to talk to me, but I refused to speak to anyone until the base commander’s grim, gray-furred face appeared on the display screen before me.
“You are surrendering, Orion?” She made it sound more like a statement than a question.
“No,” I said. “I have returned to offer you an exchange.”
“What have you to offer that I would desire?”
“Your team of scientists.”
Her lips pulled back slightly to show her teeth. “You captured them and now you return them?”
“I saved them from the Tsihn and now I offer them back to you.”
Unconsciously she began grooming the fur of her face. “They must be of very little value to you if you offer them back to me.”
I almost smiled, remembering the wonderfully fierce bargaining that would go on in the bazaars of cities the Mongols had taken or even in the boardrooms of interplanetary corporations.
“Their value to me is not so important as their value to you,” I said.
“What value are they to me? They cannot fight. They cannot entertain. They cannot be used for food. They have not succeeded in their mission. Because of them I have lost nearly two whole battalions of warriors.”
I jumped on that point. “Your orders were to protect these scientists. You fought honorably and well to protect them. Unfortunately, you must tell your superiors that you failed. The scientists were captured, despite your spending nearly two whole battalions to protect them. It is very sad.”
If a cat could smile, she did it then. “I have not lost the scientists. They are on your ship.”
“But not on yours.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that I will blow up this ship, with the scientists in it, if you do not agree to my terms.”
“You will kill yourself, then?”
“Yes, and no Skorpis will ever eat my flesh. I will blast this ship and all of us into an ionized gas cloud.”
Her massive shoulders moved in a very human-looking shrug.
“Go ahead, then. It is no fur off my face.”
“But what will your superiors say when you report to them that you failed to protect the scientists? What will they say when you report that you refused to take them back after they had been captured and returned? You will be meat for their larders, I’m afraid.”
That brought out a snarl. “We can take your ship—”
“Not before I blow it to atoms.”
She just stared at me. Even though it was only an image on the display screen I could feel the fury of that yellow-eyed stare. At that moment she would like nothing better than to sink her fangs into my throat.
“But I will happily return the scientists to you,” I said, trying to sound carefree and cheerful.
“Under what terms?”
“That you return my troopers to me.”
“They are prisoners. They surrendered with hardly a fight.”
“So they are worth very little,” I taunted. “How much courage can you ingest from soldiers such as they?”
“Then why do
I had to think fast. “I want to revive them and train them to be true soldiers, worthy of their calling. So that the next time you meet them they will offer you a better meal than their miserable carcasses offer now.”
Now it was her turn to do some thinking. She undoubtedly thought that I was lying, that there was something else going on. But actually, what I told her was as close to the truth as I could say. My troopers needed better training—and better leadership—if they were to survive their battles.
“I must consider this carefully,” said the base commander. “The prisoners have been frozen. They belong to the larders of those who captured them. I must determine what payment those warriors should receive if they give up their food.”
Nodding, I replied, “I’m inserting this vessel into a stationary orbit around the planet. In one hour I will set off the engines and blow up the ship.”
“I will give you my response in less than one hour, Orion.”
“Good.” I cut the connection, and saw that my finger trembled slightly.
“You can’t be serious.”
Turning in the pilot’s chair I saw that Randa was standing behind me. She had not gone back to the galley. She had heard my conversation with the base commander.
“I’m completely serious,” I told her.
“You’d kill us all for the sake of a handful of soldiers? Soldiers? Why, they’re little better than machines.”
“They’re quite human,” I said, holding on to my temper.
“And you think that we’ll just sit here quietly and allow you to murder us?”
There were no weapons among them, I knew. Even the tools that the ship carried were in cargo containers outside this crew habitat module.
I grinned up at her. “There are twenty-two of you and only one of me. But I doubt that more than three or four of you could squeeze into this cockpit area at one time. And I can handle three or four of you without raising much of a sweat.”
“You’re insane!” Randa snapped. “We’re
I let that pass. I merely said, “If you keep your cool and don’t do anything foolish, you’ll be back at the Skorpis base within an hour or so. Or what’s left of the base, anyway. If you try to stop me I’ll blow this ship to hell right here and now.”
She stared at me, horrified. “Don’t you care about your own life?”
I found myself shaking my head. “No. I don’t give a damn. Death doesn’t frighten me in the slightest. In fact, it would be a relief.”
Randa shuddered, turned, and fairly ran toward the galley and her fellow scientists.
The Skorpis commander called me when there was less than five minutes remaining in the hour. I could imagine what she had been going through: trying to determine if there was some way they could take this survey vessel or incapacitate me before I blew up the ship; weighing the worth of the forty-nine frozen prisoners against the worth of the twenty-two Hegemony scientists; deciding how much recompense to give the warriors who had captured my troopers. Idly I wondered if they ate any of the reptilian Tsihn they captured in battle.
She agreed to the trade, reluctantly. The forty-nine cryo units were carried to my orbiting vessel by a trio of Skorpis landing shuttles. I would not have my troopers destroyed by a matter transceiver. Once I was satisfied that all of the bulky sleeper units were properly attached to my vessel, I allowed the scientists to board the last of the Skorpis shuttles.
Delos stood beside me and watched his team file through the air lock that connected to the shuttle.
“Where will you go now?” he asked me.
“To find someplace that has the facilities to revive my troopers.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Continue the war?”
“I suppose.”
Randa was the last of the scientists in line. As she placed one hand on the rim of the air-lock hatch, she turned slightly to look at me.
“Would you really have killed us all for the sake of a gang of frozen corpses?”
I heard the words she did not speak: a gang of frozen corpses who are nothing but soldiers, not quite human, fit for nothing but to fight and eventually die on some ball of rock out among the stars.
“If I had to,” I said.
The corners of her lips curled slightly in a malicious smile. “And how do you know that those pods actually hold your precious soldiers? Maybe the Skorpis commander put forty-nine of her own warriors in them, to take you by surprise.”
