Orion Among the Stars

Chapter 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lucky?” I asked.

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

“I wouldn’t call that lucky,” I said.

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

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

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

“It must have been very painful,” I said.

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

I sipped at my whisky.

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

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

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

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

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

I glanced at the colonel. “They make it look good, don’t they,” he muttered.

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

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

The entire show was over in less than ninety seconds.

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

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

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

“Really?”

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

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

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

“Crap,” I said.

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

“What did your family think of that?”

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

“And now?” I avoided looking at his legs.

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

“Wouldn’t you like to go home?”

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

Another night we got onto the subject of his legs.

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

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

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

“Even our cloned troopers?” I asked.

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

“And train them to kill,” I said.

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

“Brigadier, what’s going to happen to my troop?”

“Happen?” He blinked his bleary eyes. “They’ll be reassigned, what else?”

“Don’t they get any time for R and R? Furloughs?”

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

“But you said you’ve drifted apart from your family, your home,” I pointed out.

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

I wondered what to say, finally decided on, “No, I don’t. I’m—an orphan.”

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

“There’s nothing in their lives except battle and training for battle.”

“We let ’em have sex, don’t we?” he countered with a broad wink.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uxley shrugged. “Headquarters hasn’t decided yet. Or at least, I haven’t been informed.”

“Aren’t they being retrained while they’re in cryosleep?”

“Not yet,” he told me. “Not as far as I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

Love or death. The ultimate stakes of life.

I began to plan.

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s better, Orion,” I heard Aten’s arrogant voice say. “A properly worshipful position.”

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

“You did well on Bititu,” he said, almost grudgingly.

“It was a slaughter.”

“Yes, but necessary.”

“Why?”

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

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

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

“Two others, Orion,” he answered. “We destroyed them both.”

“How many were killed?”

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

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

“So?” he taunted. “Think, Orion. Think.”

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

It hit me. “The Old Ones.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Exactly.”

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

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

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

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

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

“They are human beings,” I said.

“Manufactured to be soldiers. Weapons, Orion, nothing more.”

“Your ancestors,” I reminded him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The longer we stay with you, sir, the better off we’ll be. If we live through it.”

I believe he was entirely serious.

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

Except that we never got there.