Orion Among the Stars

Chapter 13

They carried the injured guards away as the security officer fumed and snarled and slowly regained her self-control. At last she used the comm unit on her desk to speak to her superior, the base commandant. Within a few minutes I was brought to her office.

The bearded human, the one called Delos, was already there. The base commandant seemed older than the other Skorpis I had seen. The fur of her face and hands was graying. Her uniform was a pale blue, crusted with ribbons and decorations. The human scientist still wore gray shapeless coveralls.

“Is that all the uniform you have?” the base commander growled when they shoved me into her office.

“I’ve been swimming,” I replied. “With the Old Ones.”

Delos nearly jumped out of his chair. “The Old Ones? You’ve been with them?”

“I’ve spoken with them. They have a message for us.”

The base commander waved the security officer out of the room. “I’ll call if I need you.”

Once she had shut the door, the commandant got up from behind her desk and indicated the table on the other side of her spacious office.

“Sit there,” she told me. Delos got up from his chair in front of the desk and joined us. The table was too high, the chair too big, for me to feel comfortable. It was like being a child at an adult’s table. I felt small, almost humiliated.

Delos did not seem to mind the furniture at all.

“What did the Old Ones tell you?” he asked eagerly. “How did you make contact with them? Where are they from?”

“Will they join us in this war?” the base commander wanted to know.

“They refuse to join either side,” I said. “They reject all attempts to draw them into the war.”

“Reject, do they?” the base commander rumbled. “A nuclear bomb or two exploded at depth might change their opinion, I think.”

“Your weapons will not work against them,” I said. “That is what they told me.”

“Nonsense!”

“I believe them. They are far older and wiser than we.”

“So were the Tsihn, and we bashed them halfway across the galaxy.”

“And made eternal enemies of them,” said Delos.

The commander’s slitted eyes flashed, but she turned away from the scientist and said to. me, “You must tell me everything that the Old Ones told you. I must know precisely what they said.”

I repeated their message word for word, several times. The base commander sank deeper into a glowering unhappiness each time. The human scientist, though, seemed to grow more excited with each telling.

“Tens of millions of years older than humankind!” Delos said, almost smacking his lips with anticipation. “The things they can teach us! The things they must know!”

“They won’t teach us anything as long as we continue killing one another. They regard us with loathing.”

“But surely they would talk to scientists,” Delos pleaded. “We’re not fighters. We haven’t killed anyone.”

“Perhaps,” I replied. “In time.” I smiled inwardly, knowing that the Old Ones’ contemplation of time was so far more leisurely than our own.

After repeating my story another half-dozen times, I was dismissed by the base commander. Outside her door, the security officer was waiting for me. If the Skorpis still had feline tails, hers would have been twitching with impatience.

“She believes you, does she?” she asked as she personally escorted me back to the prisoners’ compound.

“How do you know that? Can you hear through closed doors?” The thought occurred to me that perhaps she had bugged her commander’s office, under the guise of her security duties.

“No need to eavesdrop,” she said grimly. “If the old tigress hadn’t believed you, you would be chopped meat by now.”

Before we were halfway to the prison compound, though, Delos came sprinting after us.

“The base commander’s given me permission to house Orion in our quarters,” he panted.

The security officer snorted, but we changed direction and went to the scientists’ fenced-in area.

“He is your responsibility,” she said ominously as she left me there with Delos.

He nodded and gestured toward the nearest of the low-roofed buildings.

“Wait,” I said. Turning to the security officer, I asked, “What’s going to happen to the rest of my troop?”

“The prisoners?” she made a movement with her shoulders that might have been a shrug. “Cryostorage, of course. We’ll freeze them till we need them.”

“Need them? For what?”

She bared her teeth. “For food, human. What else?”

“You eat humans?”

“They are made of meat, aren’t they? Not as nutritious as some of the enemies we’ve fought, but they’ll do in a pinch. With vitamin supplements, of course.”

She seemed to be enjoying my consternation. I pulled myself together and said, “Well, until you put them in storage—or other arrangements are made for them—couldn’t you find some shelter for them? And better rations?”

“No, I could not, human.” And she turned abruptly and walked away from me.

The other scientists were just as eager to learn about the Old Ones as Delos was. They clustered around me once he had ushered me into their barracks. We were in a wide, bare room, furnished only with a long table and human-sized chairs and a pair of video machines off in one corner. A single row of windows on one side of the room looked out on the Skorpis camp, where purple twilight shadows were lengthening into night. The walls of the room were devoid of all decorations except for a single display screen showing an astronomical chart.

As I told my story still again I scanned the faces of the scientists around me. There were twenty-two of them, nine of them women. Most of them seemed young, the prime of their lives still ahead of them. Unlike my soldiers, they obviously were not cloned from one or two gene sets. They were tall and short, dark and fair, eyes of every shape and color, skin ranging from chocolate brown to pinkish white.

The woman called Randa, the one who had denounced me to the security officer, would not look directly at me. Either she felt ashamed of what she had done or she was angry at me for bringing danger to them. None of them commented on the claw wounds on my shoulder, matted with drying blood. I let it pass for the moment.

When I had finished my tale, though, I said, “Now I have some questions for you.”

“Go ahead,” said Delos. He was obviously the group’s leader.

“What are you doing here on this planet, working for the Skorpis?”

“Working for the Skorpis?”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re not working for the Skorpis,” said one of the men, with a considerable show of indignity. “They’re working for us.”

“The Skorpis are mercenary troops. They’re here to guard us,” said Delos, “while we try to study the Old Ones.”

“Guard you against who?” I asked.

“Against you,” Randa snapped. “And the rest of your homicidal maniacs who want to kill us all.”

So it was anger that drove her, not shame.

“We had no idea there were other humans on this planet,” I said. “All we were told was that there was a Skorpis base here and we were going to eliminate it.”

“Typical military operation. They only tell you what they want you to know.”

“Do you mean that humans are fighting against each other?” I asked. “We’re involved in an interstellar civil war?”

“The Hegemony has been battling for its very existence for three generations now,” said Randa. “Your so-called Commonwealth has been trying to annihilate us. You and your lizard allies.”

“The Tsihn?”

“That’s what they call themselves, yes,” said one of the men.

“But how did the war start? What’s it all about?”

“It started when Commonwealth fleets began attacking our settlements on a dozen different worlds.”

“They wiped out whole biospheres. Killed everything.”

“Burned planets right down to the bedrock.”

“For no reason!”

“Without a declaration of war.”

I shook my head. “It couldn’t be for no reason. People don’t attack one another for no reason.”

“Lizards do.”

“The Tsihn hate us. They hate all humans, anything that’s not themselves.”

“But you said that the Commonwealth is allied with the Tsihn.”

“Against the Hegemony, that’s right. But sooner or later the Tsihn will turn against the Commonwealth, too. You’ll see.”

There was real hatred in their voices, in their faces.

“I still don’t understand how this could have begun,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“You’re just a soldier,” Randa sneered. “How could you be expected to understand anything except killing people?”

That’s what the Old Ones thought of me at first, I said to myself. But then they trusted me, they helped me.

Delos gave me a worried look. “Uh, if you really want to catch up on the history of the war, you can use one of our readers.” He gestured to the video systems in the far corner of the room.

“Yes, why don’t you do that,” said one of the other women. “We need to discuss how we can use your information, what our next steps will be.”

I could see that they wanted to talk among themselves without me. And I was burning with curiosity to learn how and why this seemingly endless war had begun. So I went to the video reader and sat in the contoured chair before its screen.

“I’ll show you how to run it.” I looked up, surprised. It was Randa.

“I can operate it,” I said. “Soldiers aren’t complete idiots.”

“Oh.” Her face reddened. “All right.” She turned on her heel and fled back to the others, who were sitting themselves around the long table.

I turned on the machine and softly spoke my request to its computer. The screen glowed briefly.

And instead of the history tape I wanted, Aten appeared standing before me where the machine had been. He wore a golden tunic and formfitting tights with calf-length boots. And a frown. The golden aura of his presence enveloped me like a warm mist. I knew that he had brought me out of the continuum into a bubble of suspended space-time where he could interrogate me fully while the men and women across the room neither saw nor heard us.

“The Old Ones made contact with you, Orion.”

I nodded solemnly.

“And they refuse to help us?”

“They refuse to become involved in our war in any way. Only after we stop the fighting will they even consider further contact with us.”

“I had hoped for more.”

“They were quite firm about it.”

“There must be a way to convince them to help us! There must be.”

“Perhaps you should try to contact them yourself,” I suggested.

His frown deepened. “I have. We all have. The only one they responded to was you.”

I must have smiled. “I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be,” the Golden One snapped. “They saw you as a helpless victim of our cruelty. They took pity on you, Orion, nothing more.”

“I disagree. When they first contacted me, in a dream I had, they were repelled. They saw only a warrior, a killer, a soldier who made war on other intelligent creatures. Later they saw that there is more to me than a killing machine. That’s why they chose to speak to me.”

“Remember, Orion, that I put those additional emotions into you.”

“No you didn’t. Not deliberately, at any rate. You built me to carry out your will, and for me to be able to do that I had to be able to think and act for myself. I’ve learned much about the world, Golden One. Much about the Creators and myself—and my fellow humans.”

“Really?” Aten crossed his arms over his chest.

“Really. I’m more than your tool. I’m an individual. How many times have you berated me for not following your orders?”

“Stubbornness is not godliness, Orion. Only we Creators have full freedom of action. You obey me, whether you think so or not.”

“You have full freedom of action?” I actually laughed at him. “Then why this desperate war? Why this need for help from the Old Ones?”

“That involves forces that your mind could never understand,” he said. “I didn’t build such capabilities into you.”

“You didn’t have to. I’m learning them on my own. The Old Ones speak to me and not to you. I am learning and growing.”

“And someday you will challenge me,” Aten mocked. “You sound like a frog planning vengeance on an elephant.”

I decided it was foolish to carry on this vein. Changing the subject, I asked, “How did this war start? What is the reason for the fighting?”

“It was inevitable. As the human race expanded into the stars they met other intelligent species. Xenophobia is a basic emotion among all intelligences.”

“Xenophobia doesn’t start wars.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Then how are the humans allied with the Tsihn? And how are the Skorpis working with…” My words choked in my throat. Suddenly I understood what was happening.

Aten slowly unfolded his arms, studying me like a zoo-keeper who had just added a new specimen to his collection.

“This war—” I hesitated, thinking furiously. It was the only explanation I could see. “This war is really between you and the other Creators. You are fighting among yourselves, and using us as your pawns.”

His utterly handsome face twisted into a smirk. “Of course. I’m surprised it took you so long to figure it out. You who prides himself on his growing wisdom.”

“But why? Why would you have such a falling-out with the other Creators?”

“It’s not only me, Orion. Our little family has split into two almost equal camps. Equal and opposite. Much as we did over Troy, except that this time, instead of a paltry few Greeks and Trojans, we are dealing with interstellar civilizations.”

“And you drive them to war?”

He shrugged carelessly. “There was no other recourse. The other Creators would not listen to reason.”

“They would say the same of you and your allies, wouldn’t they?”

“I imagine so.”

“You still haven’t told me why you’ve split; the source of the conflict.”

“We have reached the ultimate crisis, Orion. A dilemma so crucial, a turning point so critical to our survival, that we Creators could not agree on how to handle it. I told you that this war was part of the ultimate crisis, and so it is. Until I can force the other Creators to agree with my plan for handling the crisis, we will be powerless to face it when it finally falls upon us.”

“So you’re sending billions to slaughter, destroying whole planets, to decide how to deal with this final crisis.”

“It is necessary. For our survival.”

“You make war on each other by using us—and other races, as well.”

“Why not? Do you expect us to fight each other, to kill one another?”

“And Anya? Whose side is she on?” But I knew the answer even as I asked the question.

Aten’s face clouded over. “I’m afraid she is not among my allies. In fact, she is leading the opposition.”

“Then, to serve you I must fight against her.”

“It’s her own fault, Orion.”

I did not care whose fault it was or which of their sides was in the right, if either of them was. All I wanted was to find Anya, even if that meant working against Aten.

I looked into his gold-flecked eyes and saw that he understood precisely what was going through my mind. I could not hide my thoughts from him.

“The last thing in the world that you want to do is find her,” he warned me. “She is far beyond the paltry romance that you once had with her. She has reverted to her true form, Athena, the warrior goddess. She no longer cares to don human shape. She no longer loves you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He made an indifferent gesture with his hands. “What you believe or fail to believe makes absolutely no difference.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“No, Orion, it doesn’t. You can chase across the whole galaxy seeking your beloved goddess. You can think me an egomaniac who sends his own creations to slaughter. No matter what you think, if you find Anya now she will kill you. Without a second thought.”

“No! She loves me.”

“Perhaps once she did. But she has outgrown you, outgrown the foolish desire to take on human form. She is truly the goddess of death, Orion. Your death. Believe it.”