Orion Among the Stars

Chapter 23

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

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

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

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

“Great! Then they’ll know exactly where and when to shoot!”

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

Frede huffed at me. “No, they’ll see it as an opportunity for target practice.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” I admitted.

“You’re willing to get us all killed, for her?”

“She can stop the war,” I said.

“Dogshit she can. Nobody can stop this war. It’s going to go on forever.”

“Is that what you want?”

“It’s the reason I’m alive, Orion. All of us mutts. Stop the war and they freeze us.”

“Continue the war and you’ll be killed, sooner or later.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I made myself smile and say, “Aye, aye, sir.”

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

“Next stop, Zeta system.”

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

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

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

“Lightspeed in one minute,” the navigation computer announced.

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

“Forty-five seconds.”

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

“Peaceful,” Frede said.

“Mind-expanding.”

“Just plain expanding.”

“Thirty seconds.”

I said, “Just in case you didn’t know, I’ve enjoyed serving with you.”

“We know, sir!”

“A mutt gets to sense when his commander’s having a good time.”

“You’ve got to be born to it. Sir.”

“Ten seconds.”

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

“Lightspeed,” said the computer.

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

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

They were not going to shoot first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I let out a breath of relief.

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

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

“We’re here to talk, not fight,” I reminded them.

“Yessir, I know. But I still feel naked.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning to Frede, I said, “Lieutenant, you’re in command while I’m gone.”

“Yessir,” she said, snapping a salute.

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

Her face a frozen mask, Frede only repeated, “Yessir.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The street climbed up a steep hill.

“That’s the capitol, up in the old castle,” Nella told me. “That’s where we’re going.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My knees sagged beneath me.

Anya!