“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.
Chapter 7
We marched along the riverbank the next morning, and by noon had reached the area where it broadened into a wide calm bay. By midafternoon we reached the beach and stopped for a few moments of rest and reconnoitering.
From where we were, huddled beneath the trees and shrubbery that lined the river, we could not see the Skorpis base. The ruins of the ancient city stood between us and them. My hope was that they could not see us, and would not detect us as we marched across the open beach to the ruins.
“No sign of Skorpis patrols,” Manfred told me, sweating from running to report in person. I had forbidden all radio communications for fear of being overheard.
“I’m sure they have satellites up,” Frede said. Quint seconded her estimate with a worried bob of his head.
“Even if they do,” I said, “we’re not doing any good here. Those ruins will make a better defensive site, if we have to fight.”
So we dashed across the kilometers of beach, skimming scant centimeters above the sand on our flight packs, hurrying, worrying, expecting a swarm of Skorpis attackers to swoop down on us at any moment. Frede kept squinting up at the brazen sky, as if she thought she could see any satellites up there if she only tried hard enough.
It was fun skimming that fast, so low to the sand, the waves to one side and the flowering shrubs on the other streaking into a blur, the cracked and crumbling ruins rushing up toward us, wind whistling past, breathless, racing, racing like a flight of low-swooping hawks.
We slowed down as we approached the ruins and touched our boots onto the sand, one by one, panting and laughing from the dash we had just gone through. The sun was hanging on the rim of the ocean horizon, a bloated red ball that threw long purple shadows among the blasted buildings and heaps of debris. We filed into the ruins gratefully, happy to feel some little protection of the decaying walls after being out in the open, vulnerable.
It had been a sizable city, I could see now that we were in it. Wide avenues lined for several kilometers with buildings that must have risen quite high before they were blasted into rubble. How old? And what destroyed them?
“Radioactive background is nominal,” Frede murmured as we picked our way through the debris littering one of the major avenues. She had unpacked the scanner from her equipment web and was holding it out stiffly in front of her almost the way a blind man pokes his cane ahead of him.
“This city wasn’t nuked,” I said to her.
The troop had automatically fanned out into two columns, one on either side of the shattered street, the troopers spaced out widely enough so the first shots of an ambush would not take out more than one or two of us. Manfred had taken the van, with four picked men and women; Quint had assigned himself to the rear. I was starting to worry about Quint; it was normal for a man to be afraid, but he was letting his fears get in the way of his duties.
“If it wasn’t nuked,” Frede asked, walking beside me, “how did it get blasted so badly?”
I thought I knew. “They fought a battle here. A long, bloody battle that went from street to street, building to building. Hand-to-hand killing, for weeks. Maybe months.”
Frede shook her head, uncomprehending. “But that would mean the whole population was in the fight: civilians, children, everybody.”
Memories were stirring in me. Troy. Stalingrad. The Crusaders’ siege of Jerusalem and the bloodbath that followed.
“Civilians, children, everybody,” I echoed. “In the siege of Leningrad most of the city’s population died of starvation. They ate rats and all the animals in the zoo.”
“Hell’s fire,” Frede murmured.
“Can you get a fix on how old these ruins are?” I asked her.
“Doubtful. Have to know the ambient ratios of radioactives for this planet, and that data isn’t in our computer background data.”
“You’re sure?”
“I already checked,” she said, tapping the side of her helmet where the earphones were. “I got curious about this city the first time we saw it, when we were still in the mountains.”
So these “tools” can exhibit curiosity. They are more than mindless killing machines, despite the purposes of their creators.
We made camp in the littered basement of one of the crumbling buildings, with a thick concrete roof over our heads and solid walls around us. I let the troops risk a small cook fire, and while they were preparing the last of the food we had hunted in the mountains, I left them to wander through the buildings, seeking some clue to their age and origin.
I could find no pictures to help me. No paintings were left unburned, no statues unsmashed, no friezes or murals or mosaics were recognizable on the shattered remains of the walls that still stood. I found patterns of tiles here and there, tantalizing suggestions of what might have been decorations or even maps. But nowhere was there enough of a wall left intact for a whole picture to be seen.
As I picked my way through the debris-filled buildings, I discovered something else. There were no animals scurrying about. No rats or even insects that I could detect. The destruction of this city must have happened so long ago that even the bones of its inhabitants had long since crumbled to dust and blown away on the winds of the nearby sea.
I stood in the middle of one ruin, in what might have been the lobby or entrance hall to a great building. With my booted foot I scraped aside some of the debris on the floor and saw that it was tiled in colors that once had probably been quite bold. Now they were faded with time, gray with clinging dust. I hunkered down on my knees and swept more of the debris away, seeking a pattern, a picture, any kind of a clue as to who built this city and when.
Nothing but a checkerboard of many-colored tiles. Perhaps, like the ancient Moslems, the creatures who built this city refused to draw representations of themselves.
What difference does it make? Once, long ago, the creatures who built this city fought an implacable enemy. And lost. Their city was ground down to dust. A civilization was destroyed. Another turn of the wheel.
Wearily, I took my helmet off and used it for a pillow as I stretched myself out on the rubble-strewn floor and gazed up at the darkening sky, those strange patterns of alien constellations. And with all my heart I wanted to be with Anya, to see her, to speak with her, to watch her fathomless gray eyes when she smiled at me, to touch her, hold her, love her and know that she still loved me.
Clasping my hands behind my neck, I said to myself, You boasted to the Golden One that you could find her without his help. All right, then, let’s see you do it.
At least I could try.
I closed my eyes and attempted to remember those times when I had been translated across the continuum. The moments of nothingness. The cryogenic cold of the void between place-times. The endless dance
