There has to be a way to stop this killing, I told myself. There has to be.
It was a voice from the Old Ones, in my mind. I recognized it instantly. Closing my eyes, I felt a moment of utter cold, the wild plunging sensation of nothingness, and then I was swimming in the warm sea of their ocean once again. A dozen or more of the Old Ones glided through the deep, dark water with me, pulsating colors, tentacles waving as if in greeting.
“Is this the planet in the Jilbert system or am I back on Lunga?” I asked.
“What difference?” came their reply. “In a sense, we are on both worlds—and many others, as well.”
I thought I understood. Each of the Old Ones swimming around me came from a different planet. They had all come together to meet with me; each of us was light-years from all the others, yet we swam together in this fathomless ocean.
“You said you wanted to warn me of something?”
Their response seemed to come from all of them, even though I heard it as only one voice.
“Orion, your war grows deeper and more violent. It troubles us.”
“I have been asked by one of my Creators to encourage you to join the Commonwealth,” I said. “Their reasoning is that, with you on their side, they will quickly end the war.”
“In victory for the Commonwealth, at the expense of the Hegemony.”
“Yes.”
“Since this slaughter began,” they said, “we and others of our maturity have remained totally neutral.”
“Others?” I asked.
“There are many, many races among the galaxies, Orion. And even between them. You humans have met and interacted with species of your own youthful stage of development. You interact with your own intellectual peers. You trade with them. You fight with them.”
“While you older species remain aloof from us.”
“From you, and from the Skorpis, the Tsihn, the race you call the Arachnoids, and all the others who have not yet achieved the wisdom to avoid slaughtering one another.”
I got the impression of a group of gray-haired elders watching a gaggle of noisy brats fighting in a sandbox.
“But your war grows more violent,” they repeated.
I agreed. “There seems to be no end to it.”
“From the outset you slaughtered billions of your own kind, eradicated all life-forms from entire planets, blasting them down to their rocky mantles.
“Then you escalated the violence. Whole planets were blown up, as were the two outer worlds in the Jilbert system, blasted into fragments.”
“I know,” I said.
The voice became grave. “Now the violence is about to escalate again. The Commonwealth has perfected a weapon that can destroy a star. The weapon creates a core collapse of the star; a supernova explosion is the result.”
I felt a hollow sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.
“This must not be allowed.”
“If the Commonwealth unleashes this weapon,” I told them, “then the Hegemony won’t rest until it develops something similar.”
“We will not permit stars to be destroyed.”
“Not permit…?”
“Give this message to your Creators, to the leaders of both warring factions: Tell them that if they attempt to destroy a star they themselves will be eliminated from the continuum.”
“Eliminated?”
“The human race, the Skorpis, the Tsihn, all the warring species will be extinguished.”
“How? What do you intend to do?”
“The older species have maintained neutrality throughout your squabbles. But we cannot allow you to destroy the very stars on which the continuum hinges. Attempt to attack a single star, and we will eliminate you— all of you—completely.”
They spoke with one voice, an implacable finality in their tone.
“Go back to your Creators and tell them what we have said, Orion. The fate of many species depends on their reaction to our warning.”
I sat bolt upright on my bunk. Frede lay sleeping peacefully beside me, a little girl’s smile on her relaxed face.
The Old Ones were using me as a messenger again. It’s not enough that Aten manipulates me, the Old Ones use me to manipulate him and the other Creators.
But then I smiled. Did the Old Ones know my inner thoughts, my plans? I had hoped to use this scout ship to find Anya, somewhere deep in Hegemony territory. Now the Old Ones had given me a reason for seeking her. I had to warn her about the Commonwealth’s star-wrecker.
The third watch still had an hour to go when I came onto the bridge and relieved Dyer, my logistics/damage-control officer, who had the command. The watch was almost entirely perfunctory; as long as we were in superlight velocity there was nothing to worry about except a possible internal malfunction.
Taking the command chair, I ransacked the ship’s computer records for information about the Hegemony. Where was their capital planet? What kind of defenses guarded it? Would they honor a flag of truce on a Commonwealth ship?
The computer could not tell me, of course, if Anya was in the Hegemony’s capital. The data screens showed their capital planet, Prime, in the Zeta system. I viewed their cities and learned their population, history, economy, social customs, politics, military capabilities—much data, little understanding.
The screens showed Prime itself to be a gray, forbidding city of massive stone buildings rising out of dark cliffs into a heavy cloudy sky. Its streets were almost empty, swept by gusts of rain and sleet. Giant Skorpis warriors seemed to be at every intersection, serving as police or militia guards. The people of Prime looked grim, dour, humorless.
“Why the interest in Prime?”
I looked up from the screens surrounding my chair and saw Frede standing beside me, looking curious. At the touch of a keypad I blanked the screens.
“That’s where we’re going,” I said.
“Prime?” she squeaked. “But that’s the Hegemony’s capital!”
The four others on duty in the bridge turned and stared at us.
“I have secret orders,” I told her. But I didn’t say who the orders had come from. “We’re on a mission of diplomacy to Prime.”
“They’ll blow us out of the galaxy the instant we drop out of superlight,” Frede said.
“Let’s hope not.”
Reluctantly she followed my command to set course for the Hegemony capital. I planned to send out message capsules ahead of us once we neared the Zeta system, so the Hegemony defenders would be warned that we were coming and that our mission was a peaceful one. Frede and the rest of the crew thought the Hegemony ships would shoot first and check on our story after we were safely dead. The almost happy air about the ship dissolved into soldierly griping and dread.
There was something more that I could do, of course. That night, while Frede slept, I tried with all my energies to reach across the span of space-time and contact Anya. Nothing. It was like facing a blank wall too high to climb, too wide to go around.
So I reached out to Aten, instead. Concentrating on my memory of the Creators’ city, I translated myself to its timeless stasis in the continuum. I found myself standing atop a Mayan pyramid in the heart of the city, high enough to look out across its broad empty avenues toward the eternal sea. The sun’s warmth Was tempered slightly by the shimmering golden dome of energy that encased the city.
Aten looked surprised when I appeared. He and several other of the Creators were apparently locked deep
