Orion Among the Stars

Chapter 6

We resumed our trek across the world of Lunga, heading for the base that the Skorpis were building on the other side of the planet. I sent a few scouts ahead and out along our flanks, but none of them saw any sign of the enemy.

We came to the edge of the vast forest on the second day, and hesitated only long enough for me to consult the maps from the briefing files in my helmet computer. The display on my visor showed a broad stretch of open grasslands, then a range of rugged mountains. I did not like the idea of moving across the open grasslands; I had felt much safer beneath the screen of the forest’s trees. The enemy’s sensors could probe through the foliage, I knew, yet I felt instinctively that being out in the open was dangerous.

So we struck across the green, rolling country and headed for a fair-sized river that flowed out of those distant mountains—so distant that we could not yet see them. Trees and game lined the river’s banks, and the fresh water was a necessity, since our recycling equipment had been left behind at our camp.

I began to live up to my name, and taught the troopers how to hunt. Laser rifles are hardly sporting, but we were after food, not entertainment. We began bagging the local equivalents of rabbits, squirrels, and birds.

“Wish there was something bigger than a tree lemur on this planet,” complained one of the troopers.

“Something with more meat on it, anyways,” said his buddy.

But for day after day, week after week, we saw nothing larger than the nocturnal tree dwellers. Slowly our wounded healed, all except two of them who died on the trek. We cremated them—we were building campfires each night, since we had no sign of any enemy presence. They might have put surveillance satellites into orbit, but if they had spotted us they had no move against us. And we could not risk eating our fresh-caught meat raw: cooking not only made the chewing easier, it killed parasites and microbes.

It was more difficult to maneuver along the riverbank than it had been to get through the big forest, because the trees along the river were smaller and the underbrush much thicker. Often we simply swung ourselves on our flight packs out over the river itself and glided along without obstructions.

“Here, there’s things living in the water!” a trooper shouted one morning.

I should have berated her for looking down when a soldier should be looking out for signs of danger. Instead I told her that people catch fish and eat them. It was totally new information to her and to the rest of the troop, even the officers. Again I was stung at how narrow these soldiers’ lives were. They had been given nothing except what they needed to fight with.

Soon enough, though, I made fishermen out of a few of them. Most did not have the patience. But each evening, as we made camp, my fishing brigade brought us back some wriggling protein.

At last we could see the mountain range rising up in the distance, blue and purple folds of bare rock topped with bluish white snowcaps. That evening Lieutenant Frede took the casts off her legs and gingerly tried walking around the campfire.

“Feels good,” she said. The tentative expression on her face eased into a happy smile. “Feels fine!”

She slept beside me that night, snuggling close as the fire guttered low. The next night Frede took me by the hand and led me off into the trees, away from the camp.

“It’s time, Orion,” she said, sitting with her back against a trunk. She pulled me down to sit next to her.

“Yes,” I said, glancing back toward the camp. We were well screened by bushes. “I suppose it is.”

We started slowly, but very soon Frede was giggling softly as she slithered out of her fatigues and helped me pull mine off, all at the same time. I was surprised at my own passion. I had intended to accommodate Frede, yet very quickly I was just as frenzied and heated as she. A vision of Anya stirred me, and I fantasized that is was my goddess with whom I was making love: Anya, warm, daring, loving, distant Anya, the woman whom I had sought across all of space-time, the goddess who had taken human form for love of me.

The stars were glittering through the trees as Frede and I lay side by side, sweaty and relaxed, and watched the moon rise over the sawtooth silhouette of the mountains. It was a tiny moon, far and cold and bleak, hardly throwing any light at all onto the wide, silent landscape.

“What are you thinking about?” Frede whispered to me.

I shrugged my bare shoulders. “Nothing.”

“Nothing, hell. You were thinking about her, weren’t you? The woman you’re promised to.”

There was no point in denying it. “Yes,” I breathed.

“While we were doing it, too?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said.

“Good?”

“They don’t tell you in training, Orion, but it’s not smart to make friends. Not among soldiers. Don’t get yourself emotionally tangled. Even if we live through this, they’re just going to pop us back in the freezers for retraining. When we come out we’ll be assigned to other partners.”

“Do they wipe your memories when you’re in cryosleep?”

“Sometimes,” Frede said. “Depends. Mostly they just lay new training on you, add new data on the next mission.”

Very much as Aten did to me, I thought.

“So don’t get emotional about this,” Frede said, very matter-of-factly. “It’s not smart for soldiers to make friends.”

Her tone of voice was so flatly unemotional that I wondered how certain Frede was about what she was telling me. She sounded like someone trying to convince herself.

I lay silent beside her for a long while. Then Frede slid a hand along my thigh.

“Ready for more?” she whispered.

I was, and so was she.

Afterward, I idly asked, “What happens when a soldier gets pregnant?”

She was silent for a moment, then replied softly, “That never happens, Orion. We’re all sterilized. For a soldier, sex is just a way of letting off steam. We’ll never have children.”

And for the soldiers’ masters, I knew, sex was a way of maintaining their army’s aggressive/protective instincts. I remembered the bitter words of an old man who had been a storyteller, blinded by Agamemnon after the siege of Troy: “Lower than slaves, that’s what we are, Orion. Vermin under their feet. Dogs. That’s how they treat us.”

I shook my head. Dogs are allowed to breed, at least.

I slept that night, curled up with Frede. And dreamed.

I could not tell if it was truly a dream or one of the Golden One’s communications. Often Aten or one of the other Creators would summon me out of space-time to some other place in the continuum to speak to me, to give me orders, or to berate my performance.

In this dream—if a dream it was—none of the Creators appeared. I was alone, walking on the hard-packed sand of a wide white beach, breaking surf hissing and booming as the waves ran up to lap my booted feet, a hot sun burning in a sky of molten bronze.

At the edge of the sand was a line of tangled bushes, some of them bearing flowers of red and blue. And beyond them, the stumps of buildings, looking like candles that had burned down almost to their ends, melted and blackened. Ancient buildings. Somehow I knew that they had been abandoned for untold ages. Abandoned, just as I was.

A voice called to me. I did not hear the voice, I felt it in my mind. It did not call me by name, it did not even use words. But I sensed a presence that was reaching out to me, touching me mentally, examining me. I felt an intelligence, a curiosity—and then a loathing, fear and anger and disgust all mixed together. A rejection. The presence in my mind disappeared, winked out as suddenly and completely as a dolphin diving beneath the waves.

I stood alone on that distant beach and felt a yearning, a desperate desire for understanding, a sadness about who I was and what I was, a hollowness at the core of my existence.

“Anya!” I cried out. “Anya, where are you?”

No answer. The surf rolled in. The wind blew in my face. The sun beat down on me. For all I could tell, I was alone on that dream beach, alone on that planet, alone in the universe.

I wept.

Frede shook me awake. “Orion, what is it? Wake up!”

I sat bolt upright. We were in camp, under the trees, the first streaks of dawn breaking through low gray clouds overhead. The other troopers were still sleeping, sprawled alone or coupled, except for the sentries I could see down by the river-bank.

Frede wrapped her arms around my bare shoulders. “You were moaning in your sleep.”

“I had a dream.”

“And calling to someone. Anna.”

“Anya,” I corrected.

She pulled her shirt on. “Is she the one you’re promised to?”

I almost smiled. “She’s the woman I love.”

Frede nodded matter-of-factly. “If we get out of this alive—you’ll be going back to her?”

“I don’t know. I want to, but I don’t know if I can.”

“The army won’t pop you back into a cryo freezer until the next time they need you?”

I had to shake my head and admit, “I just don’t know.”

“That’s what we’ve got to look forward to,” Frede said. “Cryosleep or battle. With some training in between. It’s a great life, Orion, being a soldier. You’ve got to be born to it.”

So that was the meaning of the tag line. You’ve got to be born to it. A bitter joke, but it was just as applicable to me as to any of these cloned involuntary soldiers. You’ve got to be born to it. Or created for it. As all of us were.

“Come on,” I said, getting to my feet. “Time to start moving.”

She got up, but locked her gaze on me and asked, “Why?”

I stared back at her. “What do you mean?”

“Why do we have to start moving?”

“You know as well as I—”

“To attack the Skorpis base? Why should we? What difference would it make? Except to get the rest of us killed.”

I knew that the troops had been conditioned to obey, to fight, to follow orders. That conditioning had weakened terribly during this mission, but it could be reinforced by a set of key words that every officer above the rank of lieutenant had memorized. I supposed, now that I thought about it, that higher ranks had other sets of memorized trigger phrases to use on the ranks below them. Aten had put those key words into my memory, and they sprang to my conscious mind now, just as if he were standing at my elbow, prompting me.

You are the tip of the spear, the point of the arrow.Those few words would drown Frede’s dawning independence under a flood of mental conditioning, turn her from a frightened, doubting woman into an obedient soldier once more. A grumbling, complaining soldier, perhaps, but one who would no longer question the mission she had been assigned to, or waver at the thought of its impossibility.

I could not speak those words. Not then. Not to Frede. Condemned to a life she never had asked for, never had any choice in, she was beginning to show the first signs of independent humanity: she was afraid that she—and all of us—were not only going to die, but throw away our lives needlessly.

She misunderstood my openmouthed silence. “All right, you can break me down to private and put somebody else in my place. But I still don’t see what good we’re going to do, throwing fifty-two of us at an entrenched Skorpis base.”

“What alternatives do you see?”

She took a deep, shuddering breath, as if afraid to say what was in her thoughts. But she squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, gathering her courage, and then said, “We can stay here. Live here. Forget the war, forget whatever the hell it’s all about and just live the rest of our lives right here.”

“Forget our orders?”

“They abandoned us, Orion! We didn’t leave them, they left us!”

“Do you think the enemy will leave us alone?”

“We’re no threat to them if we stay here. And they know we can maul them pretty good if they attack us. So why would they bother us as long as we can’t hurt them?”

I thought about it for a moment. She was probably right. But if we remained here I would never find Anya. And as much as I hated the Golden One and all the other Creators, except Anya, I had to admit that there must be some purpose to his sending me here, to this place and time. Some reason.

“Frede,” I said slowly, calmly, “my orders are to knock out the Skorpis base on this planet. Setting up the transceiver was merely the first step toward that objective, you know that.”

Her face hardened. “And you’re going to try to obey those orders, with fifty-two effectives?”

“That’s what we’re here for.”

“Then you’re going to get all of us killed.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” I repeated.

She glowered at me for a moment; then, strangely, she broke into a rueful grin. “You’re sounding more like a real officer every day.”

She marched off and started giving orders just as if nothing had been said between us. I was glad that I had not been forced to use the conditioning phrase. But I thought that Frede’s moment of questioning was not the last discipline problem I would face. Indeed, it was probably only the first.

It got cooler as the ground rose toward the mountain chain. The nights grew chill, with a steady wind sweeping down from the mountains. It rained for several days in a row, until we were coughing miserably, sodden and muddy. But we doggedly slogged ahead, following the natural pass made through the mountains by the river as far as we could, until the river itself dwindled to a set of shallow gurgling streams that splashed over the rocks and tumbled into picturesque waterfalls.

The rain turned to snow, light at first but thicker every day. We left the streams behind and plodded cold and wet through the snow-filled rocky defiles, camping in caves each night. At least we could light fires and sleep dry. We could see the jagged mountain peaks rising above us, covered with snow. Some days the winds up there whipped the ice crystals into long undulating plumes that caught the sunlight in dazzling prisms of color. It would have been beautiful if it weren’t so damnably cold. We floundered through snowdrifts hip-deep, shivering and hurting. Then at last we found more streams, unfrozen, gurgling through the snowbanks. We had crossed the mountain divide. Now our path lay downhill.

A week later we were out of the snow at last, sweating and complaining about the growing heat as we descended the mountain range. Then we caught sight of the ocean. And the Skorpis base.

The base was not as huge or well fortified as I had feared. But it was big enough to make me wonder how my handful of troopers could even approach it. There must have been a thousand Skorpis warriors there, at least.

Studying it at the highest amplification my visor sensors allowed, I could see no trenches or fortifications protecting the base, although there were plenty of gun emplacements ringed in a semicircle around it. The base was built on the edge of the sea, along a bright width of white sand beach. Low buildings with roofs that glittered with solar power cells. Many rows of square tents, all neatly lined up with military precision. Some long metallic projections jutting out into the sea, like piers, with cone-shaped buildings dotted along them.

A tendril of memory tugged at me. I swept my gaze down the beach, past the outermost posts of the Skorpis, along the dunes and beach grasses for several kilometers, and…

There it was! The beach I had seen in my dream. The ruined city, blasted and burned down to stumps and scattered debris. It was real.

I pointed to it and asked my officers, “Can we get to those ruins without the Skorpis seeing us?”

Quint immediately shook his head negatively. Frede looked skeptical. But Manfred said:

“If we work our way along the ridge up here until we’re past the ruins, and then come down there, where that river runs into the sea, we can edge up along the beach and keep the ruins between us and the Skorpis perimeter. Unless they send patrols out that far, we ought to be able to make it undetected.”

“If they don’t send out patrols,” Quint echoed.

“And if they don’t have surveillance satellites in orbit,” Frede pointed out. “We’d show up nice and bright in infrared, I imagine.”

“Not if we go along the beach in daylight,” I said. “The beach itself will be pretty hot from the sun.”

“Satellite sensors could still detect moving objects.”

I considered the problem for another few seconds, then commanded, “We’ll go that way. Start the troops moving. I want to be ready to get across the beach by midday tomorrow.”

They all made reluctant salutes.

“And if we see any Skorpis patrols we lay low and let them pass. No firing unless they shoot first. I want to get into those ruins undetected, if we can.”

We spent the rest of that day working our way along the ridge of mountains, down to the cleft where the river cut through on its way to the sea. With the fading light of dusk we maneuvered down to the riverbank, where we made camp for the night. No fires. And no Skorpis patrols in sight.

I did not even try to sleep that night. I skulked through the shadows, every sense straining, knowing that the Skorpis were at their best in the dark, wondering if they really were complacent enough to sit snug inside their base, wondering above all if they knew that we were near. The river made a rushing sound, as if hurrying to be reunited with the sea. The wind blew in off the water, warm and moist, like a lover’s breath. The night was dark, moonless, and the stars scattered against the black sky meant nothing to me; I could not recognize any of the familiar constellations of Earth.

I saw the gleam of a light, far down the river, almost at the point where it widened into a broad and deep bay. An enemy patrol? Why would the night-loving Skorpis need a light? It couldn’t be any of my troopers; they were all behind me with strict orders not to make a fire or even strike a spark.

I edged carefully toward the light, the rushing river on my left, keeping as much as I could to the brush and stunted trees that lined the base of the cliffs we had descended. I eased my pistol from its holster.

The light grew, brightened, and suddenly I knew what I was seeing. I knew who was there.

Boldly I left the protection of the foliage and slipped the pistol back into its holster. Sure enough, Aten the Golden One was standing in an aura of radiance, arms folded across his chest, an expectant smirk curling his lips. He no longer wore a military uniform. Now he was decked in a long white cloak atop a glittering metallic formfitting suit.

He looked like a god, I had to admit. Splendid of face and form, as ideal a human specimen as Michelangelo or Praxiteles could carve. Yet I knew that his appearance was an illusion, a condescension, actually. Aten’s true form was a radiant sphere of energy; he assumed a human aspect merely to deal with his mortal creations.

“You are doing well, this time, Orion,” he said to me, by way of greeting.

“Is this planet so important to your plans that my entire troop has to be sacrificed for it?”

“Obviously so,” he answered. “Why do you think I placed you here? I have great faith in your abilities. After all, I created them, didn’t I?”

We were temporarily outside the space-time continuum, I knew, wrapped in a bubble of energy that neither my own people nor the Skorpis could see.

“You created my soldiers, too?” I asked.

“Those things? Oh no! How little you must think of me, creature, to believe I would make such limited tools. No, they have been developed by their own kind, the humans of this era.”

“And what is so important about this era?”

He smirked. “How to specify time to a creature who perceives it so linearly? You see, to those of us who understand, Orion, time is like an ocean—like the great sea that lies out beyond your pitiful little camp. You can be at one place on that ocean or another, but it is still the same ocean. You can travel across it, or even plumb it to its depths.”

“There are currents in the ocean,” I said.

“Very good! There are currents in the sea of space-time, as well. Quite true.”

“And where in this ocean of space-time is Anya?”

His face clouded. “Never mind her. She is busy elsewhere. Your task is here.”

“This is the ultimate crisis that you spoke of? Here on this planet?”

“This is part of it, Orion. Only a small part. Small, but critical.”

“And you expect me to take the Skorpis base with fifty-two troopers, with no support, no heavy weapons?”

Aten made a condescending shrug. “I wish I could send you more help, Orion, but you must make do with what you have. There are no reinforcements to spare.”

“Then we will fail. We will all be killed, with no hope of success.”

“Perhaps I will revive you. If I can.”

“And the others?”

“They are of no concern to me. I didn’t create them; they were made by their own people.”

“Who regard them as dirt. Expendable cannon fodder, cheaper than robots.”

Again the shrug. “Tools, Orion. They are tools. You can’t expect someone to pamper his tools. You use them as they have been designed to use.”

“And when their task is finished?”

“You store them away carefully until you need them again.”

“Or you throw them away because they’ve been damaged doing your work for you.”

Aten shook his golden mane. “How emotional you are, Orion. Your emotions help to drive you, I know, but it does make it tedious talking with you.”

“I want to see Anya. To speak with her.”

“Impossible.”

“Then I’ll go out and find her.”

He laughed in my face. “Certainly, Orion! Grow wings and fly away.”

“I’ve traveled across the continuum on my own,” I said.

“Really? On your own? Without any help from your beloved Anya? Or perhaps even from me?”

“On my own,” I insisted. But I wondered inwardly if that was true.

“Do your job, Orion,” he said harshly. “Demolish this Skorpis base, or as much of it as you can before your little troop is wiped out. Then perhaps I can bring you to Anya. If all goes well.”

“But my troopers—”

“They’ll all be dead, Orion. Then you won’t have to worry about them any longer.”

With that, he disappeared, winked out like a star eclipsed by a cloud. I was left alone on the bank of the river that rushed to the sea.