“Doesn’t it?”
“No, Orion, it doesn’t. You can chase across the whole galaxy seeking your beloved goddess. You can think me an egomaniac who sends his own creations to slaughter. No matter what you think, if you find Anya now she will kill you. Without a second thought.”
“No! She loves me.”
“Perhaps once she did. But she has outgrown you, outgrown the foolish desire to take on human form. She is truly the goddess of death, Orion. Your death. Believe it.”
Chapter 14
For the next several days, as I worked with the human scientists, my mind kept spinning around the revelations that Aten had heaped upon me.
Anya was fighting against the Golden One. The Creators were split apart, and they had split the human race into two warring factions. They had even enlisted alien races in their ever-expanding war.
And Anya no longer loved me. That I refused to believe. She might hate Aten, she might be fighting against the Golden One with every quantum of her strength and knowledge, but she would never turn against me.
Yet I was a soldier in Aten’s army. War washes sentiment away in torrents of blood. I could be killed as impersonally as a man swats an insect, light-years away from her, and she would never know it. I would be merely another casualty among the Creators’ human pawns.
No! I could not accept that, could not believe it. Anya loves me, we have loved each other across the millennia and the light-years of space-time. She still loves me, just as I love her.
Can I find her? Can I reach her, wherever she is? Why must I fight this senseless war on Aten’s side, instead of hers?
These were the thoughts that flooded my mind as I dutifully tried to help the human scientists at the Skorpis base on Lunga. In vain.
They had been sent to Lunga to establish contact with the Old Ones and enlist their aid in the interstellar war. The planet’s only strategic value was that the Old Ones had a settlement here. My mission, at Aten’s devious direction, had been to prevent the Hegemony from making an alliance with the Old Ones while he tried to establish contact with them himself.
My mission seemed oddly successful. The Old Ones refused to have any form of contact at all with the Hegemony scientists. We swam in the ocean for days and even had a full-sized submersible sent down to the Skorpis base. But no matter how far we went into that ocean, no matter how deep we dived, we saw no trace of the Old Ones.
“Maybe they’ve left the planet altogether,” Delos suggested gloomily as he bent over the display screens in the cramped sensor center of the sub. Each of the screens showed an ocean teeming with sea life and no trace of the Old Ones.
“You say they had a city down here?” Randa asked me. In the confines of the sub’s compartment we were practically pressing against one another. I could smell the faint trace of perfume in her hair. And a musky odor of perspiration.
Nodding, I replied, “A big city, although it really was more of a collection of lights than a set of structures.”
“Well, there’s no lights nor structures anywhere in view,” Delos said with an exasperated sigh.
“Perhaps the sensors are being blocked in some way,” I suggested. “Screened.”
We sent out swimmers. I went out myself. Nothing. It was as if the Old Ones had never been there. Yet I got the distinct feeling that they were nearby, watching us, perhaps amused by our frustration.
The one good thing that I was able to accomplish during those discouraging days was to get better quarters for my troopers. I refused to be housed with the scientists, insisting that I was a soldier and I would share the treatment the other prisoners received. At the same time I pleaded with Delos and the Skorpis base commander, whenever I was brought to her presence, for a roof over the prisoners’ compound.
One morning, just as I was about to be escorted to the scientists’ buildings again, a Skorpis skimmer pulled up at the gate of the prison compound, loaded with sheets of plastic and bags of connectors.
“You will build yourselves a shelter,” said the sergeant who drove the skimmer. “No tools are needed. Get to work.”
By the time I returned that evening the shelter stood, neat and square. There was even bedding inside, I saw.
“Now we need partitions,” Frede told me, quite seriously. “For privacy.”
It astounded me how the troopers could adapt to their situation. They had slept on the bare ground and eaten one thin meal a day and been grateful that they were still alive.
“Now we need to escape,” I said back to her. “Before they put us all in their larder.”
Her eyes widened.
“To the Skorpis,” I told her, “prisoners are food. The only reason we haven’t been frozen so far is that the scientists want me to work with them and I told them that the price of my cooperation is to keep all of you alive.”
“But as long as you work with the scientists…”
I had to tell her, “I don’t think it’s going to be much longer. They’re coming to the conclusion that there’s nothing they can do to reach the Old Ones.”
“Then we’ve got to get out of here pretty quickly.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “But how?”
That was a problem without a solution that I could find. There were forty-nine of us, unarmed, under constant watch, in the middle of a camp of at least a thousand Skorpis. I racked my brain for days on end trying to come up with a plan that might have some faint chance of working. Nothing.
Until one night it hit me. We don’t need to escape. We need to be rescued.
I lay on the plastic floor of our prison, Frede next to me, staring up at the blank ceiling. I still had no clothes except the shorts I had been wearing for weeks. I closed my eyes and called silently to Aten.
There was no answer. Nor had I expected one, at first. Summoning up my will and my memory, I translated myself to the empty city of the Creators and stood once again beneath the warm sun on the hillside overlooking the city and the sea.
To those who can manipulate space-time, it matters little if you are in a certain place for a moment or a millennium. You can always return to the place and the time where you started.
“I can wait,” I called the cloud-flecked blue sky. “I can wait as long as you can.”
I did not have to wait long. Almost immediately a silver glowing sphere appeared before me, so bright I could not look at it, yet I felt no heat from its brilliance. It coalesced, took the form of a man. The Creator whom I thought of as Hermes: dark-haired, lean, the hint of mischief in his ebony eyes.
“Orion, the disturbance you make in the continuum is like a toothache.”
“When did you ever experience a toothache?” I countered.
He grinned at me. “What is it? What brings you here all hot and impatient?”
“Are you part of this interstellar war?” I asked.
“Of course. We all are.”
“And whose side are you on?”
His trickster’s face took on a sly, cunning look. “Does it make a difference to you?”
“Can you take me to Anya?”
He thought a moment, then shook his head. “Better not to, Orion. She bears the weight of our future on her shoulders. She would not be glad to see either one of us.”
“You serve the Golden One, then.”
“I serve no one!” he blazed. “I have put in my lot on Aten’s side, though, that is true.”
“Then tell him that he must rescue my troop from the Skorpis base on Lunga.”
“Tell him that he
