“Can’t be helped. Not now. This is war, human. Losses are to be expected.”
Not my troopers, I said to myself. Not Frede and Jerron and the rest of them. They’ve suffered enough. They’ve been through battle and done everything we asked of them. I’m not going to leave them to feed the Skorpis.
“Tell me about these scientists,” the captain was saying to me. “They must have valuable information in their heads, no?”
“They’re not military scientists,” I said, warily. “They don’t know anything about weapons or strategy.”
“Still, they are a good prize to bring back to headquarters. A bonus. I will be praised.”
“You’d be praised more if you brought back the troopers you were sent to rescue,” I grumbled.
Its red eyes seemed to burn. “Orion, I was sent to rescue
I stood my ground and glowered back at it.
It shifted in its chair, then raised one taloned three-fingered hand. “Take the helm,” it said to its second-in- command. Then it curled one of those taloned fingers and said, “Come with me, Orion.”
Mutely I followed it through a hatch that we both had to duck through and into a small, dimly lit compartment. I saw a wide bunk built into one bulkhead, a desk with a blank display screen above it. The captain’s quarters, I guessed, spare and spartan.
“Sit,” it commanded. There was only one chair, a stool, actually, in front of the desk. The captain eased its bulk onto the bed. It reached to a panel at the head of its bunk and a section of the bulkhead turned transparent.
I gasped. We were out in deep space, nothing to see but stars that were stretching into elongated streaks of light because of our ship’s relativistic speed.
“We run with our tails between our legs, Orion,” the captain said good-naturedly. “Soon we reach lightspeed and then there is nothing out there to see.”
I looked back at it and saw that it was holding a metal drinking cup out to me.
“Alcoholic beverage made from grain,” it said. “I keep this for human guests.”
“Thank you.” I accepted the cup.
It reached into the compartment in its bunk again and poured something else into another cup. “Tsihn prefer drinks with blood in them.”
We touched cups and drank. The liquor was smooth and warming.
“Many intelligent species have rituals of sharing food or drink to show friendship,” said the captain. “I want you to know that even though I cannot rescue your assault team, I wish to be friendly with you.”
“I understand,” I said.
“War is never pretty. But maybe for your troops this is a better fate than they might have expected. They are frozen now. They feel nothing.”
“But they must have known what the Skorpis intended when they were put into the freezer cells,” I said. “Their last thoughts must have been hell.”
I realized that its darting tongue was the Tsihn equivalent of a sigh. “So what better did they have to look forward to? Your Commonwealth does not regard warriors with honor. The Hegemony, too. Humans treat their warriors very strangely, Orion.”
“They treat them as if they’re less than human,” I admitted.
“Yes. Send them to do fighting, then freeze them when fighting’s over.” It shook its head. “Your warriors are treated like machines. Worse.”
“I would still like to save them, if I could. I’d like to help them, find a place where they could live in peace and safety, without the Commonwealth forcing them to go into battle, without being frozen like some unwanted slabs of meat until they’re needed again.” I was thinking out loud now, letting my thoughts spin out to this stranger who was not human in form but more human than my own Creators in its sympathy.
“Put it out of your mind, Orion,” said the captain. “I would like to retire to a planet I saw once, green and lush and so humid that steam rises from the swamps every morning of its year. But I will die in a metal egg, Orion. I will spend my life aboard this ship or another like it and one day, somewhere, I will be killed. That is the life of a warrior. That is what we are, Orion, you and I and all those others of so many different species. We were hatched to fight our peoples’ battles. There is no other life for any of us.”
I sat in that cramped compartment sipping at the whisky this reptilian captain had given me while we grew more morose and bitter. At last I pushed myself to my feet and asked it to excuse me. It ordered one of its bridge crew to show me to my quarters, which turned out to be a compartment almost identical to the captain’s. The Tsihn showed me how to manipulate the controls to make the bulkhead transparent and to tap into the ship’s communicator and computer systems. It slid back a panel and I saw a closet with two sets of uniforms hanging in it.
Once the reptilian left me alone, I slid the closet shut and stretched out on the bunk. It was a little short for me, but I did not care. I had no intention of sleeping in it.
I summoned the Golden One. I called across the currents of space-time to him. Speak to me, I urged. Give me a moment of your attention.
Nothing. He would not answer. I could have translated myself back to the Creators’ city, but what good would that have done? Aten would not deign to see me there. The last time he had sent his messenger. I did not want a messenger, I wanted Aten himself, the Golden One.
But he would not reply to me. When I closed all my senses and tried to reach out to him with my mind, I received nothing but emptiness.
Wait! There was something. A tendril of thought. The faintest whisper of a contact.
But there was no further response. The Old Ones had said what they wanted to say and departed from my mind.
Use all your resources, they had told me. Grasp the opportunities that surround you.
I swung my legs off the bunk and reached across the narrow compartment to activate the ship’s computer. Through the transparent bulkhead I could see that we were still flying at relativistic velocity, not yet beyond lightspeed. I called up the tactical program and saw that there was indeed a full squadron of Hegemony battle cruisers chasing after us. The tactical plot showed that we would reach lightspeed before they came within weapons’ range. Once past lightspeed we would be safe.
We would also be unable to send back a ship toward Lunga to pick up my troopers. Whatever I was going to do, I had to do it before we got to lightspeed.
I had less than two hours to act.
Chapter 16
