Orion Among the Stars

Chapter 30

Voices struck at me.

“What is it?”

“How can it be?”

“They just—appeared! Pop! Just like that.”

I opened my eyes, glad that I had eyes and ears and an existence in the world again.

We were in a wide, sunny city plaza, what was left of us. Frede still leaned against the cryo capsule, pointing her rifle at me. The others of my crew were slumped against the capsule’s curved flank. The side that had faced the Skorpis’s guns was so hot that it steamed in the afternoon air.

The plaza was filled with people. Well-dressed men and women. The buildings that lined the spacious open square were all graceful towers of glass and gleaming metal. The square was paved with colorful tiles. A fountain sprayed water barely a dozen meters from where we had landed. The people gaped at us as if we were ghosts or some strange alien apparition. More people were gathering around us, talking, pointing, staring.

We were a grimy crew. Bloody, sweaty, aching and parched from our deadly battle. Eighteen of us still alive. Our uniforms were torn, our faces streaked with dirt.

“Who are they?” an elderly woman asked.

“How dare they show themselves here?”

“I think they’re soldiers! ”

“Soldiers? You mean, from the army?”

“What are they doing here?”

“They must be soldiers of some sort. Look at the guns they’re carrying.”

“You’re not permitted to carry weapons in the capital,” a cross-faced man shouted at us. “I’ve summoned the police.”

“They smell terrible!”

“Yes, we smell terrible and we look terrible,” I shouted at them. “We’ve been fighting and dying to save you from being invaded.”

They gasped.

“He’s insane!”

“The whole group—look at them! Obvious lunatics.”

“Where are the police? I called for them more than a minute ago.”

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing and hearing. “Don’t you realize there’s a battle going on in orbit above you? Don’t you know you’re at war?”

“It’s some sort of trick.”

“New theater. The younger generation always tries to shock their elders.”

One of the gray-haired women stepped up to me, barely as tall as my collarbone. “See here, young man, there’s no use trying to frighten us. The war is being fought a thousand light-years away from here.”

I shook my head in a combination of disbelief and disgust, then turned away from her and went over to what was left of my crew.

Frede and the rest of my crew were just as stunned as the civilians. She lowered her rifle, slumped against the sleep capsule and let herself slide down to a sitting position. The others sprawled, exhausted, on the brightly colored tile pavement.

“This is Loris?” Frede asked.

I nodded. “The capital of the Commonwealth.”

One of the men came over and glared at me. “You can’t stay here,” he told me sternly. “This is a public plaza, not an army barracks.”

“Where do you suggest we go?” I asked, controlling my temper.

“That’s not for me to decide. But—Ah! Here come the police, at last.”

The crowd made a path for a pair of gleaming robots that glided on flight packs a few centimeters above the pavement. Legless, they had six arms, cylindrical torsos, and domed heads that bore sensors and speaker grilles.

“Please identify yourselves,” said the one on my left.

“We are the survivors of the crew of the scout ship Apollo,” I said. “We escaped the battle—”

“One moment, please.” The robot put out one clawed hand in a very human gesture. Then it said, “Records indicate that the Apollo is on a mission to the Jilbert system. Please identify yourselves.”

“We never got to the Jilbert system,” I said, starting to feel odd arguing with a machine. “We got involved in the battle now going on here.”

“There is no battle under way here.”

“In orbit.” I pointed overhead.

The crowd murmured at that. I wondered if any of them would take the trouble to look at the sky after dark, when the exploding spacecraft could be seen as flashes of light among the stars.

If a robot could glare, this one did. “Please come with me.”

“Where?”

“To higher authority.”

Of course, I thought. Where else? Then I pointed to the cryo unit. “This capsule can’t be left here. It should be brought to a hospital or—”

“The object will be taken into custody and brought to a proper facility.”

“We go with it,” I said.

“You will come with us,” the robot replied. “The object will be taken by others to a proper facility.”

I rested my hand on the butt of my pistol. Frede and my crew got slowly to their feet, unlimbering their weapons. The crowd faded back from us.

“We were assigned to guard this capsule,” I lied. “We have carried it across many light-years and fought overwhelming odds to bring it here safely. We will not leave it in a public square for some garbage truck to pick up.”

The robot buzzed to itself for several moments. I noticed that its partner edged off to my right slightly, as if to catch me in a crossfire if any shooting started. Little Jerron, half his tunic torn away and his skin blackened with laser burns, stepped up to it and nudged it with the muzzle of his rifle. It stopped and hovered, buzzing loudly.

“A trained and experienced medical team is on its way to handle the capsule,” the first robot said. “It will be dealt with properly.”

“Good,” I replied. “We’ll wait for them to arrive; then we will go with you.”

Within minutes three aircars glided across the square and landed gently about fifty meters from us. The crowd muttered and chattered as a team of humans climbed out of the cars. One group wore medical whites. The others were in blue, and armed with pistols and stubby rifles.

“I am Captain Perry of the capital police,” said one of the blue uniforms. He was almost my height, stocky, muscular. His curly dark hair flowed to his collar; his face was square, with a pugnacious button of a nose in its middle.

“I am Orion, captain of the Apollo. We’ve brought this cryo capsule from Prime, the Hegemony capital. It bears one of the Hegemony’s top leaders, who has come here to discuss peace terms.”

“While the whole Skorpis fleet is trying to obliterate our defenses?” Perry almost snarled the words.

I fell back on the time-honored refuge of the soldier. “I’m just following my orders, Captain.” It was a lie, but it would work—for the time being.

He tried to stare me down, and when that didn’t work he said, “All right, we’ll take the capsule to our medical facility. But first you’ll have to give up your weapons.”

I shook my head. “We’re soldiers, Captain. We will surrender our weapons to the proper army authorities, no one else.”

“On this planet, the police have the authority to disarm anyone carrying a weapon.”

“Find an army officer to order us, and we’ll disarm,” I said.

Clearly unhappy with us, Perry ordered the medics to attach flight packs to Anya’s capsule and slide it into their car. Then he bundled my crew into the two police cars. Eight of them went with Frede; I led the remaining nine into the car with Perry. It was a tight squeeze for us all, especially with the rifles poking ribs.

As I strapped myself in beside Captain Perry I heard the robot police officers telling the crowd, “Please disperse. You are impeding traffic flow.”

Like good little citizens, they broke up and went their separate ways, buzzing among themselves about this strange event.

All three aircars lifted off the pavement and started down one of the narrow canyons between the glass and metal towers. We climbed above the towers and I could see the city spread out beneath me, a neat geometrical gridwork of straight streets dotted with plazas and green parks.

The white medical car peeled off and headed in a different direction.

“Wait!” I said to Captain Perry. “We’re going with the capsule.”

“No, you’re not,” he said tightly. “The capsule’s going to the med labs, where it will be examined and tested.”

“But—”

“You and your crew are going to an interrogation center. We checked your story. The Apollo was sent to the Jilbert system, more than seven hundred light-years from here. Either you’re lying or you’re a band of traitors. Either way, we’ll get the truth out of you.”

I slid the pistol from my holster and nudged it under his chin.

Perry’s eyes went wide. “Are you crazy?”

“Call it battle fatigue,” I said. “Either we go with the capsule or your brains get splattered on the overhead.”

The other police officers in the car gripped their weapons. So did my crew. The driver was the only one without a gun in his hands; he clung to the control wheel, gulped and stared straight ahead.

“You’ll kill all of us!” Perry snapped.

“That includes you.”

He huffed, then said to the driver, “Follow the medic van.”

We turned and went after the white aircar.

“They’ll hang you by the balls for this, Orion,” Perry said. “And I’ll be there to cheer them on.”

“After the capsule’s properly taken care of,” I told him, “then we can see whose balls get stretched.”

The medical center was a trap.

We landed in the marked pad in the middle of four towering buildings, all three aircars touching down virtually at the same instant. As we climbed out of the cars, four full squads of Tsihn soldiery stepped out of the doors on all four sides of us, guns leveled.

“Lizards!” I heard Frede growl.

“You will drop your weapons, humans,” said the Tsihn leader, a huge ocher-colored reptilian whose chest and arms were covered with insignia and decorations.

For a long silent moment we stood there confronting each other.

“I am Colonel Hrass-shleessa,” the big reptilian said. “I am duly authorized to command you. Put your weapons on the ground or we will fire.”

I glanced sideways at Captain Perry. He did not relish the idea of being caught in a firefight between us and the Tsihn.

We were hopelessly outnumbered. “They’ll kill us all,” Jerron grumbled. “Damned lizards.”

“Put your guns down,” I commanded my crew. “We will obey the colonel’s order.” I had no choice but to be an obedient soldier.

They marched us into another aircar while a medical team guided Anya’s capsule, floating on its flight packs, into one of the buildings. This aircar was army brown, and built more like a truck. We were bundled into the back, seated on the two benches running along its sides. I caught a glimpse of Captain Perry standing next to his own aircar as they slammed the hatch shut in my face. He was grinning at me, a malicious grin of triumph.

We flew out of the city, into the mountains to its west, for more than an hour. With nothing else to do, most of my crew flaked out and drowsed. I sat on the hard bucket seat and thought of the crew members who weren’t with us anymore: bloodied Emon, Dyer with her legs blown away, so many others. Don’t make friends, I told myself. A combat soldier shouldn’t make any personal attachments.

We were flown to an army detention center out in the cold, gray mountains. Human prisoners and Tsihn guards. I bristled at the reptilians; every instinct in me told me they were the enemies of humankind. And here in this detention center that certainly seemed so.

They separated me from Frede and the rest of the crew, showed me to a bare little windowless cell. Nothing but a cot, sink and toilet. And a lightbulb set into the concrete ceiling, too high for me to reach.

I was not in the cell for long, however. A pair of Tsihn guards unlocked my door and escorted me to a room where a junior Tsihn officer—its scales were pale lemon and bore hardly any decorations at all—sat on a high stool that was the only piece of furniture visible.

“You will sit,” it said to me.

I lowered myself to the concrete floor. It felt cold, clammy. My two guards remained standing by the door.

Satisfied that he could loom over me, the Tsihn officer leaned toward me and asked, “Who are you and where are you from?”

“My name is Orion. I was captain of the Apollo.”

It bared its teeth. “The Apollo was sent to the Jilbert system.”

“We never got there. We went to Prime, instead, and brought one of the Hegemony’s topmost leaders here to discuss peace terms with the Commonwealth’s leadership.”

It snorted. I could see the humid air huffing from its nostrils. “Orion, you say your name is?”

“Yes.”

“There is no record of you in the Commonwealth military files.”

That surprised me only slightly. “Check with Brigadier Uxley at sector station six,” I said. “He knows me. Check with my crew; we’ve done a lot of fighting together. Lunga, Bititu, the battle going on now in orbit.”

“That battle is finished,” it said grandly. “The Skorpis fleet has been driven off.”

“Good.”

Those red slitted eyes stared at me. “You see, to me all you humans look alike. How can we tell if you are truly a Commonwealth soldier or a Hegemony spy? The same applies to your crew, as well.”

I realized that my true story would sound ludicrously fraudulent to it. “You have brainwave scanners, don’t you? You can easily see if I’m telling the truth.”

“Ah, the truth,” breathed my reptilian interrogator, almost like a human professor of philosophy. “What is the truth, Orion? You could tell me a tale that you believe to be true, and yet it might simply be a set of memories implanted in your mind by Hegemony intelligence operatives.”

I shrugged. “Then what’s the point of this questioning?”

It cocked its lizard’s head to one side. “Why, to hear what you have to say. To determine if there is any valuable information in your story. That’s the least we can do before we execute you and your crew.”