feigning insanity to avoid battle. They turned their attention to defending the cave against the attack that they knew was coming as soon as the storm died down.

I made my way to the mouth of the cave, feeling the eyes of the other soldiers on my back. The wind still raged out there, bitterly cold. I shivered and retreated back to the warmth of the radiant heaters.

Rena took me in tow once again and led me to a small circle of men and women who were heating prepackaged meals in what looked to me like a portable microwave oven. We ate in gloomy silence. One by one, the soldiers got up and went back to the ridiculous floating cots, where they grimly checked out their weapons.

The only halfway-cheerful person in the squad was a youngish man who introduced himself as Marek, communications specialist. He showed me the portable consoles and screens that were his responsibility.

“The brutes are jamming all our outgoing transmissions, somehow,” he said in a pleasant voice, almost as if he were describing how the equipment worked. “I don’t know how they do it, but they’re doing it damned well.”

“The brutes?” I asked.

Nodding, he replied, “The enemy, the guys with the gray skins and red eyes.” He hunched forward, pulling his neck down and raising his shoulders, then shuffled a few steps, scowling as mightily as he could. For a slim human youngster it was a fairly good imitation of the one I knew as Ahriman; “Anyway,” Marek went on, relaxing again, “they’re jamming our outgoing calls, so we can’t tell the commanders up in the orbiting ships where we are or what we’re up against.”

“We’re cut off,” I said.

He bobbed his head again, seemingly as unconcerned as a man who faced nothing worse than an annoying equipment breakdown.

“We’re getting most of the incoming transmissions. The orders from Up Top—” he jabbed a finger toward the ceiling of the cave — “are reaching us just fine. And the weather maps. And the multispectral scans that show us where the brutes are massing their forces.”

He pointed to a video screen and tapped a few pads on its keyboard. The screen glowed to life, showing me a wild, sweeping circle of clouds, a gigantic cyclonic storm as seen from the cameras of an orbiting satellite.

“That’s us, that spot where the cursor is.” Marek tapped a flickering green dot on the lower left comer of the screen.

I could feel my eyes widening as I stared at the picture. The storm clouds covered about half the screen, but where the ground was clear, I could make out geography that looked tantalizingly familiar. A long peninsula jutted out into a large sea; it looked to me like Italy, except that the shape was subtly wrong and the “toe” of what I remembered as the Italian boot was definitely connected to what would someday be the island of Sicily. Above that one recognizable shape the ground was a featureless expanse of white. Glaciers covered most of Europe. This was truly the Ice Age.

Marek prodded me. “Seen enough? Ready for the bad news?”

I nodded.

He tapped at the keyboard again and the storm clouds disappeared from the screen, showing the ground — or rather the ice fields — beneath them. The view seemed to zoom down closer to the surface, until I could make out a few gray peaks of granite jutting above the snow.

“That’s our cave,” he said, gesturing at the flickering cursor again. “And here—” he touched a single key — “are the brutes.”

A forest of red dots sprang up against the whiteness of the ice and snow. There must have been at least a thousand of them, arranged in a ragged semicircle that faced our cave.

So we were cut off from the rest of our own forces and hugely outnumbered as we waited for the enemy — the brutes — to attack.

Young as they seemed to be, the soldiers around me were veterans of many battles. They wasted no time in worrying. They ate; they checked their weapons, and soon enough they began to stretch out on their wobbly cots and go to sleep.

“Might as well grab some sleep while you can,” Marek told me, as pleasantly as if he had not a worry in the world. “The storm won’t let up for another six hours, and the brutes won’t attack until it does.”

“Are you sure?”

His grin changed only slightly. “How long have we been fighting them? Have you ever known them to attack during a storm like this?”

I shrugged.

“Besides, we’ve got the field out there covered with scanners. When they start to make their move, we’ll have plenty of warning.”

But I noticed that he stayed by his equipment, fiddling with it, checking it over, searching for a way to break through the jamming and tell the commanders in orbit where we were and what we faced.

I saw Adena standing alone up by the entrance to the cave, already dressed in armor, her helmet masking her lustrous dark hair. Most of the others were either asleep or pretending to be. The cave was quiet except for the hum of electrical equipment and the louder, more ominous moaning of the storm wind outside.

Kedar was crouched beside a set of squat, heavy green cylinders. From the cryptic lettering stenciled on them, I knew they were the electrical power packs that supplied the energy to run the squad’s equipment. He cast a suspicious glance at me as I walked slowly toward Adena, but he said nothing and remained where he was, checking his power packs. Before I could say anything to her, Adena spoke to me. “You’d better get some rest.”

“I don’t need much sleep,” I replied. “I’m all right now.”

“Waiting is the worst part,” she said, her eyes peering out at the wind-driven snow. “If I had more troops, I’d go out now and attack them now, while they’re still getting themselves ready.”

“You don’t remember me?” I asked.

She turned to face me, her gray eyes troubled. “Should I? Have we met before?”

“Many times.”

“No.” She shook her helmeted head. “I would recall it if we had. And yet…”

“And yet I look familiar to you.”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Think,” I urged her, feeling a burning intensity blazing inside me. “We have met before. Long ago — in the future.”

“The future?”

“A primitive hunting tribe, in the springtime that will follow this age of winter. The capital of a barbarian empire, thousands of years afterward. A giant metropolis, centuries later…”

She looked startled, troubled. “You’re insane,” she whispered. “Battle fatigue, or the shock of exposure to the storm.”

“ Think!” I insisted. “Close your eyes and see what comes into your mind when you think of me.”

She gave me an odd look, part disbelief, part distrust. But slowly she squeezed her eyes shut, and I concentrated with every ounce of my will power.

“What do you see?” I asked her.

For long moments she did not respond. Then: “A waterfall.”

“What else?”

“Nothing… trees, a few people… and… strange animals, four legs… I’m riding on its back… and… you! You’re riding next to me…”

“Go on.”

“One of the brutes. A big one. In a cave… No, it’s some kind of tunnel…” She gasped and her eyes flicked wide open.

“The rats,” I realized.

Adena’s trembling hands reached up toward her throat. “It’s horrible… they… they…”

“We both died in that era,” I said. “We have lived many lives, you and I.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Orion, the Hunter. I seek Ahriman, the Dark One, the one who turned the rats on you. I have been sent to all those different ages to find him, and kill him.”

“Sent? By whom?”

“Ormazd,” I answered.

She closed her eyes for the span of a heartbeat, and the air around us seemed to glow with a cold, silvery radiance. The cave, the storm outside, dimmed and almost disappeared. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Kedar frozen in time, his outstretched hand as still as a statue’s. Adena opened her eyes again, and all the knowledge of the continuum shone in them.

“Orion,” she said. “Thank you. The veil is lifted. I can see clearly now. I remember — more than you can.”

We were alone in a sphere of energy, beyond normal time, just the two of us in a place that she had created. My heart was hammering in my chest. “Adena, I lied to you a moment ago…”

She smiled, quizzically. “Lied? To me?”

“Perhaps not so much a lie, as not telling the full truth. I said I was sent to hunt down Ahriman.”

“That is true, I know.”

“But not the whole truth. The whole truth is that although Ormazd has sent me to kill the Dark One, the real reason I am here — the reason that drives me — is to find you. I’ve searched through a hundred thousand years to find you, and each time that I do, he takes you away from me.”

“Not this time, Orion,” she said.

“I love you, Adena… Aretha… whatever your true name is.”

She laughed, a low bubbling sound of joy. “Adena will do, for now. But you are always Orion, always constant.”

Shrugging, I replied, “I am what I am. I can’t be anything else.”

“And I love you, love what you are and who you are,” she said. “I will love you forever.”

I wanted to leap out into the raging storm and outshout the wind. I wanted to howl my triumph to Ormazd, wherever and whoever he was, and tell him that despite all his powers I had found my love and she loved me. I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her and feel the warmth other love.

But, instead, I simply stood before her, almost paralyzed with happiness. I did not even reach out to take her hand in mine. I was content to glow in the happiness of having found her.

“Orion,” she said, speaking low and swiftly, “there is much that you don’t yet know, much that is still hidden from you. The one you call Ormazd has his reasons for the things he’s done to you…”

“And to you,” I said.

She smiled briefly. “I insisted on coming here. I made myself human, mortal, on his terms. What has happened to me is my own doing.”

“And Ahriman? What of him?”

Her face grew somber. “Orion, my love, when you learn the entire truth, it will not make you happy. Ormazd may be right in keeping it from you.”

“I want to know,” I insisted. “I want to know who I really am and why I’ve been made to do these things.”

She nodded. “Yes, I can see that you do. But don’t expect everything at once.”

“Start me with something,” I half-begged.

She pointed out toward the storm. “Very well. We start with here and now. This squad of troops is part of an army of extermination. Our task is to annihilate the brutes, to rid this planet of them.”

“And once that is done?”

“One task at a time, my love. Before anything else can happen, before you and I can meet each other at the foot of Mt. Ararat or make love together in Karakorum, before we can meet in New York City — we must annihilate the brutes.”

I took a deep breath. “Ahriman is among them?”

“Yes, of course. He is one of them. One of their mightiest leaders. And he knows, by now, that if he can prevent us from achieving the task Ormazd has set before us, he can win the ultimate victory.”

I puzzled in silence for a few moments. “You mean that if we fail to annihilate the brutes, then we humans — you and I — will be the ones to be wiped out?”

“If we fail to annihilate the brutes,” she replied, “the human race — your species, Orion — will die out forever.”

“Then the continuum will be broken. Space-time will collapse in on itself.”

“That is what Ormazd believes,” Adena said. “There is some evidence that it is true.”

“Some evidence?” I snapped. “We’re neck-deep in a war of annihilation, based on some evidence?”

She met my angry question with a smile. “Orion, I told you that there is much you still don’t understand. Forgive the words I used. I wouldn’t ask you to fight this battle if it wasn’t necessary.”

My anger melted away, although the confusion in my mind remained. “Who are you?” I heard myself ask. “What are you? And Ormazd, what is he…”

She silenced me by placing a finger on my lips. “I am as human and mortal as you are, Orion. I was not always so, but I have chosen to be. I can feel pain. I can die.”

“But then you live again,” I said.

“So do you.”

“Does everyone?”

“No, not everyone,” she said. “The capability is there. Every human has the capability to live beyond death. But very few realize it; very few can succeed in actually bringing that capability to fruition.”

“You can.”

“Yes, of course. You cannot, though. Ormazd must intervene for you. Otherwise, you would live only one lifespan and die just like the others of your kind.”

“My kind. Then you’re not of my kind. You said you chose to make yourself human. That means you’re… something else.”

Adena’s smile was sad with the knowledge of eons. “I am what your people will someday call a goddess, Orion. They will build temples to me. But I want to be human; I want to be with you — if Ormazd will permit me to be.”

CHAPTER 36

I stood there gazing into her gray eyes and saw whirlpools within whirlpools, wheels within wheels, the entire continuum of stars and galaxies and atoms and quarks spinning in an endless cycle of creation and change. I did not understand, could not understand, what Adena was telling me. But I believed every syllable that she spoke.

I was in love with a goddess, a goddess who would someday be worshipped by human beings, human beings who were created by the gods. The cycle of creation, the wheel of life, the continuum of the universe.

And this was the continuum that Ahriman sought to destroy.

The silver aura surrounding us faded away, and a blast of icy wind sent a shudder through me. I heard its howl, then the muted voices of the soldiers inside the cave. Kedar’s hand closed around the tool he was reaching for. We were back in normal space-time.

“The wind has shifted,” she said. “The storm will be passing by in another few hours. They’ll attack then.”

I focused my attention on her, on the here and now. “Can we hold out against them?”

“As long as our power holds. Once the battery packs are drained, though…” She let the thought dangle.

“There are others,” I probed, “other units in the area, aren’t there? Can we get help?”

Adena hesitated a moment, then said, “This is the last battle, Orion. The brutes that are gathering out there are all that’s left of them.”

“And us? You mean that we’re all that’s left of the human army?”

“We’re all the humans there are,” she said.

“What about the commanders, up in the orbiting ships?”

With a single small shake of her head, Adena replied, “There are no ships, no commanders. The transmissions that Marek is receiving come from Ormazd. He doesn’t want us to know it, but we are quite alone here. There will be no help for us.”

“I don’t understand!”

That bitter smile touched her lips again. “You’re not supposed to understand, Orion. I’ve already told you far more than Ormazd wants you to know.”

She stepped past me, no longer the goddess now, but the human commander of a lost, trapped, expendable detachment of human soldiers. I stood at the cave’s entrance, letting the icy wind slice through me, almost enjoying its bitter cold. The thoughts spinning around in my head led nowhere, but out in that waning storm, I knew, waited the ultimate enemy. This tiny group of men and women carried the fate of the continuum in their hands. Soon the battle would begin, and the victor would inherit the world, the universe, all eternity.

“Orion?”

I turned and saw Rena standing there, an apprehensive little frown on her elfin face.

She tried to smile. “The commander says we should all get into our armor now and check weapons.”

I nodded and followed her back to the area where the cots floated in ragged rows. The others were pulling on their armor suits. I found mine and followed Rena’s example: the bodyshell first, then the legs, the boots, the arms, the magically thin gloves, and finally the equipment belt. I hefted my helmet; it had a two-way communicator built into it and a visor that could slide down to cover the face completely. The visor was completely transparent from the inside but opaque from the outside. Once the troops had them on, I could not see their faces. Only the insignias emblazoned on their shoulders and the names stenciled on their chests told me who they were.

Once we had checked out the suits, Rena led me to the power packs that Kedar was nursing so tenderly and we charged up our suit batteries. Then we joined the others as they lined up for weapons issue.

Adena watched as Ogun, the squad’s burly, sour-faced armorer, grimly handed each soldier a pair of weapons: a long-barreled, rifle-like gun and a pistol that plugged into the suit’s battery pack.

When I stepped up before him, Ogun scowled at me and turned to Adena. “Give him a pistol,” she said. “He will work the heavy gun, with me.”

The pistol was like the one I had found on me when I had been stranded here out in the storm. I hefted it in my gloved hand.

“It has its own battery,” Rena said, “but regulations are that you plug it into the suit. That extends its range and duration.”

I glanced down at her and nodded. She looked strange in armor and helmet, almost like a child playing at war. But this was no game, as I could tell from the sober expressions on the faces around me.

They were an experienced squad. Once armed, they moved out toward the cave’s mouth and took up positions where they could cover each other with protective fire while at the same time raking the sloping field of snow that led up to the cave.

I stood uncertainly in the middle of the cave, watching the soldiers and not knowing what I should do. Rena gave me a fleeting smile and hurried to a large metallic crate that rested at the side of the cave. She touched a few buttons on its top and it levitated several inches from the floor and followed her like a dutiful pet dog as she joined the others at the cave’s entrance.

“You can help me,” Ogun said. His voice, like his looks, was surly. He headed back toward the deeper recesses of the cave. I followed him.

“Rena’s biowar,” he told me, without my asking a question. “Her equipment checks what the brutes are throwing at us in the way of viruses and microbes. We lost a lot of good people before we realized what they could do with those little killers. Instant poisons. Paralyze you, tear your guts inside out, make you blind, choke you — they got some beauties.”

“They work instantly?” I asked.

“Faster than you can blink your eyes,” he said as we ducked through a low passageway worn in the rock. “That’s why you got to keep your visor down and locked and breathe nothing but the suit’s air until Rena gives us the all-clear. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

His face contorted in what might have been a grin. Despite his sour looks and demeanor, Ogun was a man who cared about the others around him. “Well,” he huffed, “there it is. Let’s get it into position.”

Itwas a heavy-looking mass of tubes and coils that looked to me vaguely like a cannon. Ogun activated its gravitic lifters and it floated up off the cold rock floor. We nudged it down the shadowy passageway toward the front of the cave, with him warning me every other step of the way to be careful not to bang it against the stone wall.

“Are you sure that there’s only one entrance to this cave?” I asked as we guided the heavy weapon toward the entrance.

Ogun nodded. “We’ve been holed up here six days. The commander had us explore every inch. All those passageways end in blind alleys, except for the one that drops down into the water. Damned near fell into it myself. It goes deep. Nobody’s going to come at us from that direction.”

He was absolutely certain of himself. But I wondered, remembering Ahriman’s ability to alter space-time and his fondness for darkness and the deep.

“Maybe we ought to place a sensor there, just in case,” I said. “You’re probably right, but if they do find a way to get at us from down there, it’d be better if we had a warning, don’t you think?”

We had pushed the weapon as far as Kedar’s line of green power packs. Ogun grimaced as he straightened up and let Kedar take up the cannon’s heavy cables and plug them into two of the green cylinders.

“I’m the armorer, not the commander. I’m not supposed to think. I just take care of the weapons and follow orders.” He stretched his heavily muscled arms toward the rugged ceiling of the cave. “Besides, if they find a way to come at us from down there, we’re cooked, no matter how much of a warning we get.”

Kedar shot him an inquisitive glance.

“He wants to put a warning sensor down by the well,” Ogun explained. “Just in case.”

The power specialist turned his gaze to me, and for the flash of an instant I thought I might have been looking at Dal, shaved clean of his red beard.

“I’ll ask the commander about that,” he said. “It might be a reasonable thing to do.”

“Reasonable.” Ogun mumbled and muttered to himself.

The three of us pushed the cannon up to the mouth of the cave. The other soldiers had left a cleared space for it, and now they busily began lifting loose rocks and planting them in front of the heavy weapon to form a rough sort of protective wall. I helped them, while Ogun and Kedar ran their checks on the equipment.

I found myself hauling rocks with Marek. We made an effective team, although I suspect I did most of the real work. He grinned at me as we sweated away at it, and cocked his head toward Ogun and Kedar.

“Officers,” he whispered.

I almost laughed. It was the same in all armies, in all organizations. Some worked with their muscles; some worked with their brains.

And there was always one who directed them all. With us, it was Adena.

“The wind’s dying down,” she called out to us. She was standing a few yards out in front of the cave’s mouth, fully armored and helmeted, but with her visor up, off her face.

I looked up and saw that the snow had stopped. It was knee-high just outside the cave, where she stood, but farther off, outside the lee of the cliff, it had drifted many feet deep. The gray clouds were scudding along the sky, as if hurrying to get away from the carnage that was to come.

“The sun will break through soon,” Adena said, almost cheerfully. “We’ll have a blue sky to fight under.”

The soldiers stirred and tinkered with their weapons. Pure instinct, I thought, produced by merciless training.

Ogun gave me a rapid run-through on the workings of the heavy cannon. It was an energy-beam weapon, an extremely powerful kind of laser that made the fusion-laboratory lasers I had known in the twentieth century seem like children’s toys.

I wondered, as we crouched behind the massive gun, how these people and their advanced weaponry could have been brought into the Ice Age. I knew that Ormazd could play with time and space at will. So could Ahriman. But, for the first time since I had arrived at this bewildering place, I wondered how humans could exist in what must have been the Pleistocene Epoch, a hundred thousand years before the pyramids were erected in Egypt, with such sophisticated technology. There was no archeological record of it in later centuries.

And who was our enemy? Who were these creatures we were fighting against? The brutes. Ahriman’s people. Where had they come from? Why were they here on planet Earth?

There was much that I did not yet know, Adena had told me. And she had said that I would not be pleased with the knowledge, once it was revealed to me.

Was this little band of human beings part of an army that Ormazd had sent back to the Ice Age from some distant future era? Had he sent us here to drive out the brutes, the invaders who were trying to destroy the human race? But Marek had spoken about command ships in orbit. Why would the commanders of this army be in ships orbiting the Earth? Why not in cities or command posts in their native lands?

A horrifying thought struck me. What if we are the invaders? And the brutes — Ahriman’s people — are the ones defending their homes against us?

I almost cried out aloud with the pain of that idea. But my thoughts were stifled by Adena’s calm announcement: “Prime your weapons. Here they come.”

CHAPTER 37

“Visors down.”

I reached for my helmet in response to Adena’s order and slid the transparent visor down until its lock clicked in place against the neck ring of my armor.

The clouds were breaking up and patches of blue were spreading across the sky. The snow glittered under the wintry sun, a featureless expanse that rolled out as far as the eye could see. Not a tree or a rock broke the ocean of white.

I stood up, peering out from behind the laser cannon, to study the field in front of us. Adena, I noticed, was crouched just inside the cave’s entrance, her eyes glued to the small display screen of a gray metal box that rested on the rocky ledge where she had posted herself.

At first I could see nothing out there. Then, gradually, I began to make out the tiny specks of moving forms trudging slowly, inexorably, across the snow, heading at us.

“They’ve got bears in the vanguard,” Adena’s flat, emotionless voice called out to us. “And smaller game scouting ahead — wolves, it looks like.”

I strained my eyes to make sense of what she was saying. Gradually I realized that the forces marching toward us were mostly animals, rather than the humanoid brutes. Gray wolves were at their front, with silver-furred foxes slinking among them. Farther back I could see the lumbering shapes of great bears, some of them white, most of them cinnamon brown. They were huge and muscular, trudging toward us on all fours.

Eagles, hawks, and smaller birds filled the sky. Smaller animals — raccoons, badgers, wolverines — became visible against the glistening snow. It was as if the whole planet’s fauna had united to attack us.

Now, as they approached to point-blank range, I could see the humanoids behind them. Gray-skinned, powerfully muscled men dressed in skins. Smaller, slimmer females among them. Each of them carried long, spear-like weapons in their hands.

“Hold steady,” Adena told us, in an expectant whisper. “Pick your targets. Leave the animals to the cannon crew.”

I crouched behind the transparent plastic shield that curved across the front of the cannon. My assigned task was to monitor the power being used by the laser and warn the firing crew when the energy drain became dangerous. It was a job a monkey could do; all that was necessary was to watch the gauges on the power conversion panel that was built into the cannon’s main console.

I looked up from the panel and stared at the advancing army of beasts, fascinated. How could Ahriman’s people control them? As I watched, the animals seemed to hesitate for the span of a heartbeat, and then they broke into a running, galloping charge, heading straight for us.

“Fire!” Adena snapped, and the cave was suddenly filled with the hum and crackle of blazing energy weapons.

A hideous roar arose from the icy field outside, and I looked up to see the gleaming virgin snow turned into a sea of flame as the heavy laser cannon swept out an arc of raw burning energy, boiling the snow, roasting the beasts that were charging at us, filling the air with noisome oily smoke.

The soldiers were firing their individual weapons through the clouds of smoke and flame. What they were aiming at, I could not see. But a few of them pointed their guns upward, against the falcons and other birds that were swooping down toward the cave’s mouth. An eagle smashed into one of the helmeted troopers, knocking him off his feet and killing itself with the impact.

I could see snarling wolves dashing across the snow toward us, leaping across the smoldering arc of blackened snow and burning animal flesh that the cannon had left. As we swung the laser to one side of the field, the animals would charge at us from the other side. The gunners shortened the range of their beam and roasted the beasts in their tracks, but more kept coming at us, closer and closer. The other troopers were picking them off, but always they got closer.

Suddenly a bear loomed right at the mouth of the cave, frighteningly huge, snarling and slavering, towering over us on its hind legs. It smashed a heavy clawed paw into one of the troopers, ripping the soldier in half and sending him sprawling bloodily against the cave wall. Four troopers blasted at it with their laser rifles, burning its guts open and nearly severing its head from its body. But the giant beast lumbered into the cave, screaming with pain and rage, striking blindly, bowling people over as it staggered forward on sheer inertia.

Without even thinking of what I was doing, I leaped out from behind the cannon’s shield and threw myself in a rolling body block at the beast’s legs. It felt like hitting the concrete pillars of a towering skyscraper, but the huge bear toppled and fell to the floor of the cave. A half-dozen laser blasts killed it; I felt the sizzle of their heat, smelled the burning hair and flesh as the beast died with a final strangled scream.

There was no time for congratulations. I snatched up the rifle from the fallen trooper and saw from her shoulder insignia that it was Rena. Her helmet visor was spattered with blood, her broken body plainly lifeless.

“They’re infiltrating along the wall of the cliff!” Adena shouted to me.

I shouldered my way past the visored troops who were still firing into the advancing army of animals and stepped halfway out of the protecting mouth of the cave. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Adena doing the same thing on the other side of the entrance.

A dozen yards in front of me, a sleek gray wolf was edging its way along the face of the cliff, pressing its flank against the rock wall so that we could not see it from inside the cave or detect it with our sensors. Behind it, in single file, I could see a mountainous gray-white bear and more wolves.

The wolf stopped when it saw me. For an instant we looked into each other’s eyes. I saw an intelligence there, and a burning red hatred that shocked me. The beast snarled and leaped for my throat. I squeezed the trigger of the rifle and burned it from jaw to crotch. It was dead when it hit me, and I staggered back a step under its impact but did not fall. The bear roared up onto its hind legs and came at me. I shot it through its fanged mouth; I could see the red beam of the laser emerge out of the roof of its skull. As it fell ponderously at my feet, I blazed away at the rest of the beasts. Wolves, foxes, badgers — whatever they were they scattered in all directions and ran away.

For just an instant I stood there, breathing heavily, feeling exultant. Then I spun around and saw that Adena was doing an even better job on her side of the cave entrance. Several dead beasts littered the ground around her, and she was picking off the others as they fled from her.

The area directly in front of the cave’s mouth was a sickening carnage of charred bodies and glazed ice. The snow had been boiled instantly by the laser’s power and then refrozen in the frigid air.

I suddenly realized that the battle had stopped. The only sound I could hear was the soft sighing of the wind. The clouds had blown away, leaving a crystalline blue sky marred only by the wafting black smoke from the smoldering bodies of the beasts.

“Get back inside the cave,” Adena’s voice commanded in my earphones. I could not see her face through the visor, but she sounded as if she was smiling at me.

I trudged inside and lifted my visor. The others were either clustered around Rena’s dead body or checking the cannon and power packs.

“Is that it?” I asked Adena. “Is it over?”

She shook her head. “That was merely the first attack. They’re regrouping. They’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“But… it’s a slaughter,” I said. “We’ve killed hundreds of them.”

“We haven’t killed anything but animals,” Adena countered. “The brutes are fighting a war of attrition against us. They send in the animals to make us use up our power. Then, when our guns are out of energy, they make their real attack.”

It took a few moments for the meaning of her words to sink in on me. “You’re saying that they’ll keep sending those animals against us until our weapons run out.”

“That’s what they’ve always done in the past,” Adena said.

“Then what chance do we have of winning?”

Her smile came back, but it was the grim smile of a woman who appreciated irony, even when the joke was on her. “It all depends on whether they run out of beasts before we run out of power.”

I must have looked unconvinced.

“It happens, Orion. Ahriman’s people are not invincible. They’re just as desperate as we are. That’s the last group of them out there. If we can kill them, there will be no others to bother us.”

“And if they can kill us…”

She nodded. “They win. For all eternity.”

I was about to reply when one of the troopers called out, “Here they come again.”

We rushed back to our battle stations. Rena’s corpse was left on the bare rock floor, deeper back in the cave. Every man and woman took their assigned posts. Without being told, I hefted Rena’s rifle and placed myself at the edge of the cave’s entrance, where I could guard against infiltrating animals that could not be detected from further inside the cave. It was an exposed position, but the enemy had to come to within grappling distance to do me harm, I reasoned. As long as my rifle held out, I was safe enough.

“Visors down,” came Adena’s calm command. I obeyed and looked out at the approaching army of beasts.

Four times in as many hours the animals charged at us. Each time we beat them back: energy beams against fang and claw. The air became sickeningly heavy with the stench of burning fur and flesh. Dark clouds of death smeared the blue sky as the pale sun climbed across the heavens and began to throw lengthening shadows across the blackened, body-strewn field of snow and ice.

Every muscle in my body ached. My head buzzed wearily. The cave itself seemed dank with human sweat and the cloying odor of ozone. Marek made his way through us, handing each trooper a pair of yellow capsules. Food pills, he told me. Enough nutrition to sustain a man for twelve hours or more. I almost laughed. Less than a hundred yards from us was more meat than the sixteen of us could devour in a month, and we were subsisting on capsules.

Marek was speaking quietly with Adena, his face somber. I caught her eye, and she seemed to indicate that I should join them.

“How many more attacks can we handle?” she was asking him as I came up and stood beside her.

He gave me a suspicious look before answering, “Two, at least. Maybe three.”

Adena glanced at the sensor screen, still resting, slightly crookedly on the rock ledge near the cave’s entrance. “They still have enough animals for three attacks or more.”

“Then we can’t stay here,” I blurted.

Marek glared at me. But Adena said, “What do you propose?”

“That we stop fighting dumb animals and carry the attack to the real enemy.”

“Do we invite them to come here to the cave?” Marek asked sarcastically. “Or do we walk out into the snow and go to their camp?”

“The latter,” I said. “We send out two or three volunteers to make their way into the enemy camp and attack them there.”

He snorted. “They’d be torn to pieces by the beasts out there before they got close…”

“Not if they could get out of this cave undetected and circle around the beasts,” I said. “They could attack the enemy from the rear.”

“How could you get out of here undetected?” Adena asked.

“I’d go right now, and follow along the cliff wail until I’m beyond the flanks of their army of beasts. Then I’d cut across the snow field and make for their camp.”

“That would take hours and hours, even if they didn’t spot you,” Marek said.

“Yes, I know. It would be nightfall before we even got near their camp.”

“Suppose you waited until nightfall before you started,” Adena said, “and then attacked at dawn. We could lay down a bombardment on them from here in the cave, with the cannon. That would take their attention off you.”

Marek shook his head. “They have the advantage at night. They have animals out there that can see in the dark, where we can’t.”

“We have sensors that are as good as any beast’s,” Adena said. “And they never attack at night. You give them too much credit, Marek. We have the advantage in the darkness.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“But I do,” she said. “Orion, we’re going to try your plan. It’s worth the risk. I’ll pick two troopers to go with us.”

“Us?”

“I’m going with you.”

“You can’t do that, Adena!” Kedar snapped.

“I’ve got to. The others won’t follow Orion; he’s a stranger. But they’ll obey my orders without hesitation.”

“But the danger…”

“I would never send any of my troopers on a mission that I wouldn’t undertake myself,” Adena said. “Never.”

I could see by the fire flashing in her eyes that there was no sense trying to change her mind. And, to be truthful, I was glad that she would be coming with me.

“But what about the rest of us?” There was real fear in Kedar’s voice.

“You will be in command here,” she told him. “Start a bombardment against the beasts at the first light of dawn. We should be in position to attack the brutes’ camp by then.”

“And if you’re not?”

She grinned at him. “No matter. If we’re not ready to attack them by dawn, it will be because we’re dead.”

CHAPTER 38

Whether or not my plan would have worked, we never found out. The brutes attacked us before we had a chance to try it.

Adena picked two troopers to go with us: Ogun, the burly armorer who looked at the world from behind a scowl, and Lissa, a tall, lithe, dark-haired beauty whose specialty was explosives.

“If we catch the brutes asleep in their camp,” Adena explained to me, “Lissa can rig her grenades to destroy them with a single blow.”

The lowering sun had dipped behind the cliff in which our cave was set, throwing the blackened and littered field in front of us into deepening shadow. Adena ordered the four of us to sleep, since we would be on the move once true night covered the area.

I have never needed much sleep, but I commanded my body to relax as I stretched out on one of the floating cots. I closed my eyes and within minutes I was drowsing.

If I dreamed, I do not remember. But I was awakened by a strange, cloying odor that tingled in my nostrils and made me feel as if I were choking. I opened my eyes and tried to sit up. The cot tilted beneath me and I slid to the stony floor with a thump.

Adena lay asleep on the cot beside mine, her arms and legs limp, her face turned in my direction, utterly relaxed. I started to gag on the strange odor; it was like having your face pushed into a thicket of exotic tropical flowers.

I staggered to my feet, only to see that all the other troopers were asleep, too. No one was on guard. Gas! I realized. Somehow they were filling the cave with a gas that had knocked everyone unconscious. The only sound in the cave was the soft hum of the power packs, which kept the lights on.

Lurching, gagging, I battled my way past the fallen bodies of the troopers and out into the fresh air beyond the cave’s entrance. It was black night, clear and frigid, the stars shimmering coldly in the icy air. I filled my lungs once, twice, as my head cleared.

They must be about to attack us, I thought.

Unless the gas is lethal.

I plunged back into the cave, holding my breath as I dashed to my cot and the helmet that rested beneath it. I pulled the helmet on, slid down its visor, and pressed the stud at my waist that activated the suit’s life-support system. A tiny fan whirred to life, and I felt clear air blowing against my face. I breathed again. Quickly, with one eye on the cave entrance, I pulled Adena’s helmet over her head and put her on suit air. Then I went to the cave entrance to be on guard there.

“What happened?” I heard Adena’s voice in my earphones, wobbly, confused.

Looking back into the cave toward her, I began to explain. But out of the shadows deeper in the cave I saw one of the brutes looming, a long, pointed shaft of crystal aimed at Adena’s back.

“Look out!” I shouted as I grabbed for the pistol bolstered at my side. Adena ducked instinctively as the brute rushed toward her. I fired and hit him in the face. He howled and went down, the crystal spear shattering as it hit the cave floor.

There was no time for more explanations. More of the enemy were rushing at us from out of the darkness at the rear of the cave. Adena picked up a rifle and cut them down. I covered her with my pistol. The two of us stood them off for what seemed like hours, but actually was no more than a few minutes. Suddenly their attack melted away into the shadows. Four of the hulking brutes lay dead at our feet.

“They’ve found a way to get into the cave from the rear,” I said, forcing my breath and heartbeat back to normal.

“Or made one,” Adena replied. “We don’t have much time. They’ll be back.”

I felt trapped. And outsmarted. The brutes had us surrounded now; our cave was no longer a shelter — it was a confining, constricting cell of solid stone in which we were unable to move, unable to escape. The walls seemed to be closing in on me. My hands started to shake.

But it was not fear that racked me. It was anger. As I looked around at the bare stone walls of the cave, realizing that it could well become a coffin for all of us, I was seized with fury. At myself. How could I be so stupid? The chamber deep beneath the ground that Ahriman had created in the twentieth century, the dark stone womb of a temple he had built at Karakorum, the caves he had dwelled in back in the Neolithic — caves and darkness were his places, his sources of power. Why didn’t I see it before? Why did I let these poor doomed soldiers stay in this trap? I should have known better.

As I berated myself, I worked with Adena to revive the others. Swiftly she told them what had happened.

“They thought they would find us all unconscious, and easy to kill. Now they know differently. They’ll be attacking from the front and rear, any minute now.”

The sensors up at the entrance to the cave showed plainly that more animals were moving about in the darkness of the night. Adena kept the cannon pointed outward toward the open field of snow and ice.

“Orion,” she commanded, “you, Ogun and Lissa must cover the rear of the cave. Try to find where the enemy is coming from. It looks as if they can’t bring a large number of fighters through that way at the same time. If the three of you can’t hold them, call for help.”

I could not see Ogun’s face behind his visor, but I easily imagined the sour grimace on it. Lissa hauled a crate of grenades with her, towing it on a leash wound around her fist as it floated on its anti-gravity disc a few inches above the ground.

“I can give you explosive forces from mild concussion to the kiloton range,” she said, her voice sounding almost cheerful in my helmet earphones.

“It looks too confined in here for explosives,” I said as we pushed deeper into the cave’s narrowing recess.

“Yes, I’m afraid you’re right,” she answered glumly.

Leaving the bodies of the slain brutes behind us, we inspected the narrowing rock tunnel by the lights set into our helmets. It soon became too tight for the three of us to walk abreast. Ogun took the lead; I followed, with Lissa a few steps behind me.

“We checked out this area when we first came to this cave,” Ogun grumbled. “There’s no way out of…”

“What is it?”

He had stopped dead in his tracks. I looked past his shoulder and saw an opening in the cave floor in front of him.

“That wasn’t there yesterday,” Ogun muttered. He knelt on the rocky ground and picked up a few loose pebbles in his gloved hand. “This is new. They must have been digging all the time we were being attacked.”

“Why aren’t they guarding this shaft?” Lissa wondered. “Have they just abandoned it?”

I peered down into it. The light from our helmets was swallowed up in a well that seemed bottomless.

“They’ll be back,” Ogun said. “When they’re ready to attack again, they’ll come swarming up here.”

But something about the shaft bothered me. Lissa was right: if this was their avenue to attack us from the rear, why had they abandoned it?

“Let’s move back,” I said.

“Back?” Ogun’s voice sounded puzzled. “Why?”

“I can booby-trap the shaft,” Lissa suggested. “If they try to use it again they’ll blow themselves to pieces.” I couldn’t get over how happy she sounded when she talked about blasting people to death.

“It’s a fake,” I said, just as surprised as they were to hear the words coming out of my mouth. “A feint. Maybe they used this shaft earlier, but they’re probably digging a new one right now, between here and the main chamber of the cave.”

“They’ll cut us off,” Ogun said.

“And surprise the rest of the troop from the rear,” Lissa added.

I nodded, then realized they could not see it through my helmet visor. “Come on, quickly!” I said.

We scrambled back as quickly as we could toward the spot where the bodies of the dead brutes lay. Once there, with the lights and activity of the other troopers at our backs, I took off my helmet and pressed my ear to the rock wall. Sure enough, I could hear a crunching, tapping sound. Someone, somewhere, was digging.

Adena must have seen us, for she appeared at my side and asked why we were not back in the deeper recess of the cave, as she had ordered us to be. I explained: “They’re digging another entrance into the cave. They’ll attack as soon as they break through.”

She looked skeptical until I invited her to listen to them at work. Then she nodded her understanding.

“We’ll be ready for them,” she said grimly.

Waiting was the most difficult part of it. The sensors at the cave’s mouth showed the enemy’s buildup of beasts quite clearly, despite the blackness of the night. Marek attached seismic sensors to the cave walls back where we were, and their flashing lights showed every blow the brutes were striking against the rock. As they came closer to the cave, the sensors began to triangulate their location. Soon we knew where they would break through. But we had no way of knowing when.

We kept our helmets on, visors down, gripped our weapons and waited.

Nerves stretched taut. Fingers tapped on gunstocks or fiddled with equipment. I strained my eyes at the blank rock wall, trying to see through it to the enemy working so patiently, so laboriously to reach us. How they must hate us, I thought. How they must be focusing every ounce of their strength and hatred against us, sixteen men and women, alone, abandoned, trapped in a time and a place far from their own, waiting for a battle that can end only in extermination of one side or the other.

The sensor lights went blank. They’ve stopped digging, I thought. Why?

“Here they come!” came a shout from the cave’s mouth. I inadvertently turned to glance in that direction…

The wall of the cave in front of me exploded, knocking all of us back onto the ground. I rolled over, my rifle still in my hands, and saw a half-dozen of the brutes charging at us out of the smoke and rubble. They were big, powerful, their broad, red-eyed faces snarling with fury and crystal spears in their raised hands.

I fired pointblank at them. The rifle’s beam cut the first two in half, but their momentum carried them into me and they fell beside me as I rose to one knee and fired again. Ogun was firing too, but one of the brutes reached him with a crystal spear. It barely grazed his helmet, but a shower of sparks erupted and I heard Ogun scream in my earphones. His body spasmed, arched, then fell dead.

I ducked under the spear that was aimed at me and jammed the muzzle of my rifle into the brute’s midsection as I pulled the trigger. His body burst into flame, and he shrieked hideously as he bounced away from me and into the others behind him.

Lissa had recovered her wits now and was firing into the brutes who were emerging from their newly dug tunnel. I lost count of how many there were; we fired and dodged and fired again at them, killing them left and right until their bodies jammed the entryway that they had blasted out of the rock.

Lissa leaped onto the barricade of flesh and lobbed a grenade into the tunnel. Its explosion shook the whole cave — stones fell from the ceiling; smoke filled the area.

I staggered back a few steps, turned and glanced at the front of the cave. A huge gray-brown bear was rearing on its hind legs, roaring and swinging its clawed paws at the troopers ringed around it like midgets. A dozen rifles blasts hit it, but the bear stalked forward, into the cave, as the soldiers fell back. Behind it I could see wolves and stinking great cats with saber fangs.

The cannon fired its searing beam of raw red energy into the bear’s chest, blasting the beast in two, blood and bone and flesh splattering in every direction. As it toppled to the cave floor, already slippery with blood, the soldiers turned their weapons on the wolves and saber-toothed cats.

I looked back at the tunnel mouth we were guarding. Lissa was busily rigging explosive charges, sitting on the floor, her back to the barricade of dead bodies, her rifle on the ground beside her.

I went to her and peered into the murky darkness of the tunnel.

“There don’t seem to be any more of them coming from this direction,” I said.

I could sense her nodding inside her helmet. “This will seal off the tunnel.” She lifted with both hands a set of grenades that she had wired together. “Then we can seal off the other one, farther back.”

I agreed to her plan. Quickly she dropped her explosive package into the tunnel. We flattened out against the solid rock wall as she counted off five seconds. The blast jarred me almost to my knees, but when the smoke cleared, Lissa shone her helmet light into the tunnel and laughed lightheartedly.

“It’ll take them awhile to dig through that,” she said triumphantly.

Within minutes she had blasted the other tunnel shut, and we joined the others at the front of the cave.

Wave after wave of animals attacked us, and we battled them back. Huge, ferocious bears, snarling wolves and smaller dogs, saber-toothed mountain lions. We killed them by the dozens, by the score, by the hundreds. The nighttime darkness was lit by the glow of our energy weapons; the stars themselves faded from the sky in the blood-red light of our killing beams. Through the padding of my helmet and earphones I could hear the screaming, howling, shrieking roars of pain and fury as the animals were driven at us by Ahriman’s diabolical powers, only to be slaughtered by the blazing energies of our guns.

Off in the distance, barely seen against the flickering shadows, I could now and then glimpse one of the brutes, skulking among the poor savage beasts that they were commanding. But they never came close enough to kill; they stayed their distance, as if they knew that what had happened to their comrades at the tunnel would happen to them.

I heard a voice in my head calling to them, daring them, challenging them: Come and fight us yourselves! Leave these poor dumb beasts alone and take up the fight, face to face. Come and meet the death you hand out so freely to others.

But they hung back, keeping to the shadows.

After long hours of fighting, I realized that the cannon had gone silent. The lights in the cave were out; we fought by the light of our weapons and the lamps built into our helmets now. My own rifle finally quit on me, and I began to use my pistol, instead.

As dawn tinted the sky with a grayish pink, the attacks stopped. The ground in front of the cave, once smooth with pristine snow, was a blackened, bloodied shambles of dead beasts, shattered limbs, bodies ripped open, flesh torn apart.

I looked around me. Four soldiers were down, their helmets and armor broken, blood-soaked. Counting Ogun, back by the tunnel, we had lost five. There were only eleven of us left alive, and three of them were wounded, including Kedar. His leg had been broken when a bear charged into the cave and made it almost to the power packs.

Lissa and several others began tending to the wounded. I went to Adena, who was surveying the battlefield with a powerful pair of electronically boosted binoculars.

“They’re leaving,” she said, as if she knew I was beside her. “The brutes are moving off to the south.”

“We’ve won,” I said.

She handed the binoculars to me. “Not until we’ve killed the last one of them.”

I looked out toward the south. Through the magnification of the binoculars I saw eight people like Ahriman shambling through the snow. There was no sign of any animals with them. No tracks except their own. Not even a dog accompanied them.

“They’ve thrown everything they have at us,” I said, “and we beat them off. They’ve lost.”

Adena’s visor was up, and I could see that her face was set in grim determination. “No, Orion. We may have won this battle, but the war is not finished. Our task is to exterminate them.”

“Those eight…”

She nodded. “Those last eight brutes must be killed, Orion. We have to go out after them.”

“Is that Ormazd’s command?” I asked her.

The corners of her mouth curved slightly in the beginning of a smile. “It is my command, Orion. It is what must be done.”

CHAPTER 39

She gave orders quickly, efficiently. Kedar and the other wounded would remain in the cave. The rest of us started out after the fleeing enemy, without pausing for rest. We gulped down food capsules as we slogged through the knee-deep snow, following the trail left by the brutes, under a clean blue morning sky. The air was cold but still, as chilled and delicious as wine.

“Eight of us against eight of them,” I said as I marched beside Adena. “Ormazd arranges things neatly.”

She gazed at me, her gray eyes gleaming in the reflection of the morning sun against the pure white snow.

“You mustn’t think that Ormazd is doing all this for his entertainment, Orion,” she said. “We are dealing with the fate of the universe here, the maintenance of the continuum.”

“By hunting down a handful of people…”

“ Ahriman’speople,” she corrected. “Our enemies.”

“Whose most powerful weapon is some sort of electrostatic wand, while we have laser guns that can cut them down at a thousand yards.”

“Do you think it would be fairer if we fought them hand-to-hand?” She almost seemed amused. “The power packs that heat our suits and energize our weapons will be drained soon enough. The main power packs back in the cave are completely drained. We’ll be fighting them hand-to-hand soon enough, Orion. Will that please you?”

I had to admit that it did not.

“They must be exterminated,” Adena went on, her face utterly serious now. “Every last one of them, including Ahriman. Especially Ahriman. You understand that, don’t you?”

With a reluctant nod, I replied, “I understand that Ormazd wants it so. I understand that Ahriman wants to exterminate us. But I don’t like it.”

She gave me a strange, almost pitying glance. “Orion… we are not here to enjoy what we do. We do what must be done. We have no choice.”

I started to reply, but thought better of it and held my tongue.

We pushed on through deepening snow, walking in the tracks made by the enemy band. The sun shone brightly but without much heat out of a cloudless sky of perfect blue. Adena headed our little column; I walked beside her. Due south the tracks headed, through a featureless expanse of dazzling white snow. After long hours of marching, with nothing to do except plant one foot in front of the other and watch my breath puffing out in tiny clouds of steam, I saw a forest of huge pine trees rising on the horizon, their deep green a startling, welcome contrast to this world of white.

The brutes’ trail led straight into the woods, and I began to think about what might be waiting for us in the shadows of that forest.

“That’s a fine spot for an ambush,” I said.

Adena nodded agreement. “But as you say, we have weapons that outdistance theirs. If they’re foolish enough to attack, they’ll be doing us a favor.”

“They’ll throw more animals at us. There must be wolves and other predators living in that forest.”

Adena asked, “What do you think we should do?”

“Circle the forest. If they’re in there waiting for us, we can make them come out in the open.”

“And if they’re not, we’ll lose half a day’s march on them. Perhaps more.”

“Does that matter?”

“We mustn’t let them get away.”

“If we go straight into those woods, we’ll be ambushed and probably killed.”

“That doesn’t matter…”

“Perhaps it doesn’t matter to you,” I said, “or even to me. But what about them?” I cocked my head to indicate the other soldiers. “They may not have as many lives as you or I. Death for them is very real, and very permanent.”

Her eyes looked troubled. “I had forgotten that.”

“If we’ve got to kill the enemy down to the last man, at least let’s try to preserve the lives of our own people.”

“But you don’t understand, Orion.”

“I don’t care,” I said, keeping my voice low but putting as much strength into it as I could muster. “You’ve taken these men and women out of their own time, torn them away from their homes and families and flung them into this distant age of cold and ice to do Ormazd’s bidding…”

“To do what must be done,” she insisted. “To save the human race from extinction.”

“Whatever the reason, they deserve a chance to get through this alive. They shouldn’t be thrown away like a handful of pawns.”

“But that’s exactly what they are,” Adena said. “Don’t you see? They are pawns. They were created to be pawns.”

“They’re human beings, with lives of their own that are precious to them, families, friends…”

“No, Orion, you are wrong. You don’t understand.” Adena’s face was sad, her eyes searching mine.

“Then tell me, explain it to me.”

For long moments she said nothing, as we trudged through the snow, each step bringing us closer to the looming, brooding dark forest.

“I’m afraid,” she said at last. “If I tell you the entire truth, you will hate me.”

“Hate you?” I felt shocked. “How can I hate you? I’ve gone through death three times to find you, to be with you.”

She lowered her eyes. “Orion, we are all pieces in a game. We all play our assigned roles.”

“And the gameplayer is Ormazd,” I said.

“No. It’s not that simple. Ormazd plays his role, just as I do. And you.” She hesitated, then added, almost in a whisper, “And these… pawns, who march with us.”

“You’re not a pawn,” I said.

“Neither are you,” she said, with a sad, resigned smile. “You are a knight. I am a bishop, perhaps.”

“A queen.”

“Not that powerful.”

“My queen,” I insisted. Then I realized, “And Ormazd is the king. If he is killed…”

“We all die. Permanently. The game ends.”

“So that’s what it’s all about.”

“Yes.”

“And these men and women with us?”

“As I said, they are pawns. They were made for this task, and no other.” She looked weary, miserable. “You spoke of their being wrenched out of their own time, separated from their friends and families. Orion, they have no families! No friends. They know of no other time except this. They were created by Ormazd precisely for this task of exterminating Ahriman’s people. For this task, and none other.”

It was as if I had known this all along. The truth did not surprise me. Instead, I felt a terrible hollowness within me, an emptiness as deep as the pit of hell.

I glanced back over my shoulder at them, marching along through the frigid Ice Age afternoon without a complaint, following Adena’s orders, each step bringing them closer to death — either their own or their enemy’s. And they did not seem to care which.

Lissa smiled at me. She was toting a heavy sack of grenades and other explosive devices on her back. I thought back to her lighthearted eagerness just before the battle in the cave. To the killing frenzy of Dal’s clan that night they were attacked. To the grim efficiency of the Mongols as they wiped out the armies of Bela the Hungarian. Even to the crowd of demonstrators in front of the fusion laboratory in Michigan, so quick to violence.

“Yes,” Adena said, as if she could read my thoughts. “Violence has been programmed into them.”

“They are machines, then? Robots?”

With a single small shake of her head she answered, “They are flesh and blood, just as you yourself are. But they were created by Ormazd and their minds were programmed for this task of killing.”

“Just as I was,” I realized.

“Now you know the truth,” she whispered, her gray eyes filled with sorrow.

“I was created by Ormazd to kill Ahriman, and for no other reason.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why I couldn’t remember my past, back in the twentieth century. I had none. I am a puppet, and, Ormazd pulls the strings.”

The hollowness I felt inside me grew to engulf the universe. I was a machine! We were all machines, made of organic molecules and DNA, of bone and nerve, but machines nonetheless, programmed to do Ormazd’s bidding: puppets, marionettes, remotely controlled killers.

“Orion.” Vaguely I heard Adena’s voice calling me, summoning me back to this instant in time, this place on the vast chess board that Ormazd controlled.

“Orion,” she said again. “You were made to serve Ormazd, but you have grown beyond the purpose for which he created you.”

“Have I?” My voice sounded utterly weary, defeated, even to my own ears. “Then why am I here, if it isn’t to twitch whenever Ormazd pulls my strings?”

Adena’s beautiful face eased into a smile. “Why, I thought you were here to find me. That’s what you told me.”

“Now you’re teasing me.”

“Not at all.” She grew serious again. “You were created for a single purpose, true enough. But even from the first you acted on your own. You are a human being, Orion. As fully human as Socrates or Einstein or Ogotai Khan.”

“How can I be?”

“You are,” she said. “How could I love you, if you were not?”

I stared at her for long moments as we trudged steadily through the snow toward the gloomy forest. Its huge conifers reared before us like the battlements of a fortress.

“You do love me,” I said.

“Enough to make myself human,” Adena answered. “Enough to share in your life, your fate, your death.”

“I love you. I’ve loved you through a hundred thousand years, through death and resurrection.”

She nodded happily, her eyes suddenly misty.

“But we must face death again, mustn’t we?” I said.

“Yes, but we’ll face it together.”

“And these others?”

She grew somber again. “Orion, they are pawns. They have no past. They know nothing but how to fight.”

“Even pawns have a right to survive,” I said.

“Our task is to exterminate Ahriman and his kind. There is no other goal for us, no other path. If we fail in that, we die forever, Orion. Oblivion for us all.”

I knew she was telling the truth; yet I could not accept it.

Adena halted abruptly and grasped me by the shoulders. The others stopped a respectful few paces behind us.

“Orion, if you love me, you must be willing to sacrifice these pawns,” she whispered fiercely.

I gazed into her gray eyes for what seemed like an eternity. With an effort I turned my face away, toward the looming dark forest that awaited us, and then back to the men and women who followed us. They stood at rest, shouldering their weapons, waiting for the next command.

“I don’t want them to die,” Adena said, her voice low, almost pleading with me. “It may not be necessary for them to die. But if we delay, Ahriman and his band will get away.”

“If we march straight into those trees, we will be ambushed.”

“That doesn’t mean that we will all be killed. Our weapons are far superior to theirs.”

“While they last.”

“We’ve got to be willing to make the sacrifice,” Adena insisted. “You risk your own life, and mine. Why draw the line at theirs?”

“Because they don’t understand what’s at stake.”

Adena turned away from me and glanced up at the lowering sun. Already the trees were throwing long shadows toward us, like fingers reaching for our throats.

“Check your weapons,” she called to the handful of troops. “We’re moving into the forest. The brutes will probably spring an ambush in there. Be on the alert.”

They nodded and began checking their guns and power units. Within a minute we were all marching forward again, without a protest or even an instant’s hesitation from any of them. If anything, they looked glad to be coming to grips with the enemy.

There was nothing I could do. Nothing I should do, I kept telling myself, except move forward and find Ahriman. But deep inside my mind a voice was telling me that there was more to the world, far more, than hunting and killing.

It made no difference. Adena was right, we were all players in a cosmic game, and we all had our roles to fulfill. I stayed at her side, pistol in my hand, and peered into the shadowy hollows between the trees as the forest swallowed up our meager little band of warriors.

Birds called back and forth among those dark trees. Small furry animals chittered at us and scrampered up to the higher branches, as if they knew that danger surrounded us. The sunlight was mottled and weak. It grew colder the deeper into the woods we tramped, cold and still as death.

The ground beneath the thickly clustered trees was barely touched by the snow that had drifted so thickly out in the open, but we could still see the trail that the brutes had left. as clearly as if they had deliberately laid it down for us to follow.

A squirrel, the biggest and reddest squirrel I had ever seen, jabbered angrily at us as we neared the tree on which it was standing; all four paws gripped the bark of the pine’s huge bole. When it saw that we would not turn away, it raced up the tree trunk toward the safety of a lair high up in its branches.

I saw a shadowy form move up in those branches, something as big as a man.

I reached out and touched Adena’s arm. “They’re up in the trees,” I whispered.

She barely had time to look up before they attacked. Mountain lions leaped out of those branches, their saber fangs huge and glittering white. Adena had no time even to shout an order, but the troops automatically formed a circle as they shot the beasts in midair. One snarling, spitting cat landed in our midst and I blasted his skull open with a burst from my pistol.

“Wolves!” somebody yelled.

They came loping through the trees, eyes gleaming balefully as they charged at us. We gunned them down by the dozens.

I searched the trees as we fought the howling, roaring, bloodthirsty beasts. The saber-toothed cats lay dead in our midst, and the bodies of wolves ringed our tiny defensive perimeter. But I was looking for Ahriman and his kind. They were up there in the trees, I knew, waiting for the moment when our weapons ran out of power. Already four of our troopers had dropped their rifles and were using pistols, which were powered by the suits’ power packs.

I called to Lissa. “Let me have some grenades!” She was scanning the trees, too, looking for more cats to kill. The wolves were skulking out in the deepening shadows for the moment, working up the fury for another attack. We could see their eyes glittering in the darkness.

“What kind?” Lissa called back, cheerful as ever. “Concussion, fragmentation, gas…”

“Concussion,” I answered.

She rolled four of them to me, shouting instructions on how to set the fuse’s time delay. I picked one up, turned the timer to five seconds, then reared back and threw it high into the trees in front of me.

The blast was much smaller than I had expected, but a shower of snow and shattered branches rained down us. Adena looked up sharply.

“What are you…”

I silenced her with an upraised hand. A howl of pain echoed through the trees; it was not an animal’s howl either.

“They’re up there!” Adena realized.

As I picked up another grenade, the brutes launched their real attack, swinging out of the concealing branches of the trees on long, thin ropes and slashing at us with those crystal spears of theirs. We fired at them as they fell upon us, but they were wearing glittering crystal armor that splashed our laser beams harmlessly away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the two troopers who still had rifles in their hands were the first to be swarmed under by the brutes. I fired at them but my pistol’s beam could not penetrate their armor.

Their electrostatic spears, though, were deadly effective. Both our riflemen were cut down in showers of blue sparks, and the beasts turned to charge at the rest of us.

Lissa threw herself at four of them, grenades in each hand. Twin explosions tore all of them apart and knocked the rest of us down. Groggily, I clambered to my knees, threw my useless pistol into the face of the nearest brute and kicked the legs out from under him. I grabbed his spear and jammed it into his neck, where his crystal armor did not protect him. He screeched and died in a blast of electrical agony.

Adena was on one knee, coolly shooting one of the brutes through the head as two others rushed at her. She turned slightly and shot at one of them, who raised his armored forearm over his face to deflect her shot. Her pistol went dead.

I leaped at the two brutes, knocking them both away from her.

They snarled at me, spears raised in their hands. I parried the first thrust that the nearer one made, then rammed the butt of the spear into the head of the other. Someone’s pistol blast took the head off the first one as I killed the second with the spear’s electrical bolt.

Suddenly the fighting was over. Four of our people lay dead at our feet, and seven of the brutes.

“One got away,” Adena said.

“Ahriman.” I knew.

“We must find him. We mustn’t let him escape.”

“I’ll go after him,” I said.

“No,” Adena countered. “We all will.”

CHAPTER 40

For two days we followed Ahriman’s trail southward, until another storm darkened the skies and began to pelt us with grainy snow driven by a fierce, howling wind.

I led Adena’s little band back to the relative shelter of the pine forest as quickly as I could. Our suit packs were running out of power, one by one. We had only a handful of food capsules remaining. If we’d stayed in the raging blizzard, we would have starved and frozen.

I showed them how to make a lean-to shelter from the pine boughs and how to make a fire. We used the last ergs of energy in the pistols to cut the tree limbs for the shelter and to start the campfire. When the last power pack finally was exhausted, our little troop was suddenly plunged into the Stone Age. None of the equipment they had with them would work anymore. We had to make do with what we could take from the land itself.

The storm moved off after three hungry days, and we started back toward the cave where we had left Kedar and the other wounded. Adena let me become the leader, and I remembered from my time with Dal’s clan how to make primitive spears and how to find small game hidden in the snow. We did not starve, although we were a ragged, hungry, lean and very cold straggle of soldiers by the time we got back to the cave.

For the next several days we were all busy every waking moment. I showed them how to survive in the wilderness, how to start a fire by the friction of rubbing two sticks against each other, how to flush out the hares and squirrels that lived unseen in the snow-covered fields, how to skin and cook them over the open fire.

And at night, while the others slept, I stood watch — alone with my thoughts.

The shock of the battles and their aftermath was wearing away. I began to feel what had registered on my conscious mind, but not yet penetrated to my inner self. I saw Lissa’s goodhearted grin as she handled her deadly cargo of explosives, as innocent as a child when she spoke of them and what they could do. And I saw the exultant look on her face, eyes wide and mouth agape with a scream of triumph, as she rushed the enemy with those live grenades in her hands.

I stared up at the stars, glittering coldly in this Ice Age night, and began to realize that Ormazd never intended that these soldiers would survive their battle. They were put here to defeat Ahriman’s people, to annihilate them, and once that task was done, they were meant to self-destruct, to die here in the cold darkness, their purpose accomplished, their value reduced to zero.

“Ormazd,” I muttered to the silent, grave stars, “wherever you are, whoever you are, I offer you this vow: I will find Ahriman for you, and I will kill him if I can. But, in exchange, I am going to take these people to a place where there is no snow, where they can survive and live like decent human beings. And I will do that first, before I seek out Ahriman.”

“You bargain with your creator?”

I turned to see Adena smiling at me. “I can’t leave these people here to die,” I said. “Can you?”

“If it’s necessary,” she said.

“But it’s not. We can take them south, to a land they can live in. I can show them how to survive.”

Her smile broadened. “You have already shown them so much. Their children will create legends about you, Orion. You will become a god yourself. Is that what you want?”

“I want you,” I said, “in a land and a time where we can live together in peace.”

“For how long?”

“For a lifetime,” I replied.

“And then?”

I shrugged. She was not teasing me. Her smile was not one of amusement.

“Orion,” said Adena, “when you can live beyond death, you must try to see further than a single lifetime.”

“But I won’t live beyond my next death.” I knew. “Ormazd won’t revive me once I’ve killed Ahriman.”

Her gray eyes fixed on mine, pulled me to her. “Do you think, my beloved, that I would want to face eternity without you?”

“Then what…”

“I will see that you survive death. And if Ormazd prevents me from doing so, then I will live your one lifetime with you and die with you at the end of it, gladly.”

“I can’t ask you to give up…”

She placed a finger on my lips, silencing me. “You have not asked me. You did not need to ask. I make my own decisions.”

I took her in my arms and kissed her as if we would never be able to touch each other again, as if this night were the last night of the world, as if the stars were blinking out forever.

“Now lead them, Orion my love,” she whispered. “Lead them to a land where they can live in peace.”

The following morning we started our long trek southward, Kedar and the two other wounded forcing us to move slowly across the glittering fields of snow. No animals attacked us. If Ahriman were nearby, he did not show his presence in any way.

We became a band of primitive hunters, stalking game for food and furs. Piece by piece we discarded our useless equipment, replacing laser pistols with wooden spears, plastic armor with the hides of foxes, hares, and mountain goats.

Southward we trekked, away from the snow and ice. Within a week we found an open stream, gurgling toward the southwest, its glacier-fed water as cold as the dark side of the moon. We followed the stream through hilly, wooded country. The snow grew thinner on the ground, the sun brighter, the air warmer.

One of the wounded died, and we buried her in the bank of that unnamed stream. Kedar grew stronger, though, and we made better time despite his limp.

At last we entered a land of softly rolling hills, covered with grass, teeming with game. Trees tossed their leafy branches in the warm breeze. Huge, lumbering beasts trumpeted at us from the undulating horizon — mammoths, I guessed, from their size and their trunks.

I had no idea where we were, but we found a large, dry cave and made it our own. The ten of us had become quite skilled at survival by now. The men set off to catch meat; the women began gathering shoots and berries from the plants that grew in profusion all around us.

“We can stay here awhile,” I said as I started a fire. “This might be a good place to stay.”

Adena sat beside me and stared into the crackling flames. The sun was low in the west and the heat from the fire felt good, comforting.

“Now you can begin to search for Ahriman again,” she said, without turning her head from the flames.

I nodded wordlessly.

“Do you think he’s far from here?” she asked.

“No. He’s near us, I’m sure. He still wants to exterminate us. He hasn’t given up, not yet.”

“When will you leave?”

I squinted up at the setting sun. Thick clouds were gathering in the sky, turning the sunset into a blaze of reds and golds and violets.

“Tomorrow,” I answered, “unless there’s a storm.”

Adena smiled and leaned her head against my shoulder. “I’ll pray for rain.”

CHAPTER 41

It did begin to rain. As darkness fell and the men came straggling back to the cave, a strong wind arose and thunder boomed across the sky. Kedar, the last of the hunters to return, limped sullenly into the cave, wet to the skin, his hair plastered down over his head, grumbling to himself.

As we feasted on rabbit and woodchuck, the men began talking about the bigger game they had seen farther downstream — antelope and bison, from the sound of their descriptions. And, of course, there were mammoths and horses and all sorts of other animals abounding in this Ice Age landscape. I told them as much about them as I could, knowing that I would be leaving them soon.

“And there are wolves out there, too,” said Kedar. “I saw a pair of them as I was heading back, in the rain.”

“There must be bears, too.”

“They won’t bother us here in this cave as long as we have a good fire going,” I said.

“Unless the brutes control them.”

“There’s only one brute left,” I said to them as we sat around the fire. Their faces, lit by the flickering flames, were smeared with dirt and dinner. “And I’m going after him, as soon as the storm ends.”

For a moment no one said a word. Then Kedar began to talk about going out after antelope.

I glanced at Adena and let them make their plans. Already they were more concerned with their bellies than with continuing their war.

The storm grew in fury as the night wore on, its raging wind slashing into the cave, driving raw wet coldness and rain that nearly drenched our fire. We grabbed up burning firebrands and moved farther back into the cave, beyond the reach of the rain.

Thunder racked the night, and lightning flashed out in the darkness. The others tried to sleep on the cold rock floor, but something kept me staring out into the night, into the storm.

Ahriman, I realized. He is here. He is reaching for us. This is his storm, his doing.

Adena was stretched out on the ground, sound asleep. I smiled at her, my sleeping goddess who had taken on human form. Her breath was slow and regular, her beautiful face even more exquisite in repose. I wondered how she could make the transition to being so completely human. I wondered how Ahriman could make the transition to being superhuman.

He must have started life just like any other of his kind. Even now, here in this time and place, he had shown no evidence of superhuman powers. In other eras he had whisked himself — and me — through space-time as easily as a man steps through an open doorway. How did he acquire those powers?

When?

A flash of lightning lit the world outside the cave for a brief instant of time, and I saw something that startled me. It happened too quickly to be certain of it, but I closed my eyes for a moment and reviewed the scene in my memory.

Frozen in place by the lightning’s strobe glare, it was the hulking form of Ahriman I saw, not more than a hundred yards beyond the entrance of the cave. And beside him, standing on all four legs, a huge bear that dwarfed Ahriman’s powerful figure. He was facing the bear, one thickly muscled arm raised, a blunt finger pointing, as if he was giving the beast instructions.

Guided by Ahriman’s intelligence, driven by his hatred, that bear could kill us all. I scrambled to my feet and drew two blazing branches from the fire, one for each hand, and hurried to the cave’s entrance.

As I approached, a jagged fork of lightning streaked across the sky and the bear’s massive, fearsome form reared up in the cave’s entrance, blotting out the storm outside, its roar of rage blending with the boom of thunder to shake the ground itself.

It advanced toward me, forepaws raised, claws the size of hunting knives glinting in the light of the fire, gaping jaws armed with fangs that could tear off a limb with ease.

Instead of retreating, I yelled as loudly as I could and jabbed the burning end of one of my torches at it. The bear roared back and swung a mighty swipe that ripped the torch out of my hand. I feinted with the other torch, tossed it from my left hand to my right, and then drove it into the beast’s midsection. It bellowed with pain and anger, staggered back a step.

My body went into overdrive, every sense hyper-alert, every nerve reacting faster than any normal human could move. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the others awakening, getting to their feet as if in slow-motion, taking up firebrands.

They circled to the bear’s left and right, dancing close and then away, jabbing at him with the blazing torches. The bear screamed fury at them but would not back out of the cave. Ahriman’s control was iron-bound.

I saw that we were at a stalemate that could end only with the bear’s killing one or more of us. Then a burning stick whistled over my head and hit the bear on the shoulder.

“Drive him out!” Adena shouted, and I knew it was she who had thrown the stick.

But the bear had other ideas. Instead of retreating it moved straight at me, utterly disregarding the others and the torches they jabbed at it. I could see the poor beast’s coat blackening from the flames, smell seared fur and flesh, yet still the bear forced itself forward, toward me.

It was like a nightmare where everything happens slowly, as if time itself was winding down; yet even so you cannot escape the terror that is relentlessly engulfing you. The torch in my own hand seemed puny as a matchstick as the bear’s eight-foot height towered over me, its bellowing roar blotting out the shouts and cries of the soldiers, its hate-reddened eyes fastened on mine.

I saw the blow coming, but I had backed up so far that I could not retreat any further without stumbling into the fire. I could feel its heat singing the backs of my legs as the bear’s mountainous paw swung slowly, inexorably, at me. I tried to duck under the blow, and almost made it.

The paw cuffed me on the back of the head as I ducked, hitting me like a boulder dropped from a great height. I went sprawling; everything went fuzzy and black spots danced before my eyes.

I don’t know how long I lay stunned, probably only a moment or two. I found myself on my back, my vision blurred. But I could see Adena leaping at the beast, both hands gripping firebrands, and the bear cuffing her away. It knocked down two more of the troop, then loomed over me. I saw those fangs reaching for me, and I was unable to move out of their way.

The first shock of pain went through me like a bolt of electricity. I could hear my bones crunching as the bear bit into my shoulder and roughly jerked me up off the floor. I pawed feebly at its snout with my free hand and saw, vaguely, dimly, the others still jabbing uselessly at it with their torches. The bear swatted another soldier to the ground and shambled out of the cave, into the night and the cold rain, with me dangling like a limp doll from its jaws.

The last glimpse of the cave I got, through eyes blurred by blood and pain, was of Adena clambering to her feet and starting out after us. But Kedar and another soldier restrained her. They held her there, struggling, and watched the bear carry me off.

The beast dropped to all fours as the rain pelted down on us. Lightning danced through the black sky. The fire-lit mouth of the cave became a distant glow, a speck of warmth as remote as the farthest star.

The bear dropped me, at last, unceremoniously, in a muddy puddle and then trundled off to lick its own wounds. I lay there on my back, the cold rain sluicing down my face and torn body. The pain had reached the point where numbness was setting in. I was too far in shock to even think of trying to control it. My right shoulder was useless, the arm dangling by a few ligaments and scraps of torn, bleeding flesh.

I coughed and shivered. So this is how Prometheus was created, I thought, half-delirious. The demigod who gives humankind the gift of fire only, in return, to be horribly punished by the gods. I think I must have laughed as I lay there bleeding to death. Not a dignified way for a demigod to die.

Another stroke of lightning split the darkness and I saw Ahriman’s brooding form hulking over me.

“I’ve beaten you,” he said, in that tortured whisper of his. I could barely hear him over the moaning of the storm wind.

“You’ve killed me,” I agreed.

“And them. They’ll die off soon enough, without their weapons and their energy generators.”

“No,” I said. “They will live. I’ve taught them how to survive. They have fire. They will master this world and populate the Earth.”

In the darkness I could not see the expression on his face, only the anger and hatred radiating from his red-rimmed eyes.

“I will have to strike elsewhere, then,” Ahriman muttered. “Find the weak points in the fabric of the continuum…”

It took all my strength to shake my head as I lay there in the mud. My voice was growing weaker; each breath I drew in was more difficult, more painful.

“Ahriman… it won’t do you any good,” I gasped. “Each time you try… I am there… to stop you.”

For long moments he said nothing, merely standing there, looming over me like a dark, ominous destiny.

Finally: “Then we will go back to the very beginning. I will kill you for all time, Orion. And Ormazd with you.”

I wanted to laugh at him; I wanted to tell him that he was a fool. But I had no more strength left in me. I could do nothing but lie there as my blood mingled with the rain and mud and the life seeped out of my body.

Ahriman raised his powerful arms to the stormy night sky, threw his head back, and gave out a harrowing, blood-chilling, howling cry, like a beast baying at the moon. Twice, three times, he cried out, his thick blunt fingers reaching toward the black clouds that blotted out the stars.

Lightning strokes flickered through those clouds and then began lancing down to the ground all around us. My failing eyes widened as one bolt after another sizzled to the ground, scant yards from us, and stayed there, crackling and blistering the air around us until we were surrounded with a cage of electricity. The rain-sodden ground bubbled where the lightning danced. The sweet, burning smell of ozone filled the air.

Ahriman stood outlined against the blue-white glare of the lightning, his arms still straining upward, reaching, his baying, yowling cry the only sound I could hear over the simmering blaze of electricity.

Then a tremendous stroke of lightning shattered the world, engulfing Ahriman, turning him into a glowing demon of pure energy, overflowing onto me, screaming along every nerve in my body until there was nothing in the universe but pain.

And then darkness.