Then I left her sitting there with her legs spraddled and a surprised expression on her face.
But the humor of the situation quickly faded from my mind as I stretched out on the mossy ground and closed my eyes. Anya. Where in all the space-times of the continuum was she? Why couldn’t I be with her? Why must I be here with the troop of cloned soldiers, stranded, abandoned on some godforsaken world?
Godforsaken indeed. Forsaken by the would-be god Aten. Abandoned by the Creators, all of them. Had Anya abandoned me, too? Or had the others forced her to stay far from me?
I could not sleep. I wanted to. I closed my eyes and willed my body to relax. But I could not force my mind to stop thinking. I saw past lives, past missions on which the Golden One had sent me. I was Osiris in Egypt long before the first pyramid was built. I was Prometheus in the cold and snow of the Ice Age. I crumbled the wall of Jericho and helped to remove the Neanderthals from this timestream of the continuum.
All at the service of Aten, the Golden One. And always with the help of Anya, the goddess whom I loved. The Golden One hated me for that. Aten hated me because Anya loved me. Time and again she took human form to be with me. Time and again he tried to keep us apart. I had crossed eons and light-years to be with her. But always he schemed to keep me from her.
I am Orion the Hunter, created by Aten to do his bidding, hopelessly in love with one of Aten’s fellow Creators. And here I was, stranded on some insignificant planet in the middle of an interstellar war, lost and abandoned with a troop of soldiers who were just as much slaves of their creators as I was of mine.
Why? Why had the Golden One placed me here and then abandoned me? To keep me away from Anya? Or for some other purpose, some part of one of his impetuous schemes for shaping the continuum to his own suiting? He had gone mad once, I knew. Perhaps he had become deranged again.
But no, I thought, what he’s done now has all the earmarks of a calculated, deliberate plan. He put me on this planet Lunga for a reason. He simply has not deigned to reveal his plan to me.
The first rays of sunlight began to filter through the trees. I pulled myself up to a sitting position and gave up all pretense of sleep.
All right, I said to myself. If the Golden One won’t tell me why he’s put me here, I’ll have to find out for myself.
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
“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.
