“What did the Old Ones tell you?” he asked eagerly. “How did you make contact with them? Where are they from?”
“Will they join us in this war?” the base commander wanted to know.
“They refuse to join either side,” I said. “They reject all attempts to draw them into the war.”
“Reject, do they?” the base commander rumbled. “A nuclear bomb or two exploded at depth might change their opinion, I think.”
“Your weapons will not work against them,” I said. “That is what they told me.”
“Nonsense!”
“I believe them. They are far older and wiser than we.”
“So were the Tsihn, and we bashed them halfway across the galaxy.”
“And made eternal enemies of them,” said Delos.
The commander’s slitted eyes flashed, but she turned away from the scientist and said to. me, “You must tell me everything that the Old Ones told you. I must know
I repeated their message word for word, several times. The base commander sank deeper into a glowering unhappiness each time. The human scientist, though, seemed to grow more excited with each telling.
“Tens of millions of years older than humankind!” Delos said, almost smacking his lips with anticipation. “The things they can teach us! The things they must know!”
“They won’t teach us anything as long as we continue killing one another. They regard us with loathing.”
“But surely they would talk to scientists,” Delos pleaded. “We’re not fighters. We haven’t killed anyone.”
“Perhaps,” I replied. “In time.” I smiled inwardly, knowing that the Old Ones’ contemplation of time was so far more leisurely than our own.
After repeating my story another half-dozen times, I was dismissed by the base commander. Outside her door, the security officer was waiting for me. If the Skorpis still had feline tails, hers would have been twitching with impatience.
“She believes you, does she?” she asked as she personally escorted me back to the prisoners’ compound.
“How do you know that? Can you hear through closed doors?” The thought occurred to me that perhaps she had bugged her commander’s office, under the guise of her security duties.
“No need to eavesdrop,” she said grimly. “If the old tigress hadn’t believed you, you would be chopped meat by now.”
Before we were halfway to the prison compound, though, Delos came sprinting after us.
“The base commander’s given me permission to house Orion in our quarters,” he panted.
The security officer snorted, but we changed direction and went to the scientists’ fenced-in area.
“He is your responsibility,” she said ominously as she left me there with Delos.
He nodded and gestured toward the nearest of the low-roofed buildings.
“Wait,” I said. Turning to the security officer, I asked, “What’s going to happen to the rest of my troop?”
“The prisoners?” she made a movement with her shoulders that might have been a shrug. “Cryostorage, of course. We’ll freeze them till we need them.”
“Need them? For what?”
She bared her teeth. “For food, human. What else?”
“You eat humans?”
“They are made of meat, aren’t they? Not as nutritious as some of the enemies we’ve fought, but they’ll do in a pinch. With vitamin supplements, of course.”
She seemed to be enjoying my consternation. I pulled myself together and said, “Well, until you put them in storage—or other arrangements are made for them—couldn’t you find some shelter for them? And better rations?”
“No, I could not, human.” And she turned abruptly and walked away from me.
The other scientists were just as eager to learn about the Old Ones as Delos was. They clustered around me once he had ushered me into their barracks. We were in a wide, bare room, furnished only with a long table and human-sized chairs and a pair of video machines off in one corner. A single row of windows on one side of the room looked out on the Skorpis camp, where purple twilight shadows were lengthening into night. The walls of the room were devoid of all decorations except for a single display screen showing an astronomical chart.
As I told my story still again I scanned the faces of the scientists around me. There were twenty-two of them, nine of them women. Most of them seemed young, the prime of their lives still ahead of them. Unlike my soldiers, they obviously were not cloned from one or two gene sets. They were tall and short, dark and fair, eyes of every shape and color, skin ranging from chocolate brown to pinkish white.
The woman called Randa, the one who had denounced me to the security officer, would not look directly at me. Either she felt ashamed of what she had done or she was angry at me for bringing danger to them. None of them commented on the claw wounds on my shoulder, matted with drying blood. I let it pass for the moment.
When I had finished my tale, though, I said, “Now I have some questions for you.”
“Go ahead,” said Delos. He was obviously the group’s leader.
“What are you doing here on this planet, working for the Skorpis?”
“Working for the Skorpis?”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re not working for the Skorpis,” said one of the men, with a considerable show of indignity. “They’re working for us.”
“The Skorpis are mercenary troops. They’re here to guard us,” said Delos, “while we try to study the Old Ones.”
“Guard you against who?” I asked.
“Against you,” Randa snapped. “And the rest of your homicidal maniacs who want to kill us all.”
So it was anger that drove her, not shame.
“We had no idea there were other humans on this planet,” I said. “All we were told was that there was a Skorpis base here and we were going to eliminate it.”
“Typical military operation. They only tell you what they want you to know.”
“Do you mean that humans are fighting against each other?” I asked. “We’re involved in an interstellar civil war?”
“The Hegemony has been battling for its very existence for three generations now,” said Randa. “Your so- called Commonwealth has been trying to annihilate us. You and your lizard allies.”
“The Tsihn?”
“That’s what they call themselves, yes,” said one of the men.
“But how did the war start? What’s it all about?”
“It started when Commonwealth fleets began attacking our settlements on a dozen different worlds.”
“They wiped out whole biospheres. Killed everything.”
“Burned planets right down to the bedrock.”
“For no reason!”
“Without a declaration of war.”
I shook my head. “It couldn’t be for no reason. People don’t attack one another for no reason.”
“Lizards do.”
“The Tsihn hate us. They hate all humans, anything that’s not themselves.”
“But you said that the Commonwealth is allied with the Tsihn.”
“Against the Hegemony, that’s right. But sooner or later the Tsihn will turn against the Commonwealth, too. You’ll see.”
There was real hatred in their voices, in their faces.
“I still don’t understand how this could have begun,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“You’re just a soldier,” Randa sneered. “How could you be expected to understand anything except killing
