Orion Among the Stars

“And to prevent us from making such contact,” the Golden One added.

“Now that we’ve driven the Hegemony out of the system,” I reasoned, “you want to try to reach the Old Ones.”

Like a patient schoolteacher, Aten prompted, “And since you are the only person the Old Ones have seen fit to talk to…”

“You want me,” I finished his thought, “to attempt to contact them again.”

“Exactly.”

My mind was churning, trying to set this new factor into my plans without letting Aten realize what my true objective was.

“In that case,” I said, “I will need a ship and a crew.”

“I can send you there without such paraphernalia,” he said.

“And have me tread water in that planetwide ocean until the Old Ones deign to speak to me?” I retorted. “Can I breathe that planet’s atmosphere? Can I eat the fish that swim in that sea?”

He nodded. “I see what you’re after, Orion. You want the survivors of your assault team to be retrained as crew for your vessel. Touchingly virtuous of you, to be so loyal to such creatures.”

“They are human beings,” I said.

“Manufactured to be soldiers. Weapons, Orion, nothing more.”

“Your ancestors,” I reminded him.

Aten laughed derisively. “So are tree shrews, Orion. Do you feel pangs of conscience for them?”

Before I could answer, the entire scene disappeared as suddenly as a snap of the fingers and I was hunched over my computer screen again in my quarters at sector base six.

The computer beeped and my orders appeared on the display screen: I was to command a scout ship and return to the Jilbert system where I would contact the Old Ones and invite them to join the Commonwealth.

I saw to it that my cryosleeping troopers received the training they needed to run a scout vessel. I myself spent almost all my time in the training center with a crown of electrodes clamped to my head as the training computer poured information into my brain. I wondered if this was the way Aten trained me for my various missions throughout space-time, while I was unconscious.

In a week my troopers were revived and our ship arrived, a sleek disk-shaped scout named Apollo. I frowned when I first learned the name; the Golden One had styled himself Apollo to the awestruck ancient Greeks and Trojans. Aside from the name, though, I found the vessel trim and fit, and my troopers transformed by their cryosleep training into a crew that at least appeared to know what it was doing.

Frede was still my second-in-command, and Apollo’s navigation officer. Little Jerron was now chief engineer. Ordinary mutts who had been little more than cannon fodder on Lunga and Bititu now found themselves classified as ship’s officers, in charge of weapons, logistics, damage control, communications, medical services. They grinned at their newfound stature, but they took their new duties quite seriously.

And, one by one, each of them thanked me for getting them better duty. Emon, our weapons officer, put it best:

“The longer we stay with you, sir, the better off we’ll be. If we live through it.”

I believe he was entirely serious.

We spent two days directing the robots that outfitted and stocked Apollo with supplies; then we left sector base six and started our run back to the Jilbert system.

Except that we never got there.

Chapter 22

Frede and the others were happy to be awake, alive, and running a starship rather than fighting as expendable infantry.

“This makes us more important to the Commonwealth,” Frede told me. “More valuable.”

“And it’s easier duty,” said weapons officer Emon. As a sergeant, he had been wounded twice during the assault on Bititu. Frede’s official title was now “first mate,” which set off a lot of jokes because she once again had jiggered the sleeping assignments so that she shared my bunk.

The bridge was compact, built more for efficiency than comfort, with only five duty stations jammed in cheek by jowl. Tactical command and all the ship’s information systems were tied together in the consoles and data screens that surrounded us. From my command chair I could see anything in the ship I needed to see, call up all of the computer files, activate any system aboard the vessel.

We made the transition to superlight velocity as smoothly as if the crew had spent years aboard the ship. As far as their memories and reflexes were concerned, they had. Neural training, whether awake or in cryosleep, leaves virtually the same imprint on the brain and nervous system as actual experience would.

“What if we could just fly this ship forever,” Frede whispered to me one night in our bunk. “Just forget the war and everything and go out among the stars for the rest of our lives.”

“Would you like that?” I asked.

“Yes!” She clutched at my bare shoulders. “Never to be frozen again. To be free. It’d be wonderful.”

“To be free,” I murmured, knowing that in all the eras of space-time in which I had existed, I had never been free.

“There are others,” she whispered. “You hear stories about them.”

“About who?” I asked.

“Renegades. Units that disappeared, just walked off into the jungle and never were heard from again. Ships that took off on their own, split from the fleet and ran away forever.”

I knew all about renegades. Lukka and his squad of mercenaries, fighting for their lives in the shambles of the Hittite empire’s collapse; Harkan and his band of thieves roaming the mountains of Anatolia, searching for his enslaved children; guerrillas from a thousand wars in a thousand different eras.

“And the war,” I asked her gently. “Our duty to the Commonwealth?”

She hesitated for a moment, realizing that she was speaking to her superior officer even though we happened to be lying nude in bed together.

“How long have you been serving the Commonwealth, Orion?”

I evaded a direct answer. “Time loses its meaning.”

“I’ve been serving all my life,” Frede said. “So have we all. It’s all we know, the army. It’s all we have to look forward to, until the day we’re killed.”

There was a trigger phrase, of course, that came with my orders. Whenever the crew began to show signs of humanity, indications that they were thinking of themselves instead of their duty to the Commonwealth, all I had to say was “Remember Yellowflower.”

The planet Yellowflower, according to the Commonwealth’s history of the war, had been suddenly and ruthlessly attacked, destroyed by Hegemony forces without a declaration of war, scoured down to bedrock. Four billion human beings had been killed, the planet’s entire biosphere totally obliterated. Yellowflower had been the start of the war, three generations earlier.

According to the Commonwealth’s history. I recalled the human scientists on Lunga telling me that it had been Tsihn attacks on Hegemony worlds that had started the war.

I stroked Frede’s short-cropped hair. “It’s not so bad now. We’ve got this fine ship. As long as we stay in superlight no one can touch us.”

“But sooner or later we’ll drop back to relativistic speed and reenter the war.”

“Maybe,” I murmured, not yet ready to tell her what I was hoping to do.

She fell asleep and I lay on the bunk beside her. As captain of this vessel, my quarters were small but comfortable. Frede was right: the galaxy is huge; one ship could lose itself among the stars. But what of all the other ships, all the other assault teams and regiments and armies and battle fleets? What right did we have to run away and hide while others were fighting to their deaths, humans and aliens, Commonwealth and Hegemony?